?Last night I ran sound for a band I'm good friends with, Promise To Burn. They are a modern rock band somewhere between Fall Out Boy and Breaking Benjamin. It occurred to me just how sensitive audio engineering is to changes in the song arrangement.

I'm using live sound examples, but the concepts are meant to be applied to the recording studio world. I think that the live sound world illustrates these concepts better because there is no time to adapt an instrument to sound ideal for a particular musical part. You are stuck with what you have and just have to go with it. So, don't get too bent out of shape if I'm speaking a lot about live terms.

The Promise To Burn guys have a PA that I believe is 16,000 watts, EAW Mains, and a Yamaha 01V96 that I'm slowly becoming accustomed to. So basically, we have an adequate PA to playing good sized bars and clubs. I think turn out was about 500 people last night.

Ok, so now you understand where we sit in terms of live sound. The band has great gear: DW Drums, Mesa Boogie Dual Rectifier, Hughes and Kettner Triamp, Ampeg SVT something or other, etc.

Assuming we get all of our sounds dialed in correctly and the PA tuned just right, every song should sound amazing, right? (Well, the sounds are exactly perfect and I'm running the PA, so the means we are no where near perfection on that end!).

What ended up happening last night clearly illustrated how audio engineering is grossly effected by the arrangement of a given song. The chords the song uses, the tempo of the song, the volume the singer projects, the notes the singer is projecting, etc all have a huge effect on the tone that comes out.

Here are a few examples:

Kick Drum

We used my Shure SM 91 in the kick drum. It had quite a bit of high end attack to it. In fact, with most live sound (or studio) kick drums, I find myself adding 3Khz. The Shure SM91 needed no help in hammering us with plenty of attack in the kick drum. There was another local sound man there who wanted to know how I got the kick drum sound, which I thought was pretty cool.

So we had a kick drum with plenty of chest pumping beef in the low end and plenty of attack in the high end. The kick drum had just a little bit of sustain to it. (You know, some kick drums go boom an others go boooooooooomm. Last night, we had boooom). It was exactly what the band wanted.

On songs like Def Leopards “Pour Some Sugar On Me” or Three Days Grace's “Pain” the kick drum was about as good as it gets without moving up to concert halls that have real pro sound guys who really know what they are doing.

It just so happens that both these songs have very simple, but very powerful kick drums in them. I was very happy with the sound of the slower, deliberate type of kick drum sound. Then at the end of one of these songs, the drummer started doing some double bass stuff. It sounded like a washing machine was imploding. The sound was terrible!!! How could a kick drum sound so great during a slow part and then sound so terrible during another part? Well, it comes down to how audio engineering is effected by arrangement. The double bass kick drum sound has much different requirements than the huge, slow, and deliberate kick drum sound does.

We could have set the kick drum for “boom” and it would have worked for the double bass stuff, but the big, slow stuff would not have sounded near as cool. The big slow stuff requires “boooom”.

I could have chosen a sound that was somewhere in the middle (and essentially compromised on both), but for whatever reason that wasn't the biggest priority when I had an entire band to setup.

Lead Guitar

Managing guitar solos was also very tricky last night. There was time in particular where the lead guitar player had a solo that jumped from fairly low notes to notes up high on the neck. It was strange because I had to crank up the volume a TON to be able to hear the low notes. However, when the lead guitar player flew up to the high notes, the sound was WAY too loud.

Basically, that lead was arranged in a way that it could clash just a little bit with the bass and distorted rhythm guitar during the low notes. The low notes were being played in a very dense spot and therefore needed more level to cut through. When the guitar player shot up to the high notes, he was all by himself. There was no competition at all. In fact, it hurt. So, I had to ride the fader on the lead guitar. If I saw fingers fly up the neck, I'd pull back on the level.

In the studio you can account for this sort of thing, but it's very difficult to find one tone that works perfectly for lead guitar, rhythm guitar, etc.

Vocals

I want to stress that I don't know what I'm doing in the live sound world. That is not how I pay the bills! I had some buddies that needed help and had adequate tools for the job. It seamed like an okay idea at the time to volunteer to run live sound.

I'm probably the world's second worst vocal EQ guy in the live sound. The rules that apply to the studio are useless in the live sound, for the most part.

I tweak vocals to sound good at full voice. The singer is usually singer quite aggressively, so it's almost my goal to make him sound his best in that setting. (Really, I'm just trying to avoid feedback). The end results is not ideal. When the singer is not singing aggressively, but singing softly, we end up with a ton of low mid junk in the vocal sound.

So, on a song where the singer is digging in most of the time, the tone wasn't too bad. The second we switched to a song that didn't not require a vocal cannon, everything went to hell. A great example of this was on Everclear's “Santa Monica”. During the first 2/3 of the song, the vocals are on the softer side. During the last 1/3 the singer is practically yelling...or at least really digging in. So, based on my vocal settings, the first 2/3 of the song had a vocal sound that was really boomy sounding, I guess. Towards the end of the song, we were about where we should have been.

The interesting breakthrough with the software vocals came on the Three Days Grace song “Pain”. That song has software vocals, during the verse. There should have been a problem getting the vocals to cut through. There wasn't. The song practically breaks down to nothing. Instead of the strummed clean/semi-clean guitars, we had a much more sparse instrumentation for the guitars. The vocals had no problems.

Of course, when the full band kicked in with the big, rock guitars the singing was also more aggressive and everything cut extremely well.

Some Songs Just Sounded Better

It was strange, but some songs just sounded 1000% better than other songs last night. This is with the same exact sounding instruments. The only difference is in the song arrangements and my settings on the console. I don't think my settings had much to do with it.

The Three Days Grace “Pain” song sounded enormous and “right” the two times they played it (their set length was extended). Everything came together. As mentioned above, the vocals had little competition when soft singing was required, so there were no issued with getting the vocals to cut through the soft stuff. The singer gunned it during the aggressive stuff so he cut through without a problem. The kick drum was slow and deliberate. Palm muted guitars could cause a low end mess even though I rolled off the low end in the guitars in the PA. Luckily this song didn't use aggressive palm muting or fast kick drum sounds.

I'm not trying to say that a given song is better. The Three Days Grace song is certainly not my favorite song. However, it is certainly arranged to sound super huge and the sounds we decided on ended up being ideal for that song.

Another song that happened to sound great was the Collective Soul “Why Pt2” song. That song is another big sounding song with a slow, deliberate kind of kick drum. The guitars can be cranked in the verses because they do the “da duh duh . . . ...da duh duh” and only play when the vocals aren't playing. There is no worry that the vocals and guitars are going to clash at all.

Conclusion

I hope this article illustrated some possible pitfalls that you could fall into on your next recording. A huge boomy kick drum does not have any place on a speed metal song, but it sure sounds great on the arena rock songs. You don't want tons of loud, crazy guitars fighting the vocals. So it's best to save the big guitars for a time when the singer is maybe in a higher register. Guitar solos in the lower register will have to be turned up louder to fight rhythm guitars. (Or you could track rhythm guitars up and octave or just use high strings....(use standard “D” chord instead of a D power chord, but example).

There is a lot more that goes into arranging than what was presented here. This article was merely meant to bring awareness to the issue of arrangement and show you some possible conflicts that could occur between arrangement and audio engineering.