Musing: On Monitor Mixing - Part 1
By Chris Kathman

When it’s good, it is a great position to be in.

Chris Kathman’s wireless world

Some of my memorable wins over the years include experiences with Booker T. and the MG’s, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the first Billy Zoom reunion gigs with X, the beautiful sounds of The Story, Y2K New Year’s in Hollywood with Al Green and band, and a short-notice gig in San Francisco with trumpeter Mark Isham and his group.

So I take pride in my ability to communicate with advanced musicians, delivering tones that please them and help them put on an extraordinary show, instead of gritting their teeth, hating life, and wondering when the show will ever end.

But there are always demons lurking, ready to ambush you in different and unexpected ways. Situations can devolve into tension when neither the monitor mixer or the band members are bad people, but for whatever reasons they don’t mesh. And once people stop communicating, the flight is headed for turbulence.

A band member may see me on the verge of hyperventilating, looking down at a desk at a festival as though I am a caveman who has never stood behind a console before. They may understandably misinterpret that to mean that this particular desk is freaking me out. Maybe they are paying an inexperienced charlatan, they think.

When, if they could see inside my brain, they would pick up on my tension being related to the systems guy who swore to me during the previous band’s set that he would be available to drive while I checked mixes, and that there were other people who would do the patching. It turns out those other people are busy humping gear, and this guy is patching all by himself, for 22.5 of my 30 minutes to accomplish a 32 channel, nine-piece band changeover.

My glazed stare is due to me thinking what the hell is patched in and what isn’t? Where do I start? Not – gollllee, Sergeant, this sure is some newfangled gizmo console here! Shazam!

There’s an old saying that a carpenter doesn’t blame his tools. Well, I have a satchel full of tools that I carry around, and I don’t blame them. But a band member may not understand when one day he is in heaven because I have a stage full of gorgeous Meyer UM paired wedges that pump a kick-snare-hat mix up at him like a CD, and the next day, I have underpowered boxes by Shite and Sons that are allegedly bi-amped, but sound like passives made of wet cardboard, with no definition at all. And I get the look like I am drunk, stoned, elderly or all of the above.

That’s when all those sayings start coming back – friends don’t let friends do monitors. What’s the difference between a monitor mixer and a toilet seat – the toilet seat only has one a-hole crapping on it at a time. Ba-boom! Only it’s not very funny, when you are a long way from home, working as hard as you know how, and you actually respect the playing of the individuals who are not happy.

Two of my FOH jobs in years past, with Berlin and Cake, I got after meeting the bands by first mixing monitors for them. Getting to know the musicians, feeling what their musical and sonic worlds were like onstage, and then being entrusted with presenting that to the audiences.

I have survived Prodigy at their deafeningly gnarliest, Morbid Angel, Funkdoobiest, Anthrax, you name it, I have gone one-on-one with many Godzillas of our time, and walked away with them satisfied and my pride intact. So I don’t tend to identify myself as the weakest link in a given situation.

Jeff Kashiwa

With Guitars and Saxes, I was presented with the most devoted-to-wireless bunch of artists I have ever met. Going into the audience is a huge part of their schtick. Saxophonists Jeff Kashiwa and Warren Hill seem like they live to run around out there and party with the people. They are also both capable of playing intensely creatively and emotionally, and have worked to become as facile on their instruments as they expect the people who work with them to be on the audio end of the show.

By the end of the tour, Mr. Kashiwa was venturing out with a Bat-belt-looking assortment of three belt packs. One for his Shure receiver for in-ears, one for his Shure wireless mic that clipped to the bells of his horns, and one for a European mic that was purpose mounted on his soprano, to capture the notes that drift out of the top keys.

John Tripeny at FOH

We had gone through many variations. European mic on the bell, then not used at all. Ears. No ears. One mic on the soprano, then two. I remember the afternoon that FOH mixer John Tripeny’s voice spoke to Jeff Kashiwa through the talkback to the wedges, and said “I hate to admit it, but it sounds better with the two.”

We still only received one channel from Jeff, and he just shut off the transmitter to the over-keys mic when he was not playing the soprano. In his rack is a wonderful device known as the Presonus Blue Tube pre-amp. He ran the two mics through the two sides, and then y-ed them before going in and out of his Korg effects unit. That started out on the drum riser, and evenutally ended up by me, where I triggered a T-wah patch for part of one song.

I explained to him that this could be a problem, if an emergency audio issue arose with another musician or my gear, right when his patch change was suppposed to be made. That did in fact happen, and he was cool about it. Of course, when I did a less than perfect “dummy check” after a festival in Pasadena, and Jeff did not have his rack the next night at Konocti Resort, he was quite displeased, and who could blame him?

Touring party bags, SFO

The tragic thing is that once a fragile bond of trust is broken between a musician and a monitor mixer, it is really hard to get it back. When I would walk a venue with Warren Hill’s beltpack and mic, to test for RF, I had the gain turned up on the channel to hear myself talking, since my voice is functioning at a dB level much less than Warren’s screaming David Sanborn-style sax would be delivering later.

Drummer Dave Hooper described to me what it was like when I opened Warren’s channel into his wedges, at a festival soundcheck, after I had neglected to trim back the gain to a more appropriate setting.

“I knew it was too loud when I could hear you guys talking to each other. (Warren would come over to the monitor board and actually dial up his stereo ears mix of the other instruments as I line-checked them.) It was like in a movie, when everything goes to slow motion and I was going to yell Nooooooo!!!!” And then Warren blew into the horn.

That blast of 115 dB of alto sax, out of two strong wedges, messed up Dave’s hearing for the whole show. In life in general, I have a policy of any drumsticks hurled toward monitor world get sent back with gusto, but that day I would have stoically withstood a rain of them. I felt terrible. But “Hoop” has more class than that. Which almost makes it worse.

Onward we went.

Check out Musing: On Monitor Mixing Part 2 I Guitar and Saxes 2001 Pics

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