Happy Friday and welcome to Tech Tip 6. As you know, this blog attempts to provide you with simple tips that can aid you in your attempt to provide quality sound in places that just are not so sound friendly. Have a great weekend and see you next week.

Here is a tip for adjusting levels at a sound check that makes sense to me and I hope it has the same effect for you. I often see inexperienced sound people doing a vocal check and looking intently at the singer while they adjust the level on the microphone. To me this can be very misleading and I will tell you why. Psychoacoustics. What’s that you say? Have you ever gone to a concert in a terrible sounding venue (gymnasium or arena) and not been able to distinguish the singers words, but then they do a familiar song or their “hit” and suddenly you you can hear every word perfectly? What happened? Did the sound just magically become perfect? Not at all. You are experiencing a psychoacoutisic effect. Your brain is interpreting visual signals (the singers lips) and combining them with memory of the lyrics in an effort to help you recoginze and understand what you are hearing. All this happens in an instant and without you realizing it. Think about it. When you listen to someone speaking and it is difficult to hear them you usually instinctively watch them (their lips) much more closely. You don’t have to be told to do this, you just naturally do it. However this can work against you when doing sound. In my workshops I like to teach people that once the mic is working and generally dialed in, to purposefully NOT LOOK at the vocalist and try to really listen to how the level of voice blends with the instruments. Most of the time you will end up bumping up the vocal a bit more. Try this and see for yourself. The moral of this story? You don’t do sound with your eyes. Listen like you have your eyes closed.
TT