Anybody ever hear of Rat Sound? Rat is one of the very best companies in America. They’re also fairly large. They own a proprietary system called the Rat 5, they also own V-DOSC and VerTec. They have a leasing arrangement with SSE Hire, for a full Nexo rig. Some of the bands they supply are Pearl Jam, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Rage Against the Machine, when they existed.

Dave Rat, the guy who owns it, personally mixes the Red Hot Chili Peppers and he is a brilliant guy. He’s a John Meyer kind of guy in terms of understanding physics. He actually comes from a background in aviation manufacturing. He’s one of the people who I’ve learned a great deal from, and who does not have a negative attitude towards people like myself who are primarily motivated by musical and emotional reasons. I still need to learn technical things to run the larger rigs, and for Dave it’s a pleasure to share knowledge with me. Also, his speakers sound totally incredible.

When I was working in clubs in LA, one of the places I worked at was called Charlie’s Obsession. It was about half as big as this room and it was in a basement and it was dank, it was punk rock, man, it was dark, it was filthy. Anybody heard of the Minutemen, or the Meat Puppets? Those were the kind of people who played there. Up until that point in time, I had really been idolizing jazz fusion people because I grew up with very competitive musicians. It was all about who could play the most complicated stuff the fastest, the most complex chords and stuff like that.

Then somebody asked me as a favor to help these people at Charlie’s Obsession and I started meeting these punk rock crowds. I looked at them and I said “These are me. These are the kids who are like I was when I was sixteen. With the flannel shirts and the ripped out jeans. I have to help them. I’m a jerk if I just keep kissing the yuppies’ asses.” So I started to get involved in that scene.

Rat’s first main account was the punk rock band Black Flag. Rat built a raging system, with tall rectangular cabinets, and they were the first people who I’d ever met who deployed more amp power than was needed. Every system that I’d ever been on or that I’d ever heard, one of the characteristics was that the amps were constantly being overdriven. Just pitifully, balls to the wall breaking-up, on the verge of shutting down the whole show.

Black Flag wanted a badass PA. They got it, especially for the size and the compactness of what was built for them. This was at a time when the really big tours were standard rock and roll, Styx, Supertramp, the Stones. Those people had millions of dollars to spend on gigantic rigs that didn’t need to be particularly efficient. The thing that set Rat apart was they wanted to create something that was small enough to be trucked around with Black Flag, but it would just rip your face off. And it was clean. I had never heard anything like it in my life.

To show you how little I understood at that time, there was a guy mixing the Meat Puppets whose name is Davo. He walked up to me and said “Do you have inserts in your board?” and I said “What is an insert?” I had no idea. I had never seen an insertable compressor, an insertable gate, anything like that. In these club situations, there was a console, if you were lucky there was a reverb, which might just be a spring reverb. If you were really rich, you might also have a delay. But there were no gates and comps. So this guy sees where I’m at, and he starts to work with me at that level. That’s what I mean about being lucky. I met these guys who were tremendously knowledgeable and didn’t put me down. They saw that I was sincere and they started bringing me along with them. That’s what enabled me to move up.

I had a friend named Bob Brown, who was an enginerr and also a manager. I would spend many hours in studios with him in LA. I remember sitting with him one night and he didn’t like the way the high hat sounded. He said “Pay attention, because I’m going to show you a magic wand.” What the magic wand was was a parametric EQ. In the clubs I was used to low, middle, and high. Three knobs if you’re lucky instead of two. When Bob Brown started looking for frequencies and dialing around, it blew my mind. He taught me a lot.

I moved up here and I met a guy named Chris Becker, who hired me to work building a studio for the guitarist from Journey, Neal Schon, down here in Fruitvale. I spent a few months in the former Journey rehearsal hall, building the studio and getting to meet players like Randy Jackson and Omar Hakim. And being around them and a brilliant producer/keyboardist from LA named Bob Marlette.

I chose not to become a studio engineer. At that time in this area, in East Bay especially, big hair metal was really happening. There were a lot of people who wanted to be Poison and Metallica. I worked in a club that doesn’t exist anymore in Oakland and I hated these bands. I could maybe make it through one night with them, but the thought of being stuck in a studio for a month with these morons and their cocaine, I felt like I would have had to kill somebody.

I kept working in this club, which had a very minimalist PA. In fact, it was very common for touring mixers to come in and put on a CD and listen to it. It would be all dark in the house, and I would be on stage in the monitor position. I’d hear the CD stop and then a depressed little voice, far off in the distance at the mix position, would say “This is the worst PA I have ever heard in my life.”

The club had imported people with computers, long before SMAART, around the time that Meyer was developing SIM. They probably had TEF. What they came up with was subwoofers here and there (left and right) and a mono cluster here. (Points straight up.) The thing is, I can stand right under this (points up at Meyer center fill) and my voice is not going to resonate. This is pointing fairly straight ahead. These cretins who were flown here at great expense put their center mono cluster raked sharply downwards. They had no front fill. So a singer would typically step out here and the whole PA would take off.

That was when I started to see that there were these con men, and there still are today, I assure you, major audio manufacturers who hire people that have their head up their butt, and don’t even operate on the simplest grounds of common sense. An uneducated person like myself could tell that this one setup was totally wrong, but the club owner wouldn’t change it, because some guy set up a computer and told him that was how it was supposed to be.

Anybody see a Blink 182 show in the last couple years? They’re very funny guys. The thing I love about the work I do is that someone my age would never go see Blink unless they’re a parent. But I get to go down and meet the guys and have fun. They’re one of the few bands who use no drum monitor at all, even in giant arenas. Travis Parker is one of the most powerful drummers I’ve ever seen in my whole life. You may or may not know that most drummers are monitor divas and work the hell out of the poor monitor guy.

The only other major act I’ve ever met that uses no drum monitors at all is Cheap Trick. The bass player is over here, the guitarist is over there, and the drummer sets up more downstage than any other drummer I’ve ever seen. To the point where his ears are physically an inch in front of the amps. So he’s hearing the bass and guitar amps acoustically. Therefore the poor singer is a foot in front of the cymbals, but his monitor wedges are screaming so loud that the drummer can hear them.