09/07/2024
Live guitar players: How to deal with Boomer (il)logic?
Impulses vs hastily placed dinosaur mic
Aside from the boomer dinosaurs that don't realize that the calendar year is post 1994 who still insist on trying to feed the audience volume from their stupid dinosaur amps onstage, you have the issue of mornos insisting you mic their oh so magical cabinets that can defy the laws of physics and somehow completely reject everything on stage and make it out pristinely with only one mic hastily placed in the 15 minute swap between bands
Fundamentally we have the 300 Spartans "See I brought more soldiers than you did" problem. You have an accountant or gas station attendant, who has never spent a day in the music industry, trying to dictate to the guy who has NEVER DONE ANYTHING ELSE IN HIS WORKING LIFE THAN MUSIC RECORDING AND SOUND REINFORCEMENT, exactly how to get sounds to the audience.
So let me get this straight, you are going to beat, with one mic, in less than three minutes, the best collection and combinations of mics, painstakingly placed for hours or days, in the best rooms in the universe, with the best gear possible, in the best conditions possible, under the best monitoring possible? How again?
So, force me to use one hastily placed mic. Ok, so now, I have to high pass like hell to avoid this becoming yet another bass amp mic, kick and tom mic, stage noise mic
******oh yeah, lets remember that this mic is just sitting there, waiting to be kicked over, fall on its own, snagged by a cable, etc etc etc ******
So good bye all the lows.
Chances are (not chance but actually 100% statistical likelihood) that this mic is in a place of mud. As there is no time to completely figure all the mud frequencies (and a VERY limited, if you are LUCKY, 4 band EQ) and ditch them, you heavily cut a wide valley from like 160-450hz or more. Hello mosquito tone
But hey, at least you will get those searing highs for the solos right?
No...Now with all the cymbal and other crap leaking into the mic, I likely have to low pass the signal as well and guess what? Most consoles don't have a low pass. If you are lucky they may have a1 pole, 6dB/octave shelf, so, to be effective, kiss like 2.5kHz and above goodbye
Congratulations, you now have a 1k fartband that either hurts, or if. you are lucky, just annoys, the audience.
Guitarists are by and large, victims of many bits of fallacious reasoning, but probably their absolute worst is Appeal to Tradition
Everything was so much better back then. This is how we did it back then, so its the best.
You could (and many do) use the same argument for slavery.
Same argument so many recording pretengineers insist NOTHING can be recorded if the microphone was not made by Hi**er
How about instead, you trust your soundman, because he respects your expertise enough that he doesn't slap the you know what out of your mouths when you are doing your crack procurement job on the corner, so he'd rather you not tell him how to do his job?
If you really want to do a deep dive on an edumakation on how not only are impulses NOT a simulation, but that they are better in every single way, than anything you would likely to ever be able to create or afford if you are outside of the 1%, we could do that.
If you are clinging onto the one possible exception of dynamic response in impulses we could do that (and for those who actually believe it matters, it has been handled)
But no, by all means, take your non-engineer ass to a club you've never been to, and insist that by right of 1950's logic, YOU know how to handle the sound and tell the actual audio guy what to do.
