Author Archives: dmaland

About dmaland

Danny Maland was introduced to the world of pro audio back in his high-school days, almost accidentally. Danny has experience in both the recording studio and live-sound reinforcement worlds, and has found that he prefers the immediacy and intensity that live-sound offers. In past years, he was a key player in establishing and operating "New Song Underground," an all-ages music venue offered as an outreach by New Song Presbyterian to Salt Lake City. He is currently the "inconveniencer of electrons and air molecules" at Fats Grill. Danny holds a vocational diploma (MRP II) from the Conservatory of Recording Arts and Sciences, and also a Bachelor of Science: Information Technology from Western Governors University.

The Inverted Microphone

Passive, cardioid subwoofers? We have passive, cardioid mics.

Please Remember:

The opinions expressed are mine only. These opinions do not necessarily reflect anybody else’s opinions. I do not own, operate, manage, or represent any band, venue, or company that I talk about, unless explicitly noted.

Want to use this image for something else? Great! Click it for the link to a high-res or resolution-independent version.

In the spring, I finally became a homeowner. That means I have a yard, and that means I have time for podcasts.

Seriously, podcasts make lawn mowing interesting.

It’s especially interesting when you get to hear Dave Gunness talk about his career. And then, Mr. Gunness goes into how to build a passive, cardioid subwoofer, and everything comes full-circle.

What I mean is, a lot of us with anything that even halfway resembles a traditional education in audio are taught that speakers and microphones are inverted versions of each other. One’s an input, and one’s an output – and you can even turn a speaker into a microphone if you wire a connector in the correct way.

What we don’t always realize, though, is that the inversion works “all the way down.”

The Gunness-built, passive cardioid subwoofer, when described in any sort of detail makes a person go, “Of course!” The entire idea is that radiation from inside the box goes through acoustical filtering that causes a tuned null at the rear. This filtering causes some difficult resonances that have to be dealt with.

And that’s exactly how a cardioid microphone works, if it’s a passive unit. An acoustical phase-changing network causes the incoming radiation from the mic’s rear to cancel out when it reaches the front of the microphone. Creating an effective version of the network requires careful tuning, because some nasty resonances can result. (The exact methods for doing so are trade secrets to the microphone companies.)

It’s. All. The. Same. Concept.

It’s yet another example of how everything in this business is made of the same “physics blocks.” You can make pretty much anything you want if you understand what the parts are.

It makes me wonder if a line-array of microphones might have an interesting application…

Separation In Real Time Is What Makes Streaming So Terrifying

Broadcasters have known this forever.

Please Remember:

The opinions expressed are mine only. These opinions do not necessarily reflect anybody else’s opinions. I do not own, operate, manage, or represent any band, venue, or company that I talk about, unless explicitly noted.

Want to use this image for something else? Great! Click it for the link to a high-res or resolution-independent version. This image was found on Pixabay, here.

I was recently THE engineer for a concert live stream, my first time being in that position, and it was a bit of a rocky start.

My encoding settings were too much for the streaming machine (a laptop) to handle, and so the stream that the audience saw was a nightmare of frozen video and general “chop.” Folks were greatly displeased, quite understandably, and if you think live music is stressful…

…try adding the stress of trying to figure out why a streaming broadcast is going wrong, while also trying to mix the streaming broadcast AND the show for a few folks in the seats.

AND for the musicians.

Luckily, it was a pretty simple show, or I would have gotten flattened.

For me, as a guy whose work is very heavily weighted towards concert sound, there’s a special terror to broadcast. The fear comes from having realtime output that’s essentially impossible for a single craftsperson to monitor effectively. Folks who specialize in broadcast have had to deal with this problem for ages, and wield all manner of effective strategies for navigating the conundrum. I didn’t, though, and it was tremendously educational to have a shoe on the other foot.

What I mean by that is I was facing what a lot of studio engineers run smack into when coming over to the live-music side: We use lots of the same technology and terminology, but the production disciplines are very different. You can’t expect to be an ace at broadcast simply because you’re a seasoned operator for live music. The needs are different, and the pitfalls don’t have the same geometry.

In live music, what you get used to is hearing the same output (or largely the same output) as everyone else. You hear it immediately, and so does the audience. If something isn’t right, you have a common reference point.

With broadcast, the output is real time for all practical purposes, but you’re separated from it. You experience the show so differently from your audience that the two realities are almost totally unmoored. You can fix that by having a separate broadcast studio or broadcast truck, but that’s not something that happens for sole operators. You can open the stream on your phone and get something of a clue, but all the immediate output in the space basically drowns your sense of what’s happening.

Plus, you can get everything else right and still fail the majority of your participants.

Monitors okay? Check.

Main mix okay? Check.

Streaming preview seems okay? Check.

Audience experience at the far end? HOUSTON WE HAVE A PROBLEM, SEND CHEESE-BALLS AND BEER!

The first three items are plenty difficult by themselves, but the last point is what really matters. It’s the creature that will eat you alive.

So, what’s the lesson here? Other than realizing how broadcast is a different discipline, I’d say that “you haven’t done it until you’ve done it.” You can’t live through the process of streaming production by thought experiment, or even by limited empirical work. Until you’ve actually put a stream through the Internet, and seen how your hardware and software truly interact with that task, you don’t know what you’re dealing with. It’ll sober you up in a hurry.

But getting sobered up is an opportunity to learn, because you begin to get a handle on knowing what you don’t know. That’s true for me, and I have to say that I’m pretty excited to have another crack at the whole thing in July. Once you see things go wrong, it’s a chance to do them the right way. I’m craving that chance.

A Very Simple Acoustic Calculator/ Simulator

A little toy for visualizing driver interactions.

Please Remember:

The opinions expressed are mine only. These opinions do not necessarily reflect anybody else’s opinions. I do not own, operate, manage, or represent any band, venue, or company that I talk about, unless explicitly noted.

 
Want to use this image for something else? Great! Click it for the link to a high-res or resolution-independent version.

I recently wrote up a piece about my adventures and/ or misadventures in creating an acoustic calculator. I’ve since deployed that calculator. You can play with it here.

The calculator requires that you first specify a frequency of interest before generating the acoustical workspace, but you can change that frequency at any time after specifying it – even with drivers already placed. The calculator assumes that all drivers are omnidirectional.

But how does it work?

the.u.forIn(the.drivers, function(index, driver) {
   let x = Math.abs(driver.x - column);
   let y = Math.abs(driver.y - row);
   x = x**2;
   y = y**2;
   const initialPressure = 1;
   cell.value.distancesToDrivers[index] = Math.sqrt(x+y);
   let distanceDoubles = Math.log2(cell.value.distancesToDrivers[index]);
   cell.value.driverPressures[index] = initialPressure / (2**distanceDoubles);
});


First, the calculator traverses each grid cell and determines the distance from that cell to each driver. Since we’re working on a grid, the difference between the cell’s horizontal and vertical location vs. the driver’s horizontal and vertical location can be treated as two legs of a right triangle. When you do that, the Pythagorean Theorem will spit out the length of the hypotenuse as neatly as you please.

From there, we can determine the apparent pressure of the drivers at the observation point. The initial assumption is that, at a distance of 1, the observed pressure is 1 (1 Pascal, to be exact). This makes the “decay” calculation simpler. It allows us to simply find the number of times the distance has doubled from 1 – in other words, the base 2 logarithm of the distance. For example, at a distance of 8, the distance to the driver has doubled three times from a distance of 1. (2^3 = 8)

Also for the sake of simplicity, the assumption is that we’re in a completely free field with no reflections of any kind. This means that we expect to lose 6dB with every doubling of distance. A 6dB loss is 1/2 the apparent pressure, so for each doubling of distance we divide by two again. A compact way of doing this in our particular case is to divide the initial pressure of 1 by 2, raised to the power of the number of distance doublings we found. Again, using a distance of 8, we would get 1/2^3, or 1/8.

The next thing to do is to find the driver which arrives first at each observation point. That driver is the reference for all other drivers in terms of phase. After that…

the.u.forIn(the.drivers, function(index, driver) {

   if (index !== shortestArrival.driver) {
     let arrivalOffset = Math.abs(cell.value.distancesToDrivers[index] -  cell.value.distancesToDrivers[shortestArrival.driver]);
     const totalCycles = arrivalOffset / wavelength;
     const phaseRadians = totalCycles*(2*Math.PI);
     cell.value.driverPhaseRadians[index] = phaseRadians;
     //Use cos(), because a 0 radian offset should result in a multiplier of 1.
     //(The wave is in phase, so its full pressure sums with the reference.)

      const phasePressure = Math.cos(phaseRadians) * cell.value.driverPressures[index];
     cell.value.finalSummedPressure = phasePressure + cell.value.finalSummedPressure;
     cell.value.finalSummedPressure = Math.abs(cell.value.finalSummedPressure);

  }
});

Next, we go through all the other drivers and figure out the difference in phase angle between them and the reference. Doing this requires knowing the wavelength, so that the difference in arrival distance divided by wavelength gives the total difference in cycles. We can then find the phase angle in radians by multiplying the difference in cycles by 2pi radians.

Having found the phase angle in radians, feeding that to cos() gets us a multiplier for the observed pressure of that driver at the observation point. With cos(), a phase angle of 0 radians means a multiplier of 1 – and that makes sense, because two waves in phase will fully add their pressures. A phase angle of pi radians would get us a multiplier of -1, meaning that the two waves would cancel out at the observation point.

Having found the multiplier, we add the driver pressure multiplied by that number to the total pressure at the spot in the grid we’re measuring. The process is repeated for each driver.

When that’s all done, we convert the final pressure to an SPL, which can be assigned a color.

When those colors are plotted, we have our acoustical calculation/ simulation to look at on the grid.

Calculated Adventures

Danny tries to create an acoustical prediction system.

Please Remember:

The opinions expressed are mine only. These opinions do not necessarily reflect anybody else’s opinions. I do not own, operate, manage, or represent any band, venue, or company that I talk about, unless explicitly noted.

 
Want to use this image for something else? Great! Click it for the link to a high-res or resolution-independent version.

(Important Note: After publishing, I finally realized that something was very wrong with my calculations. I put in a fix, and have documented it at the end of this article.)

The thing is, I really want to write about what happens when you build a line of drivers – how they interact acoustically. The problem is that my favorite, relatively easy to use acoustical prediction software was taken and made into an iOS-only app by somebody. (I am disappointed in that somebody. Maybe even angry.) Everything else that’s out there is overly complex for what I need to do.

Being a little nutty, I thought to myself: “Couldn’t you make something yourself that does what you need?”

Which is hilarious, because in the time it would take me to build my own calculator, I could probably figure out how to use one of the overly complex calculators in a minimal way. But whatever! I need to learn React to be a modern UI developer anyway, and this will help me on that road.

The first step in modeling a problem is figuring out how to represent it.

After some thinking, I determined that the first thing I needed was a way to input the frequency of interest, and how many drivers would be involved. That’s easy enough.

In acoustic calculation, what we’re trying to do is determine how much pressure we have at a given point in space. With any computer display, visually plotting that information involves a grid. To get started, I don’t need ultra-high resolution. A 100×100 array of boxes should do the trick, right?

That’s what I thought, until I saw it rendered in reality. Zoinks! A 40×40 grid is much better, and seems perfectly adequate if 20Hz waves aren’t really important to us. (A 20Hz wave is about 50ft long, and I’m going to be assuming that each grid box is about a foot square.)

After a good bit of futzing with React and CSS styling, I can see the grid.

Now, I have to plot speaker positions. A really full-featured calculator would allow for arbitrary locations – but I’m in a hurry, so I’ll just place the speakers programmatically. I’m going to see if I can build a line along the left side of the grid, essentially centered vertically.

After a lot of bumbling around with offsets and a misuse of the addition operator, I finally get things to position themselves appropriately.

Of course, I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t change my mind. After getting the speakers to plot correctly, I decided that a higher-res grid was better, and also that I didn’t want gridlines. This was after I finished my code for abstract calculations and color plotting. Here’s what I got when plotting one speaker:

That looks about right to me. Plotting two speakers, though, seems wrong. The plot should be symmetrical, and it isn’t quite, plus the “cyclical waves” of intensity are just not how things work in real life. I think I’m going about my calculation incorrectly.

My debugging process was one of looking at my various interstitial values, and trying to figure out where they were different when they should have been the same. In the end, I made one very important determination: When calculating the phase difference and resulting pressure summation from driver to driver, the reference driver should always be the nearest one to the observation point. If you always start with, say, the first driver, the graph will bias off towards that sound source. Here’s my stab at an explanation for why:

Humans don’t experience a show from all points in space simultaneously, and omnisciently about a particular sound source being “first.” Instead, we experience the show from where we are, and whatever source of sound is the closest to us is the “0 phase” reference point.

What I’ve got now is much better. It still seems to have some issues, but my sneaky suspicion is that grid resolution and floating point math may be the final hindrance on the way to perfection.

Wait…no, that’s not right at all. Those two drivers should sum very handily in the middle. What’s going on?

After another day of working mostly on other things, I finally found the problem. I was using the sine function to find an “offset pressure multiplier” for the later-arriving drivers. The problem with that is you get the wrong multiplier. If two drivers arrive perfectly in phase, then the phase offset is 0 radians. The output of sin(0) is 0. Multiply the second driver’s pressure by 0, and…you get 0. Which would mean that two drivers in perfect phase alignment would have one of them not contributing to the pressure. That’s completely incorrect.

What I needed to use was cos(). The value of cos(0) is 1, meaning that a driver perfectly in phase with a reference sums at its full pressure. That’s what we want. NOW, I think this is right.

Better Livestream Quality

Good light and audio interfaces are a big help.

Please Remember:

The opinions expressed are mine only. These opinions do not necessarily reflect anybody else’s opinions. I do not own, operate, manage, or represent any band, venue, or company that I talk about, unless explicitly noted.

Want to use this image for something else? Great! Click it for the link to a high-res or resolution-independent version.

There’s a whole lot of livestreaming going on, even with COVID19 worries easing a bit, I’ve encountered some questions about it. Mostly, they come down to how to do it well without spending a million bucks. As with anything in show production, there are some pretty big wins to be had with strong basics. Sure, very elaborate setups can provide very impressive results – but you can get a lot of mileage out of a little money and homework.

Good Light

Livestreaming is so firmly entwined with video that any discussion of quality has to involve the visual aspects. Obviously, a decent capture device (camera) is helpful, but what’s less obvious is how you can use lighting to your advantage. Even relatively down-market phone cameras can get pretty decent pictures in strong light. If you remove the need for the sensor to be run at a high ISO value, image grain drops significantly.

Just hitting yourself with a lot of light isn’t enough, though. The color of the light matters, and so does the distribution.

I strongly recommend starting any lighting experiment with warm but desaturated tones. (Tons of saturation can cause you to quickly overload the image sensor in one color range.) The more your lighting reminds you of some flavor of afternoon sunlight, the better. Soft-white is a good place to look first. Start off by making yourself look natural, and then you can go off in wild directions later.

In terms of distribution, strive for very even light across everything you want to see. Avoid hotspots; Diffuse light through lampshades, or paper, or thin sheets if you’re having trouble. You can also try bouncing strong light off of walls. The reason for diffusion and even-ness is that most cameras have a pretty limited dynamic range. They aren’t as forgiving of large intensity ranges as your eyes are. Subjects hit by disproportionately strong light may “clip” into large blobs of white if darker areas are made visible, or the parts of the picture in shadow may be indiscernible if the exposure is dialed back to rein in the extra hot areas.

Direct Connections

Your best shot at good sound is to mix your stream directly to a line input. Sure, using a device’s built-in mic can work reasonably well, and I’m always going to tell you to get the show to sound good in the room. However, I’m also a vocal and fervent proponent of deleting the room from the equation whenever possible. That means going for direct coupling of signal, rather than via multiple transductions from electricity, to sound pressure waves, and back again.

Achieving a direct connection on a phone can be a little challenging. You can certainly get a breakout cable and connect something directly to the microphone input on the headset jack. It’s likely, though, that driving the input too hard will be very easy. Plus, the connections might not be the most robust…and let’s not even get started on automatic gain control doing weird things to your input audio. (It might be an issue, or it might not.)

It’s much better to spend a bit of money on an interface that allows for robust, pro-audio connections (like XLR), and delivers a digital audio stream to the phone over the USB port. There are many such devices available, a good crop of which are under $200 US. Armed with such a unit, you can send a mix straight to the phone with minimal fuss. (Try to find something with good input metering, if you can. Guessing at when you’ll hit a device’s clipping point is vexing. Seeing that point clearly is divine.)

When getting set up, make a test-recording that you can play back to hear your broadcast mix. Monitoring in headphones is okay, but unless the performance is very quiet you’ll get plenty of “leakage that lies to you.”

***

None of what I’ve presented is particularly earth-shattering. In fact, it may sound rather simple. That’s my point about strong basics, though. A huge number of streamers aren’t even getting to the level of intentional lighting choices and a direct audio-signal connection. Standing out from the pack does take a little work, more than a lot of other folks are doing, but it’s really not that bad.

Hadfield’s Thought

Don’t launch with your fingers crossed.

Please Remember:

The opinions expressed are mine only. These opinions do not necessarily reflect anybody else’s opinions. I do not own, operate, manage, or represent any band, venue, or company that I talk about, unless explicitly noted.

 
Want to use this image for something else? Great! Click it for the link to a high-res or resolution-independent version. This image was found on Pixabay: Space Shuttle

Those “Master Class” things? Commander Chris Hadfield has one. I know, because I’ve seen the trailer. In that trailer, he says something that really got my attention: “No astronaut launches for space with their fingers crossed. That’s not how we deal with risk.”

Of course, without taking the class I don’t know exactly how that thought works out in the context of spaceflight. At the same time, it was intriguing to me because of how true it is for show production. We don’t manage risk with blind hope, and we don’t REACT to risk with a resigned sigh of “there’s nothing we can do about this.”

Or rather, my experience has taught me that we ought not to.

Dealing with show-production risk is not complicated. Indeed, I believe all risk management is handled by essentially simple steps that you take consistently. Those steps boil down to two things: You have to have an error margin, and you have to have a plan for using that margin.

If someone pressured me into picking a most essential risk-management element for audio and lighting, it would be on the error margin side and it would be time. In other words: Get there early. Get there early enough that you have time to react to the situation going sideways. I was once on a show where the equipment vendor sent us a wedge with a blown HF section. It wasn’t the greatest feeling in the world, but there was plenty of time to get a replacement driven over…because the crew was there early. If we had waited until an hour before soundcheck, we would probably have been up a creek.

Being early helps to solve so many problems. You have to rebuild your show file? You’ll have time. You need to run to a local shop for something that broke – or just to eat? You’ll have time. You need to deal with the inevitable change in plans, venue misconfiguration, cranky equipment, or deployment conundrum? If you’re early, you can take a second to think without anyone (including you) breathing down your neck.

The importance of being early is so high that one of my major annoyances in this job is schedule compression. Compacting a production schedule is the opposite of what needs to happen, folks. It’s a risk injection when what we need is mitigation.

Physical margin is the state of having spares with you. Again, this is the concept of error margin, but in the physical domain. Bring more mics than you need, and more stands. I almost always have far more XLR cables than I need to get the job done, and so I’m totally relaxed if one’s been mangled. I’m lucky enough to have a surplus of consoles, so that in most situations one could completely die and the show wouldn’t change at all. If you can’t have a whole duplicate mixing desk, at least have something you can use. In any case, excess gear reduces risk considerably.

And files! Dear heavens, if you’re using show or scene files, have them sit in a couple of different places. If your main console dies and it’s the only thing with a copy of the show setup, you are in real trouble. Make copies. Carry a USB stick you can use to recover from.

Then there’s the disaster plan, which is your mental map of how to use your error margin…or create just enough error margin to survive. Your disaster plan doesn’t have to be written, but you do need to have an outline of how to deal with a major failure. For instance, with a spare console sitting in my mix rack, I know that if the main console dies I’ll need to repatch the stage boxes and remote control connection, and then load in my show file (that I kept on a USB stick separate from the main console, SEE HOW THIS WORKS)? I know that, if a moving-head gets fouled in a power cable, I can remove it from show playback along with its mate on the other side of the stage. Then, I can continue on with a slightly reduced, but still symmetrical lighting design until we get a chance for a fix. (This happened to me a few months ago.) It’s good to have a sense of what’s non-essential in the show, and how those non-essentials can fill in for a failed essential. That drum overhead line might just be your salvation if the lead guitar channel fails utterly. Sure, the drums won’t sound as good, but you’ll still have the other drum mics and your lead guitar. Know which channels you can sacrifice to get through, even if it’s by the skin of your teeth.

An interesting element of all this is how margin and planning exist in a feedback loop. Your plan is also part of your margin, because having even a rudimentary idea of how to handle an emergency reduces your need to think up a novel solution in the midst of the chaos. Having the plan means, in a way, that you showed up to the emergency early. Heck, you showed up to the emergency before the emergency did! Really, it’s all about “The Law Of Conservation Of Effort,” which I wrote about years ago.

So, get what margin you can, and think of how to use it when necessary.

And never launch with your fingers crossed again.

Streaming

The future of our business may have less people in the seats.

Please Remember:

The opinions expressed are mine only. These opinions do not necessarily reflect anybody else’s opinions. I do not own, operate, manage, or represent any band, venue, or company that I talk about, unless explicitly noted.

Want to use this image for something else? Great! Click it for the link to a high-res or resolution-independent version.

It’s not my intention to make a dire prediction here. I don’t want to forecast the end of the live-music business – completely – as we’ve known it. Others of much higher pay-grades have rightly stated that humans are social creatures and will want to get together again. When the danger of the current pandemic drops off, there will be some major parties. I think that’s likely to be correct.

In parallel with that, though, I think the present crisis has created a new level of comfort with live streaming. Folks who wouldn’t have readily considered it before were thrown into the freezing-cold pool of necessity, and they’ve realized that it’s not that hard to make something happen. Musicians who already have an established streaming presence are refining their offerings. On the other side of the screen, audiences seem to be highly receptive to receiving their experience in private, at home. As such, I think a new reality has suddenly sprung forth from its chrysalis, one in which audio humans will have to contend with a couple of surrounding concepts:

  1. We are/ were gatekeepers of the live-music “flow” from artist to audience. That gatekeeping took a different form from other entities in the live-music world, but it was nevertheless present.
  2. Technology that directly connects an artist to an audience removes gatekeepers…or changes their role.

For us, my meaning of gatekeeping is that we’re primarily translators. This is a little different than what we’re used to; We may have come to believe that “gatekeeper” really meant “curator.” However, anyone or anything that regulates an interaction, in any way, between the artist and their fans is a gatekeeper. For many players, the finer points of getting a PA system to work for them (especially at scales larger than a corner coffee shop) are too much to be bothered with. In that situation, craftspersons like us are needed to create an interface between what the artist wants and how to make the equipment achieve that want. By creating that interface, we regulate an interaction between the music makers and the music listeners. Hence, we’re gatekeepers.

Livestreaming bypasses the need for our translation.

I’ve written before about how engineering for live-music is a different discipline from studio mixing. I’ve talked about how our world is a “closed loop,” for example. There are also the physical realities of big enclosures, involved routing, deployment needs, large input and output power requirements, etc. The skills that we’ve developed for dealing with those needs, and the equipment we’ve amassed for serving those needs are barriers to entry.

But the barriers to entry for studio mixing, and the associated gatekeepers for that world fell a long time ago, as far as many musicians are concerned. Further, livestreaming is essentially studio mixing done for a remote audience:

  • There’s no feedback loop to worry about at “FOH,” because the audience is effectively listening to playback (it’s just that the playback is very near in time to the original sonic event).
  • The listener supplies their own playback equipment, so there’s no need for the streamer to worry about loudspeakers, or loudspeaker processing, or deployment, or if it’s too loud here or there.
  • Because the listener also supplies their own room, and the loop is open, acoustical worries and stage bleed are much less of an issue.
  • A livestream mix can be setup and tweaked for hours before the broadcast starts, with the full ability to record a test mix, listen to it, fix it, and then continue iterating. The need for high-speed mixing skills can be almost totally obviated in some cases.

What does this all mean?

As I said, my desire is not for dire predictions. I don’t want to say that any particular outcome definitely will happen. I do think, though, that we need to be ready for our roles to shift.

Some of us will get to mix livestreams for people who still would rather that someone else handle the console. Being more fully ready to support livestreaming in parallel with in-person events is probably a smart move.

We also need to be ready, I think, for a further hollowing out of the middle of our industry. I think folks will still hold bigger ticket events as special treats, but it’s entirely possible that artists will lean much more heavily on the livestreaming direct connection for more shows. (Think about it – livestreaming removes the need for a lot of venues that folks play. All you need is a big enough room to hold the band, and even if you want a wider shot, you still don’t need as much space if there’s no audience in the room.) We may find ourselves transitioning to much more of a consulting role, where we get folks set to run their own shows and then help them if something misbehaves.

And if I were to open a venue, I would make very sure that support for excellent streaming was just as high a priority as the sound for the folks in the room.

For the world is changing: I feel it in the water, I feel it in the earth, and I smell it in the air.” – Treebeard, “The Return Of The King”

In The Darkness

You don’t have to fall ill to the coronavirus for it to kick you in the spleen.

Please Remember:

The opinions expressed are mine only. These opinions do not necessarily reflect anybody else’s opinions. I do not own, operate, manage, or represent any band, venue, or company that I talk about, unless explicitly noted.

Want to use this image for something else? Great! Click it for the link to a high-res or resolution-independent version.

A couple of weeks ago, I had gigs coming up I could count on.

The IAMA LCS had two more installments in the season, plus an “extracurricular” with the Utah State Instrument Championships. Samba Fogo had a spring concert.

Now we’re in a soft-quarantine, where gatherings of 10 or more are prohibited. It’s for a good reason: If we can slow down the spread of COVID-19, we can prevent the need for medical care to accelerate past the capacity to provide that care.

It’s entirely appropriate that we keep the outbreak under control.

It’s also entirely true that a chunk of my income has been wiped out.

And I’m lucky. I have another job that seems to be rolling along for the time being. I have lots of liquid, monetary reserves I can use. I have a family that can help take care of me.

But I’m still nervous. I’m nervous about what will happen down the line, because we don’t know how long this will last. At least one, big, summertime contract is potentially under threat because of the indefinite nature of these (necessarily) drastic measures.

I’m worried about my profession as a whole.

Sure, livestreaming is a tool available to us to keep live music going – but does it have the buoyancy to keep a whole segment of the music industry afloat? I don’t know. Plus, all the modern-economy perks that can keep other folks rolling are essentially unavailable to the live-sound engineer.

“Work remotely.” (We can’t. We almost always have to be in close proximity to the performers.)

“Sign up for unemployment.” (Do you know how many of us are 1099 contractors, inhabiting this bizarre pocket of interstices where the government thinks we’re employed as far as taxation…but ineligible for unemployment insurance?)

Beyond the short term, there’s some discussion of how a normal flow of business might never return. There’s a possibility that mini-quarantines will always be looming whenever we get a spike of disease. That we could be shut down, again, at any time, over and over again.

Plus, my industry relies quite a bit on people having disposable income. If the economy really goes in the toilet, we will absolutely go with it. Entertainment has a certain kind of recession resistance, but if we really fall off the cliff we will all fall off together.

I have a sense that this will all turn out better than my pessimism is telling me it will, but also that the world changed forever when we weren’t even looking.

All is vapor.

Funny how that works.

Money, Part 2

I’m more expensive because I’m experienced, and VERY GOOD at my job.

Please Remember:

The opinions expressed are mine only. These opinions do not necessarily reflect anybody else’s opinions. I do not own, operate, manage, or represent any band, venue, or company that I talk about, unless explicitly noted.

Want to use this image for something else? Great! Click it for the link to a high-res or resolution-independent version.

There are times when I quote a price for a job, and the person on the receiving end squirms a little. I’m hardly the most expensive audio human on the planet, but I’m not the cheapest either. My pricing can seem a little steep to some, and that brings up the question of “Why?”

What might be unexpected here is that I’m not going to talk about vehicles, gear, insurance, or any other expense. That’s not the major driver.

For me, it’s all about experience and results. It took a strikingly long time, but I’ve reached a point of very high confidence in what I’m able to accomplish. I express that confidence in the form of a question:

“Have you noticed that, when I’m around, everything I’m responsible for works properly – and if that suddenly becomes untrue, I have a fix at the ready?”

That’s what you’re paying for. I’ve studied my craft at a depth that few other audio craftspeople dive into. I’ve written the equivalent of at least two books on topics pertaining to live music. Unlike some other technicians, I’m not interested in the easiest solution. I’m interested in the solution that delivers the best possible show to both the musicians and the audience. Signal flows that boggle other operator’s minds are routine to me. (To be fair, though, there are some signal flows out there that are incomprehensible because they ARE truly bad implementations. I know the difference between those and the routing solutions that are complicated because they have to be.)

I don’t carry the most expensive equipment in the business, but I know how to get absolutely everything out of what I have on hand. It’s because I understand the physics involved in what I’m doing at the necessary level to know the limits of what I’m doing.

You can be quite sure that I know why I’m taking an action, as opposed to simply following a checklist I don’t truly comprehend.

My point is that I’m not a “$50 and a bar tab” engineer, because I’m not in this to muddle through making a few things louder for a couple of hours and then drive away. I’m here to understand, predict, execute, and have alternative contingencies for a show from top to bottom. That kind of experience and thought costs a few bucks, and clients that want that kind of attention are the people I want to work for.

Money, Part 1

Yes, I charge different clients differently.

Please Remember:

The opinions expressed are mine only. These opinions do not necessarily reflect anybody else’s opinions. I do not own, operate, manage, or represent any band, venue, or company that I talk about, unless explicitly noted.

Want to use this image for something else? Great! Click it for the link to a high-res or resolution-independent version.

There are some out there who argue that you have to charge all your clients the same rate. Their argument is that, eventually, someone will talk to someone else and “the secret will be out.” Once the cat escapes the bag, at least one client of yours will be thoroughly infuriated that they’re paying more than someone else.

I would say that there’s a major assumption driving this logic:

That your clients can afford to pay ever-increasing rates as your business expands, and if they can’t, they aren’t worth keeping. (And also that your clients can’t handle the truth, at least in a way.)

I don’t agree.

First, I’ve said before that my repeat clients are some of my highest-value clients overall. This is both in terms of tangible value (money), and intangible value (referrals). The vast majority of those repeat, long-term relationships were founded when my  rates were lower, and/ or where those clients had a certain budget that I was willing to work within. The ones that were worth sticking with self-selected; My low-quality clients tend to automatically evaporate quickly without me doing any weeding. Because the folks who have stuck with me are good to work with, I’m willing to offer a discount.

Second, I’m clear about there being price differences between old and new clients. When I quote to new clients, I explicitly say “My new-client rate is…” I try not to give the impression that everyone is paying the same thing. I think people can handle my frankness. I’ve never had anyone throw any flak my way over what I’ve said.

Third, some rates do go up. The best case is when someone is very impressed and gives me a raise without me insisting upon it. There are also positive conversations, though, where I’m able to say, “I’ve really expanded what I’m able to provide for you. Do you want to go to the next level? It would cost…” Sometimes they say yes, sometimes they aren’t really interested.

Fourth – and in some ways, a corollary to the third point – I scale what I provide. What I mean is, some clients who pay a bit less also need less. Just this year, I moved to a “single-hung” system versus a “double-hung” system for a particular client. The double-hung approach was mostly adding clutter and effort to a show that didn’t benefit from it any way. Effectively, I now get a better rate for those events, and the client is still just as happy.

Fifth, there are some clients that are just too much fun to work with to lose. There are folks out there who, if I insisted on them meeting a new and much higher rate, would be completely priced out. I’d then lose those high-quality clients who play great music and are a blast to be around. Why would I do that, especially when the long-term business case for keeping them as clients ALSO lines up with loving them as people? It’s a no-brainer. Of course I keep working with them.

I can respect that some folks can’t get on board with billing different clients different rates. If it doesn’t make sense to someone, I can’t arbitrarily insist that it be logical. At the same time, all kinds of different businesses and contractors offer discounts and specials for all kinds of different reasons. That’s what I do, and the folks that I work for seem to appreciate it.