That’s a great reply, I should’ve been more clear that I was being facetious. I’m in the camp of “the person doing sound %99 of the time wants you to succeed”. If you can help them help you, you’ll only sound better.Garth wrote: Mon Apr 01, 2024 7:57 amSo as a sound guy I am occasionally sensitive to remarks like this. Bands need to understand sound techs (usually) don't hate anyone. They're working under challenging conditions and often times venues are providing them with the cheapest, shittiest tools to get their job done. So they're looking for the easy button when it comes to getting a band to sound as good as they can in the 15 minutes of line check or whatever. They're trying to manage the expectations of their employer, the band on stage, and the audience and they don't often align (especially when it comes to this crew that generally espouses the loud everything over everything else philosophy (which ya know, I do happen to agree with)).TylerDeadPine wrote: Fri Mar 29, 2024 5:17 pm I think synths don't get their due as an instrument to be amplified independently... or... or sound guys hate me.
Anyway DI isn't ever meant as a slight, it's someone doing their best to make you sound as good as they can when they probably don't know anything about you. It's the "safe" route and not the "most interesting sound" route. Please remember that while your band is special and precious to you and you have invested a ton of time and labor and money into getting the sound you want, you are one band out of the dozen or more that the sound person has to work with that week and probably one of 3-5 just that day and manage those expectations accordingly.
Best advice is that if you have a sound you're after and is important to your performance, try to clearly communicate this to the sound person (preferably ahead of time through the venue booking agent/talent buyer whatever). Sometimes this is obvious if you think of touring organ players who lump around a B3 or Rhodes players bringing out Twin Reverbs etc. So yeah if this aspect is important to you, you should consider helping to facilitate this by bringing your own kit - like a DI that does some level of speaker emulation. One suggestion might be some variety of sansamp maybe. It won't be exactly perfect, but might get you close and that's a reasonable expectation for a live show and 100 pounds < a dedicated amp. I think most sound people would be amenable to this, with the one or two exceptions being the assholes that make the rest of sound techs look bad and create an adversarial relationship from the jump.
Anyway, this was pretty eye-opening in general so I appreciate this being brought up - for whatever reason I hadn't considered any of this when recording synth even though I've never loved the ultra-clean di sound. Going to try treating it like a bass next time and do a blend of amp + DI. I have done this w/ drum machines as per the Justin Foley method and ended up being pretty underwhelmed (like that was a lot of fuss w/ minimal ROI for me) but I could see this being more impactful for keys.
We bring our setup and if stage/equipment/time doesn’t lend to our ideal, we do what is practical. Having speaker emulation on the side is a good idea. Usually we just let the sound guy DI and the synth amp setup is likely just helping us play like we are used to.