January 2013 saw the arrival of California funk-rock icons the Red Hot Chili Peppers to South African shores – a first for all involved – and as usual, they brought along their career-long sound engineer and friend Dave Rat to handle FOH duties. Dave Rat is a world renowned live sound engineer, system designer, and sound consultant whose client list has included the likes of Rage Against the Machine, Blink 182, The Offspring, and, of course, the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
He also holds two patents for the EAW MicroWedge stage monitor and the Ratsniffer cable tester, owns an audio rental, sales and installation company called Ratsound, has been a contributor to various audio publications and runs a blog called Roadies in the Mist. To say he is a busy man that immerses himself in all things sound is a vast understatement.
I had an opportunity to catch up with Dave at the Intercontinental Hotel in Sandton to discuss his techniques, views and philosophies and to pick his brain on audio. Here’s what he had to say.
Thanks for taking the time to talk to me, Dave. Did you have a good time last night? What did you think of the venue?
I did, it was fun. It was big! I heard the place holds 85 000 and we were set up to sell 60 000ish and I’m not sure, but it was close to sold out. It’s a big venue, man. We’ve done a couple of those. We did one in France that’s a little bit bigger, but it’s a giant stadium.
What inspired you to become a sound engineer? Did you always want to be one or did you stumble into it?
I never wanted to be a sound engineer! It wasn’t even something that dawned on me. I just wanted to design speaker cabinets because I like to build things. I would test them out, see if they blow, and set the limiters and crossovers, try to get them to sound good, and then we would rent them out and do some shows with them. Being a sound company owner first, a lot of bands would come through without an engineer, at least early on, so I ended up mixing a bunch of shows. That was great because I could test all the designs out. So I did a lot of local engineering. I started out doing some stuff with Black Flag and I was Jane’s Addiction’s first sound engineer when they were a local club band. Then they went on tour and they asked me to go and said no. I didn’t want to tour. I gave the gig to a friend of mine and he went out and toured with them. They became real popular. I did that with several bands in the late 80s.
Are you still involved in speaker cabinet design?
Not as much as I’d like. I still do the Soundtools stuff with the Ratsniffer and that’s kind of what’s lingering on but I still do consulting with EAW very actively. With touring the cabinet design kind of goes on the back burner when I leave. With Soundtools I’m able to keep designs running but probably the biggest time sponge for me is engineering and running the business.
You do a lot of seminars while you’re on tour. Is this something you’re passionate about?
Yeah, that’s really exciting. When I’m home and I’m designing stuff and running the company and when I’m in my world, I’m pretty happy. I’ve got all my tools and all the things I like to do like surfing and hanging out with my daughters. But I love touring and traveling so I do sporadic sound engineering jobs just for fun, to keep my chops up and to see what new gear is out there. The Chili Peppers is the only band where I’ll really take a full world tour and commit time to. But it’s tough. It takes me away from home, it takes me away from designing gear, it takes me away from the company and it’s mixing a show, which is somebody else’s project. So I wanted to bring something into the touring world that was challenging, unique, and fun for me. So the idea of seminars and sharing some knowledge came about. I don’t think anyone has really ever done that before as in a touring engineer totally autonomously setting up a seminar on tour. It’s like I’m doing my own little gigs.
Can you tell me about your double hung PA? Is that something you still do or do you mix on a standard rig these days?
Idid that with a V-DOSC rig on the last tour. There were two driving forces behind it. First of all, the manager of the Chili Peppers asked me and the lighting designer to do something unique to make the Pepper’s show special. So I put some thought into it and came up with the double hung rig in order to address two angles of sound reproduction. These are the fundamental theories that I talk about in the seminar which is that nowhere in nature does the same sound radiate from multiple places, and the corollary to that, where nowhere in nature do multiple unrelated sounds radiate from the same place. With home stereos and live rigs we take all these sounds and crush them into one radiating point, which is very unnatural. For the first time in history we have line arrays which are long slender rigs that cover wide areas so I can have two identical rigs side by side and cover almost identical area with it. So I can put the guitar on the outside, guitar on the inside, bass on the outside, bass on the inside, I can put anything anywhere. It creates a whole new dimension of realism.
Is it two stereo rigs or are you using a mono and stereo bus together?
No, it’s quad, so four separate channels. Basically there would be inner left, inner right, outer left, outer right, all on separate sends. Then for both out-hangs there’s mono inner, mono outer and then for the two center clusters, there’s a mono left and a mono right, so there’s a lot of matrixing involved. That allows me to change the width; I can have the guitars on the inside and the vocals on the outside, I can move things between, I can put everything on the inside or outside, so it gives me this new space to work in. Even though the rigs are fairly close together, the ability to decipher spatial placement is really good. The other advantage of that system is that it addresses inter-modulation distortion, which is the difficulty of a loudspeaker to reproduce complex signals. The simpler the signal, the easier time it has reproducing it. At low volumes, speakers can reproduce fairly complex signals. At high volumes, when they reach the mechanical limits of their coverage, two similar tones will inter modulate each other and you will get distortion. So I divide it up. I put bass and guitar in the outsides. The bass is mainly in the fifteens and the guitar is mainly in the sixes and twos so they don’t fight with each other too much. The result is lots of clarity. Then I put the vocals, kick and bass into the inside rig. So the vocals are super clean without modulation from the bass or guitar.
Is L-Acoustics your go-to PA?
Yeah. Pretty much. I prefer it because I’m familiar with it; I can get the same rig all over the world and it sounds identical everywhere I go.
I read about you using polarity to increase monitoring clarity. Is this something you still do?
The concept is summations and cancellations. When you have two signals coming from two different points, by paying careful attention to polarity throughout the audio chain you can create summations or cancellations and gain a lot more control over what we’re doing by understanding the fundamentals.
So does this go beyond simple polarity flipping on the console?
For example, if the bass player asks for more bass in the wedges, fair enough, you turn it up in the wedges. The wedge might be polarity reversed to the bass rig. If it’s out of polarity, it will be loud at the wedge, loud at the rig, and cancelled in between. That’s a huge problem. Very rarely do I see a monitor engineer paying attention to polarity between the bass rig and wedge. Once you envision that whole structure, you can really clean up and eliminate all those gremlins and improve the quality of the presentation. The core concepts are polarity, time and distance.
Can you go into some detail about your cardioid subwoofer arrays? Does your approach differ from what has now become quite popular with cardioid subwoofer configurations?
Which part? As far as spinning a speaker around backwards?
Yes.
It’s the same thing; polarity, time and distance. Basically most of them are end fire arrays, like L-Acoustics. When sound comes out the rear speaker the sound-wave spreads. Sound comes out the front speaker, combines with the rear and the result is additive in the front with cancellation in the rear. The distance is fixed; the time is adjusted at the front so you get summation and the signal is left in polarity. The exact same theory applies to many audio situations. With cardioid subwoofer arrays you’re trying to accomplish several things. One is coverage pattern, usually expanded horizontally. You want to minimise interaction; you want to get rid of power ally, you want to minimise cancellation nodes, like having an array that’s directional but fanned outward. Then you want to determine why you want cancellation behind [the stage].
Are there neighbours behind? Is production office behind?
What kind of processing do you use on live drums?
I don’t compress individual drums. I take the kick and snare, put them into a stereo group and compress the group. I take toms, put them into a stereo group and compress the group. I take the round things made of metal, put them into a stereo group and compress the group.
What’s your go-to compressor for that?
I use a lot of compressors but my go-to utility ones are the BSS DPR-404, which is a quad, single rack space unit. Nothing special about it. I just like the way they sound and they’re fairly high density. I’ve got twelve channels and I use them on everything. I also use an Empirical Labs Distressor on keyboards and stereo Distressor on the percussion. I would use 404s but we ran out of them.
What do you look for in a compressor?
That it doesn’t screw up the sound! Also, the main thing I’m looking for in a compressor is the metering; if the gain reduction looks like what I expect it to. There are some compressors where the meter doesn’t move at all and I can hear drastic changes. There are others where the meter is working a whole bunch and I can’t hear anything. So I want to see some correlation between what I expect to hear and what the meter is saying.
How do you approach bass? Do you use a mic and DI?
I always take a minimum of two channels but I try to take three. I take a clean line right off the bass, a line after all the effects before the bass rig, and a mic as well. I don’t use the clean very often; maybe if they run their crappy effects or they run it really dirty and I don’t have a clean low sub. In that case I’ll pick the subwoofer send off of the clean. The rest of the sound will come off the dirty channel and mic. I use a Beta 98a on the bass cab.
What is your vocal chain?
I use Distressors on all the vocals on the channel inserts. That kind of grabs them all so they play well with each other. Then I run them all into a stereo group.
Have you ever worked in studio or have you always been a live guy?
Early on. There was so much detail; it was like you went over and over to make everything perfect and I was never perfect. Live was just so much fun because perfection didn’t matter. What matters is the excitement and the moment. The flaws don’t matter. I liked the spontaneity. You can have the most exciting show and have a bunch of different issues and that’s ok. You can have everything pristinely perfect too and have it be boring. There’s a wildcard beyond technology that has to do with the energy of the artist connection with the artist.
What advice would you give to up and coming engineers in 2013 in South Africa?
Well it’s tough here because you have a limited touring market. It’s the age old thing. If you want to be an actor, you go to New York and LA. You gotta go to the big city if you want to swim with the big fish. Get your chops up and jump into it. There’s a lot of competition no matter where you are. Successful people are the ones that are willing to approach any challenge, and no matter what goes wrong they look at the bright side, roll through it and then keep going. The people that fail tend to be the ones that are always looking for the reasons why they can’t succeed or always point out the issues. Issues are just challenges.
Finally, what’s been your favourite part of being in South Africa?
We had a great time in the lion park! I got to hug a cheetah! That was interesting. For me it’s such a remote place. I’ve been all over the world but it definitely has a unique feel to it. Everyone is super nice and friendly. There’s this kind of general feeling of open friendliness here.
By Greg Bester
