Virtual Sound Check… No Actual Sound
I’m sure there will be more than a few hands in the air for this tale of woe. The band decides they’re not going to come in for sound check, so you finish tuning the PA and play back last night’s multitrack show recording using the console’s virtual sound check feature. Fantastic! Who could have imagined we would have this feature 20 years ago?
You finish up and are ready to open doors. Walk-in music is playing and is all is well. House lights go down, you trigger the intro music, the band hits the stage and you press the “Unmute All” button – and to your horror not a darn thing is coming out of the PA, You can see them hammering away at their instruments but you’ve got nothin’! It’s then you realize you left the console in virtual sound check mode.
Yup…been there/done that and bought the T-shirt as well. It may only last five seconds or so (which feels like a lifetime), and when you switch the inputs back to “actual” inputs instead of “virtual” inputs there’s an audible gasp from the audience. You skate directly to the penalty box for two minutes and feel much shame.
Lessons learned: Have a pre-show checklist. Pilots do it, why shouldn’t audio engineers? List several important items that ensure the show kicks off properly, and a big one is double-checking that you’re not in virtual sound check mode and the stage inputs are active.
Signal Routing Snafu
Back in the good ol’ days of analog consoles before “digital store and recall,” we carried around printed sheets of paper that were a blank outline of the console’s knobs and buttons. This way we could mark where they should be set for quick and accurate recall.
I remember waiting my turn at front of house during festival sound checks to access the behemoth Midas console I’d be using later for the show. When my chance came, I would pull out my printed channel papers and start “recalling” each input’s settings from the last time I charted them. Even if the act I was working with was squeezed out of the sound check line up that day, I could feel comfortable that my channel EQ, gain, auxes and inserts would be close.
However, I remember a particularly bad day when I accurately dialed in all of the input knobs and buttons but missed a very critical step. On this tour I was assigning inputs to groups instead of straight to the Master L/R bus, and while this portion of the “recall” was done correctly, I missed the important step of assigning the groups to the Master L/R. We were unfortunately denied a sound check through the PA due to time constraints, so I had to be happy with a line check in headphones. The first time I was going to hear anything for real was at the top of our show.
I played the intro music then un-muted the inputs only to find they weren’t feeding the system. I saw the input meters bouncing, and the group meters were showing signal, but nothing was getting to the Master bus. It didn’t take long to realize the “sounds of silence” we were all hearing was due to an important omission in signal routing that I was solely responsible for. (Aw jeez, eh!) I started pushing the “Group to Master” buttons and (one by one) sections of the band suddenly came to life in the loudspeakers. A lot of heads spun around to see the knucklehead who was flying the plane!
Lessons learned: Be hyper-alert that you’ve completed every step when recalling settings to a console especially if you don’t think you’re going to get a sound check through the PA. After this incident happened in the early 1990s, I changed my standard festival protocol and just un-muted all the inputs while the intro music was playing so I could hear them in the PA before the show started. Or I would quickly unmute the lead vocal or kick drum so I could hear it “live” during line check.
These days we load our shows into digital consoles from a USB stick, but many parameters like Master or Matrix routing to the PA system or interfacing plugin servers can be different for every one-off and/or festival, so double check everything and be sure stuff will actually come out of the system when it’s go-time.
Total Recall
Some of the greatest features of modern digital consoles are the Scene Store/Recall, Show File Store/Recall and Automation functions. When instrumentation is vastly different from song to song or FX is needed to provide a distinct feel when the band changes from an up-tempo song to a ballad, it’s wonderful that it can all be saved and recalled instantly. Like many cool features that are meant to improve our lives, they can also introduce complications that set us up for a crash if we don’t pay attention to certain ground rules.
Saving each song as a “Scene” can often open up an audio can of worms. When I’m mixing a band that’s fairly straightforward, with only a few instrument changes through the night, I avoid using scenes for each song. I’ll roll through the show with one scene entitled “SHOW” and a couple of hot keys entitled “MUTE ALL INPUTS” and “UNMUTE ALL INPUTS.” This steers me clear of recalling something I had no intention of recalling.
I remember an unsavory example of this years ago while setting up the console and system for a corporate event. It happened while timing and equalizing all of the loudspeaker zones using the console’s matrices. I was approximately one hour into the process and just about finished when I accidentally recalled the scene that was one number below the one I’d been working on. I immediately knew I hadn’t saved my changes in the scene I’d been working on, and in a flash, all of my work was lost. This console didn’t have an AutoSave or “History” feature, so my recent changes couldn’t be recalled. I had to start over.