Kick Drums, Reverb and Vibrating Denim: The Art of Rock Show Sound Design

It’s six hours before show time, and Achim Lindermeir is at the control panel inside The Pageant concert hall in St. Louis making sure tonight’s performance will be perfect.

He’s the sound engineer for Milky Chance, a German indie rock band known for vocal-forward music with layers of guitars, electronic tones, horns and a driving drumbeat that makes people want to dance.

The dancing will indeed start in a few hours but first Lindermeir has to do his job. Opening a software suite known as Smaart, he uses a touchscreen to manipulate the sound put out by the loudspeakers throughout the club.

The beat booms like thunder, but Lindermeir concentrates it into a pulse that stabs and retreats, accentuating the quiet in between booms. It’s not so much heard, but felt. It makes your jeans vibrate where they’re loose behind your knees.

“I’m looking for a good drum sound,” Lindermeir says. And what exactly is a good drum sound?

Lindermeir smiles despite the pounding.

“This.”

Welcome to the world of modern sound design, in which designers and engineers like Lindermeir use technology and years of experience to shape exactly what the music will sound like in a club, a concert hall or a stadium.

Doing that requires a lot — including the right equipment and deep on-the-job experience. And, of course, it helps to have great musicians on stage. But even the best artists can fall flat with a poorly crafted sound design. The engineer who designs the show can elevate the experience to great heights — or ruin it.

An experienced sound designer can literally tune a performance room.

“I can make [the room] whatever I want it to be,” said Chris, the front of house engineer at Lincoln Hall, a revered 500-seat club in Chicago. “I can make it a living room or I can make it an arena. You can mix Imagine Dragons in here and make it an insane rock show, or a solo singer-songwriter and make it the most intimate experience.”

You’re dealing with varying aesthetics from varying artists and trying to do justice to all the acoustic needs. It’s science. It’s art.

Before they opened Lincoln Hall in 2009, Mike Schuba and his brother Chris spared no expense in creating a flexible, responsive music space. They wanted to replicate the warm, textured sound that had made their other local music spot, Schubas, world famous.

The brothers Schuba gutted Lincoln Hall, a former nickelodeon theater, down to a concrete box. Then they hired a company of acoustic experts and another company that supplied public-address hardware.

“The model was to bring people in and say, ‘OK, here’s Schubas and this is what we do and this is what we’re known for,’ ” Mike said. “’We’d like to recreate that at Lincoln Hall.’ It involved a lot of time and money as far as acoustic paneling, and ceiling treatments. But we ended up with one of the nicest sounding rooms in the city, if not the country.”

If tuning the fixed space of a room is hard, stadium concerts and outdoor festivals present a whole different challenge.

“A big part of what a great sound designer does is balance all the needs of a festival,” said Brian K. Shepard, associate dean and professor of audio design practice at the USC Iovine and Young Academy  and USC’s online Master of Science in Integrated Design, Business and Technology program. “You’re trying to create really great sound for everyone there.”

Shepard, the author of Refining Sound: A Practical Guide to Synthesis and Synthesizers said every band has its own “sonic signature,” and the front-of-house engineer is the one who shapes that sound.

“Performers have to have a lot of trust in their engineer,” he said. “You’re dealing with varying aesthetics from varying artists and trying to do justice to all the acoustic needs. It’s science. It’s art.”

Indoors or out, the science of sound design starts with proper placement of hardware components like speakers, subwoofers and monitors. Speaker tech in particular has exploded in recent years. Most top venues now distribute smaller speakers throughout the room; they provide better overall sound than the two massive cabinets of yesteryear.

“Long gone are the days of showing up, plugging in a speaker, and pointing it somewhere,” said Monty Curry, audio coordinator for The Governors Ball Music Festival on Randall’s Island, N.Y., and The Meadows Music & Arts Festival at Citi Field in Queens.

In the hands of a good designer with the right tech, a room can sound warm or crisp or fat, and the roar of a rock show can be shaped so it remains, mostly, inside the stadium, adapting to contain noise and leaving the neighbors in relative peace.

To help with that, most top-of-the-line speakers now come with proprietary prediction software to help engineers do their jobs. There are also smart speakers that can “see” how sound will hit objects at both indoor and outdoor shows.

Curry said he uses software for his arena shows that tells him how the sound interacts with nearby buildings and hard surfaces, and predicts any potential interferences. With that data, he said, he can design the arena and be confident how it will sound before he shows up on site.

In the end, a live show can sound “better than any record” said Gelin, the Lincoln Hall engineer. “It’s really full of life and huge.”

While the science is impressive, let’s not forget the art. Getting sound right speaks volumes about the intricacy involved. While sound engineers do use computers, an expert like Lindermeir will walk the venue to check the sound at multiple locations. He’ll consider what his computer tells him, but he also trusts his ear.

Hours later Lindermeir is back in the control booth as Milky Chance launches into its single, “Clouds.” Sound fills the room but is far from earsplitting. It’s textured, with shape and color. The crowd is ecstatic. For Lindermeir, the show isn’t about volume. It’s about the whole sonic experience.

“People shouldn’t worry about the sound,” he said. In fact, if he’s done his job, “they shouldn’t even think about it.”

Citation: The USC Iovine and Young Academy’s online Master of Science in Integrated Design, Business and Technology