Re: Who's In Demand
Otherwise though, I think good system techs are probably hardest to come by. Next to monitor engineers then FOH.
*Good system techs: most people have no clue how to align a PA system. This goes from anything to setting the angles right on a line array (because a lot of people just love to use 0 degrees because they're either 1 lazy or 2 don't know how a line array is supposed to act) to aligning the entire system correctly. I'm sure everyone has a different way of doing this but
I usually align the line array to the drums, and align the subs to the line array.
*Monitor Engineers: Everyone thinks they can do it because they can push faders at FOH. Monitors are a bit more complicated than that. You have a hell of a lot more mixes, you don't what the musicians want, you have more feedback problems (unless working with IEM's), you have 4, or 5 impatient people yelling at you at once, and a lot of people can't use hand signals correctly or assume you can hear them yelling as they're playing. Just some reasons why monitors are more complicated. When working with a professional band some of those cancel out though.
*FOH engineers: Most people can push faders, but a lot can't do it well. Okay. Yea a good mix is again more complicated than that. I've noticed a lot of engineers, at least in my area don't like to hear anything besides kick, and bass, which IMO is not a good mix. There's many variables that come into a mix, stage volume, guitar players that can't leave their amp alone after sound check, badly designed venues, a system set up improperly, etc. After you overcome all of those, a lot of people don't know how to properly Eq anything, use compression, use gates, use effects, some people can't even make an already perfect mix sound good. Every sound guy has a different "perfect sound" to their mix. Every type of music needs a different type of mix as well.
