Bob’s Sound Rant fires up

Guitar legend Bob Spencer (Finch, Skyhooks, Angels and more) fired off about Live Sound engineers on Facebook, here.

“You go to the gig and put your trust and the safety of your ears (and the audiences) in a sound engineer you don’t know, hoping that when the publican says the sound engineer is ‘great’, he might be at least partially correct.”

“All too often, this optimism is badly misplaced & the audio equivalent of Hurricane Katrina ensues. So my questions to you: how many times have you been presented with the qualifications of the sound engineer when you’ve played a gig? How many times have you been sent the sound engineer’s CV before the gig? How many times have you been given the opportunity to question the engineer on their knowledge? For me to get a gig, my history and qualifications need to be presented; why is it not so for sound engineers? Again, I am blessed to know some terrific engineers, but sadly I have also been exposed to some dreadful ones and I am really quite sick of it.”

He got a staggering 268 comments, amazing since he is followed by just 308 people!

Some excerpts:

Tony Romeril: Sorry guys but a sound engineer should not present himself as such, if he can’t at least pull a reasonable sound.

Russ Kidner:  Most gigs I attend nowadays when not working all I hear is the kick, very rarely hear the vocals and too much of one instrument and not enough of the others – these kids spend thousand to learn a skill in schools (like) sae, full sail etc and know nothing about the music and a mix structure.

Graeme Goodacre: Wow, what a great read! Whilst there certainly are a lot of inexperienced, cloth-eared “sound techs” out there using cheap garbage equipment (much of it from China) producing crap sound in return for cheap rates, there are also plenty of amateur wanna-be-rock-stars that haven’t got a clue how to play and shouldn’t have been let out of the bathroom.

There’s plenty more! A great post. Read it: Facebook, here.