The SOS Guide to Live Sound

by Paul White

Published 3 April 2014

If you've ever handled live sound, you know the recipe for creating quality live sound requires many steps. Your list of ingredients, shall we say, requires an understanding of sound and how it behaves, the know-how to effectively use a sound system), and the knowledge to choose and use your gear well. Add a dash of miking ability, stir in a pinch of thinking on your feet for when your system starts to hum or the vocals start to feed back, and mix.

In practice, there really is no "recipe" for creating a quality performance. Instead, musicians and engineers who effectively use sound systems have a wealth of knowledge that informs their every move before and during a live performance. You can slowly gather that knowledge over years of live performance, or you can speed up the process with The SOS Guide to Live Sound.

With these pages, you get practical advice that will allow you to accomplish your live-sound goals in every performance. Learn how to choose, set up, and use a live-performance sound system. Get the basics of live-sound mixing, save money by treating your gear well with a crash course in maintenance, and fix issues as they happen with a section on problem-solving, full of real-world situations. You'll also get information on stage-monitoring, both conventional and in-ear, along with the fundamentals of radio microphones and wireless mixing solutions. Finally, a comprehensive glossary of terminology rounds out this must-have reference.


Professional studio design is a specialized science, with more than a touch of "black magic" thrown in. Over the past few years, Sound on Sound magazine has made one trip each month to a reader’s studio. These visits have demonstrated that it is fairly simple to make a huge improvement to an untreated project-studio room, without spending a fortune. However, they’ve also proven that beginners’ attempts at DIY acoustic treatments often cause more problems than they solve.

Utilizing knowledge from dozens of visits to readers’ home and project studios, the SOS team imparts easy-to-understand, organized troubleshooting advice. Learn how to rid yourself of monitoring problems and get an accurate monitoring system, how to enhance the sound of your recording space, and how to perfect your instrumental and vocal recordings. Decrease the time you spend re-recording and mixing, simply by improving your room with advice from the guys who have seen it all when it comes to make-do small studios. Contains:

  • A structured look at the problems that most often plague small studios, with individual studio case studies addressing each issue
  • Real solutions that you can both afford and implement; no thousand-dollar investments or idealized studio designs that don’t work with your space!
  • Case studies that look at small studios’ specific problems, with additional break-outs tips that address quick fixes to common problems