Down from the Mountain:
TEC Award-Winning Bernie Velluti,
FOH Engineer for
Alison Krauss + Union Station




He was at the Ryman Auditorium console for the live versions of "O Brother Where Art Thou?" and "Down from the Mountain". Not bad for a guy who got into sound as a way of picking up pedal steel licks from a country rock band.

For the past 13 years, this veteran has been responsible for the crystal clear acoustic sounds of Alison Krauss + Union Station. And in spite of his countless accolades and achievements, he still found time to talk to Shure Notes about what he does and what he's learned.




It's probably fair to say you didn't set out to do what you're doing now.
I grew up around Boston in the '60s and the folk scene was a big influence there at the time. My first exposure to bluegrass just grabbed me. I was a big fan of Tony Rice, Jerry Douglas and New Grass Revival. I liked the way they pushed the boundaries of the traditional form.

After college, I auditioned as a dobro and pedal steel player for a punk country band but decided to try doing sound on the road for Cabin Fever as a way to pick up some licks on pedal steel.

We traveled around the country opening shows for the big country names at the time - Marshall Tucker, Johnny Paycheck, Roy Orbison, Merle Haggard, Roy Acuff and Tammy Wynette. Touring one summer with Jerry Reed and Waylon Jennings led to working out of Nashville doing sound and coordinating production for Jerry Reed from about 1983 to 1989.

You worked with Ronnie Milsap after that, right? How was that?
I did monitors for Ronnie Milsap for three years. I learned a lot about frequencies and how to tune monitors from Ronnie himself.

All the while I'd been doing other bluegrass things around Nashville, and that's when I started working with Jerry Douglas and some other acoustic and bluegrass acts including Alison Krauss. I bounced around a bit between acts and gigs, but in 1994, I was hired full time to do Alison's sound.

By the way, congratulations on last year's winning Mix Magazine's Tour Sound Production TEC Award for Creative Achievement.
I didn't even realize I was nominated until Cliff Miller of SE Systems told me I was up for FOH mix. We were an underdog. I was on tour with Jerry Douglas' Band, opening for Paul Simon, when I heard we won.

Talk about competition. You were up against FOH engineers for The Rolling Stones, James Taylor, White Stripes, the Dave Mathews Band…
I have a lot of respect for the engineers and technical personnel who were nominated. And it's funny because I think of those acts as being so high-powered and here we are, completely different — an acoustic show with very quiet and subtle dynamics.


Apart from your talent, how did you manage it?
All of us on the crew have played this style of music over the years so we've got a good idea of what we're trying to get across. The fact that we have such a great working relationship with SE Systems has been a real benefit, too.

AKUS' dynamics can be quite measured and reserved at times and that's a challenge – making it sound big without blaring — retaining warmth and detail in large venues. Reinforcing sounds that can be as quiet as a whisper.

A lot of shows have an 'unplugged' theme these days, but its what we've been doing for years and in a multitude of environments.

What kinds of venues?
From small theaters with 1,500 to 3,000 seats to arenas, outdoor sheds and festivals like Telluride, Newport Folk and Merlefest. I really prefer the theaters because they offer an intimacy and contribute to the aesthetic. Arenas usually sound like the tub of the room that they are— in spite of that, I think we do a pretty good job of presenting the sound and band consistently.

How do you shifts gears – from theaters to arenas?
We try to get control of the acoustic environment. First, we maintain as much isolation from the stage/source to our FOH sound as possible, through the use of soft goods like stage drapes, legs, backdrops and the rugs and scenic drapes we carry. That reduces reflections and background noise.

Second, the array, tuning and time alignment of the FOH speakers and fills. We've been using JBL VerTec® line arrays for our main FOH and fills. The tuning and time alignment have a huge impact. The isolation of these speakers gives me a lot more latitude in the volume of the mix without affecting the stage. The proper tuning and shading of the speakers reduces reflections and increases the overall coherency.

Going from a 2,000-seater to a 3,000-seater is one thing, but going from a 3,000-seater to a basketball stadium is something else.

We're constantly shifting up and down, aiming and re-orienting speakers to make sure that the seated area sounds as consistent as possible throughout and avoiding the reflective surfaces like walls and balcony facades. Cliff Miller of SE Systems has been a wiz with the Smart technology, keeping the system really consistent from day to day.

Let's jump into how you've miked Down From the Mountain and some of the other shows.
When we did Down From the Mountain, we used an old-style miking technique. We started with vintage Neumann U47s and U87s condenser mics because there was a specific look we were going for. Five microphones. In the beginning, they didn't even want stage monitors up there.

But after having all sorts of problems with the old mics which were subject to all kinds of conditions, wind noise, humidity and tubes in the pre-amp that would snap, crackle and pop every day, we switched some of them out to KSM32s and KSM44s, which were much more stable and user-friendly. I brought them in as back-up along with a few KSM137s and KSM27s and they became the main mics for the rest of the tour.

We used the same set-up for The Great High Mountain tour, which was kind of a continuation and combined Down From the Mountain with the Cold Mountain music. We did three of those tours. We were using a very rudimentary monitor set up, which also included Shure in-ears. That really helped. We were playing big arenas, so the idea of preserving a vintage look was important.

In acoustic music, there are so many mics open simultaneously that the instruments and their respective mics hear the monitor wedge with a greater sensitivity than you do. They're a lot closer to the monitors than your ears are, and there's more energy coming into them. It colors the sound.

The more sources you've got, the less gain you're going to get out of it. The more cluttered your mix becomes, the more incoherent the stage in general. Physical separation can help, but most bands are uncomfortable being spread too far apart.

It all impacts the FOH. Less is more.



The system here is the one Bernie takes on the road
with Alison and her band.

What about smaller shows?
Last spring, we went on the road with Alison doing Tony Rice's music. It was very bare bones miking — just fiddle, guitar, dobro, mandolin and banjo. No drums or anything electric — straightforward bluegrass. Everyone who came to the show really wanted to hear Tony play, so his guitar was really featured in the mix. You could actually hear his pick landing on the string.

Tip #1 Tune the System
Working for Ronnie Milsap, I learned a lot about tuning the speaker system, to respond flat so a microphone will sound normal and function at the level desired and remain stable and not feedback. That's a real important key to doing sound in monitors and front of house.

Positioning the monitors is very important in terms of the rejection angle of the microphone to be able to get good gain before feedback and good fidelity. A little common sense on stage can go a long way for both performers and engineers alike, but then this is the music biz where common sense isn't the operative term.

I used to sit at the piano hitting notes, associating them with the frequencies and tonalities I could produce through the vocal mic and perceive in the monitor. I learned to tailor the frequency response of the speaker before getting to the point of generating feedback. I became a kind of human oscillator that could tune the monitors to those frequencies.

I took that experience and applied it to front of house. Tuning the sound system before you just start turning things up is really important, especially with acoustic music. A lot of times the frequencies aren't distributed in the proper proportion of values of power to the different speakers - the highs, mids and lows.

Tip #2 Don't Fix it in EQ
If a microphone that's EQ'd flat when you put it into the system just doesn't sound intelligible, then something's wrong with the overall system EQ. It should reproduce the sound realistically. Before you really trash it out on the input strip to make it work, the house EQ should be tuned. You should be working on tone in your console and not doing damage control. This is important.

Tip #3 Consistency in Microphones
There is no secret to acoustic miking, but if I were just starting out, I'd look for uniformity in the microphones.

Have everyone on the same mic. Like Beta 58s or 86s for vocal mics, Beta 57As on guitars or banjo. The input gains and sensitivities should be uniformly the same on your console. No matter how loud the source, the microphone will find its point of maximum gain before it begins to clip on the console at the same point of input gain.

You'll see that in festivals with a lot of different bands coming onstage. Mic consistency keeps everything on an even footing, at least at the start.

For one thing, a bad signal path will look out of whack and that's usually due to a leg missing on a cable or a bad mic. And a lot of performers are accustomed to using certain microphones and perform well in that comfort zone. The mics are not going to get you or them into any hot water.

As an engineer, you get more uniformity in setting up gains on the console and more uniformity in the frequency response of the microphones. If you've got the same mic, you know where the peaks are and you can even that out in the EQ. It allows you to be more consistent.

Final words of advice?
Think about the characteristics of the instrument, the characteristics of the microphone and challenges of the different environment. You've got to tune your system so that the microphone has a flat EQ, then when you gain it up in your console, it sounds true to the source. You can start tailoring your tone to bring out the depth and sweeten it a little bit. You don't want to be doing damage control.

When he's not on the road with AKUS, he's probably in North Carolina somewhere hiking with his dog. We thank Bernie Velluti for his insights and his generous gift of time. For information about the sound company AKUS uses, visit SE Systems' site.