Interview done for EQ magazine. Originally this was intended to get less information on a different subject, but I thought the whole thing was pretty interesting in it’s own right… and it’s almost word for word off the tape. EQ passed.
In 1970 Buford Jones took a job fixing power amps for a little audio company in Dallas called ‘Showco’. Twenty-seven years later his laptop occupies a central location on his ATI Paragon, atop the rarely used group-out eq section, with a copy of his “Tour Stack” hypercard-Mac program running. Aside from the midi-patch change tasks it fills during the show, the program he developed dutifully records daily information, venues, system used, show length, and it prompts Buford for his assessment of the band’s performance, as well as his own.
He is a genteel man with a strong drawl and a long southern moustache. He is disarming, one of those people who knows more than you, and yet is looking to see what you can teach him. His confidence comes from quality of experience, and there’s been plenty of that.
His resume reads like a K-Tel superstar hits compilation, and he’s erased more tapes than most of us will ever see. ZZTop, ThreeDogNight, David Bowie, Jackson Browne, Linda Rondstat, PinkFloyd, Faith Hill, Tim McGraw, and Travis Tritt have all sent him to man the FOH position (among others, actually, it might be easier to list the acts he hasn’t mixed), and over the years he’s collected a few pointers for making every night count.
“In 1982,” he explains, “Jackson Browne came and stayed at my house for three days while we went over a year’s worth of show tapes. It was an unbelievable task.” He nods at the laptop. “Ever since then, I’ve kept really close track of that sort of stuff, so when a somebody from the band comes to me and asks, ‘What’s a good show tape?’, I can break it down by setlist, band performance, my performance, mix quality, or of course, overall.”
He sits in front of the computer and says, “I designed this program to do all the stuff I can’t, which is basically remembering everything for me. As soon as all the paperwork is in I’d like to see if anyone else wants to use it.” He looks back at me with a smile and says, “For a price, of course.”
He turns his chair back so that he can see me and says, “Now explain to me again what it was you wanted.” Not much, I tell him, I’d just like to ask his opinions on some of the basics of a ‘big-time’ live recording. He lights his cigar and says, “Like what?”
EQ: What sort of things affect the live recording process from the technical end – before the day of the show?
Jones: You need to know who the producer is and who the mixer is. In cases where it’s me I’ll sort things the way I want it… if it’s a producer and they’re there I’ll ask them how they’d like it… They may not be as familiar with the instrumentation of the show or of how it should be laid out for mixdown…. There are so many different track formats these days. Ten years ago it was 2-inch-24 track, and now you see a lot of the ADAT’s and the 8-track Sony’s — multiple machine systems, some of the high-end professional trucks are running 48-track Sony’s or 32-track Mitsubishi’s. Knowing your track format is the first thing to deal with… but you don’t want the live recording to interfere with the show… The show is the show, and the tape should reflect that.
EQ: Do you ever see additional channels or other things for a recording which are not part of the usual show?
Jones: Yes, often the recording engineer would like to have something different to put on tape… and the signal just goes straight to the truck, so it doesn’t impact me or the show. Generally I think miking techniques are pretty close, live you just don’t have as many options as far as isolation and experimenting with different listening positions. With that many instruments going on at one time it’s pretty much all close mic-ing. We can vary the microphone and get different effects. I find there’s less and less of that going on these days. Most engineers just try to stick with what the live show has been running….
EQ: How do you deal with a truck mixer, like on a ‘live-to-air’ or ‘two-track-to-tape’ show, or how do you assure yourself they’re getting what you want?
Jones: Most mixers tend to go from the album if they have time. I think a show tape is a great place to start. You can pass on what you’ve learned about the show and the musicians. Any sort of cue sheet that you have, with solo’s or instumentation on them will help… unless you have a producer representing the artist’s music, or even the live engineer who will do different versions of the song. Live shows are often different from the original recordings… breakdowns and audience participation and background vocals and even cover tunes in a set need to be pointed out.
EQ: Have you ever mixed in the truck, leaving the hall to an assistant for the night?
Jones: When I have that option, definitely yes. Although most artists prefer that I stay out in the house, for security reasons, many of these festivals, especially the Live-Aid and Farm-Aid and so-forth, can have huge listening audiences and often the guy in the truck has only a CD and an input list to work from.
EQ: Often the truck people will fit your inputs to their input list, especially if they’re doing several bands in a day. What about compromising inputs or combining channels for guitars and so forth?
Jones: The only thing I want to see combined are drum channels, and that’s hard too. I want to have all the flexibility when remixing a live multi-track that I would have in the house. A certain amount of submixing is okay, so long as there’s an even or ‘average’ eq so I can do what I’d like to them later. I don’t mind a little compression either, say maybe 8:1, no more than 3db of compression, just to keep the peaks out… but besides that I’d prefer to save all the effects until the mix-down.
EQ: What about audience miking?
Jones: I like to see audience mics way above the stage, over the front truss or something, so they don’t get any sort of localized noise, where they’re in time with the stage and the PA. Otherwise they can’t be brought in at any significant level without the time lag being apparent. I use them pretty sparingly, too. I hear many live recordings where it seems like they might have been trying to recreate the fact that there were 80,000 people in a stadium. When I’m listening as an average listener, I’d rather hear the quality of the recording.
EQ: Anything else?
Jones: The hardest part is tracking… when the tape goes down it is so hard to try to change that feeling without a lot of overdubbing, and once we’ve done that, I feel we’ve taken the energy out. It’s great if you can get live tracks down and not have to doctor it too much.
There is another angle to this subject. I firmly believe that it is possible to mix a live album directly to two track. Not everybody agrees with that, especially live engineers. The trick is isolation. I have had a couple of opportunities to mix the FOH in isolation. In Japan there were two small theatres we played where we couldn’t bring the equipment in and one thing led to another and I said, “I’d like to try this.” It’s only a matter of voicing the PA in the main room and then voicing the control room, be it a dressing room or truck or what have you, to match the main room. If you can get them both flat, or at least to an equal response, one will translate to the other. I don’t think it works so well where you have a high SPL coming off the stage, like say a metal band, because we tend not to put those instruments as hot in the mix. Mixing in isolation provides more definition in what is happening in the room. It allows me to make adjustments without guess work. Of course you’ll need someone in the house with a third-octave eq, to make adjustments in the system that crop up during the show, like overall volume and maybe a little eq here and there.
EQ: How do you match the room?
Jones: A quality RTA is the main thing. I think it’s most critical to get not only the main curve but also the RT-60 of the room, the ‘fall-time’ of different frequencies in the room. (A quality reverb can be used to simulate the main room for the mixer in isolation.) There are several types of gigs where you might be recording, like theatres, amphitheatres, arenas, and stadiums all of which have different general sounds, even between different gigs of the same type. However, once you have achieved a good replication of the main room, what you print to tape can be of the highest quality.
EQ: So should we be looking for a two-track live album with your name among the credits?
Jones: No, not yet, but I believe that it is a solid, cost-effective alternative to hiring out a big truck and crew and all the what-not that comes with it. A nice truck and all can run you over $10,000 a night. Not much room for error when the tour guarantee is barely twice that. It’s so easy to have a bad night or broken string in a solo. You give a good engineer a chance and sixty or seventy shows and you’ll get a good tape, and you’ll get a mix that captures that ‘live-feel’ that artists are looking for in a live album.
Copyright © 1997 JPArmstrong