Amid feedback loops, flickering lights, and fleeting connections at Get Tight Lounge, a local sound tech finds clarity in the chaos and meaning in the impermanence.
by Eric Kalata
I had to go across town first, to a different venue, to grab the microphones and monitors that I would need for the night. There were six speakers, and I was to take three—hoping to have a fourth there but I could make it happen with just three. Hell, I could make it happen with two.
Give them just a little something and let them loose on stage. You don’t need much to make someone feel like a rock star.
I grabbed the speakers and, one by one, placed them in the backseat of my sedan. Never take your eyes off the forest, never get lost in the details of the trees. Do each task with focus but keep the bigger picture in mind.
I put the mics I needed in my backpack with the few I own and proceeded to drive to the venue I’d be working at that night, in the Fan right next to VCU with the gravel patio and powerful subwoofer and crisp high end out of the mains.
I was to have a bluegrass jam band that night; they were bringing their own rack for their in-ear monitors. The speakers I grabbed were for the opener, some local band I hadn’t worked with yet.
I got the speakers out of the car once I arrived at the venue and set them up first anyway, then quickly realized I hadn’t grabbed any IECs, the power cables for the speakers, and there weren’t enough at the venue. I would have to drive back and grab some.
Such is why I am perennially early to every gig I can be: something can always rock the boat, something could always be missing. It is best to buffer yourself with ample time for mistakes—yours or those of others. I still had an hour until load-in. Plenty of time.
I made the trip, grabbed the power cables, and got back to the venue in less than half an hour. Traffic was light. I had the cables. I had the microphones. I had the stage plots, everything I needed to make the night happen.
And if I’m anyone at all, I’m someone who makes the damn thing happen.
The headliner for that night, the bluegrass jam band was only a trio. No drums. Electric guitar, upright bass, and mandolin. They’d texted my manager that they’d be in town from Raleigh in about an hour.
I placed my food order, more than a bit peckish from all that running around already, and began to set up the stage.
I line in the monitors first and check that they’re all working by playing some pink noise through each individually, and then playing some high-fidelity music with a mix I know by heart like “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac or “Something About Us” by Daft Punk.
Songs with clear highs and full, active lows. Songs that take up the whole spectrum of sound frequencies in active ways.
I sent the noise and then the song through the mains. Everything sounded great. Everything was working.
I didn’t think about getting fired earlier that week. I didn’t think about the shows behind or ahead of me. I didn’t dwell on anything.
All that mattered was the singular night now descending upon me.
Everything starts to feel real once I begin to set up the stage.
I hadn’t had the chance to check with anyone about pre-sales yet. The band seemed a bit small potatoes, but they were coming with some professional gear and had sent a detailed stage plot with an input list. Plus, people at the venue love jam bands and bluegrass.
There could be two, twenty, or two hundred people there.
The presales don’t tell you too much either. I wouldn’t really know until the show was actually happening. Even if I knew the current numbers, that would only tell me who was planning to come not who actually would.
You can bank on the presales all you want, and they’re a decent measure of a show’s potential success, but all that really matters are the bodies that end up in the space.
With the monitors set up and a good idea of what mics I would need and where to put them, I got to work labeling my inputs trying to figure out the best way to utilize the two snakes on stage.
One was shorter than the other, intended to go center stage for the drum kit, and took up the first eight inputs. The other was quite long and took up inputs nine through sixteen.
Usually, I put that longer snake downstage left, sometimes even center, but that night I’d be running the six inputs for the headliner—three vocals and three instruments—into the longer one, so it would have to be close enough to their rack unit, wherever they would end up putting that.
And the opening band had drums and two keyboards, as well as bass, guitar, and two vocals, one downstage center for lead and one for the drummer.
Not the most to juggle, and I didn’t have to make any cuts to their inputs, but I had to be sure I set my inputs as best as I could to keep the stage as tidy as possible with what I am afforded at this venue. A puzzle to figure out how best to keep things as tight and together as they could be.
I didn’t think about how I was accused of a lack of initiative, I couldn’t, with that puzzle in front of me.
My food came out, sliders with fries. They forgot I asked for no cheese. I didn’t have the gall or the time to send it back or even really feel any type of way about it; I just ate it. I was not there to enjoy the food. That’s just an occasional perk of the job.
As I ate, I did one final pass over my inputs and decided they were how I wanted them. I then came up with a plan for which mics to use and where, so that by the time I was finished with my food, I could get back on stage and set up what I could before the headliner got there.
The headliner wrote in their plot that they usually bring their own mics and stands, but that’s the key word: usually. Wiping my mouth and hands with a napkin, I hopped back up on stage and pulled out the three stands I would need to mic the drum kit and three tall booms just in case for the headliner’s vocals.
I outlined where I wanted the kit: with the stand for the kick, the stand for the snare, and another tall boom for an overhead mic. The tom mics would clip onto the rim of the drums. The mic for the electric guitar could dangle over the amp. I shouldn’t need any other stands for the night.
I know a good few techs wait until load-in to start this process, and most venues that pay by the hour will tell you to come in only fifteen minutes before load-in. But I find that if I take the time to outline the space on stage with a couple of mics, it’s usually easy for the band to come in and tell where I want everyone usually following the stage plot as closely as possible.
Both acts had sent plots that night, so I already knew where they wanted to be. So why not go ahead and spend the time to be ready for them once they got there?
So I put the kick mic on its stand, an Audix D6 that belonged to the venue, put a Shure SM57 on the snare stand, and clipped two Sennheiser e604s on the snare stand to use on the toms. I put up a 609 as an overhead.
Typically, that flat microphone is used on guitar amps; its design allows it to be draped over an amp and lay flat against the speaker without a stand, as I mentioned earlier, which saves some space on stage. However, setting it up at about six feet high, maybe a bit shorter, over the middle of the kit, with heavy compression and a brutal high-pass filter, will have it capturing all the cymbals nearly as brightly as a condenser mic.
Was it really what I preferred to use? Not really, no. But it was what I had, and it works. Sometimes, you just gotta figure out what works with what you’ve got and not get hung up on what would be perfect to use.
Perfection is the enemy of good, one of my friends always said, and I really couldn’t waste any time wishing I could do something differently or had some other piece of gear.
It’s all another piece to the puzzle, of which the solution is the beautiful realization of live music.
By the time the drum mics were all lined in, the headliner had arrived.
I must have been taking my time. Or maybe they were early.
They pulled in the alley behind the stage and began loading in through the back door. They commented on the ease of load-in. I agreed. Having a door you can pull right up to, with your car mere feet away, is better than most venues I’d worked at, even if the alley was all gravel so you couldn’t wheel anything around. Carrying an amp five feet is better than wheeling it down a whole city block.
These were men that truly looked fresh out of Appalachia. The bassist had a beard down to his sternum. They wore flannel even though it was seventy degrees out. They all had that country charm. They reminded me of my family in that way.
The setup for the band was exactly as they described in the stage plot. No surprises. There was an upright with a Humbucker pickup and a clip-on condenser mic, which he informed me would be sent to me as a mono line but as a split of the sounds, showing me his pedal that took the two signals, something I hadn’t done before but made total sense, to get the deep lows of the bass through the Humbucker and that slap off the condenser mic that distinguishes an upright bass’s sound from an electric one.
The electric guitar went through his pedals and into a little Fender amp, something classic and classy, but the actual model slips my mind. They brought their own 609 and draped it over the amp. The mandolin I took through a DI on his pedalboard.
It’s worth mentioning that all three of these musicians had very large pedalboards but especially what was at the mandolin player’s feet. I’d had mandolin before, but never one that came with so many effects. Typically, mando players I’d had in the past liked to keep it relatively clean and basic. Not this cat.
They positioned their in-ear monitor rack in the back corner, upstage left, and gave me a split snake that was labeled clearly and properly. I lined them into my own snake, stepped off the stage, and stood at the ready for soundcheck. They did indeed bring their own stands and moved them to the shallow wings of the stage. I would still need at least two for the opener, so I didn’t rush to strike them quite yet.
But only six inputs, with all their own gear, and already almost set to go in less than half an hour? I liked this band already. Hopefully, the music would be good, too.
Once the band was ready to check, I went one by one down the lines to check each instrument by itself first—gain staging each to about unity and did some minor compression and EQ, waiting to hear it all in context before I really went to town on anything. Mostly, I made sure the two acoustic instruments up there were stable with no feedback.
The bass I got into a good position easily, though it was a bit boomy. The electric had a little mud in the mids, nothing that couldn’t be scooped out. The mandolin did indeed feedback, but in a real low frequency, lower than any signal I was getting from the instrument itself, so I swept up a high-pass filter to knock that shit out, before going ahead and notching out a couple of other frequencies that felt less than stable.
And then came the vocals, which all came through crisp and clear and plenty loud, with no real risk of feedback thanks to the in-ear monitors. I didn’t recognize the mic the bassist was using, but it sounded phenomenal.
Finished with the line checks, I let them hit a song together, to both make sure they were happy with their ears and that I could pull it all together well in my mix out front.
Not often does a band wow me at soundcheck. It’s not really the time or place for showing off and, at that venue with multiple bands, it typically happens so quickly that I can’t even take a moment to enjoy any of the music. But when this little bluegrass trio hit that song—the odd choice of “I Wanna Be Sedated” by the Ramones—I knew I was in for a good night.
To take a punk song and bend its genre so viciously to bluegrass is a flex in and of itself. It was tight, it was lively, it was free. It was twangy, it was jazzy, and it had a ripping solo on that effects-laden mandolin. Brilliant.
After running another quick song to check some other effects they hadn’t used on the Ramones’ song, the door person arrived. She came over to me and said a quick, “Hey,” and asked if the band was almost done with the check. I told her yes. I couldn’t remember her name. It must have been the fourth or fifth time I had worked with her. I quietly felt bad as she waited patiently for the band to stash away their instruments now that they were finished checking, before she approached the stage to give them their meal and drink tickets once she got their attention. She seemed nice. I just couldn’t seem to remember names as well anymore—only faces.
The opener had arrived during the soundcheck and they swiftly loaded in. The band was fronted by a giant of a man, his head grazing the beams that held up the roof over the stage (it used to be a garage). He had a little vintage tube amp, also a Fender, one that was tweed all around. A pretty little thing.
The pianist brought in his keyboards and set up stage right, where I already had two DI boxes waiting for him. The drummer, a swell guy I had worked with several times in that past year (and whose name I could, in fact, remember!), set up his kit quick as a whip directly upstage center, right in the middle of the drum mics and next to the monitor.
The bassist filed in last, cool as a cucumber in all black, and turned on her amp and got playing before anybody else, even though she was the last one to bring in her gear. Thankfully, just like the headliner, they were tight with it and the rest of them were ready to go in barely a blink of an eye.
I liked this band already, too.
When they checked, I was immediately relieved by how quiet they kept the stage. I knew the drummer was good about it, but I hadn’t ever worked with the rest of them before. Too often, bands and acts of all genres would show up to that venue, see that the stage was outside, and take it as an open invite to crank their shit up to eleven, not seeming to think about the fact that, at most, the audience would only be about forty feet away from them.
These guys read the room and kept it quiet. Besides, a quieter stage leaves me more space to actually mix and try out effects and really dial shit in without hurting my ears. For that night, with this rock-adjacent vibe, I only put on a splash of reverb and the tiniest touch of delay on the vocals and some hall reverb on the drums, but it felt like I had the headroom to really do anything I wanted. And I wouldn’t have to worry about feedback so much, another note I received when I was fired.
The guitar tone was less than perfect, the keys were coming through a bit tinny, and the rack tom was resonating horribly, but these were all just things that happened—things that were my job to fix as best as possible. More or less the entire reason to have a soundcheck. Some things, sometimes, just take a minute to dial in.
Yet I say again, however, that there can be no pursuit of perfection in this profession. Polish it up as pretty as possible, always try your damnedest, but remember that the show will have to go on regardless of it all.
Still, I got to a happy place with my mix, again scooping the mids out of that electric guitar and pressing a hi-shelf down on the keys to soften that sound a little bit. Not something I usually had to do with keys, but it was what the sound called for. The tone of the bass through that Markbass amp she had brought was immaculate.
Everything was where I wanted it to be levels-wise as they played one of their songs for me. Everything coming in around unity again, nothing feeding back, with the kick and vocals loud and clear, something I’d been advised long ago was what was really important, that “that’s all the people really need to hear.” I don’t think I agree with the sentiment entirely, but the core of the advice isn’t terrible.
People want to hear and feel that kick so they can move to the rhythm, and they want to hear the words when the singer is singing. Bump the fader up when the guitar takes a solo, sure, but if they can’t hear every note from the instruments the whole time, it’s not the end of the world. You should mix it clear and loud enough to be able to, but in reality, it’s when they can’t hear the vocals or feel the kick that the strangers in the crowd will start to complain.
I digress. I was happy with the mix. I allowed them to play a few more tunes to make sure they were happy with the monitors. We had the time.
But now that I was fully settled on my end, I dropped my focus from my tablet, looked up at the stage, and was hit suddenly with the striking features of the bassist up on stage. I could fill a whole page with circling nonsense about the arc of her neck and how it sloped down to her one exposed clavicle, pushing out against her flawless skin, but I had to shake it out of my head.
There is little time for romance while you’re working a show. Besides, I had been hit on before at a show, I know the slimy discomfort that can come with being stuck working with someone who is obviously making a move and can’t take a hint. For both our comforts, if I were to make a move at all, it would have to at least be after her set had ended and she wouldn’t feel trapped at the venue with me, so that she could feel like she actually has the option.
(Unfortunately, she would disappear after their set ended. So it goes.)
Thumbs up all around, they wrapped their soundcheck, put down their instruments, and stepped off stage, giving that courteous, almost requisite thanks to me. The thanks is always nice enough, even if it sometimes feels performative, but what felt even better was looking at the time to find I was a whole thirty minutes ahead of schedule.
It always feels good to have a little extra time.
I go out the backstage door into the alley to have a private smoke. Both bands had gone inside, presumably to consume food and imbibe on a tasty beverage, a beer or a highball or whatever the drink tickets would get them.
I sat on the stump next to the door, appreciated the quiet and solitude for a moment, and let a wave of gratitude wash over me for a relatively easy night of only two bands. Usually, I had three at the venue, sometimes even four, and having to fit them all in the three short hours we allocated for the shows before curfew at eleven could be quite the headache.
If the bands are all quick with everything, from soundcheck to changeover, it’s not that bad. Nothing compared to a festival. But that wasn’t always the case. Plus, I would have to be the asshole with their eye on the clock.
With two bands, it’s a lot more relaxed, almost exponentially so, with a feeling of having so, so much more time to actually check both acts and not have to make do with any line checks on the fly.
I finished my cigarette and went backstage, plugged the aux cord into my phone, pulled up the aux channel on my tablet, and set the lights for the night. The lights are connected to a tiny little board that couldn’t be controlled remotely, so they had to stay static. Looked damn good, though.
They told me no red or blue, the headliner did, so I went with an orange and amber wash across the stage. Everything was falling into place for a wonderful show.
I quickly wrote a short and shitty poem. Everything felt right.
I got off the stage, sat down at an empty table, and watched as people filtered in now that doors had opened. (Sometimes they’d open them up a bit early if soundcheck was all wrapped.)
Since my phone was trapped backstage playing the house music, I had little else to amuse myself with beyond people watching.
I looked on as the crowd slowly grew in numbers, not into anything huge, but enough people were actually on time that night that I was a bit shocked.
I walked over to the box office table and asked her what the pre-sales were for that night. She said forty-two. There were already twenty-five, thirty people there before the first act had even started. Not a packed night, but the punctuality was refreshing. Hopefully, even more people would come in and the bands could actually make a pretty penny, something a bit more than gas money, something to make it worth it.
The opener hit the stage about five minutes late. Not a big deal, but something to note still with the tight curfew we had.
I had been chatting with their drummer before, catching up a little bit and being friendly, and he had told me that it was to be a truly genre-bending experience. But that was something I had been told dozens of times before, only to be let down, so I was still unprepared for just how cerebral the songwriting was—almost all originals. I could never predict what it would sound like next.
And it was energetic. And they were tight. And the bassist still had my eye.
But no time for that, not in the middle of their set; better to close my eyes instead and focus just on the music coming from the stage.
Now that they were in performance mode, I could hear that the singer was a touch louder than he’d been during soundcheck. Something not too unusual and certainly not something I’m complaining about, but I did have to pull him down a bit in the mix so it wouldn’t be overpowering.
And then I noticed the snare was getting lost as I stood at the back of the crowd, remembering that humans are some of the best baffles—absorbing sounds across the whole spectrum of audible frequencies, sucking up the sound with their fleshy, watery forms.
With the vocals pulled down and the snare bumped up, everything felt right again.
I checked the level on the mains. It was coming in at five dB under unity, which meant it was probably around eighty decibels in the space. Not the quietest mix, but not blasting the people away.
They played their forty-five minutes, going from blues to funk to whatever other genre they wanted, dazzling me and the crowd with a rare expertise. And then they said their goodbyes, the audience cheered, and I pulled the house music back up.
I got up on stage and began to strike what I could that wouldn’t be needed for the headliner, cleaning up the stage a little bit.
I didn’t notice while I was in the audience, focused on my mix, but on stage I looked out and realized how much the space had filled out, how large the crowd had grown, certainly far beyond the forty-two presales. There had to have been at least a hundred people there.
I couldn’t see the details of any of their faces past the stage lights shining in my eyes, but I could see their shadowy forms stretching all the way to the very back, to the end of the gravel. I felt naked.
I hurriedly finished striking the mics and stands that I could and then stepped out back into the alley again for another cigarette.
I found the headliner in the alley as well, tuning and fiddling with their instruments, a last-minute check before they hit the stage.
“I think we’re gonna get going at 9:15,” the bassist told me.
I checked the time on my tablet: 9:05. Fine by me, so long as they’re done by eleven.
I watched them noodle around as I smoked. They didn’t seem to be playing anything in particular, just improvising short little songs. The soft twinkle of the mandolin, the almost inaudible, unplugged electric guitar…
The beauty of communal creation never ceases to amaze me. The attention they paid to each other… is that not what we all crave? To be seen and heard (and felt and loved)?
I stepped through the back door after I had finished and snuffed my smoke, then crossed the stage to check the smoke machine to make sure it was spitting out some tasteful haze and had enough juice.
It was pumping out quite the cloud, so I turned it down. I loaded in the scene for the headliner on my tablet and tapped the vocal mics to make sure I was getting signal. Everything was working. I was ready.
It was almost time. I turned around and saw the band step through the curtain and out on stage. I clipped the curtain closed and stepped off into the crowd. I unmuted all the channels, exchanged a thumbs-up with the bassist, pulled down the house music, and they got started.
Words are not enough to explain the intricacies of their sound. No amount of adjectives or onomatopoeia would be adequate. A vocoder on the bass, distortion and flange on the mandolin, the dirtiest guitar tone he could get out of that amp—only to switch flawlessly to a pristine, clean sound that elevated the entire performance.
They did a fifteen-minute version of “Low Rider” by War, jamming on it not so much like a typical jam band but how jazz cats do it: tasteful, trading off all the instruments evenly, always giving each other the space to shine in their solos while also laying down unique contrapuntal melodies beneath it all. Not to say I hadn’t worked or seen jam bands do that well, but most jam or rock acts are heavily guitar-focused. Sure, they were bluegrass by admission, yet I had still assumed the guitarist would be doing most of the heavy lifting. How wrong I was.
The transitions were divine—rarely stopping between songs, just going from one into the next seamlessly, not wasting time with banter, stopping only to announce their band name and merch table. And the decent-sized crowd stopped talking and gave the band their full attention, an almost silent crowd—a rare sight at any small or medium venue.
It was a heavenly experience: we all closed our mouths and gave our gaze and ears to the band together, to something wondrous and dazzling before us, fireworks sparking from the musicians’ fingertips. One in the crowd loved the slap of the upright bass; another followed the guitar, enamored with the little riffs and tone; someone cared most for the mandolin effects; someone wanted even more vocal harmonies. Together, we all enjoyed it. For a moment, our hearts were one.
There’s always something to enjoy at any show, even if the singer can’t sing or the bassist is out of tune, even if it doesn’t go as smoothly as this one did. Even the worst bands I’ve seen had something to say or do that made me think, even if just for a flash—“Even eating bad ramen can be fun sometimes,” or whatever she said in FLCL.
I thought for a second about getting fired earlier that week but knocked it out of my head. I can’t make everyone happy, and I needed to focus on what was in front of me, this show, this venue, and make sure I did it well. Better now to sit back and enjoy the music, now that we were deep into their set and I was happy with the mix.
It crept up quickly, but with half an hour left in the show I was allowed to get my shiftie. I asked for a PBR, took it from the bartender in the outside pocket bar, and sipped it slowly as the band played their last songs. The energy was still there. There was never a dip in their fire, between them or the crowd. The whole ninety minutes ended up entirely enthralling.
And then, it was over. The trio ended on a swelling, atonal moment that could only be categorized as free jazz played on those bluegrass instruments. Then they hit a chord in harmony with each other, muted their strings to stop the resonance, and the bassist said, “Thanks,” and “Goodbye.” They stepped off the stage and headed to the merch table.
The show was finished.
I pulled the house music back up, got on stage, and started grabbing the mics that were either mine or the venue’s to put away. Always first grab the mics, then the stands, then the monitors, then the cables and snakes. That’s how I liked to do it when I was able. And that’s all that was left to do now.
The music had ended. The crowd began to disperse. The band was seated at the merch table, talking to a few lingering fans. I was alone on stage, wrapping cables—as it is at almost every show’s end.
I thought of two tweets I had seen recently. One lamented the deletion of a five-year-old Minecraft world. The other spoke about the desolation and loneliness after the end of a three-year-long relationship. Both tweets came to the same conclusion: since it was now over, it had all been a waste of time. That they should have never invested any time into those endeavors.
But if that’s true, then it’s all a waste of time. It’s all going to end.
You just have to try to enjoy it while it happens, and learn from it once it’s over. There will be another show tomorrow—but then that, too, will end. And then another, and another after that.
I had been fired, but there would be other shows to work. Other bands to work with. More journeys to go on. More new things to be excited about.
You can make a new Minecraft world. Find a new partner. Work another show. Write another essay. Move on from the endings.
Or you can revel in nostalgia and pine over what is now gone, what is lost, now that it’s done with.
Remember the past, but look toward the future. Live right now, as best as possible.
And remember: because none of this is important, all of it is.
ed. note: For those that are curious the bands were Into the Fog with local opener Leslie and the Dots.
