by Serguey Shinder
In the summer of 2019 we played third of five bands at an all day event in a converted brewery. Changeovers were twenty minutes, and the house engineer ran all five bands from one desk. Our line check went smoothly. Drums, bass, two guitars, three vocal microphones, each one sounded and nodded through.
Our second song opens with sixteen bars of me singing over our guitarist on acoustic, and nothing else. He does not touch the acoustic in the first song, so at line check it was the one channel still muted from the band before, and nobody had told the engineer it mattered. For the whole first verse, the audience heard a man singing unaccompanied with a guitarist visibly strumming at nothing. Three songs later our bass player sang lead on the one song he fronts, and his vocal sat at harmony level for a verse and a half before anybody on the desk noticed who was singing.
In the van we blamed the engineer, loudly and at length. By the time we reached the motorway it had begun to sound less convincing. He had mixed five bands that day. He had heard each of us for twenty minutes, in the dark, for the first time, while an audience listened. Everything he knew about our songs he had to find out live, by ear, a bar or two after it happened. We had spent years rehearsing those songs and not one minute thinking about the one person in the building who decided how they sounded.
Now we carry a single sheet. The top half is a plan of the stage with every instrument and microphone marked and numbered. The bottom half has one line per song: who sings lead, what starts the song, where the quiet parts are, any change of instrument, and how it ends, because an engineer who does not know a song stops on a held chord will pull the faders down a second early. One copy goes to the engineer at load in, and another is taped beside the monitor desk.
It took an evening to write, and it has changed our gigs more than any piece of equipment we have bought. Engineers read it. One in Leeds said it was the second one he had been handed all year, and then asked, before we had played a note, whether the bassist's song was the fourth or the fifth.
The room still does what rooms do. But a fair amount of what we had blamed on rooms for ten years was something we had simply never told the person at the desk.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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