Agreed! That's why when I soundcheck I always listen to the guitar with amplification on and off and up and down while I'm dialing it in.
And with many players even at live gigs we do use both a pickup and a mic. for full range and/or for lead parts where the player steps up to the mic so the soundguy may not need to ride herd.
My goal is always to make your voice and your instrument sound like your voice and your instrument.......only louder.
I suppose me and george w bush could both write a book by the same title......" Tips from a Novice".

Yeah, my buddy the purist is a pip!

Cool! Sometimes I accidentally write suing instead of using...

We need people like you, Larry! For the playing out that I do, I am always grateful for a good sound guy that can strike a good balance between instruments and voices!
My pickups in two guitars are simple (Martin thinline GoldPlus) but they are dependable and work well...I plug into the system, the sound guy does his magic, and it's all good. With autoharps, it's a bit different...mic-ing from the front does not always give you maximum sound and it's hard to compete with a banjo. I've got one chromatic that has a factory installed pickup with EQ, and it works very well. My nice diatonic has no pickup, so I'm looking at some different options, and may go to something similar to what Bryan Bowers is using...a mini mic he pins to his shirt which gets the sound from the back of the 'harp. His 'harps always sound crisp and clear, and it's working for him. But, I'm open for suggestions! I haven't had the best of luck with the currently available after market Oscar Schmidt pickups...they're buggy.

It's easy. Take up accordion.

In the bluegrass world, there is a lot of purism in my experience although excellent musicians. My brother, Mike, picked with Bill Monroe and when around Mike's friends, it's all diatonic and learn the licks note for note. A flat-picking roommate of mine way back looked at me in the middle of a song and asked, "Why are you using those fag chords?" when I used a 9th on a IV. Ronny Cox sat with me at The Bluebird in Nashville lecturing me about the 'chord police' after my set. The nit is that my Dad's generation wasn't like that. They turned me on to Woody's songs when I was three, but they also played western swing, leadbelly, spirituals and old jazz. They weren't preserving a tradition; they were the tradition and it was alive and looking around for fresh air.

I get the idea of preserving traditions and do understand Harlan Howard's rules of "three chords and the truth" but I want to write songs and go adventuring. Purists would tell a painter that red green and blue are all they can use. Sure, it is a bad idea to toss 'em all in one song, but it worked for Paul Simon.

The music wants what it wants.

Well thanks Sue. But I never said I was a GOOD soundman, just that I have been doing it for a while. Autoharps! Yikes! It's fun when I get an autoharp player that sings and plays into the same mic and the EQ should be a zillion times different for voice and harp. That can be a challenge!

Larry, that's exactly why I bought the 'harp that had onboard electric...most times, they (local sound people) try to pick up the 'harp and vocals from the same mic, and that does NOT work! A mic from the front on the 'harp and one for vocals is marginally better, but I think what's been working for Bryan for years should be a lesson to me...it's simple, it separates the 'harp from the vocals and I've heard from my own ears how good it sounds. His little mini-mic is attached to foam on the back side to keep it from picking up his heartbeat, and the whole thing slips into a little flannel pouch. That keeps down any clicking or tapping from the wood back of the 'harp and the mic. The pouch gets pinned to his shirt on the left, and the mic is plugged in for the sound guy to adjust. He switches 'harps about every other song (he shows up with six or seven) and he never has to do anything about the mic...which makes it easier on the sound guy.

I rarely run into autoharps in general, except for one of our members, a woman who plays open stages and our birthday show and stuff. She is difficult to dial in for the reasons already mentioned. I would suppose a touring player may have the toys.

Arlo was saying before that he rarely has to EQ his guitars and runs them flat. I've noticed that to be the rule as well. The exceptions tend to occur when someone may have a lower end quality guitar or when there is more than one guitar or other instruments being played at the same time.Sometimes I notice that some things tend to either drown out other things or get drowned out,not in volume but in some frequencies, and then we adjust to avoid that sorta thing.

We do get national and regional touring acts,and some big names, but not the huge names as a rule.
I understand that it's gotta be tough for some touring musicians that don't travel with their own sound people to rely on whoever the venue supplies. I'm glad to say our group gets it right pretty much all the time.
I have seen exceptions of course. I did have a big problem once with a duo that you probably all know that I'll let remain nameless.
This male/female duo plays a multitude of stuff from 6 to 12 strings, ukes, sitar etc. They tried to run the mix on thier own from a little board on the stage that was feeding my board. They way it was configured, all I could control was total house volume. The performance was great, but the sound was terrible. What they heard on stage was not what was heard in the house, and it boiled down to the instruments drowning out the vocals in a big way.I had a soundguys nightmare when people starting looking at me, and knowledgable people were coming up to me and asking me what the hell was going on, but I was powerless to change it. The knowledgable understood at least! We corrected much of it for the second set after an intermission, but it still needed improvement.
At the very least if I work with them again, I would at least like to get seperate instrument and voice channels on them so they may still control the mix but I could control the relative volumes between voice and instruments.

Gotta trust the board man or else unless ahm da man, he ain't my friend and I need him to be . Most are trustworthy.

I've had some bad ones who mixed vocal bands as if they were metal bands, or the "producers" who try to mix the song as if it were a studio but don't know the material. Then there are the ones who sit asleep at the wheel while it all goes to **** around the band because it's not 'their' band. But once onstage, unless it's really freaky, I try to focus as hard as I can on the sound right around me and make it work.

My aggravation is a board man who keeps playing with the mic sound instead of getting it stable and letting me work with proximity effect so I can tune myself. It's just scary to be singing and have the voice drop off into a canyon or the mic suddenly become so insensitive I have to scream. Not good for ballad singers. I realize he/she is in front of the big magnets and I'm behind them, so it's a different experience. The big scary is the stadium gig when a voice goes into hyperspace and comes back three second later. Earplugs.

Of course, when we work with the people it isn't a hassle. I'm thinking of the multi-act gigs or the occasional stoner on the board or behind the mic. (Better to wait for like the third set, dudes). We played a concert called Beach Creek in the 70s where the herbalists took a power cable from a transformer and ran it a few hundred yards. It was a festival, so as the night wore on, the system began to disintegrate as the old power amps gave their last gasps. The last act was Rachel, Larry Byrom's band (just out of Steppenwolf at that time), and they didn't get paid until they played. At one point, Mike Byrom is looking at me from the stage saying "All empty? No one at home?" and then his band began to reassemble the whole PA from parts. They got it working then played their whole set to the five or six other musicians sitting on the ground in front of them. They played like there were a thousand of us. True pros.



Cymbals and acoustic guitars can cancel each other out if the players aren't copacetic, but this is really about playing styles. A hot jazz drummer who is cymbal-happy can be a hard evening if the song is wrong. Still, it's a style thing, what's in the foldback, what's not, and where are we standing. Being next to the drummer on a small stage, a cymbal is deadly (watched one slice off part of an old Fostex mixing board one night just after it sailed past my head).

What I REALLY hate is when sound guys turn that "suck" knob up to 11!

What I REALLY love is at the end of the gig when I can tell the performer(s) that I didn't have to adjust the talent knob even once!

I saw at a craft show where a dulcimer builder was selling these little clip on mikes where ya plug it into a portable amp & can clip it onto your dulcimer or other instrument and it amplifies it so you can hear it. I decided to wait till later & am now sorry I waited...

Hey Sue:

So you would be the one with the four-footed speckled friend and a room full of guys playing CSNY songs on mySpace?

That's a whole lot hair in there?

Uhhh, I don't remember a speckled dog or any dogs being present, but there IS a YouTube posting where part of the movie is me, an autoharp and a room full of guys (who happen to LOVE CSNY) from the Unofficial Martin Guitar Forum (UMGF) from one of our gatherings. We get together and play guitars and such until our fingers are blistered up in Nazareth, PA the first weekend in August. This summer will be our 8th...I've been to 7. I'm singing "By the Marks" , a Gillian Welch song. Nowadays, the weekend starts on that Thursday, and goes until Tuesday. The town of Nazareth has gotten into it, and now have their "Martin Appreciation Day" celebration, with Martin people ( and some of their clinicians!) and UMGF members providing entertainment on the streets of Nazareth. It's FUN!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Jbmk2ON ... re=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Jbmk2ONojo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdcsFUaWHn0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfRNGa612Ho

This last film was put together by Rod Neep, a really nice guy fron Great Britain. His recordings are the music in the sound track...he was in a band that was popular during the British Invasion in the 60's, but I can't remember the band name. I'm the 4th photo in, in blue tie-dye.

These give you a pretty good idea of what these weekends are all about...I love all these people; they're the best! And in some of the photos there are some well knowns...Ed Bruce that wrote "Mama Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys", Jon Garon, Ron Peterson, and one year the Kingston Trio showed up..as did Lawrence Juber.