Isolation from the Audience

Live sound goofballs do a lot of dumb things—from lousy gain structure to creating mixes that more resemble heavy equipment in operation than any sort of musical expression—but one of the most abused parts of a live sound system is, and probably will always be, the stage monitor system. The purpose of monitor systems is to give the performers some additional subtle feedback regarding timing, pitch, and balance beyond what they should be hearing from the FOH system. That purpose was lost sometime at least 40 years ago, when sound companies realized that most performers don’t give a good shit what the FOH system sounds like and could care less what their audience hears once those suckers have paid good money for an awful experience.

The the standard setup procedure, today, is to “wring out the monitors” as the band is setting up. That means some doofus will make huffing and plosive noises into various microphones until the monitor engineer has obtained the loudest, least musical possible sound from the monitor system. By the time the monitors are setup in this manner, the FOH system is usually unnecessary, volume-wise, and the FOH engineer is left to try to provide a micron of clarity to the mess that is blasting off of the stage. Usually, that underpaid and untalented soundclown takes that job slightly less seriously than the effort expended by a minimum wage private “security guard” at an abandoned Detroit public school building. The result is what we’ve all come to expect from most live music performances; even people in the industry are amazed at how awful live music sounds.

This weekend, I went to an outdoor show in town. The performance was hampered by being partially enclosed in a polyester PVC-coated stretched tents, which are pretty effective mid-range and above audio reflectors, but that didn’t explain how awful the sound was. The group was a 3-piece, very young, pop band with an over-achieving drummer who hammered the snare as if it were a tent post needing to be drilled deep into the asphalt. That set some kind of baseline for the monitor setup, since the drummer was (for once) the first guy on stage to be ready for the sound check. From there, everything went downhill fast. [You can tell by the stage picture, at left, that the sound company had a lot more monitor volume capacity than FOH capabilities.] I watched the sound check, but other than bumping monitor gains up until hitting the gain-before-feedback limits, I didn’t hear any output from the mains during the sound check. Honestly, I couldn’t tell if the mains ever made a contribution to the overall sound; even well into the show.

Obviously, there was zero intelligability from the system. Regardless of where I sat or stood, I couldn’t understand a word coming from the stage. They might as well been speaking French or Chinese, or both. Toward the end of the performance, I walked behind the stage and found (to no surprise at all) that the on-stage volume was substantially louder than the FOH output. While the on-stage sound quality was somewhat better than the FOH, it was mostly deafeningly loud. Probably so loud that the FOH mixer was already past the allowed volume for the venue (an outdoor festival).

For a few hours after leaving that show, I thought about the purpose of stage monitors in the current context. As best I can figure, monitor systems are intended to create acoustic space and physical distance between musicians and their audience. Not to bring the two together in a shared musical experience, but to drive a sonic wedge between the musicians, their fears and and insecurities and frustrations, and the overly-tolerant (and shrinking) audiences who are clearly not particularly discriminating because they put up with this abuse.

Earlier in the week, I was the FOH tech for a small venue performance. When I set up the system and stage, I took advantage of the fact that the performers didn’t list “monitors” in their equipment rider and left the monitors to the side where I could set them up if I needed them. Lucky for me and the audience, when the performers started testing their mics and instruments they were satisfied with the main’s spill and decided to go sans-monitors. The difference between the communication these musicians had with their audience, obviously aided by the close physical proximity, and the performance I saw later in the week was night-and-day. That physical proximity thing isn’t just a function of the venue setup, though. The loud group didn’t provide any high fidelity place for their audience to hear their music. Close or distant, it sounded muffled and distorted everywhere. In contrast, the acoustic/electric duo pictured next to this paragraph sounded clear, present, and natural everywhere in the room.

There has to be some sort of compromise louder acts can make to provide their audience with a decent aural experience. While most bands sound like crap, not all do. Not all bands that sound musical start with the mains, either, but they do make an effort to get out front and listen to the mains sometime before the show or early in the show. And when it sounds like crap, they do what it takes to fix it. One solution for the monitor mess is in-ear monitors, but that provides another level of isolation between the musicians and the audience; especially if the FOH system is overbearing. In-ears or traditional monitors, someone has to care what the audience is hearing and no artist worth listening to will leave that to a hired hand.