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Jonathan Kreinik’s Deep Dive on the Front of House Engineer

The front-of-house engineer is going to help you make a seamless transition between paper and live performances.

Up here at the front-of-house, the centerpiece of the sound system is the console. In smaller venues in the music industry, you’ll just have a stage box that has Wi-Fi and connects via an iPad. They can actually be controlled by a tablet and the software looks like the control surface.

For the most part, everything that would have normally existed in an analog world is all in your control tablet. In the old days and in certain older venues, you have a console. You’d have some control over the sound system in rack-mounted form. You can also control effects. This includes making enhancements to whatever is coming into the console from the stage.

The console connects to the stage via something called a “snake”. A snake in the analog world is literally a long cable that’s also called the multi-core cable. It has multiple wires in it that connect to the stage box. Nowadays, you have a digital snake. It’s still called a multi-core because it’s got multiplex digital signals coming in from a digital stage box that connects to the computer.

These are called DI boxes. Without getting too technical, they convert an instrument quarter-inch cable to an XLR cable. The reason is that those two kinds of signals have different impedances. That’s something that you probably want to learn about as you continue your online music education.

A lot of times, because we have a lot of signals coming from computers or audio interfaces or synthesizers or drum machines or iPads, they really want to get that data out. So we have boxes for that.

Monitors are typically speakers that you’ll find on a stage or wherever you’re performing. You need them because you’re usually not in front of the speakers when you’re performing your music.

If you look at most stages, there will be a stage and then a sound system in front of it. So you’re hearing everything coming back at you from the room. In a perfect world, that’s fine, and everything sounds good, and you’re able to perform with confidence and enjoy yourself and hear everything and play in tune.

However, that’s not always the case. So we add speakers that point at the artists in the opposite direction of the audience. This can help you to confirm that the balance between all the instruments are specific to your needs. For example, sometimes you don’t need to hear the prerecorded string symphony on your backing tracks in order to sing.

Or you’ve already heard it a million times and all you want to do is just concentrate on your vocals. That’s part of interfacing with either the monitor engineer or the house engineer, and doing that in such a way that you both can agree on it and is beneficial to the performance and hopefully to the audience. Because sometimes the audience can hear them, too.

Then you have microphones. They convert acoustic air pressure into voltage, which will go into the snake. From there, it will go where it needs to. That’s the first thing that connects a person or an amplifier or a drum to the snake.

Microphones come in different shapes and sizes. And they do different things. Usually, you can kind of tell what a microphone is going to do based on how it’s designed. But not always. There are no hard rules. But a lot of people use certain kinds of microphones for bass drum or a bass guitar amps or just something low.

The SM58 is probably one of the common mics in the world. You see it on vocals, but really, you can use it for anything. This is the kind of microphone that you usually see in front of a guitar amp because it looks kind of like an amp. Most engineers work with the band to figure out what you like or how to use what you have.

It’s really good to know ahead of time what your input list is, and specifically which parts of that input list you want to hear in your monitors.

You may not necessarily need a specific vocabulary of all the frequencies in the audio spectrum and how they apply to musical instruments, but having a general idea of what the difference between a low frequency and a high frequency is is a good start.

Using a lot of colorful adjectives doesn’t really help anybody. It sounds cool. But for the most part, bright and dark are good ways of describing things. But warm… warm means a lot of different frequencies to a lot of different people. You learn this in music education.

This can be something that you’re dealing with in the studio over a vocal, where it’s just not warm enough. And the content on the audio that is just not warm in general. It’s missing those frequencies.

So often, the pitfall of all of that is when you have a microphone and you have a speaker and you point the microphone at the speaker, you can set up a feedback loop. This is a sound that you’ll definitely hear at some point in your life. What will usually happen is that the engineer will do their best to give you exactly what you want before creating that feedback loop.

If you turn a microphone up too loud in front of a speaker, feedback is what’s going to happen and it’s not pretty. It’s usually not what you want when you’re setting up the sound system.

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