There is a specific kind of confidence that comes from knowing — not hoping, not assuming, but knowing — that your sound is right before you step in front of an audience. It is the same feeling I used to get as a consultant when the data was clean, the analysis was solid, and the presentation was rehearsed. You walk into the room knowing that the foundation is secure, and that frees your mind to focus on everything else.
I did not have that feeling for the first eighteen months of performing with a microphone. I had something closer to a prayer: “Please let the sound be okay. Please let the sound be okay.” I would clip on the lavalier, say a few words, hear my voice come through the speakers, shrug, and hope for the best.
Then I developed a process. It is not complicated. It takes about fifteen minutes. It requires one other person — literally anyone who can sit in a chair and give you honest feedback. And it has saved me from disaster so many times that I cannot imagine performing without it.
How It Started
After the events in Graz and Salzburg that I described in earlier posts — the acoustic nightmare and the feedback incident — I sat down and did what a consultant does with a problem: I analyzed the failure modes and designed a system to prevent them.
The failures, when I listed them out, fell into predictable categories. Volume too low for the back of the room. Volume adequate but clarity poor. Feedback risk from walking near speakers. Plosives (the “p” and “b” sounds) popping the microphone. Dynamic range compression making my voice sound flat. Echo and reverb muddling my words in reflective spaces. And the subtle but critical issue of what I sounded like on the receiving end versus what I heard from behind the microphone.
Every single one of these failures could have been caught in a sound check. The reason I had not caught them was that my “sound check” consisted of standing in the performance area, saying “testing, one two three,” hearing my voice come through the speakers, and declaring success.
That is not a sound check. That is a volume check. And volume is only one variable among many.
The Process
Here is what I do now at every venue. I am laying it out step by step because the specificity is the point. It is not a list of principles — it is a checklist.
Step One: Walk the Room Empty
Before I touch any equipment, I walk through the empty venue and clap my hands a few times in different spots. This sounds absurd. It is not. A sharp clap produces a short, loud burst of sound that reveals the acoustic character of the room immediately. If I hear a clean “clap” that dies quickly, the room is relatively dead — carpeted, curtained, low-ceilinged, acoustically forgiving. If I hear the clap ring and echo, the room is live — hard surfaces, high ceilings, the kind of space where sound bounces around and creates problems.
This ten-second test tells me what kind of room I am dealing with and calibrates my expectations for everything that follows.
Step Two: Identify Speaker Positions and Danger Zones
I locate every speaker in the room and note its position relative to the performance area. I identify the zones where I could walk in front of or too close to a speaker. I make a mental map of the safe movement area — the space where I can move freely without risking feedback.
If the speakers are poorly positioned — too close to the performance area, too far from the audience, angled wrong — this is when I talk to the venue technician or event coordinator about adjustments. Before anyone has set up chairs, before the audience has arrived, when changes are still easy.
Step Three: Mic Check at Performance Volume
I put on the microphone exactly as I will wear it during the performance. Harlan’s lavalier technique is something I have adopted: the mic clips to the tie or shirt just below the chin, the cord wraps around the tie, goes between the shirt buttons, travels inside the shirt to one side, and emerges at the belt-mounted transmitter pack. The final step is to stand straight, stretch the cable taut, then relax — creating enough slack to move freely without catching the cord.
Once the mic is on, I speak at full performance volume. Not a quiet “check, check” — the actual voice I will use when performing. The volume, the energy, the dynamic range. If I plan to whisper, I whisper. If I plan to raise my voice, I raise it. The sound tech needs to hear the full range so they can set levels appropriately.
Step Four: Send Someone to the Back
This is the step that changed everything. I ask someone — a venue staff member, the event organizer, a colleague, anyone — to sit in the back row, center seat. And then I ask them to sit in the far left. And then the far right. From each position, I speak a few sentences of my actual material and ask them a simple question: “Can you hear every word clearly and comfortably?”
Not “can you hear me?” — everyone can hear you in a silent room when they are actively listening. The real question is whether the sound is clear and comfortable. Each word distinct, no echo blur, not harsh, not straining.
Harlan makes the crucial point that sound on stage is not the same as sound in the audience. What you hear from behind the microphone bears little resemblance to what the audience receives. You must have ears in the audience to know what they will experience.
Step Five: Test the Movement Pattern
This is the step most performers skip entirely, and it is the one that prevents feedback incidents. I walk through my actual performance blocking — the movement pattern I plan to use during the show. If I know I will move stage left to interact with a volunteer, I walk stage left. If I know I will step forward during a climactic moment, I step forward. If I know I will turn my body to address different sections of the audience, I turn.
At each position, I check: Is my voice still clear in the speakers? Is there any hint of feedback? Has the volume changed because I moved closer to or further from a speaker? Are there dead spots in the room where the sound drops off?
This is the step that caught a problem at an event in Klagenfurt. My planned movement would have taken me behind the left speaker at one point — not in front of it, behind it. I had assumed that being behind a speaker was safe. But this particular speaker setup had a wide enough dispersion pattern that even behind it, at close range, the microphone picked up enough reflected sound to create a low-frequency hum. Not full feedback, but a noticeable, distracting resonance that would have been audible to the audience.
I adjusted my blocking by two meters and the problem disappeared. Two meters. A fifteen-second discovery during a sound check that would have been a persistent, unexplained hum during the actual performance.
Step Six: Test Critical Moments
Some moments in my performance are more sound-dependent than others. The opening line, where first impressions are formed. The quiet moments before a reveal, where I drop my voice for dramatic effect. The audience interaction segments, where I need to hear the volunteer’s response and the audience needs to hear it too. The climactic moments where I raise my energy and volume.
I test each of these during the sound check. Not a full run-through — just the key moments, the peaks and valleys of the vocal dynamic range. I want to know that the whisper carries. I want to know that the loud moments do not distort. I want to know that the transitions between volumes feel natural and not jarring.
Step Seven: The Emergency Quick Check
Sometimes — and this happens more often than I would like — there is no time for a full sound check. You arrive and the event is already underway. The previous speaker just finished and you are up in five minutes. The venue is in transition and nobody is available to sit in the back row for you.
For these situations, I have a quick version: clip on the mic, speak at full volume, walk briskly to the back of the room while still speaking, and listen. You are hearing the room sound from the audience’s perspective while hearing your own voice from the performer’s perspective simultaneously. It is not ideal. It is far better than nothing.
Then, in the first thirty seconds of the actual performance, I watch the audience. Are people in the back leaning forward? That means the volume is too low. Are people in the front wincing or pulling back? Too loud. Are faces confused even though the content is simple? Clarity problem. These visual cues are your real-time sound check, and responding to them quickly — stepping closer to the audience, projecting more, slowing down — can salvage a performance that started with suboptimal sound.
Why Systems Beat Instinct
I came to performing as an adult, from a professional world where systems and checklists prevent errors. Airline pilots do not skip the pre-flight checklist because they have flown a thousand times. Surgeons do not skip the safety protocol because the procedure is routine. And I do not skip the sound check because the venue looks nice and the equipment seems adequate.
The checklist takes fifteen minutes. The disasters it prevents take the entire performance to recover from — if they are recoverable at all. When the cost of prevention is low and the cost of failure is high, you prevent.
The Vienna Save
The event that cemented this process as non-negotiable was a keynote in Vienna for roughly one hundred and fifty people. A beautiful venue, a professional setup, a dedicated sound technician. Everything looked perfect. During my sound check, I ran through the full process. Steps one through six, no shortcuts.
At step four, my colleague sitting in the back-right corner reported that my voice was clear but that she was hearing a distinct echo — every word repeated about a half-second later. From center-back, no echo. From back-left, no echo. Only the right rear corner of the room had this problem, and it turned out to be caused by a reflective glass wall on that side that was bouncing the right speaker’s output directly into the corner.
The sound technician angled the right speaker slightly inward, reducing the energy hitting that glass wall. The echo disappeared. The fix took less than a minute.
Without the sound check, roughly twenty people sitting in that corner would have spent the entire performance hearing a disorienting echo of everything I said. They would not have known why the experience felt off. They would just have known that something was wrong.
The sound check found it. The sound check fixed it. Fifteen minutes saved the experience for twenty people.
A sound check is your pre-flight checklist. It is the last thing standing between your preparation and the audience’s experience. Skip it, and you are gambling that everything will be fine. Run it, and you know.
I will take knowing over gambling every single time.