Ever been to a soundcheck for another band other than the one that sings in your church every Sunday? Show up early to club show, sneak in mid-day to a tour stopping through your city, or pay attention between bands at an all day festival, and the first thing you’ll likely hear for sound check is… kick drum, then snare, then hats, etc. Watch the other musicians on stage and you’ll see them speaking in sign-language to the monitor engineer trying to communicate. “I need more.” “It sounds flat.” “Can you make it punchier?”

I’d like to offer another approach. Hopefully you’re following my recommendation of doing a soundcheck from scratch once a month. Next time, don’t start with the drums or just whatever random musician is on stage. Start with the vocalists. The vocals are what everyone wants to hear anyway, right? Your singers may be a little timid about checking first, but there are a lot of advantages to this.

For one, you can now build your mix around the singers instead of building a mix around the band and then trying to cram the singers in somewhere or getting them loud enough to get over everything else without feeding back.

Also, this allows your singers to communicate to you easier as you move onto the rest of the band. Instead of sign language, they can now talk into the mic and tell you what they need to hear.

Don’t feel like you have to put everything in the mix too. If your guitar amp on stage is filling the room, then don’t worry about putting it the house mix. Still check your gain structure though to make sure the meter is showing close to zero. This allows you to add the guitar to the monitors if needed.