¿Por Qué Hay Tan Muchos Los Ingenieros Sonido De La Mierda?

What the fuck is wrong with (most) live sound engineers? Last night I went to see Black Mountain, a band I'm particularly fond of (although they don't quite fill me with the same kind of glee that their alter-ego Pink Mountaintops does...), and who, in a reasonable venue and with half-decent sound would be fucking excellent live. Unfortunately they played at the Scala, an ex-cinema, ex-snooker club fucking barn with a sound engineer who seems to have learnt their trade by reading a lot of theory books but didn't take into account that the fact that not having any fucking ears might be a slight drawback in their chosen profession. And, this is not the first gig I've been to there where the sheer ineptitude of the engineer completely shot to shit any chance of really losing yrself in the music. Don't even get me started on what High On Fire, one of the greatest live bands on the face of the planet, sounded like when they had the misfortune to play at the Scala. You couldn't actually tell what notes Matt Pike was playing unless you got close to the guitar amp. But, as I was saying...

Complaint No.1 - The most appaling drum sound I've heard in quite some time. What kind of an arsehole gives a band who owe a fair amount rhythmically to The Velvets a drum sound that I can only describe as a disturbing cross between 80s Phil Collins gated reverb hell and compressed to within an inch of it's life shit clicky 80s metal drums? Wanker. The snare sounded like a bucket full of nails being kicked around the bottom of a well. The fact that the drums were four times louder than anything else wasn't really that helpful either...

Complaint No.2 - Far too fucking quiet. You know a gig's too quiet when you can hear the hissing of the dry ice machine over the loud bits.

Complaint No.3 - There's a Prophet 5 synthesizer on stage. We'd quite like to able to hear as well as look at it's analoguey wonderfulness. So turn the fucking thing up. Now turn the guitar up too. Jesus, how fucking hard can it be to mix this shit?

Not that hard, is the honest answer. I've engineered fuck knows how many bands, in places like the Forum to the tiniest shithole you can think of and if I'd ever made someone sound that bad I'd have cut my ears off and handed them to the band as an apology.

I'm not sure if the engineer was genuinely shit, or just fucking lazy. Frankly I don't care. There's far too many live engineers out there like this, it's not just the Scala. (There's a few brilliant ones out there too, don't get me wrong, count yrself lucky if you get Shari behind the desk, she'll shout at you, but you'll sound fuckin' great) It really pisses me off, I'm so sick of potentially great gigs ruined by crap sound. Like I say, it's not that hard. All you have to do is concentrate and listen hard. Oh, and it also helps if you actually care about what you do, because otherwise we (bands and audiences) are all fucked. The act of creating music live isn't just down to the people on stage, in a big venue especially, everyone's at the mercy of the engineer. You don't hang a beautiful painting in a lightless cellar do you?

So do us all a favour. Give a shit and do yr job or fuck off.