OMG, Where do i start, I almost got into a fist fight one night with a sound man, he's got a razor says your bass drum has got to have a hole cut in it, my response was you better keep that freakn knife because i will beat you over your Neanderthal head with my 2b drum sticks, we ended up the best of enemies after i basically did his job and showed him how to place a mic for a normal bass drum head with out a hole in it!!!Hurting

When I recorded our CD with our band, I had known the engineer for quite a while. I was using the house kit, a DW with the most beat up head I've ever seen. I brought my own snares and he had issues with the ring. I trusted him to make it sound right, he was the one who knew what he was doing. As far as live shows go, most sound guys are setting up for the masses, so I have someone go sit on my kit after the sound guy is done and listen, and make suggestions....nicely but firm.

Most sound people are great but there's a few bozos out there. I don't like jazz sets to be tight mic'd - an overhead (if it's mono) and a kick mic are suffice.

My main complaint is that they all seem to have bought crap mics like Samson and Nady (whole kits of drum mics) and nobody seems to use quality stuff, or even ok stuff as much as they used to. An SM57 on the snare is okay, so are SM81's overhead but that was 20 years ago, now it's some Peavey crap from Musician's Enemy!

But overall I've had good experiences with sound men but I play gigs where they'd get fired if they weren't nice.

At our first gig, first thing soundman cared about was his pay. When our guitarist asked him whether he could do someting about his sound, he just stated: "It's your speakar, you gotta know how to operate it!" He was no help at all. After more than a year, we got the same soundman and somehow, he was much nicer to us and the gig even was sounded better, I think.

But generally, soundmen I met were quite OK, some of them even more than OK.

Most bands I have played in the past few years, the band has been the sound man....as we are all fed up with these so called professional sound men. Most have no clue, concentrate on the guitar or vocals, crank the bass way up and seem to add gated reverb to the drums! Dude, the 80's are over!

My latest project mainly plays smaller clubs. The guitar player uses an old Fender Champ mic'd up through the PA, the bass player is using a 50 watt bassman un mic'd, and on gigs when I need to be mic'd its one in front of the bass drum (NO FREAKIN HOLE EITHER! DUMB-A$$ SOUNDMEN! DOH) and two overheads. No close mic'ing at all.

We control the mixing board, monitors, overall volume, etc.....we learned from our past mistakes and bothered to learn the other side of our craft rather than "trust" or listen to the "expert" soundmen. This we did learn, a good sound man is hard to come by an when you do, they are expensive! I should know, I charge a lot when asked between my own regular gigs to do sound for someone else! :D

We had a sound kiddo go to one of those "BE A PROFESSIONAL SOUND ENGINEER" thingys. Freekin' kid came back and argued with the head of the group...he HAD to put duct tape on my cymbals. I didn't realize what was being said...just that they were heating up. She stepped aside and said basically, "if you want to insist, there's the drummer...go and insist." Little dude came over and said with as much authority as he could muster that he was going to tape up my vintage hand hammered cymbals. I said that if he felt it was worth the use of his arm, go on ahead and try. This was our Praise and Worship band in church. GOD has an immense amount of patience with me.

And no doubt a sense of humor!Jump For Joy

If these "soound engineers" had their way we'd all be playing cardboard boxes stuffed with pillows and using pie tins for cymbals! DOH

Anyone got any links on any "How to be a soundman" websites? It sounds like a profession I could excel at! Guaranteed to argue without having to know anything about anything!!!Laughing H

(this was a joke. No hate mail please.....)

have a wonderful evening

drumhack band2flowers2Mind BlowiStorm Trooper