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Bruce Jones: FOH engineer for Counting Crows

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Road-testing the new Clair Brothers I4 PA system and more...

Published in PM July 2009
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People + Opinion : Artists / Engineers / Producers / Programmers
Bruce Jones has been doing live sound for over three decades, and has amassed a prestigious client list in the process. Here, he talks to Performing Musician about his work with Counting Crows, road-testing the new Clair Brothers I4 PA system, and building a UFO...
Richard Bennett
Building a spaceship, complete with lighting rig, in your local woods to freak out your pot-smoking high-school buddies may not seem an obvious route to running the live sound for a number of the world’s major rock bands, but for Counting Crows’ front-of-house engineer, Bruce Jones, it was the start of a long and successful career that continues more than 30 years later.
Bruce spoke to PM down the phone line from his Florida home, where he was preparing for the Crows’ support slot on the Who’s March tour of New Zealand and Australia, before the Californian-based band would play their own 13-date UK tour in May, including shows in Glasgow, Manchester, Brighton and London.
“We used to take some of our classmates out to the woods, just to blow their minds,” he laughs. “We’d tell them they were going to meet aliens, and they pulled up in the middle of nowhere and saw this spaceship with lights and everything just sitting there, and everybody believed it for a minute. When I did this to a couple of local band members, they looked at me and said, ‘Well, you’re running our lights, man.’”
After his early brush with extraterrestrials, Bruce started working for his local high school bands in his home town during the ‘70s, driving their gear around, doing the lights, sound and “all that other crap”, before deciding to concentrate his efforts purely on the sound board side of things.
With a client list including the likes of David Bowie, Ted Nugent, the Clash, Aerosmith, Deep Purple and REM, among many others, Bruce has built a solid reputation over the years for what he does, and since going independent in the mid ‘80s can nowadays literally pick and choose who he works for. This luxury allows to him make some decisions that others may not be prepared to take, such as leaving Santana after a 10-year tour of duty in 2000, just as the multi-million-selling Supernatural album broke. “I didn’t feel like we were really appreciated much when Santana finally made it big again,” comments Bruce.
After hearing that Counting Crows were looking for a new front-of-house engineer, Bruce climbed on board, a decision he refers to as “a real good fit”. When the Crows took a two-year break in 2005, he went on to work with Joe Cocker and Pink, before being “talked back into” rejoining the Crows in 2007. With so many years in the business, Bruce was able to bring his vast knowledge and experience to the Crows’ distinctive sound, with a few tricks of his own.
On the record
“When I started working with them, they didn’t even want to record their own shows,” says Bruce. “Santana always insisted on concert recordings. Carlos [Santana] taught me a lot about making good live tapes. So I just started recording the Crows’ shows on my own. When the band started hearing them, they started to think about the possibilities of the fans being able to go to a show and then download that show at a later date straight from a desk recording.”
Bruce achieves this by using the desk’s matrix to send four post-fader stems to Pro Tools, which runs on his laptop. “Basically, you just bring up the vocals and turn the drums down a bit, as they are a little bit harder on a live mix, and that pretty well gets it in perspective.”
At the desk
Bruce’s rack, housing some of his favourite outboard processors and the speaker-management system for the Clair Brothers I4 line array, which was used for Counting Crows’ tour.
Bruce’s rack, housing some of his favourite outboard processors and the speaker-management system for the Clair Brothers I4 line array, which was used for Counting Crows’ tour.
Although Bruce embraces the ever-increasing advancements in sound technology (he’s driving down to Orlando in the next few days for a Pro Tools update), he still has a fondness for the older gear that has served him well during his long career. “I used to use the Midas Heritage 3000 analogue desk, all over the world,” says Bruce. “I’ve used that desk with so many different acts. I really loved that thing; it’s really forgiving. It’s great in terms of both usability and clarity, plus you could do so much with it. I would load it up with 12 stereo channels, just to make everything fit.”
With most of the analogue desks now just a footnote in the history books, Bruce favours a 76-channel Digidesign Profile desk. Although the Profile comes with most of the effects built in, the veteran soundman can’t resist using a few of his old favourite hardware effects, to give that old ‘analogue’ sound: “I’ve got an old Sony reverb, which I use on vocals. It sounds clean and plays real well with other reverbs. It just sounds different and it helps separate that vocal.”
With all the Crows singing during a show, the reverb comes in handy when you are trying to pick up where lead singer Adam Duritz is in the mix. As Bruce explains, “I’ve got a BSS DPR-901 equaliser and a Summit Audio tube limiter daisy-chained on Adam’s vocal. This helps me if he’s a little peaky in the 2.5kHz area; it will notch it out when he’s hitting it hard, but not take away if I need it when he’s singing real soft.” And it’s not just the vocals that benefit from Bruce’s fondness for reverb. Crows drummer, Jim Bogios, uses a vintage Rogers kit, which from time to time Bruce puts through the old Sony DPS-R7. “It just makes a great drum sound,” he says.
Ad lib
The plug-in page on the Digidesign Profile desk, which Bruce used on the Crows’ tour.
The plug-in page on the Digidesign Profile desk, which Bruce used on the Crows’ tour.
With Counting Crows’ reputation as an energetic and spontaneous live band, Bruce admits it can be a challenge at times, particularly during a live show. One feature of the current tour is when Adam has a little upright piano wheeled out on stage instead of using the grand piano on the riser. As the Florida-based soundman says, “You’ve got to know when he’s going to do that. On stage it’s all open mics, which can be difficult, as if you’re not careful you can pick up all kinds of stuff.”
With the Crows consisting of seven versatile, accomplished and experimental musicians, the job of getting it right is both “challenging and rewarding”, according to Bruce. From the many changes of instruments played during a show to the inability of the band to stick to a set list, the 56-year veteran of the road has his work cut out for him. “There are three guitar players in the band, who change their guitars during a concert about 98 percent of the time — every song they change instruments. The set list doesn’t really mean much; they may stick to it for a while, but Adam can take a hard left at anytime. Even during songs it can go off in a different direction, which actually makes it a little bit more exciting when you have to mix that way.”
With the complexities of such a live show, setting up the mics on stage is a task Bruce takes very seriously. For this he uses a variety of types, depending on each band member’s style. For rhythm guitarist Dave Bryson, Bruce favours Shure SM57s, while multi-instrumentalist David Immerglück has a Shure KSM27 on his Fender Pro Reverb and a Shure Beta 56 on his Schreyer Audio amp.
The current concerts also feature an acoustic section, which Bruce admits keeps him on his toes. During this section the drummer sits on the drum riser and plays a book, a copy of The Good Girls Guide To Bad Girl Sex, with his hands. To get the clarity of the sound, Bruce mikes the book with a Beta 98H.
By using different mics it offsets the guitars a bit, as Bruce explains: “You get a different kind of colour, not just from them but from the microphones themselves. It helps give us a little bit more separation.”
The system
As for speakers, the Crows toured North America last summer with a prototype of the Clair Brothers’ new I4 system, which they will continue to use on the UK dates, says Bruce. “They are a newer version of the old I4. They worked well for us and everyone was pleased with them.” This field trial saw an unprecedented number of suited and booted company representatives attending the concerts to watch Bruce’s every move, as he recounts with an uneasy laugh. “Anytime we got near Clair Brothers the whole FOH was full of the big dogs from the company. It’s somewhat intimidating to mix a show, when you walk out there and you have all these people looking over your shoulder, checking your every move.”
Despite this intrusion, he is a great believer in creating a strong relationship between the “guys in the field”, the people who use the gear, and the ones that make it. “When you have a supplier who worked with you for years and supported you, it makes a difference,” says Bruce. “There should be some loyalty in this business. They were really interested in what was working and what was not. The engineers have to give them honest feedback. We are using it every day in all kinds of weather and situations, therefore we have better hands-on experience with them than they would get in the shop.”
With so many years of experience with sound under his belt, Bruce is able to get a feel for the type of sound, problems and limitations that a venue can offer just by walking into it. With each one being a different shape and size, he is fully aware of the various demands and “tweaks to the system” that different venues require. He explains what he has to think about when he first gets to a new place: “Things like whether the venue’s got a balcony — it’s important that, when it’s full of people, someone goes up there and listens to it, so I can make small adjustments on the amps and the crossovers so that those people in the balcony are hearing both high end and low end.”
In situations like this, Bruce admits how important the help of a good systems engineer is, although he says with confidence that nowadays he can pretty much look at a venue and get a good idea of how his system should be set up to achieve the best sound possible. “I can say, ‘This room is loads up in the 250Hz range,’ or ‘This room is better in the 160Hz range,’ or ‘It’s got a lot of glass or metal in it so it reflects high end.’”
With all his knowledge from the vast number of tours he has done, the preparation before the gig allows him to get a better mix during the show.
While some FOH engineers can spend a lot of time during the day tweaking the sound, Bruce prefers to make any adjustments during the first couple of numbers, as he believes that any venue will change its sound when the fans are in it. “Not only am I mixing the sound, but I am also checking out the room,” he explains. “I have a guy who walks around the venue, going into the balcony into the sides during the first few numbers, making sure that they’re getting coverage as well. Then you can just settle down into a real fine mix.”
For the Crows’ performances with the Who, Bruce prefers to sit on stage behind the monitors to mix the sound, a technique he also uses at open-air festivals. This is where his custom-made Ultimate Ears UE-11s come into their own. “The company built them especially for me; they really knock out everything else around. There is no ambient sound coming in on them. I have my system engineer in FOH and the whole thing is to find out where the drums and the vocals sit in the mix. We text each other on our mobiles to say, ‘Bring the vocals up 2dB, bring the snare drum down 1dB and you got it.’ This works really well. It kind of freaks out some of the other people who don’t think it can be done, but it can and it sounds good out front.”
Working with some of the biggest bands in the world has definitely been a rewarding experience for Bruce, but as he freely admits, things don’t always go to plan. He has had his fair share of disasters to deal with — from storms coming in with heavy rain and lightning, to PAs swinging around in the wind, he’s faced them all. “It can get a bit hairy,” he says. “Sometimes a generator can go down and you have to make a decision as to what lights or sound you’re going to have to give up to keep the show going.”
While recording Santana’s 1993 Scared Fire live album and DVD in Mexico City’s Olympic Stadium, he recalls the trouble caused by one overenthusiastic fan: “Right before the encore we had a guy who got backstage and he was chased by security into our power distribution area and landed right on the connector for the power to my FOH. It took a while to figure out what had happened, and then they had to run AC out to me through the crowd. You just can’t prepare yourself for those kinds of things. You never know what to expect. That show was a tough one. The Olympic Stadium had not been used for over 20 years and the place was in a mess. There was potential for a load of danger at that gig; that whole thing was scary.”
The crew
Bruce prefers to use different mics on the diffferent guitar cabinets to increase separation.
Bruce prefers to use different mics on the diffferent guitar cabinets to increase separation.
It’s at times like this that the veteran engineer appreciates the importance of a good road crew around him. On the road, working with a good crew behind you can make the difference between not only a good or a bad show, but also a great tour or the tour from hell. Not only does it create a sense of family, but it also makes the months of touring that little bit easier. A number of the Crows’ crew have worked together for many years, and with the live setup taking more than four hours to put in place, it can make a huge difference if you have guys around you that you can trust, and who know you as well as you know them — something Bruce believes is a good thing for the band as well. “Bill Thomson, the Crows’ guitar tech, and myself worked on the Green tour with REM in 1989. I met up with Bill again when he was working with Bob Dylan, and I was with Santana when we co-headlined. We go way back, we work well together and offer each other great support, but we also make damn sure that we have some laughs along the way.”
Considering he has spent so many years on the road, you would think that at the age of 56 there are times when Bruce might just want to call it a day. In reality, he admits that he can’t think of anything else he’d rather be doing, particularly when it all comes together at show time. “There is something magical about a show when the crew and the band are hitting on all cylinders. It doesn’t happen every night, but boy, when it does, it’s just the best feeling in the world.”  0

Dave Bryson: Counting Crows’ guitarist
For the acoustic section of the Crows’ set, Jim Bogios drums on a copy of The Good Girl’s Guide To Bad Girl Sex with his hands.
For the acoustic section of the Crows’ set, Jim Bogios drums on a copy of The Good Girl’s Guide To Bad Girl Sex with his hands.
Counting Crows guitarist and founding member Dave Bryson knows what it’s like to hit the big time, with the band’s debut album August And Everything After, released in 1993, selling more than seven million copies. With a new album out and a UK tour about to get underway, he talks to Performing Musician about his live setup, being taught guitar by Joe Satriani and why he prefers to work on the recording side of things.
Performing Musician: It’s not a bad start for a kid learning the guitar, when your teacher is Joe Satriani. How much of an influence on your playing was he?
Dave Bryson: “Joe was playing in a local band called the Squares, in Berkley, near where I lived. He also gave guitar lessons; that’s how he made a living. He was the guy to go to if you wanted to learn how to play. His style of teaching was more about inspiration and exploration. It was always like, ‘OK, this week I’m giving you four chords you’ve never seen before. Go away and write something.’ It was great; it got me thinking about just being me and not sounding like someone else. He got me into other types of music as well, like XTC. He’s a super open-minded guy, really musical, and he was a huge influence on my becoming a musician.”
PM: What other players influenced your style at that time?
DB: “Throughout my career there have been a number of influences. There was a Zeppelin period that kind of influenced me in a little bit of a harder rock type of playing. That then morphed into more of a Grateful Dead and Neil Young kind of thing. I grew out of that in the late ‘80s and ‘90s, getting into new wave bands like Big Country and New Order. Later on in life I was equally floored by players like the Edge. T-Bone Burnett, who produced the Crows’ first album, changed my whole thinking about playing the guitar and what it means to be a guitar player. I think your playing just grows and develops through periods in your career. It’s not that you grow out of something; more that you grow into something. You are a melting pot of your life, all those influences add up to your style. When people say, ‘Oh, he sounds like so and so,’ well, he probably listened to him. You can’t live in a vacuum; you are a product of your environment.”
PM: In the late ‘80s you started up your own recording studio, Dancing Dog. Was that a conscious effort to move away from the playing aspect of your career?
DB: “Maybe. I feel that there are two pieces to my history: playing the guitar, and recording and production, which has always been a big thing for me and it’s something I’m still very much into today. The studio was in an old warehouse where I would record local bands, and it was one of the reasons that Counting Crows got started. Lead singer Adam [Duritz] and me would get together and record songs. We did a lot of demos for the first album there and they turned out pretty good. We produced a tape, which quickly got spread around, and soon we had six labels that wanted to sign us within a few months. It was unbelievably exciting.”
PM: On tour, what are the main guitars you play?
DB: “My main electric guitar is a 1956 Gibson Les Paul Jr with the P90 single pickup. I also use a 1995 Gretsch 6119 Tennessee Rose, with a FilterTron pickup, plus a 1965 Fender Jazzmaster with a rosewood neck and the original pickup, which I still use. I cut the high E and the B off, and I restrung it with super-heavy-gauge strings, so it now sounds like an octave bass. It makes you play different; it not only changes the key, but it makes you re-voice the chords and everything. I also used to play a 1966 Rickenbacker, which I have retired now. It was far too valuable for life on the road. I replaced that with a 1991 Rickenbacker and it’s awesome. I really like the sound of the Gibsons — they just feel better and I have a preference for their sound. But the Jazzmaster is also a big part of the Counting Crows sound.”
PM: You also play a lot of acoustic numbers on stage. What do you use for those?
DB: “I use a 1960 Gibson LG2 and a 1965 B25 — that’s a total winner. I’ve set it up with Ernie Ball 13-gauge strings. On one song I play a Dobro, which I love playing in that open tuning. It makes you feel like a beginner again.”
PM: Can you talk us through your effects and amps for touring?
DB: “I have an MXR Micro Amp. I’m a big fan of delays. I’ve got a new digital version of the Roland R-E201, and that’s an awesome-sounding pedal. I use a RAT for a little distortion — it’s a weird choice, but it does such a good job of getting a little bit of distortion without changing the sound of my guitar — along with a Robert Keeley compressor, a Fulltone wah wah, and a Fulltone Supertramp tremolo pedal, which is also a really great-sounding piece of kit. As for amps, Mark Samson, founder of Matchless, custom-built me a unit that looks like a DC30. It’s reliable and you don’t have to mess with it much. I’ve got an AC30 and a Marshall Bluesbreaker Combo 51, but again they are so valuable that I tend to leave them in the studio.”
PM: The Crows have a reputation for their energetic and passionate live shows, which have a tendency to move away from the set list and fly off into other directions. As a musician, how comfortable are you with that?
DB: “As a band, something we all do is focus on the song, and when we do take a left turn Adam puts the indicator on — the audience doesn’t see it but we do because were are so focussed on him. That’s just learning to be a musician to be in a band, some people don’t push that side of themselves; they are just happy to play the same chords and stuff night after night. We find it more exciting to push ourselves in a live situation to expand beyond our comfort zones. Modern recording technology has got to the stage where a band doesn’t even have to play their instruments to sound good, but there is no fix when it comes to playing live. Live is where music has gone, you cant fake it.”

Published in PM July 2009
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