i believe that is a huge misconception, i was in a band for 10 years and we always did our best to be on time, studio wise and live performance wise every single time, the show either starts extremely late or we dealt with countless of wasted hours in the studio only to take the track back home and get it to sound better ourselves.

we have even waited for all our engineers, they always are never at the studio before we were which is surprising from reading this article you blame the artist, honestly i dont care about blaming either, i just think this article is very has a very biased opinion towards both. i just find it kind of insulting in a sense being a part of a band who took business very seriously, every other band i knew was the same. the only time you saw bands who might be late was simply because they came from out of state other than that we have never been late because of our own doing.

i honestly really dislike this entire article from a engineering and production stand point for views, production and performance tips are great but you literally make it seem like the artist is so annoying and hard to deal with. oddly every artist i know all does their own engineering, production and sets up their own live shows.

the fact you go to such a great deal to differentiate the two kind of disturbs me, because everything can be said about a paid sound engineer that can be said about a picky artist.. honestly its extremely rare to find anyone now a days who doesnt do their own work on their projects in the most complete sense.

a good tech wouldnt waste their time thinking about petty biased issues that only apply to people (not artists or engineers)and thats exactly what this is, these views apply to people individually not to the terms of every artist or engineer.

its also this simple, it doesnt matter if what they ask is wrong, they are paying you. i for one never needed a technician to tell me what sounds good, thats why you bring a already worked on track to them (to possibly get better production value out of the work) in many cases thats all we paid for.

i dont need some stuck up biased technician telling me right from wrong anyway paying someone to do what you want them to do is just that, even if it is irritating youre going to do it and personally the whole “If they ask for something impossible, and they won’t listen to reason, just say yes and then deal with it your own way.” i think thats complete crap, depending on the reason for visiting the studio in the first place to make an assumption like that is wrong in itself.

if there is a will, there is a way. nothing is impossible. its just your usage of trying to make technicians sit on a higher pedestal than everyone else is ludicrous it really is, people come packed with crap in all shapes, colors, categories and sizes. making biased views towards both (ive learned the hard way) only holds you back in life. maybe you just dont care to see the hard way, from the article it mainly sounds like your way is the right way.

the whole keep them happy thing just doesnt apply, again people are people, 9/10 times they arent inspired that much by some tech they run into just so happens to be nice. there is a whole slew of events that make a band perform good and i can promise you it has nothing to do with the venue, tech or whether they were treated nicely or not. yea its nice but every show there is someone else to deal with or a new problem. half the time bands cant even remember all the venues or clubs they play at anyway so again most these claim just arent that helpful.

without all the biased nonsense, its a great article. so im sorry i felt insulted by your verbiage, but it was offensive in many senses of that right.

And I don’t think that drinking while teching is such a bad thing, but in serious moderation. I have seen techs lose their jobs because of their lack of said moderation.

There are exceptions to all of these. Like artists who have stepped to the other side of the fence, and have been a live technician!

Although, I have to say, I prefer to work with a beer in my hand. To me, it’s one of the perks of the industry. Obviously, everyone has experienced the travesty of the drunken sound tech, but those bad apples don’t keep getting gigs for long.

Cheers!

Thanks for the story.

Years ago I was doing live sound for a cover band. Everyone was happy with the sound and all was good until they introduced a “lead guitar” player into the band.

This guy was a typical show pony. He had a cordless system and he was constantly coming down off the stage to dance right at peoples tables, playing dicky lead on his knees and such. I don’t know if he ever realized just how silly he looked or that a lot of these people were embarrassed when he approached them.

Anyway. The problem I had was that he constantly kept turning his volume up on stage. This was making it increasingly difficult to mix both foldback and FOH. The other members would start looking at me to let me know they couldn’t hear themselves and I was constantly having to spend too much time adjusting his channel. In the end the other band members started asking him to turn it down but he still kept turning it up. By the second gig with this guy i’d had enough…

I completely turned his channel off

When he got down off stage (again) he noticed straight away and stormed over to me, giving me a blasting in the middle of the set.
After the gig I explained what happened to the other band members and told them I wouldn’t be doing another gig for them as long as he was playing. The next week I got a call to say they had kicked him out.

God it was good though to see this idiot acting like a wanna-be-rockstar with no FOH.

Many of my best friends are musicians of some sort and although mostly professional, they can sometimes fall into these “traps”.

At the same time, I am a live sound-tech, recording engineer and produce some of my friend’s material so I tend to know a little about how it is to be on both sides of the glass. I absolutely despise and loathe the sound-techs that think it is okay to drink during gigs, or just sit around indifferent of how bad the band is sounding live.

So in a way, I agree with everything you said. But that doesn’t mean the things I said weren’t true, some of the time, for some of the artists.

For unusual history, instrumentation and arrangement I recommend Beach Boys – Good Vibrations.

Danke schön.