soundcheck question

[sam]

Why is it that the soundcheck of supporting bands is always so bad?

Any time I have seen DT playing with an opening act the soundcheck for the supporting band was so bad. Keyboards are always practically "invisible".

When I went to Prog Nation last week Unexpect and Bigelf really had a bad soundcheck, whereas Opeth and DT where good..

Why is it?

Tnx
SAM

[P-dur]

Usually warm-up bands sounds bad because the headliners want to be what makes the gig. It's quite common. Also, they don't usually have the same amount of equipment etc. as the headliners, who might have dedicated people for almost everything. I guess it's kind of difficult for a sound guy to get a band's mix right if he is not used to work with them.

[PinkFloydDudi]

Who would you think would have the better soundcheck? The opener or the headliner?

For some of our shows where we have openers, we give them about 30 minutes MAYBE for setup and soundcheck. Whereas we are usually given an hour for setup and a half hour for soundcheck.

Its not that we are dicks, we just want to make SURE we sound the best we can with the system we are provided...and time is not an endless commodity when there is a start and end time to a show!

Also, opening bands usually have to work "around" the headliners. They don't unplug the headlining band's equipment, they simpliy work around it. These can lead to things such as limited open channels, non-ideal monitor mixes, non-ideal monitor placement, etc...


Example:
Opening band: "why can't our keyboard player run in stereo?"
Sound guy: "Because we only have 1 more open channel for him since the headliner took up the rest of the channels"


Headliners tend to have everything better -
Louder volume
better mixes
more equipment available to them
etc...

[Maximus]

because the headliners sign the check?

[sam]

Tnx for the anwers guys,

Anyway, I wasn't criticizing the fact that headliners have better sound, that's in fact obvious.. I was just asking myself (I'm not an expert in live music mixing, soundcheck and related stuff) why support band where always sounding so poor!

In fact I thought something like the fact that they are not allowed for technical reason to exploit the full potential of the audio system, mixer and that they don't have the dedicated personell..

Thanks!
S

[St0rMl0rD]

Well, bands like Dream Theater ALWAYS demand their own monitoring/FOH mixing console, so after their soundcheck, the settings don't change at all. The supporting acts get another console, and the sound guys have to change the channel settings on the fly, as the bands play. Also, the headliner (in this case Dream Theater) will ALWAYS have louder volume - approx. 15% louder than the band that played before. Also, some speaker systems demand to be "warmed up", so as the opening bands are playing, they are warming up the system, so that when DT hit the stage, they can get full volume they want.

-J

[Christopher]

@ Stormlord: Higher Volume is not true... better volume is, though. I was to a DT concert in Munich: supporting band... ok, almost no keyboard, but that was even the case for DT that evening:( and GOD was Neal Morse loud... luckily I had ear protection with me, but however, when DT started with ITPOE(which starts at approximately max volume) I didn't need the ear protection anymore because DT had better regulated volume.

[PinkFloydDudi]

Well, bands like Dream Theater ALWAYS demand their own monitoring/FOH mixing console, so after their soundcheck, the settings don't change at all. The supporting acts get another console, and the sound guys have to change the channel settings on the fly, as the bands play. Also, the headliner (in this case Dream Theater) will ALWAYS have louder volume - approx. 15% louder than the band that played before. Also, some speaker systems demand to be "warmed up", so as the opening bands are playing, they are warming up the system, so that when DT hit the stage, they can get full volume they want.

-J

I've never seen an opening band bring their own separate mixing console...The consoles and connections they have are HUGE and take hours to setup. There is no way they just switch things over on the fly for setups like that.