Kick Drums and SM58s

For the first time in a while, I “experienced” a live sound-reinforced show last Friday night. At Red Wing’s Sheldon Theater, to be specific. I’d volunteered to monitor one of the Big Turn Music Festival venue’s gate and had occasional moments to wander the theater to hear the three acts from that evening. I’m sure you wouldn’t be surprised to know I was less-than-impressed with the sound goober’s “work.” In fact, it was about as SNAFU as is typical. The goober clearly believed impressing the audience with how much bass (exclusively kick drume) he could shovel into the mix was more important than attempting a musical demonstration. Nothing new there, but it was particularly depressing with the evening’s first act, Tony Cuchetti’s band, because Tony’s powerful voice did not blend well with a kick drum-dominated mix and the other musicians in his band, including the bass player, suffered the same clueless sonic disaster.

From my perspective, if the sound is obviously “reinforced, “ the sound goober is a screwup. Obviously, there are types of music where the sound has to be reinforced because the input is garbage and must be manipulated to resemble music: DJs, too much of hip hop, most metal, and almost all of the crap that falls into today’s Top 100, for example. But music and musicians only need subtle assistance from the sound goober to carry their music into the cheap seats. Doing more than that is just a sound goober projecting his/her own insecurities, sort of like the Harley Davidson characters trying to disguise their lack of motorcycling skills with the “loud pipes save lives” nonsense.

After my Sheldon shift, I took in a couple of the other venues and, Saturday, returned to tour the lot of the bars, stores, and churches that had volunteered to be in the Big Turn. A big part of the problem with several acts I heard over the two days was the chronic poor choice of vocal mics for every kind of singer. Over the past 50 years, I haven’t been shy about voicing my opinion of Shure’s SM58 workhorse. The mic is a brick, almost impossible to damage with all sorts of abuse, but it has limited musical applications. The mic’s bandwidth, proximity problems, self-noise, and polar pattern severely limits the SM58’s practical application; especially on quality voices.

Even more confusing is the fact that most vocalists don’t seem to know or care about the damage this lowfi hammer does to their voices. (If your own tool is an SM58, every voice sounds like a nail?) Why do musicians insist on playing their own instruments through their own amplifiers while appearing to be totally indifferent to the instrument their voice passes through? It’s not like it would be complicated to simply remove the 58 from the stand, clip and all, and replace it with a more suitable mic. If the goober can’t deal with the slight (or major, in the case of a condenser) variation in microphone sensitivity, that will be the least of your problems.

The advantage a serious vocalist would have in knowing how to replace the default poor microphone choice with their own well understood and properly selected replacement would be a night-and-day difference in the performance outcome. You could defuse any objections by telling the goober, “My RE20 (for example) has, essentially, the same sensitivity as your SM58, so you won’t need to change the preamp levels. However, I would like to have the vocal EQ set flat and I have selected my own high pass filter values. Thank you.” Or, in the case of a condenser, telling the goober how much gain to take off of the pre.

You might have to actually walk to the sound board to verify the goober knows how to do those things, but it would be worth a trip. It is always a good bet to assume incompetence when it comes to sound goobers. If you are pleasantly surprised, say so. One of the reasons bottom-of-the-barrel types end up running live shows is that the job is too often thankless. If no one notices a good job, the techs who know what they’re doing end up doing something else and the ones who don’t end up wreaking every show they touch.

Friday night, the one place the 58 did an acceptable job was with the last act’s “vocalist.” He was an atonal screamer whose range began where Tony’s left off. and never approached anything resembling musical. I still couldn’t understand the lyrics, but I wasn’t particularly tempted to put much effort into that task.