How to Avoid the Suck Knob

The question I get asked most often is this: "How did you learn what all those buttons do?”

And it always makes me want to scream a little. Why? Because people have the notion that pushing the “right” button will make everything perfect! Or just turn up the volume right? There are a million little things to learn and remember about doing sound and the first one is this: Every knob on the mixing console is a Suck-Knob if you don’t know what you’re doing!

Learning to manipulate sound starts without any noise at all. Because you must first learn what sound is and what it can do. If you expect to be able to manipulate sound and music then you have to understand a wide range of concepts that are relative to one another in ways that are sometimes hard to imagine. One doesn't immediately connect high school geometry classes with concert audio but a sound engineer must be able to stand in a physical space and predict the gross (large scale) actions of sounds in that space. He or she will do this not by calculating some angles but looking at the physical characteristics of the room, the geometry of the room layout etc. Why? Because this gross behavior of sound in an enclosed space affects intelligibility drastically and this in turn affects the methods you choose when you deploy and operate your equipment. It’s not the same for every room and space. If you don’t understand a little geometry and take it into consideration, you could severely limit the quality of the performance. Decisions you make early in the day will affect what you can and can’t achieve later during the performance.

So what are some of the things about sound that I can learn from an online class that will make me avoid the suck knob?

• You will learn the physics of sound systems and and how sound waves behave in a room or outdoors.
• You will learn about sound as a signal in a circuit and how sound behaves in wires and devices that are connected together.
• You can learn about sound as Music and how individual sounds work together and behave in your ear.

Once you understand all these things thoroughly, you begin to form a personal Gestalt (Die Gestalt is a German word for form or shape. It is used in English to refer to a concept of 'wholeness' (see wiktionary entry here). You begin to make decisions about all these facets of sound I've mentioned above that are based on what's happening right now, rather than reacting to something that happened at some time in the past. You begin to function in "real time" rather than just trying to change something after it's too late. You begin to anticipate what is going to happen next, because you can “see” in your mind’s eye where the music is going and what it’s going to do in the room! This is sound engineering at its finest.

“A pattern which is greater than the sum of its parts "

Music is a collection of sounds and voices that blend together, have interplay and counterpoint and come together to form a whole that is far more emotionally intense than any single sound. Training your ear to distinguish the different parts, hear how the signal path is affecting individual sounds and separate what the room is doing acoustically from what the PA is doing comes with practice. There is no shortcut or online class that can help you get the practice you need with your ears. Instead, Live Sound Engineering 101:FOH Mixing is intended to introduce you to the internal, problem solving methods successful live sound engineers use in different situations. You can’t “hear” your gain structure except as an artifact after the mix so instead, you use a mental process to build the gain structure correctly. There are plenty of examples of how-to methodology about gain structure and mixing techniques in this class but one of the things I want most to impart to my students is the mental techniques I use to make important decisions that affect the big picture.