Revolver Gig

On Friday i was asked to be the live sound engineer for a EP launch for Australian Hip hop group Fourth Place. I had done sound for them before at the workers club and i was asked to do another at Revolver Bandroom.

I arrived to the gig at 3pm to check out the system and set up the stage. Ready for soundcheck at 6pm. Because it was 4 acts who were all a stereo DI and a microphone I was ready to go soon after arriving. I saw the in house engineer and got him to explain the setup of the Midas Verona 320. It was a pretty simple setup that had everything grouped and automatically sending to a parallel compression making everything sound pretty great and powerful.

Soundcheck went easily and i was happy with my communication with each of the artists and the ease of the soundcheck was a good indicator that i had done my preparation work well.

During the night it was quite busy with 150 people coming into a small room making it seem busy. It was the largest group i had done sound for and it was a good feeling knowing their enjoyment was in my hands making sure they got the full experience of a live show. I can't say i am a fan of hip hop but it was interesting mixing this genre because the most crucial element is the vocals so i spent a lot of my time tweaking each act so they sounded crisp and was separated from the backing tracks. I sweeped the backing in the mids to make room for the vocal and pushed up around the 7 to 10 KH mark to give clarity and definition in what they were saying. A video on facebook later popped up from the night and i was very happy that even in a video taken from a phone you could hear all elements clearly.

The first act that came out was a duo who had completely different vocal styles and ranges. One of them spoke very quietly and the other was extremely loud and cut through everything else that was happening, and was a lot louder than he had been in the soundcheck. I ended up finding that the compressor was working way too hard so that was quickly corrected and for the soft vocalist i found out from the in house engineer that by pressing the STEREO button on the channel it doubled the signal without pushing the gain up too loud ending in feedback. This was the perfect solution for the quiet vocalist and within one minute of them starting, the issue was resolved and there were no other issues for the rest of the night.

I was proud of my efforts on that night and i hopefully gained some more jobs in the future with those artists.