Six Live Sound Mistakes We See Often and How to Avoid Them

Most sound problems that reach the audience started as something nobody checked properly during load-in. A line check that is squeezed into the last twenty minutes tends to confirm that signal is arriving, and little else. Signal arriving is not the same as signal being right. A channel can be live and still be polarity-flipped, patched to the wrong input or sitting on a cable with a loose connector that only crackles when someone steps on the stage.

I work on camera systems, and I sit beside our sound engineers often enough to see the pattern. Events that give the line check its own slot in the schedule, away from the arrival of the crew and the caterers, find faults while there is still time to fix them. Events that treat it as a formality find the same faults in the first song.

Ask for the check to be written into the run sheet with a start time and an owner, so that it does not slide.

• Check every input individually, not just the sum on the desk
• Walk the stage and listen to each cable, stand and connector
• Mark the patch on paper so a replacement engineer can follow it

A microphone position that worked in one venue can fail in the next, because the room has changed even if the band has not. A low-ceilinged hall bounces sound back at the stage, a marquee swallows it, and a glass-fronted foyer throws it in every direction. Placing a snare or a vocal microphone exactly as last time ignores all of that.

Our approach is to treat the plan as a starting point and to move things by ear during the sound check. A few centimetres of distance from a speaker cabinet, or a slight change of angle on a vocal capsule, can remove harshness that no amount of equalisation will fully repair later. Daniel Okafor, our lead sound engineer, writes his placement notes after each job so the next plan begins from what actually happened rather than from memory.

Monitor mixes are the part of a show the audience never hears and the performers never forget. A common error is to build the foldback mix quietly while standing at the desk, then leave it. What sounds balanced to the engineer a long way from the stage can leave a singer unable to find their own pitch.

The remedy is simple but takes patience: ask each performer what they need to hear, change one thing at a time and let them confirm it. A drummer who asks for more bass guitar is telling you something specific about timing. Keeping monitor levels moderate also protects the front-of-house sound, since loud wedges leak into the room and muddy what the audience receives.

Where the budget allows, a dedicated monitor engineer removes the compromise entirely.

• Build monitor mixes with the performer on stage, not from the desk
• Change one element at a time and ask for confirmation
• Keep wedge levels as low as the performers can tolerate

Gain is set at the first stage of a channel, and every later stage inherits its mistakes. Setting it too low forces the fader up and raises the noise floor with it. Setting it too high clips the preamp, and that distortion cannot be removed afterwards. Both errors are easy to make when the sound check is short and the band wants to move on.

A tidy approach is to set gain with the performer playing at full performance level, not at a polite check volume. Singers often sing differently once the crowd arrives, so we leave a little headroom. On recorded broadcasts the same rule matters even more, because a clipped recording stays clipped. A written note of the gain settings also helps when a channel needs to be rebuilt after a power cut or a scene recall.

When an event is also being recorded or streamed, the mix that suits the room is rarely the mix that suits the feed. A kick drum that feels powerful in the hall can overwhelm a stream heard on laptop speakers, and the crowd noise that gives the venue its atmosphere may be missing entirely from the recording unless someone has placed microphones for it.

The mistake is to send the front-of-house mix straight to the encoder and hope. A separate broadcast mix, even a simple one made from a few well-chosen sends, gives the viewer a far clearer result. It does ask for an extra pair of ears and some extra channels, which should be agreed at the planning stage rather than discovered on the day.

• Agree who owns the broadcast mix before the event
• Add audience microphones if atmosphere matters to the recording
• Listen to the feed on small speakers as well as headphones

The last common error happens away from the desk. A show runs well, the engineer packs up, and the settings, the patch and the lessons learned leave with them. When the same event returns, or a colleague takes over for a second night, everything has to be rediscovered under pressure.

We write short handover notes for every job: the input list, the microphone choices, the effects used and anything that behaved oddly in the room. They take about half an hour at the end of a long day and save far more than that the next time. They also give producers a clear record to refer to when planning, which links live sound back to the wider workflow of the event.

In these cooler autumn weeks, when outdoor and marquee events carry more risk from damp and cold, noting how equipment coped is especially useful.