Why the Soundcheck Is the Most Honest Hour of the Evening

An empty hall sounds hard. The reverb hangs around longer, every step on the floorboards comes back at you, and the engineer at the desk can be heard in the last row without ever raising his voice. Later, once people are in, coats and shoulders swallow exactly that reverb. Which is why a soundcheck is never the evening itself — it is an estimate.

Still, there is more to see in this hour than during the show. Nobody is posing. Things get counted in, broken off, counted in again. Someone crouches down in front of an amp and turns a knob until the tone stops biting. The singer repeats one line three times, and she isn't thinking about the lyrics, she's asking whether she can hear herself. This is labour, and it looks like it.

The drums always take the longest, for an entirely unglamorous reason: there are simply more parts. Kick, snare, every tom, the cymbals — each gets its own microphone and its own channel. The man behind the kit hits the same surface for minutes on end, evenly, while somebody else decides what it should end up sounding like. It is the least musical activity of the whole day and the precondition for everything that follows.

Then the guitars come in and the room changes at once. Two instruments that sounded perfectly fine on their own suddenly fight over the same range of frequencies. What's interesting is how wordlessly that gets settled: one player moves his tone up, the other pulls the mids back, a nod, carry on. Nothing is explained. It just happens, and afterwards it is better.

At some point someone at the desk says "that'll do", and the in-between hour begins. The doors stay shut, the work lights are on, somebody eats standing up. That half hour is the real transition: a moment ago the hall was a workplace, in a minute it is a concert.

These days we turn up earlier when we film. Not for the better spot down front, but for this hour. It says more about a band than any encore does.