Mixing jazz for large venues

When I think of an intimate jazz club, my mind's eye bounces between places like the Oak Room at the Algonquin Hotel in Manhattan and Ronnie Scott's in London's Soho. But the image that sticks most to my bones is the jazz club scene in the 1957 noir classic The Sweet Smell Of Success (check it out on YouTube). Not only do you get a classic jazz quintet on stage, including Chico Hamilton, Fred Katz and Carson Smith, but you also get Tony Perkins menacingly portraying a brilliantly despicable low-life of the nightlife in '50s New York. It's what you want from that kind of show: a little frisson to accompany the intimacy and inclusiveness of being up close and personal with a tight, talented band with a real, honest-to-god 'crooner' up front.

That's what Lee Moro discovered when he took over the reins as FOH mixer and Production Manager for Norah Jones five years ago, just as she was beginning to experience widespread fame. "Circumstances were pushing Norah's band from intimate club settings to larger venues," says Moro, a Canadian rock mixer who became exposed to a wide range of niches through other artists with Jones's management company in Vancouver, such as the flamenco guitarist Jesse Cook, torch singer Alannah Myles and the instrumentally eclectic band the Tea Party. "What I had to learn, and learn quickly, was how to take the feel of those club shows to a larger scale without losing the intimacy. These are jazz artists that want to hold onto the craft of acoustic music. They don't want a stage full of open microphones. But in some cases, that's what it's become."

Gregg Rubin, who mixed Harry Connick Jr. for 15 years until recently, says it's important to appreciate the emotional nature of acoustic music. "What mixing sound for this type of artist requires in a small to medium-sized room is to reinforce what's already there," he says. "Unlike a rock show, for instance, there's always one specific thing to focus on at any given time — the vocal, a solo. Everything else on stage and in the mix has to support that focus, whether it's in the small club or the larger theatre."

Moro's first tour with Jones and her trio of bass, drums and guitar found them reluctant to have microphones other than for her vocal on stage. The band was up to 46 inputs by the time he last went out with her in 2007. Those would cover not only vocals, but also a Wurlitzer electric piano, both acoustic and electric basses and guitars, a harmonium, a flute and a recently added backup singer. Interestingly, the entire group grew only to six and was most recently down to five, including Jones. "After the last album, they wanted to get back to what it was like to play those rooms as a small group again, so they're doing a lot of switching around of instruments amongst themselves," Moro explains. They accomplish this with a few tricks, such as the bassist playing four bars of a figure into a Gibson loop box with a bow and then playing over the loop. "The bass alone has 16 inputs now."

However, that wasn't always the case with artists coming out of the traditional jazz heritage. Looking back on the early days, Moro recalls that the group regarded microphones in general with suspicion and one-on-one mic placement as bordering on heresy. "It just wasn't 'the jazz way'," he smiles. But he gradually broke down their resistance. He added a pickup and a floor microphone to the acoustic bass, a pair of overheads above the kit, and a microphone each for the toms and kick. In the beginning, it was a matter of using the house mics, which in jazz clubs tend to be few and of middling quality. "Having a good knowledge of microphone types and placements is a real help until you can begin carrying your own production equipment," says Moro.

Once Jones's first single became a hit, it was easier to get endorsements and a budget. The drums then had a Sennheiser 602 on the kick (later upped to a 902), a Shure 57 on the snare, clip-on Sennheiser 604 condenser microphones on the toms, and a pair of Neumann TLM 192 large-diaphragm condensers as overheads ("They're very sensitive, which helps pick up the transitions from sticks to brushes," Moro explains). There is a David Gage Realist pickup on the bass, placed under the bridge post, augmented by a Neumann 184 microphone placed close to the f-hole. "Between the microphone and the pickup you can get a great sound on the bass," Moro says. "But you have to remember that these kinds of combos play very close together — the drummer and the bass player are about eight inches apart on a small stage — and once the band kicks in and the monitor wedge is on, on some songs you just can't use the live microphone. You don't want the sound to change radically when you do turn off that channel, so you tend to favour the pickup from the beginning."

Norah Jones's piano has three KM140 microphones on it, but it presents an interesting challenge in that she keeps the lid closed for sight-line reasons (another small club issue), as well as the fact that the singer likes her monitor wedge relatively loud, which would mean bleed problems into the bottom of the piano. Moro arrayed the three microphones low, mid and high across the soundboard, panned slightly to minimise phasing in the box. "Unfortunately, she's a pretty light piano player," says Moro.

Madeleine Peyroux, whom Moro also mixed, continues to work with a minimal live sound setup for her trio. She plays her piano with the lid up, and Moro had to work with the best pair of microphones available at the clubs she performed in. The drums use simply a pair of Neumann 84s or SM81 overheads with a kick and a snare mic, and the acoustic bass stays that way with no pickup. Peyroux sings into a Neumann 105. "I could do the whole show with eight inputs if I had to," Moro says. "I'd like to use more, but I don't want to distract them from their craft. I think the hardest part of mixing live sound for artists like this is making them realise why I'm here, to get them to rely on my experience and judgement in getting them across in larger venues. That we're trying to achieve the same result."

Choosing vocal microphones for cabaret-type vocalists is done with a combination of an ear to what works best for a particular voice, the way the singer holds and approaches the microphone, and the fact that these musicians tend to group themselves closely together on stage, both for esprit de corps and because the stages are often very, very small. As a result, the microphone needs to have very good rejection characteristics. "But the problem with tight-patterned microphones is that the vocalist needs good mic technique, which is not always the case, and it's hard to change a singer," explains Moro. "Madeleine uses a Neumann 105, while Norah uses a 104. They're both open and airy sounding, but you can keep the zone around the 105 nice and tight. Less so with the 104, but it sounds so good on her voice that I could live with a little leakage." On the other hand, the proximity of the musicians to each other also minimises the on-stage delays that mixers for rock and other louder, larger bands experience. "When the drummer is 25ft back from the vocalist, you will get delay issues from the vocal microphones that are open."

Harry Connick Jr., also a fan of the 105 ("The first time he tried it, he said it was like putting on glasses for the first time," Rubin remembers), also never let a little leakage deter him from keeping his combo closely knit. This presented Rubin with a challenge the night Connick was to record a live album at the Village Vanguard in New York. "He wanted the piano lid open and it's about two feet from the drum kit, so this was going to be more than a little leakage," he recalls. The solution was to place the microphones closer to the soundboard than usual and pan the piano and drums to almost completely opposite sides of the stereo mix. "The open piano lid reflected the kit, making it effectively a 'room' mic for the drums, as the drum overheads were for the piano," says Rubin.

Michael Bublé, another singer Moro has mixed, is closer to Frank Sinatra than Billie Holiday. Each of the eight horns in his section has its own Audio-Technica HM35 condenser microphone. The acoustic bass has two pickups and a single Beyer 88 microphone that Moro only turned on during ballads, since the drum kit, which is more conventionally miked, was directly adjacent to him. Bublé's vocal microphone also breaks the mould of the cabaret set. The Shure Beta 87C was not Moro's favourite choice, but it stayed both because Bublé himself likes the physical feel of the microphone and the fact that the ebullient Bublé slams it into the stage floor at the end of his performance. "That wasn't going to work with the KMS 105 or the Shure SM9 I was thinking about," says Moro.

In fact, the microphone is part of the act for many singers and has its own psychology. "You're looking at the microphone from the perspective of how tight the pattern is — will you miss a lyric if [a hand-held] is too tight or will you get too much of the band into one with a wider pattern?" he says. "But they're looking at the microphone as an extension of themselves. Don't put a lot of emphasis on the technical end of it with the vocalist. Then that's all they'll be thinking about on stage."

When it comes to mixing in the small room, less tends to be more. Moro notes that when he started with Bublé, his horn section was young, inclined to read directly from the charts and remain physically static. "I had to ride them early on in the gig because they hadn't yet gotten to where they knew when you lean in or back to create the dynamics," he says. "But that's an exception for this kind of music; you really want to let the musicians mix themselves on stage. And that's a hard one to let go of if you're coming from mixing rock music."

Moro claims Norah Jones's mix is as close to pop as this sort of music can get. "She's a powerful singer, but I avoided using heavy compression just an overall safety net with the McDSP Purple 77 multi-band compressor/limiter," he explains. "I try to keep the band up there around her voice, just so she rides above them, which gives it a full, warm sound. A lot of the warmth comes from the low end — the kick drum, the bass and the piano — but a lot of that is in the same frequency range, which makes it challenging. Create space for all these acoustic instruments by pinpoint EQ and some judicious panning."

Madeleine Peyroux, on the other hand, is straight and dry. "The band is right behind her and when an instrument needs to stand out, they just lean into it harder," Moro says. "One thing you don't want to do as the mixer is feel like you need to push the fader up when they're also pushing harder on stage. That just unbalances the sound. You have to assess the musicianship. When Michael Bublé's horn section was inexperienced, I had to ride them; as they got more experienced, they could do the swells themselves. As the performers get more comfortable and create more natural dynamics on stage, it will make it much easier for you in the mix."

"When there's a PA involved, even great musicians can only balance themselves to a degree," Rubin explains. "I always have a finger on whatever is the focus at that moment, whether it's the vocal or a lead instrument. If the vocalist pulls back a little more than usual on a line, I'll ride the mic, sort of like a human compressor. I don't want the focus to be lost. Signal compression should be kept to a minimum, as it can be too obvious and unnatural with this style of music, especially in a small space. Over the course of a show, you find that you have to ride practically everything at some point — if a guitar amp starts the show on 5, you know that's probably not where it's going to be at the end of the show."

Though the focus is almost always on the singer, Rubin generally sets up the mix around the drums because they will inevitably be the loudest instruments on a small stage. One trick is to mike them, but use very little of that direct signal into the PA; rather, he sends some of the reverb return to the PA. "That gives the drums a presence in the speakers without making them louder than they need to be in the room," he explains. "Also, I send it pre-fader, which still lets me bring up the snare microphone when the drummer switches to brushes without it sounding like a reverb tank."

Jean-Pierre Perreaux: mixing at the Metropolitan club in Manhattan

Lee Moro uses a Neumann KM 184 combined with a David Gage Realist pickup for the double bass.

There is no shortage of horror stories regarding the state-of-art of audio in small club venues. Jean-Pierre Perreaux discovered that after working for 10 years in the bistros and cabarets of Manhattan. "Sound is usually the poor stepchild in most small clubs," says the Paris native. That experience compelled Perreaux to convince the owners of the two-year-old Metropolitan club in the Flatiron neighbourhood of Manhattan to make a decent investment in the venue's audio. That includes a 40 x 16 Mackie Onyx console with a Firewire interface for recordings. Older EV PA cabinets are stacked on either side of the small stage and one flown just above centre stage. The Metropolitan's microphone cabinet is also better than most, running the gamut from the prosaic Shure SM58 dynamic to the pricey Neumann KMS 105 condenser. Perreaux uses a pair of Dbx 266 compressors and a TC Electronic M300 reverb unit.

The Metropolitan is also a naturally good-sounding club, Perreaux contends. "It's a very bright-sounding room," he says. As a result, he'll assess the volume levels of the musicians during a soundcheck (another luxury for this level of venue!) and decide which instruments to put into or leave out of the PA system. "I never mike the drums except if I'm recording, and then I'll just bring a touch of the reverb return into the PA," he explains. "If the piano or horn seems to be on the loud side, I'll leave them out of the PA as well. It's all about building the mix from the singer on down."

In that sense, the room itself and the PA are one and the same, changing their relative balance from night to night according to the dynamics of the musicians. However, like in many small venues, the PA speakers are positioned close to the stage, creating the potential for feedback issues. Perreaux tries to coach vocalists about staying on-mic, though he does so carefully. "It depends on the comfort level of the singer and how much of themselves they are comfortable hearing," he says. "Especially the quieter singers; if they hear themselves too much, they'll tend to move away from the microphone. But the theatrical singers — the ones who do Broadway — they don't even know what a monitor is."

Quick fixes for challenging acoustic environments

Perreaux persuaded the Metropolitan to make an investment in sound quality.

Most small clubs (even the ritzier ones) often put less into the PA than they do into the chandelier. Lee Moro, who has mixed Norah Jones and Madeleine Peyroux, and now manages operations at Meyer Sound's office at Nashville's Soundcheck facility, says expect sub-par acoustics as part of the culture. He suggests carrying some drapes in the boot of the car if a stage area is boxy and parallel walls set off flutter echoes. But, he cautions, first listen to the band in the space before trying any acoustical fix-ups. "Let the band get comfortable with the space first," he says. He also recommends carrying a few decent all-purpose microphones with you in the not uncommon event that the club's are beaten up. "The PA is often not maintained well either," he adds. "You might want to keep a few spare fuses on hand too."

Gregg Rubin is a big fan of parametric EQ when he mixes live: "What I'm looking for are the peaks and resonances in the room and PA. When you can identify them (I do it by playing a familiar recording) and precisely notch them out, you really bring out the true sounds of the voice and instruments. The parametric tweak should also get rid of any house feedback. Just in case, if there's a graphic EQ with the PA, I'll leave it in line and flat. In the middle of the show, if something suddenly takes off around 200Hz, I can use the graphic to pull it out quickly and figure out the source of the problem."

Mixing jazz for large venues

Stage Techniques