Article

Monday, January 23, 2012

In Profile: Front Of House Mixer Dave Natale, Presenting Artists As They Are

A look at a career in sound that includes mixing The Rolling Stones, Mötley Crüe, Fleetwood Mac, Van Halen, and many more

Beyond technical expertise and experience, Dave Natale stresses that one of the most important qualities a front of house mixer should possess is knowing how to deal with people.

“Now, anybody who knows me and reads that will say, ‘Yeah. Your people skills… Great,” he laughs, admitting that he can be blunt with co-workers at times, but adding that talking around a problem doesn’t help anyone. “You have to tell people straight up what’s going on.”

Natale’s ability to strip a problem down to basics, and adopt a course of action based on common sense, has been a key driver in his career.

Given that he’s worked for many of the biggest acts in the world in his 30-plus years in pro audio, it’s an approach that appears to work very well, and informs both his preferences for who he works with, as well as his insistence on using analog gear, whenever possible.

“You’re only as good as your crew. It doesn’t matter how well you mix if the system isn’t put up by people who know what they’re doing and have a good work ethic. The guys that fly the system, run cable, mic the stage - they deserve most of the credit. It’s a ‘no recognition, no glory’ existence. It’s also not an easy life. You go to work at 8 am, work through meals, or eat standing up, until the last bit of gear is on the trucks at midnight – if you’re lucky.”

Getting Involved
Natale’s approach to mixing is equally succinct. “People don’t come to hear me mix, they come to hear the act. I want to present artists as they are. Hopefully, I’m just turning up what they’re doing.”
It’s an outlook rooted in his early experience as a teen playing drums in a band from his hometown of Camp Hill, PA. “Basically I’m trying to make it sound like it did when I was sitting in the middle of it.”

When he started losing interest in the material the band was playing, he offered to find them a drummer, but stayed on to mix their sound. “I didn’t know anything about audio, but I still wanted to be involved.”

Eventually, he began working for a Lancaster, PA-based band and relocated to their home base in his early 20s, which ultimately led to his long-time association with Clair Brothers. “Roy and Gene Clair came to see the band and I guess they thought that the mix sounded particularly good, because when I went for a job at Clair Brothers, they remembered me.”

He started out as a warehouse foreman, building cabinets for the company’s S4 system and learning how everything worked from the inside out. It was Roy Clair, Natale says, who brought him out on his first big tour, as a system tech for Yes.

“I owe a lot to Roy. He’s the guy that initially hired me and put his reputation on the line suggesting to people that I mix them. Two or three years on, when Yes became Asia, they asked Roy for a recommendation. He said ‘you should get this guy,’ and now I’m here.”

Immediate Attention
Throughout the 1980s, Natale mixed some of the most successful acts of the time, from pop icon Olivia Newton-John to “southern fried” rock bands like .38 Special. He often did double duty, acting as crew chief and mixing front of house, with the only role he flatly refused to take on was monitors.

“In no way do monitor guys get enough credit,” he states. “You have immediate attention from the band - if you screw up, they know instantaneously, especially now with IEM. And now, monitor guys are doing 12 or more stereo mixes, while I’m out there doing one.”

Natale left Clair Brothers in 1987 to work with Van Halen. “I either needed – or wanted – to work with them. Probably both. Clair didn’t do them, so I called up (the band’s sound company) Audio Analysts.”

After fulfilling that wish, he returned to Clair Brothers in 1990 and continued to serve the acts he’d toured with previously, as well as Prince, Bush and others. He also mixed high profile television events such as The Grammys and the MTV Video Awards.

In 2000, he decided to go the free-lance route, exclusively, having come to a point where he wanted more freedom to choose his gigs. Although it put pressure on him to find work, it also opened up fresh opportunities, including a diverse assortment of tours with Lionel Richie, Fleetwood Mac, Liza Minnelli, Mötley Crüe, and The Rolling Stones.

Telling The Story
Natale believes that agonizing over recreating the sound of a band’s record is far less important than presenting the band as they actually sound, on stage, as accurately and powerfully as possible. And when someone takes issue with that approach?

“You must hear and be able to understand the vocals. They’re telling the story,” he says. “That’s probably the one component of a song everyone knows. They should occupy the top space of the mix. When the vocal isn’t happening, something else needs to occupy that space in the mix, so you figure out what that is and turn it up. When the vocal starts again, you turn down whatever you turned up, so you can hear the vocal again. There’s nothing mind-bending about it.

“In my opinion,” he continues, “trying to recreate the album mix live is a bit redundant. If you’re looking to hear a studio mix, save yourself a couple hundred bucks, sit at home, listen to the CD and have a couple of beers. Live, it has to be punchy, huge and exciting, a bit exaggerated. You have to present the band as if they’re 15 feet tall, especially in a giant venue.” Some bands – The Rolling Stones, for example – make that easier than most. “They don’t need my help,” he adds.

It’s not always basic, of course. During Mötley Crüe’s 2005 tour, he had to mic some out of the ordinary instruments, including a beer keg drum kit and the Harley Davidsons the band rode on stage.

Although the roster of artists Natale has worked with is incredibly diverse, his approach to mixing them doesn’t vary that much. “Again, it’s common sense; obviously, Liza Minnelli wouldn’t sound right with the kick drum punch of Mötley Crüe.” So the sonic choices he makes are based entirely on what’s best for that particular artist, at that particular show.

Level Of Comfort
Natale still equalizes his systems with the same Sheffield Labs direct to disc recording of James Newton Howard and Friends that he’s used for years: “because the drum sounds are great,” he notes.

His take on analog and digital consoles is characteristically straightforward. “An analog console will not do anything until I want it to. If a digital console decides to have brain damage, you can’t do a damn thing about it.”

Further, he’s of the mind that our ears don’t properly convert the sounds we hear from analog to digital. “Our ears have evolved naturally, over time. We’ve got a couple million years of R&D into that.”

His desk of choice is the Yamaha PM4000, which, he adds, he only started using well after its release, when he was certain all the bugs had been worked out.

“I’m not saying (digital technology) is wrong, or that it doesn’t work. I’m coming at it from a reliability standpoint. I’m more comfortable with analog stuff running a system for 20,000 people who are paying high dollars to see a show.”

Natale also prefers to set up his console himself. “I’m not the kind of guy who plays golf, so there’s no reason for me not to be at the venue at eight in the morning being a pain in everybody’s ass.”

More importantly, he wants to make dead certain nothing’s left to chance. “This is serious business. It’s not to be taken lightly. I’ve been very fortunate to have had the pleasure to work with people that take this as seriously as I do. I trust them implicitly. I can be very blunt, but it’s only to impress upon them the importance of the situation. I will not, however, ask anyone on crew to do something I would not, could not, or wasn’t prepared to do – with the exception of doing monitors, of course.”

Inevitably, things do go south from time to time, such as the time his console took a header while being rolled into the venue, and the time his console caught a pitcher of beer during a show, as well as the time a generator died a horrible death moments before The Stones were to take the stage at a sold-out stadium show.

“You have to stay cool. Losing your head and panicking will only add to the mayhem,” he notes, adding that those moments are balanced out by better memories, like mixing Lionel Richie in Cairo with the Great Pyramid and the Sphinx as a backdrop.

Too Much Fun
Natale also credits manager Roger Davies (Tina Turner, Joe Cocker and Olivia Newton-John) for early opportunities integral to his success. In fact, he’s worked at least 12 tours for Davies’ acts. He doesn’t measure his worth in terms of the high-profile artists he’s mixed, but rather in their opinion of his work.

“More people than not thought I was O.K., so I kept getting work,” he says. “I’ve never thought ‘I’ve got to make myself more marketable.’ I was having too much fun to think of it in those terms.” It’s a fact borne out by the sheer amount of time he’s spent on tour – on average, 10 months a year every year since 1979: “I’m into this full-time, a lifer.”

That said, after The Stones’ Bigger Bang tour ended in 2007, he slowed down some, with the idea of seeing what it might be like to be at home for a while. “I like working around at the house, raking the leaves. When you have to do it for 40 years running. you’d probably hate it, but for me, working outside is a novelty because I’ve made a whole career out of being inside.”

It also gives him more time to hang out with his closest friend, his wife, Birgitta. “We get along great. If you don’t have a spouse that’s cut out for this lifestyle, I can almost guarantee you a miserable existence. In 25 years, she’s never once asked me to get off the road.”

The couple has two grown daughters, Ingrid and Britt, both great sources of enjoyment for their proud papa. While both are pursuing careers of their own outside audio, they both spent some time working at Clair Brothers. “And they can solder like nobody’s business,” he adds.

Unforgettable
Currently Natale splits his time between Lancaster and an apartment in New York City, primarily mixing one-offs for VH-1, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and charities such as The Robin Hood Foundation for his good friend, Dan Parise of Diversified Production Services. He also mixes the Radio City Christmas Spectacular and works regularly as a stagehand at Radio City and Lincoln Center as a member of IATSE Local 1.

However, the 53-year-old “lifer” is starting to feel the pull of the road again. “I’m looking around,” he says. “When you turn the kick up in a large arena with a massive PA, it’s something you never forget. Once you’ve mixed, you always want to mix.”

Based in Toronto, Kevin Young is a freelance music and tech writer, professional musician and composer.

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