FOH engineer John Cooper gives a breakdown of his plugin chains and shares his approach to mixing Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band live on the Wrecking Ball tour. Visit: www.waves.com/?...
John Cooper is the funk-n Man.. True Master of the Mix... He's a true inspiration to anyone wanting to get into the business.. A true professional & a really nice guy. Two words can sum up this 19:30 min video.. Holly crap!!
Great Stuff. I have watched it several times. I think we all are jealous of the amount of time you get to work on these details. If it is not asking too much, Is it possible to get a copy of the preset you are using on the snare? Some of your stuff is on the Waves website but not that one. I can sort of match the curve but the small details are out of focus. Thanks.
No complaints about the sound? He clearly didn't read the reviews of the concert in Parken Stadium, Copenhagen :-) With all that technology mentioned in this video, working all the wonders, there shouldn't be an excuse for bad sound... Compare that to Trip Khalaf mixing Roger Waters The Wall on an anlogue Midas console, where the same critics had to eat their words, complaining about how awfull Parken Stadium is for concerts, when Roger and his team showed them and the crowd how it could be done.
They must have a ridiculous amount of pre-tour rehearsal. How the hell do you have time to build all the redundancy and routing and processing. I've been a live sound engineer for just about 27 yrs.... I've heard people like John Coopers mixes back in the day on analog consoles and front loaded trap boxes.... And the best mixes mixes I've heard were 20 years ago and more. When i hear a guy using all 100 slots on a Profile with ass loads of processing going on.... and all the different things they're using... line arrays... esoteric mics.... etc... It should logically sound about 1000% better than concerts used to sound. But it doesn't. There have been improvements in some levels of clarity.... But line-arrays wear my ears out really fast. And the apparently un-fixable problem with line-arrays is that it will hit you with a multitude of horn drivers from various distances creating a delay issue. Nobody in the line array world will even address it. We got away from furthering point-source technology and let industry marketing jack-offs take over the decision making...... "HEY!!! I've got an idea! Lets build a highly inefficient enclosure and cram it full of as many components as humanly possible.... thereby making it expensive as hell.... the we will tell the sound industry it's the next big thing, and they won;t amount to crap unless they buy it!"..... "Then we can treat it like an iPhone and add occasional improvements and make them have to buy it all over again!.... and make sure we tell them once again they are nothing without the latest greatest speaker box thingy!"... I toured with a major international act for approximately 12 years. I started out using every bell and whistle I could get my hands on. Over time I eventually whittled it down to almost nothing and my mix improved dramatically. I got rid all the gates, half the compression and effects.... I switched back to really basic microphones.... did things like reducing keyboard inputs via sub-mixing... I mean I just really went minimalist in every way I could think of and things just kept getting better and better. So when I hear an engineer saying "yeah I was gonna use yet another processor but my 100 available slots were already full".... I kinda just want to throw up. This is not a slam on John Cooper... its just a slam on the mentality that sound engineering is headed towards. I don't get it.
Yes I understand that. But it still takes an inordinate amount of time. And the time and effort spent is usually not reflected in the quality of the mix.
@guitargamery Obviously the educational system ripped you off too. You post in caps and claim a ten thousand....percent? Why not go with the same illogical exaggeration that the other little kiddies do and say 'a billion gazillion percent'? What a great way to remove all credibility from your own comment.
I left a springsteen concert after 3 songs - holding my ears from the downbeat. My wife and I traveled on a train to get there, renting a hotel, dinner out... We were sitting dead center, about 40’ behind right FOH on the 2nd level, front seats. 3 songs in we couldn’t take it anymore. I own and operate a sound and lighting rental company, so I can attest that this guy couldn’t mix a cake. It wasn’t just the volume, it was the tonality of whatever was coming from the pa, from piercing piano, and sax to just insane spl levels for no reason.
@Jesús St James I actually mix all the time, including some national acts.. why are you so triggered?, You’re not that guys boyfriend or anything are you?
