Bringing
it to the sound stage
As a fellow guitarist who has played on different stage settings, you know as well as I that it can
be challenging at times to get the tone we hear in our head. It shouldn’t have to be so difficult, we tell ourselves
as we untangle the rat’s nest of cables hoping we can reduce the inductance by a few more henries.
The problem starts at home when you have your dream rig that you spent months, sometimes even years assembling, sounding
amazingly fat and juicy, dripping with honey tone to die for and you take it to a gig at Joe’s Juke Joint and it sounds
thin a nasally. Very disappointing, I feel you, you just have to work with the environment and the sound system they have.
Joe Pass knew that oh too well, he would take just a guitar to his gigs and still sounded incredible. Do you think he played
through bad sound systems?
There are various factors
involved when you create an environment for music, such as room symmetry, the material of the walls, floors, & ceilings
and their absorption coefficients, which contribute to the room’s frequency balance and sonic character. Parallel walls
create standing waves, which happens when sound reflects off of parallel surfaces and travels back using the same path. Even
nonparallel walls can create problems with low frequency standing waves. Asymmetrical side reflections from the sound stage
can cause an acoustic imbalance in the audience.
The sound
system can be a whole other can of worms; if sound systems are not properly grounded they can have ground loops, which
raises the floor level noise. First you can plug all your equipment into the same AC leg; this puts all the equipment
at the same potential. Another tip is to avoid using unbalanced (-10dB) equipment in your set up. Using balanced equipment
(+4dB) most of the time is better than unbalanced equipment. Although some so called professional equipment is not properly
grounded internally. It is best to check out reviews on anything you are thinking about purchasing to get some feedback. You
want your signal from the guitar as clean as possible going into the amp. I would recommend to shell out the extra backs and
get a Klotz or Evidence cable that have very low inductance. Another handy gadget that you can take to gigs is the Electro
Harmonix Hum eliminator, this plugs in before your preamp and cleans the signal up before it is fed into the preamp. I had
a customer who has a Carr 6V slant and he was getting some nasty hum at some gigs and it was as quiet as a church mouse at
other gigs, He bought the Electro Harmonix Hum Eliminator and it has quieted the noise level down quite a bit.
Another issue can be phase cancellation; if speakers are facing towards each other you can get phase cancellation.
If speakers are not wired properly you get phase cancellation. This will drastically affect the tone of the amplifier. The
best way to avoid phase cancellation is to make sure your speaker cones are parallel with each other, and the other speakers
on the stage. Also, check the phase of your own speakers by using a 9 volt battery and touch the + side of the battery to
the + side of the speaker terminal for a second or two. (Don’t leave it on too long; it can damage the speaker.) You
should see the speaker cone move forward, if it moves back then you switch the speaker wires. I use this method with a bi-amp
or tri-amp set up to make sure all the different amplifiers are in phase with each other.
Now to the fun stuff, the chain of effects has a great deal to do with the quality of your tone. If you use a COMPRESSOR,
this should be the first effect connected to your guitar. Compressors raise the noise levels of everything before it. #2 would
be OVERDRIVE; you want to clip the purest signal before sending the signal to the other effects. #3 is CHORUS/FLANGE, #4 is
DELAY, #5 is Reverb. If you amp has reverb or you use reverb it should be set according to the room size. You do not want
the intensity of the direct sound to be swamped out by the reverberant sound. What you are looking
for is CRITICAL DISTANCE: when the direct sound equals the reverberant sound. Which can be a challenge to figure out, with
a proper monitoring system and a good sound tech it is achievable. Typically the larger the room the less reverb you should
use and the smaller the room the more reverb you can use. The #1 way you can tell that a recording is amateur is by too much
reverb, so do not go overboard with it, a little bit goes a long way, and the pros know to not use too much. You can also
put a slight DELAY in front of the OVERDRIVE for rhythm and when the OVERDRIVE is engaged you get a more prominent DELAY.
There are many factors
involved with Sound stage production, Remember to keep your cable runs as short as possible and to use the least amount of
effect to achieve the tonality you want, and don’t forget to pack a spare 9 volt and a flashlight in your gig bag!!
Tonefully yours,
Brian
