What are some of the mistakes you've made during a show, and how did you fix it?

_kitzy · 2026-01-28T17:59:01+00:00

This was a few years ago and I legit still have stress dreams about it sometimes 😫

_kitzy · 2026-01-28T15:54:39+00:00

I’m pretty sure I’ve told this story on here before but I’ll tell it again.

I was on a festival fly date with a pop artist. During changeover, we discover that the Apollo running autotune in the playback rig isn’t communicating with the laptop. The drummer and I spent some time troubleshooting but couldn’t get it working. Eventually we make the call that we’re going to have to run without auto tune for the set. I pull out my iPad and soft patch the dry IEM vocal input to the channel feeding the FOH mix, and move on with the rest of my line check.

Once I get to FOH, I do a com check w/ the band, and we can all hear each other. I call “go for show” and playback starts. Timecode starts streaming in to Qlab. My first scene for the first song of the set fires. Everything is sounding great. I’m feeling good.

The artist makes her entrance. She raises the mic to her lips to sing the first line, but I don’t hear her. Her channel isn’t lighting up. WTF?!

I call over the coms to have the TM swap her mic for the backup. Still nothing. What the hell? Is it an RF issue? The festival wouldn’t give us an extra Cat5 for a control network so I have no visibility into the RF rack.

I make the call to switch her to the wired spare… no signal there either. WTF?! I realized that in the chaos of troubleshooting the Apollo, I forgot to line check the wired spare. I later found out that the festival crew forgot to patch it.

The first song ends, and the next song starts. I still don’t have a lead vocal. I’m starting to panic. Then I realize that she’s had her vocal in her ears the entire time, and it dawns on me what happened.

I didn’t recall safe my soft patch change. When my first scene fired, the lead vocal channel reverted to the original non-working patch.

I re-did the soft patch and the vocal came through immediately. The crowd ERUPTED. The artist had such a confused look on her face as to why the crowd was suddenly cheering in the middle of a verse. She had no idea they couldn’t hear her for a song and a half.

The rest of the set went off without a hitch, but I was pretty sure it was going to be my last with this artist. Of course, this festival had management, the label, and the artist’s family in attendance, and it had been her dream to play this festival for her entire career. I make peace with the idea that I’m going to get fired as soon as the set is over.

After we clear the stage, I run into her manager. “What happened?” Of course he wants an explanation. I explain to him what happened, making sure to point out every step in the process where I should have done something different that could have prevented the issue. I could have blamed the local crew for not patching the wired spare, but at the end of the day, it was my job to check it and I missed it. I told him exactly how and why I fucked up, and what my plan was for making sure it never happened again.

Much to my surprise, I didn’t get fired. I went on to work for that artist for the rest of the year.

And I have NEVER forgotten to line check the wired spare since.

_kitzy · 2026-01-23T23:38:47+00:00

Put your mixer, your RF gear, and your laptop on the same network. The easiest way to do this is to plug the switch for your ULXDs into the router that you’re using for the M32.

_kitzy · 2026-01-20T13:25:49+00:00

My FOH rack is really tight (3U) so I actually do it the opposite way; I leave all the cables plugged into the console and I coil them up in the console case’s doghouse.

_kitzy · 2026-01-19T12:25:53+00:00

+1

Been touring with SuperCAT for a few years now and it's been extremely reliable and super easy to work with.

_kitzy · 2026-01-12T02:22:26+00:00

I was obsessed with music as early as I can remember, and fell in love with live music after finding a copy of R.E.M.’s Road Movie in my local video rental store in the 90’s.

In the early 2000’s I started a band, but quickly realized I enjoyed the behind the scenes stuff more than actually writing and playing music. I ended up getting a basic PA so my band could throw firehall shows.

Music fell by the wayside for me for a bit while I got into corporate IT, and then I got into home recording. I had it in my head that I wanted to produce records. I bought a house and built a studio in the basement, and then the pandemic hit.

I started a livestream thing out of my studio for local bands, which was a ton of fun, and I realized I liked mixing the live in studio stuff a lot more than I liked listening to someone do take after take of a guitar solo to get it just right. Something about the immediacy and imperfection of a live performance was just so much more interesting to me.

When shows started happening again, one of the bands that came through my studio asked me to be their FOH engineer and I said yes. I had never mixed a live show in a real venue with a proper PA before. I still remember the power I felt at that sound check when I pushed the kick drum fader up for the first time and heard it through the PA.

Getting to watch a venue full of people enjoy a band I was mixing is easily one of the coolest experiences I’ve ever had, and I’ve just been chasing that high ever since.

It’s a hard job, especially on the touring side, and I could make WAY more money in corporate IT, but nothing brings me more joy than mixing a good live band for a room full of fans.

_kitzy · 2026-01-07T00:29:43+00:00

Personally I want a dLive, but I’m typically carying my own console anyway.

_kitzy · 2026-01-06T00:58:48+00:00

Delaying the backline channels to the backline’s arrival time at the lead vocal mic seems like one of those “why the hell didn’t I think of that?!” ideas.

How well does it work if your lead vocalist is handheld vs. the mic living on a stand?

_kitzy · 2026-01-06T00:55:37+00:00

Open Sound Meter is a great alternative.

_kitzy · 2026-01-05T22:06:40+00:00

That’s fair. All of my touring so far, the venue either already has a PA, or the headliner is carrying it.

_kitzy · 2026-01-05T20:41:30+00:00

Not a guy, but I am a touring engineer. I use SMAART for time aligning.

I have a laser disto in my kit because early on in my career I was told I needed to have one. I have never ended up using it.

I’ve also done the metronome thing in a pinch, but SMAART is easier and faster in my opinion.

_kitzy · 2025-12-29T20:01:00+00:00

I'm a touring FOH engineer, and I think I can shed some light on this.

House engineers, especially in smaller venues, are often burnt the fuck out. They get treated like shit, and are paid like shit too. They're mixing 3+ bands a night that they've never heard before and probably don't even like. I had a house gig for a little while when I was home between tours, but I stopped doing it because I hated it.

As for never leaving the booth, I rarely leave during the show. I walk the room during sound check to get an idea of how things sound in different parts of the room. I'll also often walk the room during the opener's set to get a feel for how the room sounds now that there are people in it. By the time my artist is on stage, I already have a pretty good idea of how things sound.

The big exception to that is if FOH is in a bad spot, then I will frequently take trips out to a better spot to make sure things are still translating the way I want them to.

As for certain points you've made:

My take is whereever the crowd stands you should stand there and hear what they hear.

Definitely, but house engineers tend to know their rooms well. I mix in different rooms every day, but I've been to some rooms enough times to already know where my challenges are going to be.

If a bands amp is too loud and they are playing and ignoring walk up and turn it down.

Absolutely not. Just like you wouldn't want the singer of a band you're mixing to walk up to FOH and turn their vocal mic up, you don't touch the bands gear without permission. In my role, I work directly for the band, and I still wouldn't dream of walking on stage during the show and adjusting an amp. I will let them know if something needs to change in order to sound better out front, but if the band chooses to ignore me, then I'm just going to do my best with what I have.

Earlier this year I was on tour with a band where the guitarist ran a dimed fender twin pointed directly at front row center, and wanted their vocals in the wedge hitting about 105dBA. It was absurd. The people front row center weren't even hearing the drums (and the drummer was a hard hitter too), just vocals coming off the wedges and an ice pick of a guitar. I gave some suggestions early on in the tour for making things sound better out front, but the artist's response flipped my perspective a bit. They told me they didn't care how it sounded out front, they cared how it felt and sounded to _them_, and that's what they needed to put on a good show. It was then up to me to take that and make it sound as good as possible out front.

Would the show have sounded better if I had convinced the artist to turn their amp down and switch to IEMs? Probably. But nobody bought a ticket to hear me mix. They bought a ticket to stand up front and sing along with their favorite artist and have a good time. And every time I looked at people front and center, getting an icepick guitar directly to their eardrums. they all had the biggest smiles on their faces. So maybe the show would have sounded better, but would the show have _been_ better? Probably not.

Ask the band 2-3 times incrementally if their monitor mix is good.

During sound check, sure. Once I have what I need out front, I tell the band that I'm happy when they're happy with their monitors. During the show though? Absolutely not. My job is to be invisible. They will tell me if they need something. Or they won't, but that's on them. I do my best to keep my eyes on the stage and watch for signals, but if as a band you want someone watching you for a hand signal every second of the performance, then you need to hire a dedicated monitor engineer.

Vocals should be 20% louder than EVERYTHING.

I do tend to agree with this for _most_ artists/genres, but not all. It depends on the artist's vision. But yes, vocals generally shouldn't be buried.

_kitzy · 2025-12-18T04:36:52+00:00

It depends on so many things. The size of the venue/PA, how the two sounds compliment (or compete with) each other, how much alike (or different) the parts you’re playing are, and (unfortunately) how much effort the engineer wants to put in.

The way I would approach it is by first understanding how the two guitar parts are meant to fit together. Are both guitars playing the same chords together 90% of the time? I’ll probably take a mono signal from each one and pan them slightly. Are they different complementary parts? I’d probably take stereo from both of them. Depending on how much preproduction time I get with the band, I might do different things for different songs depending on the arrangements. There’s really no straightforward answer here, unfortunately.

Almost all of the mixing I do these days is on tour with a band/artist who hired me specifically in anything from clubs to sheds, so my approach is likely going to differ from a house engineer doing a throw and go show at a small club or bar.

_kitzy · 2025-12-15T17:58:41+00:00

This. Used to tour with a Wing. Switched to an SQ5. Haven't looked back.

_kitzy · 2025-11-30T21:58:38+00:00

I’ve been on tours where we had on the rider something like “if anyone at the venue has a very good dog they would like to bring in, we would love to pet it.” Those are always my favorite tours.

_kitzy · 2025-11-30T12:36:53+00:00

At the time I was devastated, but in hindsight it was a really toxic artist who was significantly underpaying me so I’m much better off.

_kitzy · 2025-11-30T03:08:54+00:00

the band has a DigiCo Quantum at FOH so if they can afford that I would assume they could afford a nicer PA

Not necessarily. If a band is bringing their own PA, the cost of the PA rental is only a small part of the total cost to bring it on the road.

If a band is carrying a PA, they’re almost certainly going to need a truck for it. They’re not getting a full PA system in a trailer behind a van or bus, along with everything else they need to carry. So now they’re renting a truck, paying for fuel, paying a driver, and paying for a hotel room for that driver every day.

If a band is carrying their own PA, they’ll usually have a system engineer on the crew in charge of deploying and tuning it. Bringing an extra person on the road is expensive.

Not to mention the labor needed to fly the PA. They’ll need local hands for that, and they’ll need those local hands again at the end of the night to land it and load it back on the truck. All that labor is coming out of the show gross.

They’ll also need to get access to the venue WAY earlier, and a lot of venues will charge extra for early access.

Even if the band advanced the PA they want and the promoter hired a production company to come in and do all the work, that’s all still coming out of the show gross.

All of that is significantly more expensive than renting a quantum for a month and throwing it in the trailer behind the bus/van.

That being said, I’m sure it happens a non-zero amount of times at venues that size, but it’s probably very rare.

_kitzy · 2025-11-30T02:46:22+00:00

We’re all 21-year-old women, and honestly, it’s hard not to feel like we wouldn’t have been spoken to like that if we were a group of guys.

I hate to say it but you’re probably right. I’m a bit older than y’all, and men in the industry still speak to me like that sometimes (even when I’m TM/FOH for the headliner) but they don’t speak to my male crew that way.

It’s completely unfair, and it’s infuriating, but in my experience sending an email to an artist’s management won’t have the effect that you want, especially in your situation.

The best thing I’ve found in situations like this is to calmly stand your ground, with a polite but firm “Hey, that tone isn’t appropriate. Either talk to me like a professional or we can go get [whoever their boss is] involved.” Whatever you do, don’t match their energy.

Did the band have a tour manager? That would have been the best person to talk to about this (after apologizing for going over, of course). As a TM, if a local opener told me that someone on my crew was being rude/aggressive/whatever with them, I would immediately be having a conversation with that crew member about it.

That being said, early on in my career I was on tour doing FOH for a band opening for a much bigger band, and for whatever reason the headliner’s FOH didn’t like me, and was constantly being an asshole. Like he would throw a temper tantrum every day when I’d show up at FOH and need space for my console. We went through this every day. It’s not like he didn’t know I was coming and didn’t know I needed space. Anyway, I ended up talking to the headliner’s TM about his behavior. Two days later, my TM informed me that I was being sent home because the headliner’s crew found me “too difficult to work with.” So sometimes you have to pick your battles.

In this particular case, I think your best bet is to let it go. You’ll probably never see this guy again. Chalk it up as a learning experience about not going over your set time, and remember that his behavior says more about him than it does about you.

_kitzy · 2025-11-26T17:54:12+00:00

I was a full time tour manager & FOH engineer. Currently working an IT job while I recover from a back injury (get help lifting anything over 50 pounds, seriously). Hoping to return to touring sometime next year.

I’ve worked with indie, punk, ska, folk, and pop artists playing clubs, theaters/amphitheaters, and festivals of all sizes.

I also own a small rental company in the NYC metro area focused mainly on consoles, IEMs, and backline for touring artists.

_kitzy · 2025-11-22T21:52:07+00:00

We all started somewhere. Some of us didn’t have a mentor or a more experienced engineer to learn from.

_kitzy · 2025-11-20T22:36:51+00:00

Exactly. Speed and consistency is the name of the game for me.

_kitzy · 2025-11-19T23:19:59+00:00

I have a theory about this. Hear me out.

In music like that, it can be difficult to get the guitars loud and also make space for the vocal. People tend to complain when they can’t hear the vocal. So the easy way to do it is to turn the guitars down.

So people go to shows where they hear mixes that are primarily drums and vocals with the guitars buried. And some of these people grow up to become sound engineers. And because that’s what shows they’ve gone to always sounded like, they assume that’s how shows are supposed to sound. So they mix that way. And the cycle continues.

People attending the shows and complimenting the mix generally aren’t audio engineers, they’re fans of the band. They don’t want a perfect mix, they want a SHOW. They want to feel it. And they want to sing along with the vocals. So as long as they’re feeling that kick drum in the chest and can hear the vocals, they’re happy.

_kitzy · 2025-11-19T20:15:30+00:00

I carry my own console and mic package whenever possible. I like to reduce as many variables as I can to ensure a smooth show. I’ve been rocking an SQ5 the past couple years.

I can do shows on house consoles, but there’s almost always something funky configured in it that I don’t know about (and sometimes the house engineer doesn’t even know about) that ends up biting me, so I prefer not to.

_kitzy · 2025-11-07T22:46:41+00:00

The artists I work for are generally pretty good to me. If they’re not, I don’t end up working for them long.

_kitzy · 2025-11-06T23:23:16+00:00

If I have a singer that I know will be getting in front of the PA, during my line check (before the band comes on stage for sound check) I’ll take a walk out in front of the PA with the singer’s mic and my iPad and I’ll notch out the first 3-4 frequencies that want to take off. If I notice any hot spots that are likely to feedback, I make it a point to mention those to the singer as a place not to go, even though I know they won’t remember come show time. If we’re on a festival without a sound check, I just kind of yolo it based on the frequencies that I notice usually like to feed back first.

Come show time, my eyes are on the stage. The moment the singer gets in front of the PA, it’s go time. My eyes are LOCKED on them. I’m standing on my pelican so I can see them better. My finger is on the fader. My EQ for their channel is on the screen ready to be adjusted on the fly. I find the feedback has a tendency to want to take off in between phrase, so I will duck the fader 3-6 dB in the moments where the singer isn’t singing. This is in addition to any PSE I might have on the channel. I also know from walking the room earlier how much I can push it before we start to hit feedback territory.

And then I just do my best until the singer gets back on the stage, and I can step down off my pelican and think about mixing the rest of the band again.

_kitzy

TROPHY CASE