This is the second installment in guest blogger Steve Lagudi’s series on Guitars & Bass in a Live Setting – if you missed his first post on getting to know the band, you can read it here. The best way that I have found to get people to turn down [the volume] is to approach the band and be like, “I wanna get you guys to sound great tonight, so keep the volumes low & I will make sure you get what you need from the monitors.” Now this does not work all the time, but you need to remember that we as engineers do more psychological stuff than technical stuff!!! Explaining to the band members how important this really is can be difficult, plus you figure after every sound engineer telling them the same thing that it would have sunk in by now. NOPE! The best levels for guitar is when you have them turned all the way down and slowly bring the volume up, there is a point when as you gradually turn it up all of a sudden you hear this ‘lil jump in volume and the tone kicks in. That’s usually a great starting point. Maybe go just a wee bit more and you should be good to go. I mentioned giving the players what they need from monitors, so hopefully you actually have monitors to work with. That is the whole point of them, to help the band hear what they need to hear, so if you’re doing monitors from FOH, send them what they need, or just have the monitor engineer sort them out. Loud monitors can be equally as difficult to deal with, and loud monitors are usually a result of everyone being too loud on stage to begin with, so then the monitors get cranked up to compete with it. I guess no one ever heard of turning down?!?!?!? Instead of having one thing turned up, try bringing everything else down. In Steve’s next post he’ll discuss how to select and place mics on stage to achieve the best possible live sound – don’t miss it on Wednesday!