Intro

Background check

I have been playing music professionally for over 30 years. While I started off as a guitarist in a club band and have played in a wide variety of groups ranging from 2-piece pub bands up to fully fledged military orchestras, I’ve had the most fun playing in a four- or five-piece rock outfit.

Experience

My training as a sound engineer began very early on, because we had no-one to help us with our sound when we started out. We had to do everything ourselves and consequently learned everything we needed to know by trial and error. We made plenty of mistakes, but learned from every one, and this manual is partly a result of the knowledge I have gained over the past few thousand gigs, both as a performer on stage and as a sound engineer, on stage and front-of-house.

Starting up

While the information in this manual is applicable to any musician / instrument in a live performance scenario I am a guitarist, so the approach will be more guitarist oriented. Also, I’ll be using ‘Rules of Thumb’ a lot as I’ve found that they tend to work well as generic starting points when preparing for and setting up a live sound. Once you have built a good foundation for the sound you can use your discretion to further tweak the system until the sound starts to take shape.

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