Category Archives: Best Practices for Musicians

Advice for musicians on how to work well inside the small venue ecosystem.

Eggs, Baskets, And Such

If all your eggs are in one basket, and that basket seems to be going nowhere, it might be time to escape the basket.

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.

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I’m not exactly the biggest fan of the financial industry. The prevailing culture at the high levels of that business just rubs me the wrong way. However, this does not mean that applicable philosophies can’t come from them. To wit: Diversification.

Diversification of investment helps to shield you from market misfortunes. If you have all your money tied up in a traditional media company, and traditional media tanks, you’re going to be in real trouble. If you have some money in traditional media, some in tech, some in bonds (and so on), traditional media getting hammered won’t sink you outright.

It’s the same in terms of a music career. If absolutely everything is riding on a single, narrow specialization, you can face metric-tons worth of frustration and misfortune if that specialization isn’t “the in thing.” On the other hand, being able to fill multiple roles provides a bit of insurance. The more the roles differ from each other, the more insurance you have – and the currently fashionable skilset may just subsidize an unfashionable one.

Sometimes Problems Are You, And Sometimes They Aren’t

A barrier that some of us have to understanding this (I certainly have it, so I’m preaching to myself here), is the idea that things will always get better if we keep our heads down, do the work, and just wait things out.

You might want to ask how the horse-drawn carriage business is doing with that mentality.

Sure, there are still horse-drawn carriages, but they’re nothing more than a curiosity when compared to mechanized transport. It’s not a problem with cyclical fashions. It’s not a problem with horse-drawn carriage builders not having a great work ethic. It’s a problem with very few people needing or wanting a horse-drawn carriage anymore.

If our eggs are in some sort of metaphorical basket, a real bit of smarts is being able to determine when that basket just isn’t going to travel anymore. If the basket’s going nowhere, and it’s not in our power to make the basket go somewhere, we need to seek a different basket.

For example, I don’t think the “major, flagship, music-only recording facility” basket possesses any real momentum anymore. This is not to say that large studios for music production won’t continue to exist. They will, but they will continue to become more and more a luxury curiosity. With much of their capability having been computerized and miniaturized, the big studio with the large-frame console is far less necessary than before. This is why I personally don’t want to invest much in a large-studio-centric career. It’s not a good bet on average. The industry’s need for flagship music studios has dropped dramatically, and no amount of hustle, advertising, or longer work hours will change that.

This kind of thing also happens with bands and musicians. There are players out there who are locked into niche specializations:

“All I play is black metal.”

“We never do covers.”

“No solo projects allowed.”

“If we can’t be as loud as we want, we won’t play.”

These are just archetypes, of course, but you get the idea. I think you might also be able to see the potential problems.

If people in the area don’t want to go to black metal shows, it doesn’t matter how much you practice or how much marketing you do.

If there’s a great gig that would make your band real money, but requires covers, you’re outta luck.

If band members can’t pursue their own projects, and the band just isn’t “sparking,” they’re being denied other opportunities to have real careers in the business.

If the band is only really appropriate for enormous venues and giant festivals, you’re missing out on all kinds of other places to play – and this is a big deal if you’re not yet super-famous.

In contrast, the folks who are able to do lots of different things, at lots of different times, and in lots of different places are much less limited. I’m not suggesting that everybody has to be good at everything, but I am suggesting that it’s good to find a variety of things that your natural talents connect to. Even though the actual disciplines can be surprisingly different (like live-audio and recording), a lot of the basic concepts and terminology can transfer. Diversification isn’t trivial, but I don’t think it always has to be a monumental struggle, either.

We’re all limited, but imposing additional, artificial limits on ourselves can make us overly reliant on the world being in tune with exactly how we are. If we can diversify, we probably should.


The Best Upgrades

If you’re going to upgrade something, try to upgrade at the ends of your signal chain.

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.

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This business is so “magical gear” oriented that it hurts people. I don’t know how many bankruptcies, strained relationships, failed businesses, and heartburn prescriptions have resulted from gear acquisition, but my bet is that the number is somewhere between “a lot” and “a gazillion.” Audio humans spend a ton of money, and what’s worse, there’s a tendency to spend it on the wrong things. The search for better sound is a journey that’s often undertaken through a path that leads into the deep underbrush of mythology, and that’s a recipe for getting lost.

One perennial (and expensive) mistake is pursuing upgrades to the wrong parts of the signal path. Folks get incredibly wound up about the sound quality of things like consoles, poweramps, preamps, and even cables. They thrash around, trying to figure out why things don’t sound “just so,” and run huge bills as they do. In the process, they miss opportunities to upgrade the bits that would really matter.

If we’re talking about the part of the signal chain that involves electricity, the bits that matter are at the ends.

Transduction Is Hard

Let’s start with what I’m not saying: I’m not saying that the middle of the signal chain is trivial. It isn’t. A lot of work has been done to get us to where we are now in terms of distortion and SNR. Very smart people have worked for decades to design and miniaturize the components and subassemblies that make pro-audio go. What I am saying, though, is that signal routing, combining, and gain adjustment ARE trivial when compared to signal transduction.

For instance, let’s take the INA217, an instrumentation amplifier that can be used to build microphone preamps. At around 68 dB of gain, (the base 10 logarithm of 2500, multiplied by 20), the unit maintains a bandwidth beyond the audible range. Nifty, eh?

You can buy one for less than $7. Buy in quantity, and the per-unit cost is less than half that.

Or, take a mix bus from a console. The heart of a mix bus is either electrical or mathematical summing. Addition, I mean. The basic process is incredibly simple, and though the circuits do have some important particulars, they are not difficult for an electrical engineer to design. (And, that’s assuming that they actually get designed anymore. I strongly suspect that most folks are grabbing an existing design from a library and extending it to meet a certain specification.) Insofar as I can determine, there is no secret sauce to a summing bus. There are better components that you can specify, and due diligence is required to prevent external noise from corrupting the signals you actually want to use, but there’s no “magical addition process” that some folks have and some don’t.

“Doing stuff” to electricity that’s already electricity is pretty darn simple.

Life gets far more complicated when you’re trying to change sound into electricity or back again. The vagaries of directional microphone tuning, for instance, are strange enough that they don’t even make it into patent applications. They’re kept locked away as trade secrets. Microphone diaphragms aren’t really something you can build with ingredients found in your kitchen (good luck with working on materials that are only microns thick). Just about any decision you make will probably affect the whole-device transfer function in a way that’s easy to hear. On the output side, the tradeoffs associated with making a loudspeaker driver are both numerous and enormous. Everything matters, from the diaphragm material on up. The problem compounds when you start putting those drivers in boxes and attaching them to horns. Big drivers move lots of air, but don’t start or stop as fast as small units. The box might be resonating in a strange way. Just how bad do things get when the loudspeaker is run below the box tuning? Again, a small design change is likely to have audible results.

Manufacturers continue to iterate on transducer designs in ways that appear “fundamental” to the layman, whereas iteration on other products is more about incremental improvements and feature additions.

What this all amounts to is that a transduction improvement is far more likely to be of obvious and significant benefit than an upgrade in the “pure electricity” path.

Beyond The Chain

Upgrading the ends of the signal chain is a concept that works even beyond the electro-acoustical sense.

Let’s say I have the greatest microphone ever made. The entire thing is built from pure “unobtainium.” It is perfectly linear from 1 Hz to 30 kHz, and has infinitely fast transient response. It’s not even physically possible for this microphone to exist, it’s so good. I put that microphone in front of a singer with an annoying overtone in their voice. Does that singer sound good?

No. The microphone perfectly captures that ugly harmonic. If I had a choice, I would prefer an upgrade to the ultimate end of the signal chain: The signal source. I’ll take an amazing singer into an okay mic at any time, but a great mic in front of a bad singer doesn’t help very much.

Let’s also say that I have the greatest loudspeaker ever constructed. Its transfer function is perfectly flat, with flawless phase response. This mythical device is then placed in an aircraft hangar built of metal. The acoustical environment’s insane reflections and smeared transients result in a sound that’s almost completely unintelligible, and even a bit painful.

A “basically okay” loudspeaker in a great room would be much better.

If you’re going to undertake some sort of sonic improvement, you want to do all you can to upgrade things that are as close to the endpoints as possible. If you’re not getting the sound you want, look at source quality, room acoustics, mic capability, and loudspeaker fidelity first.


Compact Can Be Accommodated

When the PA is big and heavy, other things can be small and light.

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.

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Related: A mouse can fit in a mouse-sized room, a dog-sized room, and an elephant sized room. An elephant can only fit in an elephant-sized room.

Meditate upon this carefully.

There’s also this bit about elephants and garden hoses.


Why Audio Humans Get So Bent Out Of Shape When A Mic Is Cupped

We hate it because it sounds bad, causes feedback, and makes our job harder.

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.

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I recently posted something on my personal Facebook feed. That something was this:

[myface]

A number of people found it funny.

When you really get down to it, though. It’s an “in joke.” The folks who get it have lived through a cupped-mic situation or two, and probably know why it’s a bad idea. For other folks, especially those who have been surprised by being chewed on by an irate sound-craftsperson, the whole thing might not make sense. Why would an audio human get so irritated about how a performer holds a mic? Why is it such a big deal? Why are jokes about mics being cupped such a perennial feature of live-sound forums?

The short answer is that cupped mics sound awful and tend to be feedback monsters. The long answer has to do with why.

The Physics Of How Looking Cool Sounds Bad

Microphones are curious creatures. It might sound counter-intuitive, but creating an omnidirectional mic (a mic that has essentially equal sensitivity at all angles around the element) is actually quite simple. Seal the element in a container that’s closed at the back and sides, and…there you go. Your mic is omni.

Making a directional mic is rather more involved. Directional mics require that the element NOT be housed in a box that’s sealed at the back and sides. Sound actually has to be able to arrive at the rear of the diaphragm, and it has to arrive at such a time that the combination of front and rear pressures causes cancellation. Getting this all to work, and work in a way that sounds decent, is a bear of a problem. It’s such a bear of a problem that you can’t even count on a microphone patent to tell you how it’s done. The details are kept secret – at least, if you’re asking a company like Shure.

But, anyway, the point is that a directional mic is directional because sound can reach the rear of the element. Close off the porting which allows this to happen, and the mic suddenly becomes much more omnidirectional than it was just moments before. Wrapping a hand around the head of the mic is a very efficient way of preventing certain sounds from reaching the back of the capsule, and thus, it’s a very quick way to cause a number of problems.

Feedback

Fighting feedback meaningfully requires that mics be as directional as is practical. The more “screamin’ loud” the monitors and FOH have to get, the more important that directionality becomes. When setting up the show, an audio human inevitably finds a workable equilibrium ratio of gain to feedback. A highly directional mic has much lower gain in the non-sensitive directions than in the sensitive ones. This allows the sound tech to apply more gain in downstream stages (mic pres, monitor sends, FOH faders), as long as those devices result in output that the mic experiences in the “lower-gain detection arc.” At some point, a solution is arrived at – but that solution’s validity requires the gain of all devices to remain the same.

When a mic is cupped such that it becomes more omnidirectional, the established equilibrium is upset. The existing solution is invalidated, because the effective gain of the microphone itself suddenly increases. For instance, a microphone that had a gain of -10 dB at 2 kHz at 180 degrees (degrees from the mic’s front) might now have a gain of -3 dB at 2 kHz at 180 degrees. Although what I’m talking about is frequency specific, the overall result really is not fundamentally different from me reaching up to the mic-pre and adding 7 dB of gain.

Especially for a high-gain show, where the established equilibrium is already hovering close to disaster, cupping the mic will probably push us off the cliff.

Awful Tone

Intentionally omnidirectional mics can be made to sound very natural and uncolored. They don’t rely on resonance tricks to work, so very smooth and extended response is entirely achievable with due care.

Problems arise, however, when a mic becomes unintentionally omnidirectional. Directional mics are carefully tuned – intentionally “colored” – so that the resulting output is pleasant and useful for certain applications. The coloration can even be engineered so that the response is quite flat…as long as the mic element receives sound from the rear in the intended way. Much like the feedback problem I described earlier, the whole thing is a carefully crafted solution that requires the system parameters to remain in their predicted state.

A cupped microphone has its intended tuning disrupted. The mic system’s own resonant solution (which is now invalid), coupled with the resonant chamber formed by the hand around the mic, results in output which is band-limited and “peaky.” Low-frequency information tends to get lost, and the midrange can develop severe “honk” or “quack,” depending on how things shake out. At the high volumes associated with live shows, these narrow peaks of frequencies can range from merely annoying to downright painful. Vocal intelligibility can be wrecked like a ship that’s been dashed on the rocky shores of Maine.

An added bit of irony is that plenty of folks who cup microphones want a rich, powerful vocal sound…and what they end up with is something that resembles the tone of a dollar store clock-radio.

Reduced Output In Severe Cases

The worst-case scenario is when a mic is held so that the ports are obstructed, and the frontside path is ALSO obstructed. This occurs when the person using the mic wraps their whole hand around the grill, and then puts their thumb in the way of their mouth. Along with everything described above, the intervening thumb absorbs enough high-frequency content to make the mic noticeably quieter at frequencies helpful for intelligibility.

So the mic sounds bad, the singer can’t hear it, the whole mess is ready to feedback, the singer wants more monitor, and FOH needs more level.

Lovely.

I think you can see why sound techs get so riled by mic-cuppers. Holding a mic that way is fine if the whole performance is a pantomime. In other situations, though, it’s just bad.


Bore Me. Please.

July’s guest post for Schwilly Family Musicians.

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.

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From the article:

“Of course, your show should be exciting. It should be bursting with color, light, and sonic textures. The attention of everyone in attendance should be held rapt with every word, such that any notion of NOT being enthralled by your performance borders on the distasteful.

However…

The technical execution of your show should not be exciting at all. It should contribute nothing to the adrenaline rush of the experience. For the humans tasked with the practical work of ensuring that your show does burst with tangy lights and savory audio, pulling it all off should be routine.

Workaday.

Maybe even dull.

Why?”

Read the rest, for free, at Schwilly Family Musicians.


Where’s Your Data?

I don’t think audio-humans are skeptical enough.

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.

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If I’m going to editorialize on this, I first need to be clear about one thing: I’m not against certain things being taken on faith. There are plenty of assumptions in my life that can’t be empirically tested. I don’t have a problem with that in any way. I subscribe quite strongly to that old saw:

You ARE entitled to your opinion. You ARE NOT entitled to your own set of “facts.”

But, of course, that means that I subscribe to both sides of it. As I’ve gotten farther and farther along in the show-production craft, especially the audio part, I’ve gotten more and more dismayed with how opinion is used in place of fact. I’ve found myself getting more and more “riled” with discussions where all kinds of assertions are used as conversational currency, unbacked by any visible, objective defense. People claim something, and I want to shout, “Where’s your data, dude? Back that up. Defend your answer!”

I would say that part of the problem lies in how we describe the job. We have (or at least had) the tendency to say, “It’s a mix of art and science.” Unfortunately, my impression is that this has come to be a sort of handwaving of the science part. “Oh…the nuts and bolts of how things work aren’t all that important. If you’re pleased with the results, then you’re okay.” While this is a fair statement on the grounds of having reached a workable endpoint through unorthodox or uneducated means, I worry about the disservice it does to the craft when it’s overapplied.

To be brutally frank, I wish the “mix of art and science” thing would go away. I would replace it with, “What we’re doing is science in the service of art.”

Everything that an audio human does or encounters is precipitated by physics – and not “exotic” physics, either. We’re talking about Newtonian interactions and well-understood electronics here, not quantum entanglement, subatomic particles, and speeds approaching that of light. The processes that cause sound stuff to happen are entirely understandable, wieldable, and measurable by ordinary humans – and this means that audio is not any sort of arcane magic. A show’s audio coming off well or poorly always has a logical explanation, even if that explanation is obscure at the time.

I Should Be Able To Measure It

Here’s where the rubber truly meets the road on all this.

There seems to be a very small number of audio humans who are willing to do any actual science. That is to say, investigating something in such a way as to get objective, quantitative data. This causes huge problems with troubleshooting, consulting, and system building. All manner of rabbit trails may be followed while trying to fix something, and all manner of moneys are spent in the process, but the problem stays un-fixed. Our enormous pool of myth, legend, and hearsay seems to be great for swatting at symptoms, but it’s not so hot for tracking down the root cause of what’s ailing us.

Part of our problem – I include myself because I AM susceptible – is that listening is easy and measuring is hard. Or, rather, scientific measuring is hard.

Listening tests of all kinds are ubiquitous in this business. They’re easy to do, because they aren’t demanding in terms of setup or parameter control. You try to get your levels matched, setup some fast signal switching, maybe (if you’re very lucky) make it all double-blind so that nobody knows what switch setting corresponds to a particular signal, and go for it.

Direct observation via the senses has been used in science for a long time. It’s not that it’s completely invalid. It’s just that it has problems. The biggest problem is that our senses are interpreted through our brains, an organ which develops strong biases and filters information so that we don’t die. The next problem is that the experimental parameter control actually tends to be quite shoddy. In the worst cases, you get people claiming that, say, console A has a better sound than console B. But…they heard console A in one place, with one band, and console B in a totally different place with a totally different band. There’s no meaningful comparison, because the devices under test AND the test signals were different.

As a result, listening tests produce all kinds of impressions that aren’t actually helpful. Heck, we don’t even know what “sounds better” means. For this person over here, it means lots of high-frequency information. For some other person, it means a slight bass boost. This guy wants a touch of distortion that emphasizes the even-numbered harmonics. That gal wants a device that resembles a “straight wire” as much as possible. Nobody can even agree on what they like! You can’t actually get a rigorous comparison out of that sort of thing.

The flipside is, if we can actually hear it, we should be able to measure it. If a given input signal actually sounds different when listened to through different signal paths, then those signal paths MUST have different transfer functions. A measurement transducer that meets or exceeds the bandwidth and transient response of a human ear should be able to detect that output signal reliably. (A measurement mic that, at the very least, significantly exceeds the bandwidth of human hearing is only about $700.)

As I said, measuring – real measuring – is hard. If the analysis rig is setup incorrectly, we get unusable results, and it’s frighteningly easy to screw up an experimental procedure. Also, we have to be very, very defined about what we’re trying to measure. We have to start with an input signal that is EXACTLY the same for all measurements. None of this “we’ll set up the drums in this room, play them, then tear them down and set them up in this other room,” can be tolerated as valid. Then, we have to make every other parameter agree for each device being tested. No fair running one preamp closer to clipping than the other! (For example.)

Question Everything

So…what to do now?

If I had to propose an initial solution to the problems I see (which may not be seen by others, because this is my own opinion – oh, the IRONY), I would NOT say that the solution is for everyone to graph everything. I don’t see that as being necessary. What I DO see as being necessary is for more production craftspersons to embrace their inner skeptic. The lesser amount of coherent explanation that’s attached to an assertion, the more we should doubt that assertion. We can even develop a “hierarchy of dubiousness.”

If something can be backed up with an actual experiment that produces quantitative data, that something is probably true until disproved by someone else running the same experiment. Failure to disclose the experimental procedure makes the measurement suspect however – how exactly did they arrive at the conclusion that the loudspeaker will tolerate 1 kW of continuous input? No details? Hmmm…

If a statement is made and backed up with an accepted scientific model, the statement is probably true…but should be examined to make sure the model was applied correctly. There are lots of people who know audio words, but not what those words really mean. Also, the model might change, though that’s unlikely in basic physics.

Experience and anecdotes (“I heard this thing, and I liked it better”) are individually valid, but only in the very limited context of the person relating them. A large set of similar experiences across a diverse range of people expands the validity of the declaration, however.

You get the idea.

The point is that a growing lack of desire to just accept any old statement about audio will, hopefully, start to weed out some of the mythological monsters that periodically stomp through the production-tech village. If the myths can’t propagate, they stand a chance of dying off. Maybe. A guy can hope.

So, question your peers. Question yourself. Especially if there’s a problem, and the proposed fix involves a significant amount of money, question the fix.

A group of us were once troubleshooting an issue. A producer wasn’t liking the sound quality he was getting from his mic. The discussion quickly turned to preamps, and whether he should save up to buy a whole new audio interface for his computer. It finally dawned on me that we hadn’t bothered to ask anything about how he was using the mic, and when I did ask, he stated that he was standing several feet from the unit. If that’s not a recipe for sound that can be described as “thin,” I don’t know what is. His problem had everything to do with the acoustic physics of using a microphone, and nothing substantial AT ALL to do with the preamp he was using.

A little bit of critical thinking can save you a good pile of cash, it would seem.

(By the way, I am biased like MAD against the the crowd that craves expensive mic pres, so be aware of that when I’m making assertions. Just to be fair. Question everything. Question EVERYTHING. Ask where the data is. Verify.)


Ask Me Something For Thursday

I’ll be doing a live show with AMR.FM on July 9th.

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.

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Just a reminder: On July 9th, I’ll be live on AMR.FM. If you’ve got a question about live production that you want answered, now’s the time to ask!

If you’ve subscribed to this site’s feed via email, you can email a question (or multiple questions) to me. You can also get in contact with me via Facebook or Twitter. Obviously, I can’t guarantee that any particular question will be answered, but I’ll do my best to get things in.

To listen to the show, you’ll have to go to AMR.FM and select “United States” & “Utah” in the appropriate dropdowns. The plan is to be on at 7:00 PM, Mountain Daylight Time.


Regarding Arrangements and Audio Humans – A Letter

A guest-post for Schwilly Family Musicians.

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.

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Yes, that’s me in the picture up there.

Anyway…

‘It has come to my attention that some of you have, often by accident, placed more responsibility in my hands than might be prudent. This may have come from many things: A misunderstanding of how our roles intersect, an overestimation of what physics will allow me to get away with, misplaced hero-worship, or other such thoughts.

What I am referring to specifically is the idea that your song arrangements are best managed by way of a sound person wielding a tremendous chain of signal transduction and processing equipment. You’ve seen and heard concert setups that have impressed you, and you’ve thought, “This gear, in the hands of a competent tech, will make us sound good.”

My dear Bands, I don’t wish to be combative or contradictory, but I cannot agree with you on that concept.’

Read the rest (for free!) at Schwilly Family Musicians.


Perishable Skills

Of all the things I’ve lost, I miss my mind the most.

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.

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Big Blue Ox was on the stage for soundcheck, and there was a bit of a problem. Because I get so much drum bleed through the vocal mics at my regular gig, I’ve given up on using overheads or hi-hat mics. The issue with this was that Big Blue Ox plays with some pretty gnarly timing swings, and they need the hat to help them count.

Up on stage I went with a “pencil” condenser, ready to unleash one of my favorite tricks. When space and time is limited, I use gaffers tape to mount a mic on the hat stand, with the mic pointing up at the bottom hat. With everything in place, I trotted back to the console. The input that I expected the mic to be on was dead, but I was seeing a bit of action on the next input over. “I must be off by one on my patch,” I thought.

I won’t go into everything else that followed. Suffice it to say that the mic was repositioned, cables were swapped, and a snake line was ultimately bypassed…

…and then, I finally realized my mistake.

Months earlier, I had deactivated the phantom power on the final bank of inputs to my mix rig. I don’t use ribbon mics, and I make it a point to use DI boxes for getting line-level inputs into the PA, so I’m used to the idea of just having phantom applied to everything. (It saves me from having to check if it’s needed for a particular line. I just plug in and go.) My shutting down the phantom on the final few inputs wasn’t a problem originally, because those inputs are usually a handful of dynamic mics for drums. Also, that removal of phantom was an anomaly.

An anomaly I no longer thought to check for, because – as I said – I always have phantom applied to everything. It makes my life easier about 99% of the time.

My “check for phantom” skill had perished, and the result was a comedy of errors. It did finally dawn on me that phantom might not be engaged, and we did eventually get hi-hat in the wedges. Personally, I think it was all pretty danged funny.

But it’s still important for me to recognize that the skill had withered on the vine.

Use It Or Lose It

I was first introduced to the phrase “perishable skill” through the series “Carrier.” (It’s that documentary about the USS Nimitz.) As the ship is underway back to the US, a situation occurs where the flight deck is pitching dramatically. This is used as an opportunity to provide some continuing-education to the naval aviators aboard the boat. The captain states something to the effect of “Landing on an aircraft carrier is a perishable skill.”

As it turns out, there’s plenty involved with show production that’s also a perishable skill.

The competencies that tend to drift to the wayside are the little things. The routine practices that escape conscious thought. Especially prone to quiet death are the bits that get “automated.” Automation can take the form of tasks that are actively executed for you, but it can also show up when a process becomes passively implemented. For instance, my choice to just leave phantom applied to every line entering the console. Pressing the phantom switches isn’t something that I’ve created a robot to do, or a process that requires some sort of scripted action. Once pressed, the buttons stay that way. I just assume that the phantom is on. It’s a passive implementation.

I’m the same way about the patching of physical lines to the console. Barring an equipment failure, input 1 on the snake is input 1 at the console, all the way down the line to however many inputs are in play. I never think to check for physical crosspatching, because I prefer to avoid it. This once bit me VERY hard at a show I did in Ogden on an unfamiliar audio rig…

Anyway.

The point is that a skill unused, especially one that’s “small” or routine, will tend to atrophy. I’m not here to rant and rave about having a refresher for every little thing, because I’m not going to do that – and you probably won’t either. Instead, I think it’s just wise to understand that our production routines tend to create blind spots. Complacency, and all that. Getting into a groove is a great thing, but whatever is outside that groove can easily escape from us. If we keep in mind that skills are perishable, and that our choices of what to push away from conscious management determine what perishes, we can be ready when the unexpected occurs. We can ask ourselves what might have gone wrong that’s not part of our usual workflow, and troubleshoot accordingly.


You Waited Until NOW To Complain?

A guest post for Schwilly Family Musicians.

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.

takeanumberweb

Excerpt:

“A band goes up on deck and plays their set. They seem to be having a fine time on stage. After they’re finished, someone from the group approaches me.

‘Dude, I couldn’t hear myself/ the singer/ anything up there.’

…and I’m standing there, thinking, ‘Why are you telling me this now? It doesn’t help you or me to tell me this now. Why did you suffer through your entire set, with me standing here behind this mixing console the whole time, and say nothing?'”

Read the rest here.