Phil McIntire sat in front of the stage in a nearly empty Volcanic Theatre Pub on a recent Saturday night, hunched over a tablet computer in deep concentration.

Onstage, the five members of San Francisco gypsy rock band Diego’s Umbrella stood at (relative) attention, awaiting McIntire’s instructions. In the previous hour, the band had set up its equipment, plugged in instruments and idly played while McIntire focused on mic’ing drums and amplifiers. Now the only sound coming from the stage was the incessant ringing of a snare drum.

The drummer went through each piece of his kit, playing steady hits while McIntire tweaked a digital knob or moved a line with his finger to adjust the sound. After testing the full kit in action, McIntire moved to bass, then lead guitar, fiddle, acoustic guitar and finally the three vocal microphones onstage. At the end of the sound check, the band thrashed through half a song, filling the cavernous space with echoing overtones.

“This is rather short and sweet,” McIntire said after finishing sound check with Diego’s Umbrella and the local opening band, Hot Club of Bend. “A lot of times we’re running to get things done before doors open and stretching doors to 8:30 and this and that. … Most nights it’s only two bands, but a lot of nights they’re not bands I’ve worked with before, so we’re still figuring things out. And some bands feel like sound check time is rehearsal time and that’s kind of a pet peeve for any sound guy.”

The sound guy

As Volcanic Theatre Pub’s front-of-house engineer and light designer since late 2015, McIntire is responsible for making everything you hear, see and dance to at a Volcanic Theatre Pub show sound and look its best. Without him and sound engineers like him, no live music show would happen.

McIntire is usually the first person at the venue on show nights. Despite being familiar with Diego’s Umbrella, he was still at the venue by 5:30 p.m., more than three hours before the show’s scheduled start time.

And the sound check described above was only the beginning of McIntire’s work. He spent the rest of the evening either behind the mixing console in Volcanic’s small office just to the left of the stage, or wandering the room, tablet in hand, making adjustments to the mix.

“I’ve probably done 20% of the mix at this point,” McIntire said after sound check. “… With 200 people in here just chatting, it deadens the room a little bit, so it can sound like a mud ball. So once they start playing, I have to then change the tone of a lot of things to make it cut through and keep it exciting out there, because otherwise — if I set it and left — there’s guys in small venues that do that. They set it and they’re like, ‘Yeah, it’s good,’ and they walk away from the board. It doesn’t result in a good product. I gotta keep the crowd happy.”

From drummer to engineer

McIntire was born and raised in Altoona, Pennsylvania. He tells people he’s played drums since he was 3, but “that means I had a pair of drumsticks that I hit things with.” By his senior year of high school, more than half of his day was dedicated to band classes, and he also played drums in punk and hardcore bands outside of school.

He remembered recording in a studio environment with one of these bands early on. The experience sparked his interest in audio engineering and led him to study studio engineering for a time at Columbia College in Chicago.

“I was blown away at the fact that you could record,” McIntire said. “You could have all these mics on a drum kit and they would record the thing as a whole, but it required these multiple tracks to do it. And it sounded good; it blew my mind.”

While in college, he soon realized there were more opportunities for live audio engineers than studio engineers. He landed his first live mixing gig sometime in 2010 or 2011 at what was then Walter Peyton’s Roundhouse (owned by Walter Peyton of the Chicago Bears football team).

“So I started running sound, and it was trial by fire at that time,” he said.

McIntire stayed at Columbia College long enough to “get the very basics” of audio mixing, which he was able to apply at Walter Peyton’s Roundhouse. But he had to learn how to work with the less controlled environment of a live music club, versus the more sterile studio environment.

“When I was first starting and literally creating feedback and hurting people’s ears, and it sounded like garbage and this and that, there’s no musician that wants to deal with a sound guy that’s like that,” he said. “And they never hesitate to tell you, ‘Hey dude, you’re kind of screwing up my act here.’ So the challenge was not beating myself up enough to quit (or saying) ‘I can’t do this.’”

Making noise at Volcanic

McIntire and his wife moved to Bend about five years ago. Shortly after moving here, in late 2015, McIntire heard Volcanic Theatre Pub was looking for a new sound engineer. He walked into the venue sight unseen and handed his résumé to venue owner Derek Sitter.

McIntire had installed an Allen & Heath Qu-24 digital mixing console at an opera house in Chicago and worked with it for a year before moving to Bend. As luck would have it, Sitter had just installed the same console at Volcanic.

“He looked at (my résumé) and he circled the Allen & Heath Qu-24, and I’m like, interesting,” McIntire said. “And he’s like, ‘Come here, I want to show you something.’ I’d just met the guy; I’m like, OK. We walk back in the office and there it was. … And right then I was like, ‘Oh, I got this.’”

Sitter remembered hiring McIntire on the spot: “I saw the identical board on his résumé, and I’m like, ‘Can you start, like, now?’

“We have a really unique relationship because I have my own ear and he has his ear, and we trust each other’s ear,” Sitter said. “He has a linear brain; I have a creative brain. So we create a really great balance together. There’s many nights, many nights I’ll be there (behind the bar) or I’ll be here (at the door) and I hear something’s off right away. I’ll walk over, and I don’t even have to say anything; it’s nonverbal.”

Since then, McIntire and Sitter have made constant improvements to the sound system in Volcanic. A little more than a year ago, they upgraded the sound board to a Midas M32, an industry standard for smaller venues, McIntire said.

As with studio recording and music listening in general, digital affected live sound engineering in a big way, reducing the amount of equipment needed to make a room sound good. All the equalizers, compressors and other effects are in the console now, which means only one person has to work sound most nights, McIntire said.

Most music fans have probably noticed sound engineers wandering around venues and making adjustments to the mix with a tablet rather than sitting glued to the mixing console all night. That tablet (along with a computer next to McIntire’s board) can remotely control everything in the mixing board and allow engineers like McIntire to listen to the sound in the room from the audience’s perspective and make adjustments.

“I’ve had nights where I’m just like glued to that chair back there (behind the mixing board); I’m like, I’m not moving,” McIntire said. “And there’s the nights you realize, you don’t have that luxury, dude. You’ve gotta get out there and mix or you’re gonna hear it from everyone and make the whole venue look bad. You’ve got to be aware of consequence all the time.”

A challenging room

The work Sitter and McIntire have put into Volcanic’s sound system has paid off.

Jeshua Marshall, bassist for touring folk-punk band Larry and His Flask and Hot Club of Bend as well as frontman for Guardian of the Underdog, called the sound at Volcanic the best in town — and cited McIntire as a major reason why. Larry and His Flask hired McIntire to work sound at its New Year’s Eve show at the Domino Room last year, and has talked to McIntire about bringing him on the road as a touring engineer, Marshall said.

“I don’t know if you have to be in a band to know the stereotype of the disgruntled sound guy that’s super grumpy, and almost it seems like he hates his job,” Marshall said. “And that’s unfortunately a normal occurrence you run into, especially when you’re touring and stuff and there’s people that are just — I don’t know if they wanted to make it in a band or an artist and they’re stuck. But people who know their (stuff) and are friendly. … You can tell (McIntire is) passionate about sound.”

But it wasn’t easy to make Volcanic sound good, McIntire said. The room is a perfect square, which is “about the worst shape you could mix a room in” because the natural resonance can tend to muddy the sound and create “dead” spaces in corners, he said.

“One of the primary things you do as an engineer when you walk into a room is tune the room,” he said. “You set the console up so that you’re already filtering out any problem areas in the frequency spectrum. So it’s a large combination of getting the right gear installed correctly … and just tuning things properly and making them operate properly.”

When McIntire started at Volcanic, the sound system was about 20% as powerful as it is now. Since then, he and Sitter added a center speaker for the front of the stage, two more main speakers to cover the corners of the room and larger subwoofers to fill out the low end.

“I’m fortunate to have somebody who values what I do and pay(s) me appropriately for it, get(s) me the tools I need to do it well and still be a good friend in the end,” McIntire said of Sitter.

McIntire, who also is a mountain biking and snowboarding buff and works full time at REI, occasionally finds time to mix sound in other venues. He has mixed sound for Bend’s myriad summer street festivals as well as the Munch and Music concert series with local company Sound Advice, and has worked the occasional Domino Room or Midtown Ballroom gig.

“Having no walls (at outdoor gigs) is a lot of fun, but it also requires that you either bring so much gear that the workload is intense, or you bring what you can to make enough people happy to make it successful,” McIntire said.

Cliff Wyland, who founded Sound Advice in the early ’80s, said McIntire’s musical background gives him the sharp ears and understanding to be a great sound engineer. (McIntire also plays drums with local indie rock band Cosmonautical.) As digital technology progressed, Wyland leaned on McIntire to help keep abreast of the changes.

“He doesn’t turn up the ‘suck knob’ — a lot of engineers, they go right for the ‘suck knob,’” Wyland said. “Though they’ve got perfectly good equipment, they can’t seem to get a good sound out of it. I don’t know what it is. Some people have a knack, and Phil’s one of those people. He’s super intelligent, and he’s really astute.”

Stories from the board

The hardest bands to mix in Volcanic, according to McIntire, are bluegrass bands due to the feedback from acoustic instruments and the musicians’ tendency to want to crowd around a single microphone. Rock and funk bands, which usually welcome loud mixes, are easiest.

Over the years he’s met and worked with lots of touring musicians, but he doesn’t get starstruck very often. “I’m here to do a job and remain professional,” he said.

He still has rough nights, of course. A little more than a year ago, alt-country singer-songwriter Rayland Baxter — son of Bob Dylan’s former pedal steel player, Bucky Baxter — played Volcanic. He’s one of McIntire’s favorite artists now, but at the time the sound engineer hadn’t heard his music.

“We had just gotten the new console, and I was still learning my way around it,” McIntire said. He worked with Baxter and the band to get a sound-check mix done, but he was going slowly and Baxter was losing patience.

“He asked me to put a slapback (delay) on his voice: ‘I want it like a really dreamy — like, think Beatles, “Sgt. Pepper’s,” kind of psychedelic slapback delay on my voice,’” McIntire said. “I’m like, ‘OK, give me a minute.’ And I just could not figure it out, could not figure it out. And Rayland looked at his guitarist; he’s like, ‘Can you go help him?’ At that moment you could tell — you listen, you’re tuned into the tone of their voice while you’re trying to figure things out.”

But when things are going well, McIntire is in his element. After the Diego’s Umbrella sound check, vocalist and acoustic guitarist Vaughn Lindstrom went to the microphone and gave a thumbs up.

“Wow, that sounds awesome,” he said.

“That’s what I do it for,” McIntire said. “They ultimately will give a better performance in that mindset.”

— Reporter: 541-617-7814, bmcelhiney@bendbulletin.com