SR/Live Sun, November 23, 2008

By Bruce Bartlett

Festivals always serve to teach new tricks to even the most experienced of sound professionals among us, as I learn every summer when setting up microphones and mixing sound for the annual Elkhart Jazz Festival.

Over a three-day weekend and joined by my colleagues Mark Darnell and Dave Engstrom, we handle all sound duties for 16 performances at the historic Elco Theater in downtown Elkhart, Indiana. Artists range from 1920s-style orchestras to “modern jazz” combos.

Over the years we’ve had many embarrassing moments, along with a few triumphs. I share our mistakes here both for levity and educational purposes.

Don’t always do what the musicians ask. One time a jazz fiddle player brought a small guitar amp to the stage. He wanted a mic to pick up his instrument, with this input then fed to his amp in order to get a “certain” sound.

We didn’t have the XLR-to-phone adapter necessary to do this, but instead we inserted a direct (DI) box in reverse: mic to direct-box XLR in, and direct-box phone jack out to guitar amp. We mic’ed the amp. And no time for a soundcheck.

We discovered when the gig started that the amp was extremely noisy. A nice patina of hiss covered the mix. I rolled off as much high frequency as possible on the amp mic, but it still sounded lousy.

The lesson? Take control. In this case, we should have deployed a second mic on the fiddle (directly into the sound system), or split the fiddle mic to the sound system and the amp.

In contrast to what we did in this situation, another sound mixer at a different stage was dealing with the leader of a big band, a demanding fellow who wanted a mic on every horn player and on every drum in the kit. With a 30-minute changeover time, this feat was not possible, and besides, feedback would be rampant due to the number of open mics on stage.

The wise sound person asserted himself, putting a single stereo mix in front of the brass section. And that was that. The kicker? The band members ended up complimenting him on the mix. Again, take control of the situation.