Category Archives: Gig Logs

The Case Of Insufficient Louderization

Noisy folk increase your need for PA output.

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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.

 
Pixie And The Partygrass BoysWant to use this image for something else? Great! Click it for the link to a high-res or resolution-independent version.

“How…how can this not be loud enough?”

That was my thought as Pixie And The Partygrass Boys launched into their set for the Shredfest afterparty. At soundcheck, I had been concerned that we were running too hot, and also that the overall mud and mush of the room were too much. I had dug a big hole in the midrange trying to fix it, and I had felt pretty successful with the whole endeavor.

That was working against me now.

(I also needed more trim height on the main PA, trim height that simply wasn’t available.)

What had changed, of course, was that we had a gaggle of merry-makers in the room who were there to demonstrate precisely how they were the incarnation of those who ski and party. (You can’t if you don’t, as some of you may well know.) We didn’t have enough of these humans to change the room’s reverb time in any way that I could perceive. What we did have was enough to absorb some of the PA’s output, especially with the loudspeakers having only their HF horns above head-height.

We also had more than enough to make a rather surprising amount of noise in the midrange band of the audible spectrum. You know, human voices and all that.

What I needed was volume. Sheer power. More gain was part of the answer, but I only had so much of that available. Gain before feedback in that room, with the PA deployment on hand, and my original EQ curve applied – well, that was anything but unlimited. What I had as a real option, then, when changing my overall tonal balance. I needed more energy in the “crowd roar” band, because that was the area being masked by all the…you know…crowd roar.

I made my overall EQ solution flatter, and I got on the gas. I got the show about as loud as I could reasonably get it, and it ended up being just about loud enough to get us through. I don’t get into a lot of shoving matches with audience noise, but apparently when I do it works out like this.

Caught In The Crossfire

Too much toe-in on the primary speakers can cause you problems later.

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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.

 

This summer, I encountered some deployment issues when using outfills to cover extra-wide spaces. They occurred when I was a little too aggressive with my “toe-in” of the main loudspeakers.

A bit of toe-in or crossfire on mains is often a handy thing. It helps to fill in the center, which can sometimes get a little lost if your mains are a good distance apart and fired parallel to each other. What can happen with outfills in play, though, is that a listener hears the outfill nearest to them AND the main on the opposite side at a similar intensity.

If you’re thinking that sounds like a recipe for major phase issues, you’d be very correct. The effects are not subtle. It’s clear that you’re listening to multiple arrivals when the sound is a transient (like a drum hit), and the combined sound “blows in the wind” dramatically. One show had a fair bit of air movement to contend with, so much so that we actually had some mishaps with speaker stands. When standing in places with interfering coverage, the wind kicking up would completely obliterate the high-end of the PA. Further, there was a general muddiness that couldn’t be fixed with EQ.

So, what’s the fix?

The best solution is to reduce the crossfiring of the main coverage. What you want is for the folks listening to the outfills to overwhelmingly hear those outfills in comparison to your main coverage. Getting the nominal coverage pattern of the mains away from the outfill zones helps with that greatly, while requiring no tricks with delay or gain. It’s not that delay can’t be helpful, it’s just that it works best at specific places, and less well otherwise. Physically-accomplished coverage provides a far more consistent experience across the audience.

How Matrices Saved The Summer Jam

A mix of mixes can sometimes be exactly what you need to get out of a bind.

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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.

The way I mix is often “distributed.” That is, I have at least an inner pair of loudspeakers and an outer pair. Generally, the inner pair gets vocals and the outer pair gets instruments.

Now, of course, what happens when you need outfills for an amphitheater (like at the Millcreek Summer Jam) is that you want a total of eight speakers: Inner main, outer main, inner fill, outer fill. What’s really a bummer is when you discover that one of those eight speakers has a failed HF driver.

So, after you pull down two boxes such that your outfills are a single loudspeaker each, what do you do? You could set up another bus, so that all channels go to the outfills AND one of the main pairs, but what if you want the outfills to reflect the results of processing you do on the primary buses – EQ, compression, and such?

The answer is a matrix. A matrix system lets you create a mix of mixes (i.e., a bus fed by the output of other buses). It’s very much like subgroups that feed a main bus, though with far more flexibility. All I had to do was combine my inner pair and outer pair buses into a matrix, and connect that matrix to the fill loudspeakers. As easy as you please, the show was back on track. Summer Jam saved!

Low-Inertia Mixing

Life is different when small changes are very audible.

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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 very proud to work with a Pink Floyd tribute called “The Great Gig.” We recently had a show at The Depot, one of the premier music venues in Salt Lake. Mixing in that room is very different from mixing in other rooms, and not just because it’s a rather large-ish place by my standards.

And also not just because they have a big PA with lots and LOTS of reserve power. Although that is a HOOT, let-me-tell-ya!

It’s because mixing there is what I call a “low-inertia” process.

In smaller spaces, you have the opposite. They’re high-inertia, because of the very large contribution of acoustic energy that’s essentially independent of the PA system. Any changes you make to the mix in the FOH PA are dampened: You get on the gas with a guitar to the tune of +3 dB, and unless you’re already much louder in the PA you don’t hear a huge difference. You yank the snare drum all the way out, and the snare doesn’t disappear because it’s already quite loud in the room. You might just get a bit of a tonal change, with the overall blend seeming to be quite similar.

In The Depot, though, a pretty tame room and reasonably absorptive stage mean that it’s possible to really, REALLY hear the PA over the stage wash without being insanely loud. That means low-inertia. You give a guitar a small push, and you hear that small push. Yank certain things down and they get much more lost than they would otherwise.

It’s a cool thing! Your faders, EQ, compression…all your processing tools are much more responsive. It’s also challenging, though, because the mix in the room is very strongly about your choices with fewer safety nets. There’s much less filling in the gaps. If you don’t get something tweaked quite right, it’s very audible. A little bit of buildup in the main mix that hasn’t addressed with the bus EQ? It can bite you in the face.

But, at the same time, you don’t have to sledgehammer with that main EQ. You can be much more subtle…and you can also do some tantalizingly wild things due to your relative independence from the stage. I imagine it’s rather similar to driving a car with a very light body and a very big engine. Small control inputs have large consequences.

It’s definitely enjoyable to mix in a low-inertia situation, but it takes a bit to get used to. You can also get yourself into trouble quickly. You have to be willing to own your choices, and be honest with yourself if you’re not pleased with the way thing are going.

Some Tuning Starts And Ends

A look at some system measurements and where they led me.

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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In the last few weeks, I’ve had the occasion to do a bit of measuring in a couple of rooms. One space was well known to me, and the other was brand new. In both cases, I found it pretty interesting to see the starting points…and where those starting points led me.

Room one is a venue I’ve spent lots of time with. It’s the location for The Intermountain Acoustic Music Association’s Local Concert Series. The black trace is the main PA (A pair of Yamaha DBR12s) with no EQ other than a high pass filter at about 50 Hz. The orange trace is where I ended up.

I’ve always felt that the space was “garbled,” with a tendency for me to go on deep digging expeditions in the lower mids with both channel and bus equalization. The black trace shows why. Relatively speaking, there’s a tremendous buildup of energy below 2 kHz, which leads to a sort of muddy roar. It’s especially rough when the monitors reflect off the back wall…yeowch!

I fixed the LF tilt with a couple of opposed shelving filters at about 2 kHz. A wide-ish peaking filter helped me tame a small hill at 1.5 kHz. I left the 75 Hz peak in place because some percussive work was being done with an acoustic guitar, and the small hill at around 5 kHz gave me a bit of bite that I liked.

(As a sidenote, I don’t really trust my wireless playback system to give me accuracy above 10 kHz, so I didn’t try to get linearity above that area.)

The tuning I put in place helped a lot. To be quite fair, neither act at this particular gig was a complex mix. Even so, I felt that I didn’t have to work as hard to get clear tonality during the show.

Room Two was the new place, a recently completed performance space in downtown Salt Lake where Samba Fogo was presenting a new work.

I think – thought I’m not sure – that the PA in this room is a QSC Wideline. The default system tuning in the room had an emphasis on the material at and below 1 kHz, but it’s not as sloped as the first example. I was surprised that it wasn’t a flatter trace at the get-go, but it was hardly a disaster.

Again, a couple of shelving filters going in opposite directions helped to even things out. I was more aggressive with the top end in this room for the system tuning shown, but during tech rehearsals and show runs I ended up backing off. I didn’t try to fill in the valleys at 400 Hz and 1 kHz, because I was pretty certain that I’d have an overabundance of material there in any case.

As I’ve opined before, tuning an array system at the guest-operator level is easily done by viewing the array as one large source. I wasn’t there to pick away at individual boxes or bandpasses, but to deal with the whole. As such, a couple of filters in the right places made my job much easier.

One Side, Please

Another take on a monoblock.

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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It’s tough to challenge our preconceptions, right? When deploying an audio system, you have a left and right, correct? That’s just how it’s done. You might have a center cluster as well, but really – you always deploy left and right.

Hey, let’s be honest. We like symmetry, and almost every performance is set up with the players in the center, so what do we do?

PA boxes left and right.

But sometimes you get to a gig, and you realize that a traditional L/R setup won’t do what you need…or is just pointless. That’s a great time to think about using the toys you brought in a different way. That’s exactly what happened for me at a recent Lazlos gig.

As we were loading in, we were informed that the layout of the dining tables would be different, and also that a certain homeowner was well and truly displeased about the music that had been lately pouring out of the restaurant’s lot. Standing there, looking at where our canopies were going to go, and thinking about what we were just told, I had a revelation.

There was no point, at all, in doing a traditional L/R deployment. The stage-left side of the PA would be doing nothing except either:

A) Missing the audience, if I kept the coverage away from the home in question, or

B) Hitting the same audience as stage right, but at a loss of coherence due to the delay (not that it doesn’t happen all the time – but still), and ALSO hitting the home that was having a problem with us.

In other words, going L/R stuck me with the choices of having “R” being a waste of power and coverage, or not being totally wasted but riddled with downsides.

At that point it seemed obvious to me that the solution was a “double-hung monoblock.” As I often do, the vocals would go through one output, and everything else would go through another. The only difference from a normal setup would be that we’d use two boxes total, instead of two pairs. Those two boxes would be set to cover the audience without line-of-sight to The House That Wished We Would Go Away.

Hence, a double-hung monoblock was what I did. It worked just fine, nobody noticed a lack of stereo (I mix The Lazlos in mono anyway, like the overwhelming majority of every show I do), and it didn’t work against us in regards to having someone call the police on the show. Sure, it didn’t LOOK like what people expected, but nobody cared – and all the coverage/ power in the equation was being used for the actual audience.

Localization Failure

If you thought it was all mush, it might be because you couldn’t localize the FOH PA.

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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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Last night, I was running a show in a very, VERY reflective environment. The whole thing was inarticulate mush, like what you would expect in a stadium/ hockey rink/ basketball arena, even though the place was probably fire-rated for only 200 people.

Listening to the splatter, I had an epiphany. I couldn’t figure out where the FOH PA was with my ears, even though I could see it with my eyes. The wash from the monitors and drums hitting the back wall was overwhelming the “timing information” from the mains. I mentally contrasted this with recent experiences mixing outside, where FOH could easily separate from the monitors due to lack of reflections. You could instantly point to a mid-high and say, “That’s where the singer is coming from.” Not so during my last gig. This crystallized a thought in my mind:

If you think a mix sounds bad, but can’t figure out why, the reason may be that you can’t separate FOH from everything else.

In the case of last-night’s mix, achieving separation would have meant very high volume. With all the blast and smear, though, it was already too loud. As such, I was using FOH to just barely fill in the subwoofer range and information above 1 kHz or so. Doing that wasn’t enough to create a sonic impression that the band was coming from FOH, though. It was a mere blend to make it seem that the reflections had a better magnitude response.

Overall, that was the appropriate choice. We weren’t there to be loud, achieving a great sound in an acoustically hostile space. We were there to play some tunes that people might want to dance to, without being overwhelming. As often happens “best overall show” won out over “best sound.” That’s part of the job…and so too, thankfully, is having a small revelation every so often.

Generational Poverty

A story about a lack of reliable power.

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 need the [REDACTED] generator here, now!” called the production director over the radio. It was dark on Utah’s mini-playa, and not simply because we were just that much more removed from substantial bits of civilization in Tooele county. It was dark because the main-stage generator had just died for the third or fourth time in quick succession, and even a person with only marginal experience in portable power would have recognized the sound of an engine that was running with difficulty.

In fairness, the generator had been just fine for some hours before. DJ and hip-hop sets had gone off without any perceptible trouble. Now, though, the time had come. It was irrelevant as to whether or not the failures could be directly attributed to running more dynamically now that bands were in the picture, or to the extra, big-ticket lighting fixtures now in play. All that mattered was a stopped show and a gennie that wouldn’t stay up.

(…and yes, it was a “real” generator. Real generators sit on trailers that are pulled by cars and trucks, and this unit was one of those.)

We had all the big, cool toys. We had completely solid power distribution boxes at both steps from the generator – the first step being the primary distro, and the second step being our audio distro that tied into the primary. We had Lab Gruppen amps driving a really substantial pile of JBL noise-louderizing cabinets.

We had it all, yet we were poor, because there was no electricity we could count on.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. I don’t worry about production very much anymore. The artistic part of a show of any scale is simply an act of doing your homework, then sourcing the right equipment and deploying it in accordance with what amounts to basic rules of physics. What I DO worry about are the “supports” which make that possible:

Where’s the power, and how much of it is there?

How are we going to get all the pieces and people to the location in question?

Where do we park?

Who can get us into all the things we need to get into?

Do we have enough execution time available?

If you don’t have electricity, you don’t have a show. If you don’t have reliable electricity, you don’t have a show. Supply electricity is the source of all PA activity. If that goes away, nothing else carries any importance whatsoever.

The arrival of the new generator was a wondrous thing. The unit was very clean; Pristine, when compared to the original. It started right up and hummed along without a care in the world. FOH would dig into a solid peak and the engine wouldn’t even throttle up noticeably. After about an hour, we didn’t have to expend any mental energy on worrying over the power situation.

Now, we were rich.

The desert doesn’t care about sound reinforcement. It was fine without it before you drove up, and it will be fine without it when you leave. Pro audio is a feature of civilization, and when you go out into the boonies the only civilization you get is what comes with you. If that piece of civilization is shaky, everything up the chain is shaky to the same degree.

We Blew Up A Monitor. Or Not.

Sleuthing may save you from unnecessary repair and replacement.

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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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It was night two out of three with Samba Fogo, an epic-level Brazilian music and dance extravaganza. I had walked down to the deck to run my nightly shutdown when Francisco mentioned a serious problem: We had wrecked a DBR12 monitor wedge. Soon after the monitor mix had included percussion, the box had started to make a horrible crackling noise. Francisco said it sounded like we’d killed the HF driver.

Dangit!

I wanted to hear the problem for myself, so I opened monitor world’s channels and started talking into a mic. Everything seemed fine at first, but then – ah! – there it was. Something was definitely wrong. I decided to sweep a tone through the box to figure out where the compression driver had de-spec’d.

And that’s when I started to get a tiny bit suspicious.

I tried tones from 1 kHz all the way up to 8k, and the playback from the DBR was as clean and clear as you please. If we’d blown up that tweeter (which should be hard to do anyway), why was it sounding like it was just fine?

I went back to the mic and noticed something curious. The problem seemed to correlate with my saying “two” during “Check, test, one, two.” That’s low-frequency information. I rolled the high-pass up on the channel…and the problem disappeared. Had the LF driver been ruined?

Dangit!

I wanted to do more diagnosis, but it was late, so out the door I went.

I arrived early the next day with my drill. I needed to get the grill off the Yamaha so I could test the woofer cone. My guess was that the coil was no longer centered in the gap, and sufficient excursion caused rubbing that was very audible. (This wasn’t totally reasonable, now that I think about it some more. If the coil really wasn’t centered, I should have heard nasty grinding all the time. Even so…)

The grill being removed, I applied pressure to the driver diaphragm, certain I was about to hear and feel a coil rubbing against a magnet.

Nothin’. It was smooth as a fighter jet made entirely of unsalted butter.

I got the tone-generator going again, and the problem came back with a vengeance. Maybe something had come loose on the input board? I plugged the signal cable into a different box – and the new box made exactly the same noise.

Ah-ha! It had to be something else, because the problem was now common across two completely different wedges. I walked around the upstage riser to get to my mix racks and snake heads, and that’s when it happened. The crackling tracked perfectly with my footsteps on the stage. I stomped a foot a few times. Exact correlation.

A loose connection was masquerading as a driver failure!

I poked and prodded at my main stagebox. No problem. I tweaked the drop snakes. No problem. I started jiggering the “last mile” connections to the monitors and –

Bang! There it was. one of my “not that great” 50-foot XLRs wasn’t quite mating with the stagebox correctly. So I swapped out the cable.

And our blown monitor wasn’t blown anymore. As near as I can tell, we finally got enough vibration happening on the stage such that the connection partially let go after being properly seated for a couple of days.

The moral of the story is, if something seems busted, try to track down the “why.” Work through as many different failure causes as you can think of. You may find out that some other, much less expensive thing is what’s causing your problem.

 

Show File Commentary For A Pink Floyd Tribute

The (not so secret) sauce behind audio production for Pigs Over The Depot.

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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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For weeks now, I’ve been meaning to open up the show files from Pigs Over The Depot (A Tribute To Pink Floyd) and go through some parts therein. I finally got off my rear and got busy! Here are some selected thoughts:

Routing

The show routing was really straightforward, with one small twist in monitor world:

The monitor console was gain-master for the show, because all analog input was handled by it. FOH was an X32 core connected by AES50, meaning that four of monitor world’s AES50A Output routing blocks needed to be sourced from the local inputs.

Some folks might look askance at such a setup, but it’s just fine for me. Jason, the monitor engineer, is a top-shelf operator. Plus, neither of us are preamp twiddlers. Jason figured out a good, healthy input level for his headamps, and left them alone after that.

FOH was connected to its own AES50 stagebox for physical tie lines to The Depot’s system. Driveback through monitor world’s auxiliary channels would have been possible, but easy, XLR connectivity was my priority for the evening.

Buses and VCAs and FX, Oh My!

FOH

On my side, I had two mix buses going on: Vocals and Drums. I wanted to be able to EQ and compress all the vocal and drum mics as separate groups, especially if there was a consistent “vocal garble” frequency giving me trouble. I also wanted to have a quick control for “more vocals NOW,” if the need arose.

As is my usual, I had a main L/R mix and a separate send for subwoofer material.

For FX, I  set myself up with three options: Hall Reverb, Long Delay, and Regular Delay.

The reverb was driven hard for “Great Gig In The Sky,” and Grant had a guitar part that needed to be fed through it. Other than that, I tried to be pretty sparing.

The long delay was specifically for the echoing “Stone!” in “Dogs,” with the left-side of the delay having a time of 1.5 seconds and the right side being set for one second. I used quite a bit of feedback in order to make the echoes last longer, but I still feel that I undershot a little on my settings there.

The regular delay was 0.5 seconds with only a touch of feedback, and I didn’t lean on it very much. Mostly, it ended up being a vocal texturizer on “Great Gig In The Sky.”

Due to a late-breaking addition of a second channel for the Juno synth which got pushed off into a spare line that would have been for drums, I couldn’t stereo link the Juno inputs. I should have just bused them together, but I went for a DCA instead. Clever – but I didn’t realize that the DCA was muted until we were a few songs into the first set. Whoops!

Monitor World

In monitor land, there was a true extravaganza of feeds for Jason to mix. The first six buses were monitor wedges deployed in pairs but fed with total independence. One wedge was dedicated to carrying a vocal mix only, while the other wedge was for all the instrumentation that the performer wanted. The idea was to increase clarity and separation by having the vocals emanate from a source that was physically separate from everything else. (In other words, yes, it was a Dave Rat double-hung system, but with monitor wedges.)

After that, four buses were used by the stereo in-ears that Rylee and Cason listened to. The two sax players were back on wedges, with one box dedicated to each. The final two monitor buses were used to drive a “Texas Headphones” drumfill, which sat on both sides of the kit but was mixed in mono: One bus drove the tops, and the other bus drove the subwoofers.

Reverb and delay were critical to the onstage performance, so Jason had independent processing at his disposal. The two FX sends, added to all the monitor sends, meant that the X32 was maxed out in terms of all 16 mix buses being consumed.

Jason didn’t really get into anything DCA wise, but he did make use of mute groups. One group was to mute all the inputs, the second group was to manage vocals, and the third was to kill the FX sends easily when they weren’t needed.

Lots Of Input

Of course, we didn’t just maximize the output side of things. Pigs is a 32 input show if you count everything, including a spare.

First, there’s a block of vocal mics. It starts with Lisa on stage right, and then has Grant, Rylee, and Mike included. Cason was also going to have a vocal, but in the end that was switched out to a bari sax option.

The next three channels were dedicated to electric guitars. Normally we have two, but Marty Thomas put in the clutch performance on “Dogs,” so we needed one more. After that, we had one line for acoustic guitar.

The next nine(!) inputs were for various keys and synths. Rick had a Moog, a B3 in stereo, a Korg, and a Roland to work with. Grant uses a Micro Korg and a SubPhatty in the course of the show. The left side of the Juno was next, followed by the Nord.

The bass line came after, followed by one mic for each saxophone.

Originally, I had seven inputs reserved for drums, but Mike surprised me by deleting one tom from his shell pack. This lead to the “split Juno” situation, where between the toms and the overheads we plugged in the right side of the Juno.

Channels 29 and 30 were for the playback FX (the preshow announcement that’s actually part of the show, the crashing plane, helicopter, clocks, etc). The final two inputs were for crowd mics that we connected purely for recording purposes. Some performers like to have some ambience blended into their IEM mixes, but Rylee and Grant didn’t opt in for that on this occasion.