Photo: Karl Nathan
As well as doing regular stints at Camden's Barfly and other London venues, Jonathan Lucas engineers for a successful gigging band, whom he also records in the studio. We find out how it all came together.
Leafing through the pages of Sound On Sound you'd be forgiven for thinking that live engineers and studio engineers are two very different species. But outside the very top echelons of the profession, few engineers are so specialised. For one thing, work is work and we all need to make a living, but there's also the fact that some engineers simply don't want to be restricted to either discipline. One such engineer is Jonathan Lucas — Jonny Turbo to his friends — a man who's equally at home behind a live console or behind the glass.
Jonny's first definite step towards professional sound engineering took the form of a two-year National Diploma course in Music Technology at Leeds College of Music (LCM). This came after four years working for Tele-Products Ltd in York, an electronics company who manufacture test equipment for the telecoms industry. The job turned out to be advantageous, with hindsight. "Working there prepared me really well for studying music technology, in terms of understanding circuit diagrams and generally having a technological approach. So when I started studying audio equipment in depth, looking at circuit flow and so on, it didn't phase me, as I already had that grounding in electronics".
Seeking broader horizons, he relocated to London and began another two-year course, this time at the SAE Institute. "I was originally going to do a full Recording Arts degree but I cut it short after a year and came out with an Audio Engineering diploma. The bulk of the practical work was in the first year, and a lot of the second year was industry study, which I'd already covered at LCM. It was a very expensive place to study and paying five grand a year to sit in a classroom and have someone tell you about copyright law didn't seem worthwhile. But the first year was an invaluable experience, having the opportunity to use big professional consoles like Neves and SSLs."
Other opportunities were already presenting themselves too. "I was getting offers of work from the London Barfly [the well-established Camden venue is a landmark for up-and-coming bands] and I started doing shifts there at night and then going in to study in the morning, which wasn't great. Nobody in the industry cares whether you've got a degree or not, so it seemed topsy-turvy to be turning down work because I was studying, when the aim of the game was to get work at the end of it!"
Fly On The Wall
Jonny's opening at the venue came, as is often the way, via working initially as a volunteer. "I got involved in a series of charity gigs they were doing, called Passport Back To The Bars. It was a gig a night for a week with the likes of the Cure, the Darkness, Craig David, David Gray — big shows. I was just doing bits of security and stage management, and generally helping out the production managers because they didn't have enough staff, but it was a good way into the setup there. I shadowed one of the engineers for a few shifts to get the feel of what was going on, and as my confidence grew and I learned more and more, I eventually hit a point where they were asking me to do FOH sound, which is absolutely terrifying the first time you do it."
Sevenball, the band for whom Jonathan is resident engineer, on stage at the United Islands Festival in Prague this summer.Photo: Karl Nathan
So did he learn how to engineer a gig just by watching other people? "As far as the practical side of it goes, I suppose so, but then I had the theory in place to back it up. A lot of what you learn in a studio can cross over into live sound, but the pressure is completely different. In a studio it's all quite laid back, whereas with live sound, soundchecking and so on, everything's got to be done now — you're not spending hours getting exactly the right snare sound, you're just flying through it. I just bit the bullet and jumped in. Slowly you get stronger and stronger and eventually you feel confident about what you're doing rather than just feeling panic!"
As well as working in-house at London venues such as the Barfly, the Underworld and the Hard Rock Café, Johnny is practically the fifth member of London-based four-piece band Sevenball (www.sevenball.co.uk), engineering for them wherever they play. "I got to know the band through mutual friends and started plugging away at Luke [Ritchie, lead singer] about all the benefits of having your own engineer. In fact, they had previously had a regular engineer before moving to London and were really waiting to find the right person, and I was waiting for them to realise it was me! Eventually the opportunity to do FOH for them came up. That felt kind of like a live audition, but they were happy with how it went and so was I, and feedback from the crowd was really positive, so that was that."
Jonny's Tips For Getting Into Live Sound
- Obtain your own gear
"Getting some equipment of your own is important. I think you learn the most just from experimenting, and the more time you can spend using the stuff the better. If that involves hiring equipment or buying studio time it's massively expensive. If you can find a room or garage where you can set up some monitors, a mixer and a graphic EQ, you can start finding out what frequencies do what and try ringing out monitors. You don't need top of the range gear and you can get a lot for your money these days."
- Volunteer at venues
"If you know any approachable sound engineers, or if you just go and get chatting with someone at a local venue, ask if you can go and shadow them one evening just to get a feel for what's involved. There's really no standard career path — maybe even less so than in the case of studio engineering. A lot of venues use stage managers. It doesn't take a lot of technical know-how to do that, just good organisation and communication, but it's an 'in'. You can lend a hand and get to know the people that run the venue."
- Find yourself a band
"If you know a band who aren't very technically minded, they'd probably welcome someone to look after that side of things. And having some willing guinea pigs for both live engineering and recording is great experience."
Band Of Brothers
Jonny has a lot to say on the benefits of being a band's permanent live engineer, both for the band and the engineer. "It's a huge boost in terms of gaining experience. If you do FOH in-house in one venue for lots of different bands you'll get to know that venue really well. But if you go to lots of different venues with the one band as a constant, you learn how to get them sounding good in lots of different rooms on lots of different setups. Also, if someone offers you an in-house gig somewhere, you might have already been there once or twice, so you'll have a better idea of what you're dealing with.
"It really helps to know the songs, too. If you're mixing a band and you don't know the material, and, say, a guitar solo suddenly jumps in, you'll have to look up and think, 'Now, which one of the guitarists is doing that?' That bit of reaction time isn't a factor when you know the songs — you can have your finger on the fader before they hit the first note of the solo. And if one of the band needs to swap guitars between songs, it looks so much more professional if you know it's coming and just take out that channel at the end of the song, rather than them having to wave to the back of the room and make 'is it OK to unplug this?' signals.
"Once the gig is under way, knowing the band makes communicating with them much easier, and that's a side of live engineering which is massively under-estimated. It's one more thing that helps things run as smoothly as possible and look professional. If you don't know the band and they have a problem on stage or need you to change the monitor mix, there's that a bit of a barrier that's not there if you know the band well. I actually get quite a kick out of it if, in the middle of song, someone in the band can give the subtlest of signals so that no one in the room has probably noticed it but I know they want a little more vocal in their monitor. More than anything, it puts the band at ease. They know that the person they've taken along to do the FOH is going to do the best they possibly can with the equipment and they just have to worry about playing. I think they get a better performance out of it. And knowing roughly what sort of monitor mix the band are going to need also means that the time you spend soundchecking is cut down a lot."
Sound Czech
One of the most challenging jobs Jonny has encountered with the band so far was an outdoor gig at the United Islands festival in Prague in June 2005 (www.unitedislands.cz), where the band were booked to play two different stages over two days. Arriving off a delayed flight half an hour before they were due to perform, with no prior knowledge of what to expect, can hardly be described as an ideal situation, but Jonny seems to have taken it in his stride.
Having arrived at the Prague gig with little time to spare, and with no knowledge of what equipment was on offer, Jonathan was pleased to find top-class gear, including a Midas console and TC Electronic effects.Photo: Karl Nathan
"It was quite a scary experience for all involved, but most enjoyable! I didn't have a clue what kind of equipment I'd be using — we'd tried to find out, but hit a brick wall with the organisers — and the band didn't have their own amps and kit with them either. As it turned out, there was a fantastic Midas desk at the site and their outboard gear was fantastic — better than most of the venues I've worked in. They had TC Electronics effects, digital graphic EQs and some multi-band compressors, which you rarely find in the smaller venues in London and are a real luxury.
"As well as not knowing what to expect in terms of equipment, I was a bit worried that there might be problems with the language barrier. Luckily, the in-house engineer was Irish, although the monitor engineer who was up on stage didn't really speak any English. But the band managed to get by through pointing and using the international sign language for guitar, drums and so on!
"Not having to deal with the monitor mix has good and bad sides to it. In this case, it meant that I could just concentrate on the FOH, which was great, but it's also an element of control that's taken away from you, and given the language problems I'd probably rather have done it myself. Having said that, there wasn't that much time to set up. We had no soundcheck at all — just 10 minutes to line-check everything, then we went for it."
Jonny even manages to find an up-side to having little time for pre-gig preparation. "In a normal situation, it would be a case of different bands and engineers soundchecking in turn, each noting down all their settings carefully and then recalling them later on. When it comes to your turn, another engineer will probably have used some, if not all, of your channels. Sometimes you'll have your vocals and guitars left for you, but you'll usually be sharing the bass and drum channels with everyone else, even if the bass amp and drum kit are being changed during the gig. In this kind of situation, I think there's a danger that you'll end up worrying too much about recalling your settings absolutely exactly and get lulled into a false sense of security. Lots of things can change between the soundcheck and the performance so you need to be on your toes. As well as changes to band's equipment, people make a huge difference. People just soak up sound, so if you soundcheck when the venue is empty, you'll find a full venue sounds very different — usually much better."
Using Compressors & Gates Live
"Depending on the size of the venue, you'll usually have between four and eight compressors to play with. Obviously, the type and amount of dynamics processing required varies a lot from band to band, but in general I don't use much compression.
"I used to always put a compressor over the drum group as a matter of course, but I very rarely compress drums at all any more — I find that it's usually unnecessary in smaller venues. I do tend to gate kick-drums and toms, though. Most drummers don't seem to tune their toms very well, so they tend to ring on for too long. By using a gate, I can control how much or little tom ring comes through. Gating the drums also means that you're only picking up the hits and not everything else in between.
"I compress DI'd bass because the output is usually so spiky. If I'm using a compressor on a lead vocal, I'll put it on a group rather than in-line, so that it doesn't affect the on-stage monitors — if the singer starts singing really loud, the compressor will kick in and they won't be able to hear themselves through the monitors. I'll also sometimes use a compressor as a dedicated limiter if, say, someone is using a stomp-box effect that causes a sudden big rise in level.
"As far as gear goes, I really like BSS's stereo and quad compressors. They're really transparent and they've got built-in de-essers. I'm not so keen on the Behringer and Samson ones, which you can hear working. Drawmer gates are great. On the MX40 Punch Gate there's a Peak Punch mode that adds a very brief increase in level when the gate is triggered. So it boosts the start of the hit too and really makes the drums kick through the mix."
The Great Outdoors
On top of everything else, the United Islands festival was the first large-scale outdoor gig that Jonny had engineered. "It was the first time I'd used a proper rig outdoors — I'd only done little acoustic acts before. It's very strange. It always feels quite quiet when you're outside, because you don't have the reflections off walls that you get indoors, but that's also a good thing, because you can drive the hell out of a vocal and you're never going to get feedback through the FOH. No reflections means there are no standing waves to worry about either.
"Wind caused a little bit of a problem, because the top cabs weren't fixed very securely. They were hanging on chains but weren't tethered at the bottom, and when they moved in the wind you'd get an odd phasing effect. I heard it before I realised what was happening, which caused a bit of a panic until I looked up! Obviously, there was nothing I could do about that."
The FOH mix position — a raised platform constructed from scaffolding facing the stage — had some peculiarities of its own. "Compared to most venues, where you're tucked away in a corner and have to deal with some weird acoustics, I was expecting that being outside would be much easier. You'd have thought that, being out in the open, you'd hear the same thing as everyone else from the mix position, but the board I was standing on behind the desk was developing a huge amount of bass. I could feel it through my legs and as soon as I stepped off, the bass disappeared. But whether you're inside or outside, you should be stepping out from behind the desk and moving around to see what other people are hearing, rather than just mixing for yourself in the mix position. You can never have a perfect mix everywhere in the venue, but you can aim for a compromise.
The Barfly's small upstairs studio, which is put to good use recording bands performing on the venue stage. Some shows are then broadcast on XFM. Photo: David Greeves
"In those kind of conditions — when you're standing in a bass-heavy area — mixing feels very unnatural. The kick drum sounds really heavy and the guitars and vocals don't feel like they're cutting through, then as soon as you step out, it brings all your confidence back and you can hear it's all OK. There are some venues where the crowd are down low and the engineer is very high up, and you might be tempted to boost the top end, as the vocals don't seem to be cutting through where you are. But if you were to mix to make things sound good behind the desk, the vocals would be really shrill and piercing for the crowd. You just need to keep making small adjustments and popping out to check."
Stage To Studio
Despite his obvious enthusiasm for live engineering, Jonny hasn't left the studio behind. Far from it — he's set up a studio with Sevenball in the band's erstwhile rehearsal space, an industrial unit which is split into a performance space and small control room. "The band had already set up an HD recorder and I had a lot of equipment at home that I'd been collecting for a while. Sevenball had been sharing the space with another band, and when the other band decided to move out it was just at a time when I was moving house and needed to get all of the gear out of my flat! You can't really mix loud at 3am in a flat anyway, and in a business unit you can do what you like. It works out for all of us, because I share the rent with the band, they have a place to rehearse and record and I use it to record other bands when they're not there."
Working at the Barfly also provides a more direct opportunity for Jonny to put his studio skills to use, in a small studio above the venue used to record the live shows. "The multicore going into the FOH desk splits so that everything plugged in on stage also gets sent upstairs to a seperate desk in an isolated room. Obviously, the FOH engineer is just mixing for the audience in the venue, whereas the engineer upstairs can do an entirely different mix for recording purposes. XFM regularly broadcast shows from the Barfly — I've had the chance to record all sorts of people, from Mel C to Carbon Silicon (Mick Jones from The Clash and Tony James from Generation X), Willis and The Others. There's a digital phone line going to XFM, so 10 minutes after the show you can listen to your mix on the radio, which is pretty cool.
"It's a funny mixture of studio and live work, in that the performance is all happening live, so the pressure is still there, but you're in a slightly more controlled environment. Of course, since what you're doing is being recorded, you can scrutinise it afterwards, whereas with a normal live show, once it's gone it's gone. You can't go over it again and beat yourself up about it!"
So if Jonny was forced to choose between live and studio work, which would it be? "I really couldn't just do one or the other. I love the studio side of things but you don't get the adrenalin rush like you do when you've got a crowd in front of you and you're responsible for what's coming out of the PA, which is absolutely awesome."
You can view video of Sevenball in action in Prague at www.sevenball.co.uk .