The headliner sounds like god. The support sounds like a tin bucket being kicked down a stairwell. Same room. Same PA. Same front-of-house engineer sitting behind the same desk. And you want me to believe that’s a budget problem?
It’s a choice. Say it with me. A choice.
I’ve stood in too many venues watching a band I travelled to see get mixed like an afterthought. Vocals buried. Kick drum like wet cardboard. Guitars stacked into one beige wall of mush that could be Meshuggah or could be a washing machine. Then the lights drop, the headliner walks on, and suddenly the sound engineer remembers what faders are for. Magic. A miracle. Sound travels differently when the name on the ticket is bigger.
No, it doesn’t.
The rig is already there. The cables are already run. The room is the same room it was forty minutes ago. What changed is the effort. And effort is not a line item on a tour budget. Effort is a person making a decision about whose show matters.
Here’s what that decision tells the audience. It tells them the support is filler. Warm-up music. Don’t bother listening. It tells the band that travelled across the continent in a van with no windows that they’re not worth the twenty minutes of attention it would take to push the vocals up and pull the guitars back. It tells the room to wait.
Soundcheck time? Plan better. Next.
Touring budget? The PA is rented for the whole night. You’re paying for it whether the support sounds good or not. Next.
The support “should just be grateful to be on the bill”? That’s the kind of sentence that gets said by people who’ve never stood on a stage hearing their own snare drum two seconds late in a wedge monitor. Next.
I’ve seen support bands walk off stage looking defeated and it wasn’t because they played badly. They played great. The room just never heard it. Someone decided, upstairs in the mix, that their forty minutes were a warm-up for the real thing. And a career can die in those forty minutes.
So here’s my challenge to every venue, every festival, every FOH engineer reading this. The next time a support band walks on, pretend the name on the ticket is theirs. Push the vocal. Carve the low-mids. Actually listen. You already know how. You’re going to do it for the headliner in an hour.
Do it for everyone. Or admit that the hierarchy you’re protecting has nothing to do with sound.
