When I first worked in LA, I didn’t get it at all. I was a guy who posed behind the desk and pushed faders and made pretty sounds. When I came up here (to the San Francisco Bay area) and started to work at the Warfield, suddenly I was challenged by world-class mixers.

I would walk in one day and meet a guy from Europe whose normal gig was mixing Peter Gabriel. He had some time off, so here he is confronting me, and my system’s noise floor, while mixing Terence Trent D’arby.

Over in Europe they train their people so thoroughly. It is not considered something to do because you like to party with the band. They really understand the physics and the engineeringng in a way that, to be perfectly honest, I don’t. However, I am a reasonably good trouble shooter. That’s what I had to become, in order to keep working.

We used a Meyer rig at the Warfield that was actually brought over from the Fillmore after a big earthquake. By the standards of some of the systems I work on nowadays, it was comparatively simple. But when I started there, I really didn’t understand how to troubleshoot a bad crossover, and I had to not only learn more, but also trust my instincts when something was behaving badly.

When Primus started, they had a guy whose theory was that if he used matched 57’s on everything on the drums, it would all come up uniform. Every mic on the drum kit was a 57, including the kick and the overheads. He really liked to drive the subs, too. This was before Meyer started making the powered 650P. We had regular 650’s, and I believe some older single 18 cabinets, all being driven by Crest amps. At most rock concerts there’s a big barricade, and then there’s stacks of subs left and right, and in the huge concerts there’s a row of them down the center too.

But something I’ve noticed is that if you let people physically press up against the subs, you’re going to have a really hard time hearing them. It’s really to your advantage to get them up in the air if they’re front loaded like this. Get them firing over people’s heads. At least get some of them up. Because the phenomenon that happened at this show was that the mosh pit kids were so crazed they were just shoving up against the subs, the poor guy at the mix position couldn’t hear them. He starts driving harder and harder and I start to see the clip lights come on like two red snake eyes.

I’m turning around getting ready to jump off the stage and tell him to chill out. But the clip lights lock on and all the subs go away. I guess you all haven’t really learned about Meyer processors, because now you’re using the self powered speakers. The disadvantage of the old Meyer processors is that you could do that. They had some limiting and some compression, but if you drove like a mad fiend, you could blow past them, take out drivers, do what this guy did with the amps. With the powered line you now have protection within the internal amp that makes that relatively impossible to do.

Are any of you familiar with Sandra Bernhard? A lot of people don’t know that she’s also a devoted musician and a great singer. She came up and did two nights at the Warfield. She and I were socially acquainted from mutual friends in Los Angeles. It was really exciting to be able to mix her, and she had some great musicians backing her up. Her fans are literal fanatics. They go ape at her shows. Screaming mad abandon both nights.

On a lot of consoles, you’ll notice that the PFL soloing button is right next to the on/off button. That is a bad design feature, because on this particular evening I put on my headphones, even though I already had her voice sounding huge and great. I was thinking maybe I can EQ it and make it even nicer. There’s a song she loves to sing that’s a French ballad, that’s very shlocky and corny. At the end, it has this super long held out Streisand/Celine Dion kind of note. So I put on my headphones and go to solo it. I brush against the on off button and take her voice out of the mix.

Now if that ever happens to you, take down the fader before you put the button back on (at this point, a staff member in the audience started grinning and nodding) and then bring up the fader very slowly, because what I did was panic, and just abruptly pop the button back on. During the long moment that it was out, I and the crew knew that the monitors were still on, but the people just thought they were hearing her acapella voice. Then when I brought it back on, because she’s a comedienne, they thought it was a stunt or a bit. The whole crowd busts up, two thousand people screaming with laughter. At the moment in the night when she most wants to be taken seriously as an emotional singer, and they’re all howling with laughter. If looks could kill, I would not be talking to you here today. The look that she shot up to me from the stage was heart breaking because we knew each other and had been friendly, up to that point.

But those are the kinds of things that happen. One of the ways to minimize that is to learn from great mixers who are older. I was very lucky the whole time I was learning and I am certainly still learning. Tonight I will fly back to LA, get another rentacar, drive out past Palm Springs, check into a hotel, and then this weekend I’m working a festival down there called Coachella.