Danny Maland - Live Music Producer/ Engineer

Danny Maland - Live Music Producer/ Engineer 29 years of experience in helping bands and shows sound better and look better.

08/11/2026

One of the neatest things about Summer Jam is the variety. It's not that everything is wildly different from week to week, but there are times when one show ends with electropop, and the next one is blues. On this particular evening, we went from delicate yearning and heartbreak, to modern, rocked up country.

Genre switching is one of the most fun challenges an engineer can face.

08/11/2026

This year, I've found myself re-evaluating some of my mixing strategies. One of those areas is the bass: Both in terms of the instrument and the general low-end. My current set of concert subs is very efficient at about 60-70 Hz, but the roll off below that is quite steep. This can create a problem where a bass guitar only becomes truly audible at a few notes.

Especially if you've gotten used to mixing bass as a "tactile" instrument, this can mean that you miss a lot. Feeling the bass is fun, but low-end instruments are much more than the rumble and the boom.

More and more, I find myself trying to place things like bass guitars by first removing their deep low end. I then look for a place to park them where, even without the subwoofer material, they're audible alongside the other parts of the mix. After that, I add the low end back in, trying to tame the peaks to get an even response. It's not necessarily easy to hear in videos like this, but the overall result is a more powerful mix, because mix power has as much to do with the consistent audibility of the lower registers, and not just sheer volume.

08/05/2026

I enjoy mixing rock bands as much as anyone, but music that could be at home in an Irish pub is its own kind of fun.

The bodhran isn't just a 4/4 kick drum. It's a nuanced and talkative percussion instrument that can both thump in the subs and be very subtle. The fiddle and whistles tend to occupy the same frequency space, and they also have most of their conversation in the vocal intelligibility range. It's very rare that I would ever do something like add 1.5k to a lead vocal, but I needed it here.

(Not a ton - just a bit.)

In the end, it's all music, and the basic rules are the same, but it isn't "vocal, vocal, bass, guitar, guitar drums" like so many other things.

08/04/2026

My latest call with Modern Retrospect was a bit of a doozy.

We've been trying to integrate LightKey into our setup, and the software itself has been fine. However, trying to change the DMX profiles and addresses on our Astera AX1 tubes has been a battle.

In an attempt to make those updates easier, I decided to upgrade the firmware on our AsteraBox transceiver. The transceiver got the upgrade, shut down, and then promptly bricked itself. This lead to us blending two lighting setups and computers by borrowing Shuffle's Rock Saber setup.

I also blew past the venue's SPL limit like a hot-rodder going past a highway patrol radar point at 90mph, and had to suddenly stuff my mix into a much smaller volume box in the middle of things.

So, my 36th call with Modern was eventful, but we got through it all as is our custom.

07/29/2026

A blues act probably isn't the most "telling" show to change your subwoofer processing on, but this was the night I chose to try a retune for Summer Jam. The Metis subwoofers I use are very much a "60Hz at all costs" box, but they can be smoothed out a bit - as long as you realize that you're trading out a fair bit of headroom to do it. (Again, a band like Rambunctious isn't taxing in the subwoofer department, so the full consequences of my decisions are yet to be experienced.)

07/26/2026

For this one, the space was divided into dinner and dancing sections, with an interstitial where we could keep all our gear and cases handy...but hidden! Can we do this all the time, please?

Also, I was finally able to sync up show calls with Bobby Solis! As an avowed "hater" of lighting, Bobby is, surprisingly, pretty dang good at it.

07/26/2026

I think this show ultimately came off well, but I swear, it was trying to get away from me the whole time. There were the cables that refused to cooperate while we were setting up the openers. There was the power at FOH, on a timer that almost nobody knows how to set, which turned off twice: Once before soundcheck, and then again, right before the last song of the night...at the exact moment that I needed FOH control to get an MC mic on. There was the blasting feedback during the dance lesson, and then the music player connection that refused to complete for no discernible reason (until it did).

Sometimes, you barely make it through, but we made it through.

Sharp-eyed viewers will catch a glimpse of Jason Knoell, working onstage, as he is wont to do.

07/20/2026

My 35th time out with Modern Retrospect was three other crew members(!) and myself doing the first show of a leapfrog. (One of those weekends where one rig travels while the other is used for a production.)

We tried some new horn mics, and I think they worked pretty well.

Because of time and space constraints, I had to bring a minimal PA. That, in concert with the space we were in, meant that the aforementioned PA was run very close - sometimes up to - its physical limits. In a space as reflective as the room we were in, getting separation between the band and vocal/ melody parts requires rather more power than in other situations. Then, you add in a boisterous crowd, and separating the band from the crowd requires extra power. And then, you want some fun low end from the subwoofers, and they're smallish boxes that really only play down to 50Hz efficiently, so you're running those hard.

But it all worked, and we loaded out on schedule.

07/14/2026

Gentle tunes by Marv Hamilton in the arboreal paradise of a venue we call "The Canyon Rim Amphitheater."

07/12/2026

In this installment, we decided to provide the horns with individual mics. I think it worked out.

But what stayed hidden was the scramble before load-in. I was supposed to go on the road, with another lead handling this show. At 3:30AM, the text came in: My scheduled lead had a wrecked back, and was physically incapable of being present. What followed after I finally read that text at 6 AM or so was a flurry of crew rearrangement so that I could go to Gallivan and lead a team that had been called in at the last minute.

In a way, it might have been a blessing in disguise, as this particular show was more complicated overall, plus the normal lighting designer wasn't available. So, I had to make that part work as well.

I don't think anybody who wasn't in the know would ever have been aware of what happened, and I'm fine with that. But still, I mean, wow.

Address

602 East 500 South, Suite E101
Salt Lake City, UT
84102

Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Danny Maland - Live Music Producer/ Engineer posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Shortcuts

Share

Category