Recently I, along with my good friend Richard Wheelband have had the chance to take part in helping out with two shows at a local venue called The Music Cafe located on Braunstone Gate, Leicester. The events themselves were for Paris Suit Yourself, an avant garde act known as Paris Suit Yourself fresh from reknown label Ninja Tune and another for a Dub Reggae night known as Recession Session featuring Leicesters own Counteraction. I will be putting up two separate blog post in the next couple of days detailing both events. I thought this would be better than putting up whole essays of writing that would just suffocate any readers seeing this.
The first of which, was for the band Paris Suit Yourself. A French-American electro/Rock band that have recently released their debut album My Main Shitstain through the popular Ninja Tune label so immediately we knew this was serious work on offer here.
We were asked to be at the venue at 6 in the evening. As we arrived, we were introduced to the main sound engineer known as ‘Maz’. We were also introduced to desk that was a Allen and Heath 2200, a respected make, I haven’t seen an Allen and Heath desk in the flesh before and had heard good things about them. Some channels were missing faders and the first channel didn’t work but hell, this is real life, venues aren’t crapping money and it certainly does the job.
The stage itself was relatively small, with only two onstage monitors routed the auxiliaries 1 and 2 on the desk. This is something personally I thought could cause problems as one would have to be for the drummer, if not the use of a headphone amp which would have to be routed from the desk to act as an extra monitor presumably from the desk using the auxiliaries.
With no backline of their own (Travelling with instruments and an average car), it was rented from an outside company by the venue as The Music Cafe itself tends to specialise in DJ/Electronic music with actual bands playing there roughly once a month maximum, it would be pointless to spend so much money on a backline that simply wouldn’t be used all to often.
So onto the set up of the show itself, while we waited for the bass cab and head to arrive we mic’d up the instruments. The drums just had special clip on condenser microphones for the Toms and Snare, these were ultra sensitive and with a direct cardoid polar pattern placed at a fixed distance determined by the clip the mic was attached to, roughly about 3 inches from the skin on each drum as to not pick up any spill.
With it being a live event, the microphone placement is slightly different to being in a studio. For example, the bass amp was mic’d slightly off center yet facing away from the drum kit as to not pick up any spill from the kit. For this we used a SM57, a microphone commonly used within a live environment like its brother SM58, both sturdy dynamic microphones. However the frequency response chart is has a roll off at around 200hz so it wouldn’t be good for picking up any sub yet it still worked well enough to pick it up to get a good sound. These would be primarily used with guitars due to this range and its boost in the higher frequencies allowing it to give a brighter sound.
With the bass amp placed closed to the kit, it was vital we didn’t end up picking up any spill from the microphone for the amp. So it was placed as an angle where the mic was still slightly off center by facing away from the kit as shown in the picture below This was something relatively new to me, as in previous shows at Upper Brown Street, the amps were placed away from the kit so spill just wouldn’t get much of a chance to be picked up. This was due to it being a much bigger stage than the music café that allowed us to spread everything out more.
Once mic placements were in place. We got around to the sound check. Maz mostly took this on with a few comments made by Rich and me. What with it being a band from a respected label, Maz wanted this to go as best as possible so took on making sure the sound was perfect.
The show itself went pretty well with a minor hiccup regarding the effects pedal the vocalist had. We couldn’t figure out what went wrong other than it being the unit itself as it rendered the main microphone unusable forcing the vocalist to use one of the backing mic’s. Both lead and microphone was changed to no effect
I found this experience very enjoyable as it gave an insight into working in a proper venue which is a lot less controlled than the likes of Leicester College run Upper Brown Street with battle damaged equipment and bands that were doing it as part of their living who were serious about it all.
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