Happy! Healthy! Well adjusted! Works for Marilyn Manson???!!

As befits the FOH mixer for Marilyn Manson, Brad Madix has a lot in common with the huge audiences that come to see their seething anti-hero on a nightly basis: he doesn’t like to wait for excitement. “Personally, I found the studio experience pretty tedious,” the bright and cheery Madix says, as he folds his laundry the morning of the band’s Ozzfest stop in Detroit. “There was very little immediate gratification. Making a record takes a lot of forward vision, but I like to walk into a building that morning and do a show that night.”

A converted musician, Madix did his first tour as an engineer in the mid-1980’s with John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band, the first step in a smartly fashioned network that led to the Psychedelic Furs, Def Leppard, Queensryche, Jerry Cantrell and Rob Halford’s project, Two. The next job for Halford’s guitarist at the time, John Lowery, would be the coveted guitar spot with Manson, who just happened to also need a new FOH man. Now known as John 5, the six-stringer got Madix’ name to the overlord in 1997, and you know what the rest is: history.

“I’d been doing rock bands for quite a while, and I’d been looking for something a little more cutting edge like Marilyn Manson or Nine Inch Nails,” Madix says. “My first concern about working with Manson wasn’t a technical concern, but mainly, would I get along with him? We all have our impression of his persona, and I hadn’t really talked to him before I was hired. It turns out we got along really well.

“He definitely knows what he wants the people to hear. The technical aspects of it were trying to take something that has so much going on in the way of effects and distortion – guitar and bass and drums happening at the same time without a lot of pockets of silence – and finding a way to get all of that across live. Everything always wants to come to the front, and we had to work that out.”

To manage the chaos, Madix first breaks everything down to the basics. “There are two key places to me in the chain of sound,” he says. “First of all the speaker system itself is very important, and the choice of mic is very important – that place where you make the transition from sound in the real world to electron flow is critical.”

Before he even starts specifying which mics he uses, Madix emphasizes the importance of his secret weapon against Manson’s audio madness, the Palmer Speaker Simulator. “That really brought out the sound of the guitar,” Madix says of the 1RU direct box. “It’s almost embarrassing, but I struggled for about three months trying to get two mics to sound as good as this thing. You can go for a fatter, more low endy sound or a brighter sound. In a situation where you have to get things up quickly and get a good sound, I highly recommend it.”

His latest mic discovery is the Audio Technica 4050 large diaphgram condenser over drummer Ginger Fish’s set. “It can take a lot of SPLs and still maintain good clarity,” Madix reports. “We also compress the overheads a little, too, which is something you can’t normally get away with live. But Ginger uses in-ear monitors, so we can get away without a lot of leakage. For the vocals we’re using the old standby Shure SM58. Most people go through one in a tour, but we can go through two of them in one night!”