Neumos head sound engineer Evan LaSure is an amiable and skilled man. He and his beard have become fixtures behind the Neumos board. LaSure has keen ears and nimbleness on the faders and knobs. He’s quiet and in the early stages of sagedom. LaSure knows the room and how to dial a band’s sound in for the room. Most of all though, he’s patient. LaSure lets musicians do what they need to do.

We spoke and thoughts on his science of sound flowed. Then his beard came alive, leapt off his face, and tackled me like a charging black bear:

What is your approach to running live sound?
LaSure: The way I look at it, I'm more of a translator than anything else. I listen to what's coming off of the stage and try to mix it in a way that gets the musicians’ point across. Beyond just being able to hear everything, you have to make a call on what the focal points of the songs should be, and what overall sound the musicians are looking for. For example, if I'm mixing a reggae show, I need to make sure that the hi-hat is more prominent in the mix than it would be for a mellow indie rock band, because that's part of the sound of the genre, and the musicians expect the audience to hear that. Basically, I'm trying to make the band louder in an artistic way.

What makes a band easy to work with?
Nice equipment and good tones are a plus, but honestly, as long as people are friendly and relaxed, the work environment is awesome. Personality has more to do with it than anything else.

What makes a band difficult to work with?
When they're dicks. Or when the band is just plain awful. Neither one of these situations crop up very often. Usually my job is pretty fun.

What's the loudest band you've ever run sound for? How do ridiculously loud bands change the way you run the board?
I did monitors for Dinosaur Jr., which has by far the largest guitar setup I have ever seen. J. Mascis surrounds himself with guitar amps, which basically turns his vocal mic into one giant guitar amp mic. I had to do some pretty fancy things to get his vocal into his wedge, but it ended up being great. A lot of nu-metal bands have some pretty ridiculous stage volumes as well - do you really need to run your Marshall stack that loud? When that happens you just kind of have to work around it, keeping the guitars low in the mix to compensate for the ridiculous levels coming off the stage. There have been nights where I take the bass amp completely out of the mix. Doing some drastic panning can help get some separation out of the instruments as well.

Talk beard for me. You have a great and sturdy beard. Any inspiration behind it? Have you ever gotten an omelet caught in your beard?
Never an omelet, but stuff does have a way of getting caught in there. Rice can get a little tricky. Does laziness count as inspiration?

Is it true that someone barfed on the sound board at a club where you worked? Can you talk about that barfing?
Yeah, it's true. We had a guy come in, get through sound check and immediately start drinking tequila on his dinner break. He showed up on time for the show to start, got halfway through the first band and left. He just went home without telling anybody. I get up to the stage to do the changeover, go up to monitor world, and find a huge pile of puke all over the place, three empty beer bottles, and no monitor engineer. Luckily he managed to miss anything expensive, but it was still really gross. I had to get through the rest of my night by myself, while cleaning up puke. The worst part was, there was a garbage can not three feet from where he did his business. Needless to say, he doesn't work at that place anymore.

Walk us through a night. During sound check, what are you doing? Do you really remember the levels for all the bands?
The first thing I do when I get in is to go through any paperwork to see stage plots and input lists. Then I prep the stage for when the band gets there. When the headliner arrives, we get them set up, put mics in all their gear, and figure out the best way to patch the stage and organize all of our cabling. We create a chart for the patch, and make sure that all of the mics are labeled according to what instrument they go on, so we can get the correct mics back on the instruments when they go on during the show. Essentially, the entire first half of the day is organization, and making sure we don't have any problems during the show.

Next we listen to the P.A. to make sure that all the equipment is working properly. The P.A. is also tuned to make sure the room sounds good to start off with. Then we run through a check instrument by instrument to make sure that A) everything is working properly and B) all the instruments sound good individually. After that, the band plays some songs, both to get a good overall starting point in the room, and to make sure the band is happy on stage and that the monitors aren't feeding back. The worst thing a sound person can do is let mics feed back all night.

While I'm doing this I'm going through all my outboard gear, making sure that my compressors are patched in correctly. I make sure I'm getting good gain reduction while at the same time not pumping the life out of a vocal. Also, I make sure that the levels are staying consistent on my preamps, and not clipping all over the place. I want them to be reading a nice, solid input level.

Next, I set my bus structure, get my effects sends figured out and set to the proper levels, and do any tweaking to the graphic E.Q. that controls the overall sound of the P.A. I'm also listening to the room, and trying to figure out how it's going to change for the show. One thing a lot of people don't realize is that the number of people in a room, the actual temperature of the room, and even the humidity have a huge effect on the way sound travels in a given space. Variances in temperature and humidity actually slightly change the speed of sound of a given frequency, and I have to compensate for that at the desk. An empty room on a cold, dry day is going to sound more quiet and thin than a packed house in the middle of August because of the way certain frequencies travel at a given set of atmospheric conditions.

Pictures by: Blush Photo

Evan Continues: Once I'm finished getting everything set, we actually repatch the consoles using what's called the main split. The main split is a patchbay that sends the microphone signals to the two desks. This allows us to bypass the channels for the headliner. Essentially, we don't have to change anything we've done during sound check. We then repeat the process for the opener, and open doors. All the real work gets done during sound check, which lets us just concentrate on mixing during the show.

What are you doing back there behind the board all night long? What things are you listening for?
I'm listening to the songs, and trying to mix the different instruments at the proper levels. I guess that sounds pretty obvious, but there can be some pretty dramatic changes from song to song, with different instruments or vocalists taking the lead at different points in the song. It all goes back to translation: what's supposed to be loud here, what needs to sit back in the mix, what kind of effects am I supposed to be using? It sounds kind of easy, but keep in mind a lot of the time I'm doing this while mixing a song I've never heard before, completely on the fly, with no ability to go back and fix any mistakes. And in my world, a mistake can be having a bottom snare drum mic 2db too high on a chorus. It gets pretty intense. At the same time I'm working with all my outboard gear, and compensating for anything that's changed. In the rock world, that usually means trying to figure out how drunk the band got after sound check, and how that affects the way they're playing. 'Cause bands like to drink.

What is the largest drum set you've ever had to mic?
I had a guy come in with two kick drums, six toms, three roto-toms, a timbale and what looked like about twelve different cymbals. What made it worse was the fact the the dude had no idea how to tune his drums, so everything sounded like garbage. It looked like the dude took a picture of Neil Peart's kit to guitar center and said "give me the cheapest version of this that you can." Needless to say, the drums did not end up being very loud in the mix for that band.

Are you talking down to Neil Peart? Thou shalt not talk down to Neil Peart.
Sorry. Please forgive me. Hail Neil, and 19 roto-toms.

Much better. Lastly, where did you learn sound engineering?
I played in some bands in high school, and had to learn how to set up the rinky-dink P.A.s that we used for practice. When I went off to college, I got a job at the student union building setting up rooms for events, which more often than not included a small P.A. for presentations and such. From there I learned how to set up audio for the movie theater in the building, as well as the P.A.s we used for student theatre, talent shows and college bands, and learned how to run the board for the larger events. The set up was pretty low rent: a Mackie 24 channel desk with a tiny little rack of outboard gear, running through some small speakers on sticks. Nevertheless, it was a good setup to learn the ins and outs of running an actual production, and getting some time to play around with a rig and see which knobs did what. I did this for a couple of years before I started working at Neumos, where I was taught the ins and outs of running an actual show and working with an actual professional setup.

How did you become Neumo's sound engineer?
Around the time I started at Neumos, I was playing in a band with a guy that had made himself a regular at the Bad Juju, which used to be attached to the club. We went over there one day, had some drinks, and I got introduced to the engineers that were running the club at the time. More drinks happened, I asked the dudes for a job, and they had me come in the next day. I spent the next month or so learning the ropes of working in a club, and afterwards got put on the schedule as a regular employee. Over the next couple of years, the guys that hired me ended up moving on to other jobs, and I ended up on top. I've been the head engineer here for a couple of years now.

Is your beard really alive?
No.

Thank you.