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BACK TO EUROPE
With Suicidal Tendencies
By Chris Kathman
PSW Live Editor
The Continuing Saga
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1 2
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Click here
for part 2 | Click
here for part 3 | Ireland,
Scotland
& England
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Our stops in Germany, at the Matrix
Club in Bochum, and in the Netherlands, at the Tivoli
in Utrecht, turned out to each be the opposite of what I thought
when I first walked in.
The Matrix club is shaped like a chapel, made of solid brick,
and I expected it to be a nightmare to mix in. To my surprise,
the brick enclosure made it possible for me to precisely inject
the amounts of each frequency range that I desired, and the
show sounded pretty darn great.
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Brick walls in
Bochum and
GAE speakers
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Maybe it was because my father’s father was born in
a town about 50 kilometers from Bochum, and mysterious forces
are aligned with me when I am in that area. I was apprehensive
at first when I saw the size of the GAE
(German Audio Engineering) PA, which seemed very small, but
at showtime I realized that, because of the brick, I would
not have wanted to spray more energy into the room, even if
I could have had more boxes and amps.
In order to get the room to act like I wanted it to, I had
to rake the graphic pretty hard. Mike “Cyco” Muir,
the lead singer of Suicidal Tendencies, usually does not attend
soundchecks, so I took the locally supplied wireless mic out
to the front of house and rang out the room with it.
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This resulted in a series of cuts that was quite radical, that
made me wonder if I was digging myself into a hole, in terms of
gain. But, thankfully, at showtime, I had complete control over
the tones. I could run the lead vocal as loud as I needed to, and
I realized that years of suffering in all kinds of rooms has resulted
in me at long last knowing pretty precisely what I want, feel-wise,
and often as not, how to get it.
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Christian Schulte
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Christian Schulte of Go
Audio was the lone systems tech in Bochum, which took
me a while to figure out. The monitor desk was hidden in a
separate room, and in the hubbub of the band and techs setting
up, and Christian bringing out mics, I just assumed there
was another worker around, helping him. Finally I figured
out that Christian would be doing monitors for Suicidal and
the support act, but on other nights when bands don’t
have their own house mixers, he has to do endless laps to
the stage to set up monitor mixes, then back out to FOH. Let
me see a show of hands if you know what that’s like!
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In a perfect world controlled by yours truly, this would never
happen. My personal feeling is that if a venue or event has two
consoles, they should pay to have two techs. If you have one tech,
do it with one desk. Either run foldback monitors off the front
of house, or send a stereo mix for the house from two auxes on a
monitor board, and stick your head around the corner every so often
to check it.
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