Scott Fraser at UCLA

Many of us today have forgotten that a decibel’s increase means doubling a given level of sound, but not Scott Fraser. In his work with Kronos Quartet, he reports that he typically runs 1 dB above what the acoustic performers would measure at, on their own, without the system. “I don’t want you to hear the PA,” Scott says, “you hear width and presence.”

On the day I visited Scott at a Kronos soundcheck, sitting behind a Crest Century VX at UCLA’s Royce Hall, there were EAW KF650 cabinets stacked on EAW KF850’s, in addition to the venue’s Renkus Heinz flown fills for the balcony seats. Also, the edge of the stage sported small EAW JF50’s as frontfill, while JF260’s, for additional infill, sat on the stage, just inside the main stacks.

Flown Renkus-Heinz boxes at Royce Hall

EAW JF260, 650 and 850 speakers

Scott demonstrated the system’s level for me by muting, and then opening up, the cello channel, a few times, while the player went over part of a composition. It was fascinating - I could hear the instrument, even at the back of the room, while the musician played unamplified, but when Scott’s mix kicked in, I could hear more of the full range of the cello’s low end, as though I was sitting closer to it.

Scott prefers ground-stacking by the local provider, and adds, “I try to have as many speakers as possible around the proscenium so that the proscenium is the source,” rather than arrays of speakers placed further away, or flown above the musicians. With string players, how the room sounds is really important. Violins, violas, and cellos were designed hundreds of years ago to be nothing less than resonation machines, so balancing the minimal amplification of these instruments - in different rooms, on tour - is quite an art.

Kronos uses a fair amount of prerecorded music cues that come from a minidisc that Scott controls. I had not been aware that the Sony MDE-11 can be set to automatically stop after a given cue, rather than needing to be paused. “A lot of times, I’ve got my nose in a score – I’m only thinking about ‘go,’ not pauses,” Scott told me.

Scott Fraser can’t believe that this SM 78 still works!

The minidisc player travels with Kronos, along with a t.c. electronic Fireworx, and an Yamaha SPX 990. A pair of Meyer UPM wedges are brought along to serve as front fills. Scott said, “I never mix Kronos without front fills, to provide a mono fill in between the L & R stacks.” There is also a Boss SE70 at FOH, that occasionally adds an octave shift to the cello. Hypercardioid Neumann KM150’s are used on each instrument, and the least glamorous piece of equipment is an ancient and gloriously battered Shure SM 78, used as a talk mic. Onstage, there is a rackmounted unit from Great River, with four mic preamps, from which balanced signals go to FOH.

This was designed by Dan Kennedy, and Scott also told me,“He's going to build some custom highpass filters into the unit for us, to cut wind rumble when we do outdoor gigs at European Jazz festivals.”

A Kronos musician’s position, with Neumann KM100 on floor

Unbalanced signals go to four Furman HDS-6 headphone submixers, modified by Scott, that sit on the players’ music stands, so they can control their own levels, monitored with one Walkman style earpiece. The minidisc cues also appear in the submixers for the musicians’ headphones, folded back from the FOH board. The Neumann mics sit on small stands on the floor, pointing toward the player’s instrument, and, for the house mix, are combined with Countryman Isomax omnis that are taped onto the bridges of the instruments.

This is where Scott’s background as both a musician and an engineer comes into play. He is capable of hearing the nuances of tone that the members of Kronos feel, and can help create a low-volume soundfield, from within which they can confidently project out toward the audience. In the hands of a less knowledgeable mixer, this setup would be nothing but a prescription for feedback.

Sound reduction at the ceiling of Royce Hall

Scott unobtrusively rings out the room while the players warm up. I watched him quickly take out the two first, broadest, frequencies that came up, and then, a little later, work on a third that started to trigger a little while the players were rehearsing. I could see that Scott’s recording background served him well, as he operated the minidisc playback, when Kronos asked him to go back ten seconds or a minute, in a piece that he was following on sheet music.

“This is not a normal Kronos gig,” Scott said at UCLA, because in 2002, the Quartet were acting as artists in residence. For this concert, from Mexico City, they brought in a four-piece percussion ensemble called Tambuco, who had played on the most recent Kronos recording, “Nuevo.” There was also the interestingly named Plankton Man, from Tijuana’s Nortec Collective, who opened the show sitting at a table with his laptop, starting sequences and then adding loops and fills manually.

The musicians in Kronos have staked out an international reputation as performers and recording artists with an unusual repertoire that takes them to many different concert halls. A group like this needs sound mixers who are both technically adept, and hopefully, who also have some knowledge of many different world musics and not just Western pop. Individuals like Scott Fraser will not ever be seen behind some honking huge desk, mixing the latest hip-hop or deafening metal sensation in a hockey arena.

It’s good to know that there are some mixers out there working, who are not blasting the audiences’ hearing – or their own - into premature oblivion.