Backline Consultant

I am a guitar player myself as well as an engineer, and started playing gigs with bands at the age of 16, so I have extensive experience of life on both sides of the mixing desk. As an engineer I have experienced the dramatic difference between a young novice band with poorly set up equipment, and experienced musicians with decent backline: the former takes hard work to sound barely acceptable, while the latter just seems to mix itself... and as a musician I have experienced the dramatic improvement in audience response that comes from sorting out your sound so they can actually hear what you are doing!

It is tempting to attribute that entirely to a bigger budget for expensive equipment, but that is only half the story: there are many affordable ways to improve your sound, and some of these can be as simple as tilting back your guitar amp, or raising it up on a stand.

The service I offer is: I will come to your rehearsal room with a simple recording setup, and position a mic or two to record the room. You play your songs, then we listen back and talk about which parts come across well and which are getting obscured, and discuss ways to improve them... this might mean tweaking guitar amp settings or synth patches, or programming a Pod, or tuning drums differently etc. Then we record again and compare.

You may be suprised at how big a difference this process can make to your live sound. It doesn't matter what level of gig you are playing... obviously if its a small pub gig with just a vocal PA, then your backline is all they are listening to anyway, but even a large stage with 24 mics on the band will sound better if the basic sound coming from the amps and the drums is good to begin with.

Get in touch if you are interested.