Category Archives: Live Audio Tactics

Tips, tricks, and strategies for concert sound in small venues.

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.

Shelving Off The Shelf

I’m learning that shelving filters are very handy for system tuning.

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 used to shy away from shelving filters. I mean, why sledgehammer away at something when you can perform parametric surgery? It’s better, right?

As I’ve done more and more work with system tuning, though, I’ve started to become better at imagining the filters that will produce a desired response. It’s a bit like those characters in The Matrix that could “see the code.” You begin to recognize that, oh yeah, an octave-wide parametric at 1250 Hz could get that peak under control.

I’ve also become better at understanding how obsessive microsurgery is rarely a good place for an audio human to start. The broad-brush response is far more important as a launch point.

And I’m noticing more and more, especially with powered loudspeakers that are well-tuned at the factory, that a bit of opposed “tilt” in the lows and highs does A LOT. With two filters and a few seconds, a great deal of garble goes away – and a pleasant clarity also becomes noticeable. I’ve used the method at FOH and in monitor world, and it has made me smile in both places.

The neat thing about shelving EQ is that it can affect a very broad range of frequencies very evenly. Depending on the filter design, after about an octave’s worth of transition, every frequency in the filter’s passband gets the same treatment. It’s markedly different from a pass/ cut filter that effectively does more and more as you move into its area of operation. It’s also noticeably distinct from a peaking filter that falls off as you leave its center frequency. Shelving is a unique sort of tone shaping, and I’m glad that I’m finally starting to appreciate its particular flavor. It’s not a sledgehammer at all! It’s more of a very evenly distributed push.

It’s not that peaking filters are now useless to me, either. I still love them. They’re very handy for fixing spot problems, like a raspy peak in the highs. That’s the thing, though:  I get to reserve them for fine-grained tweaks, rather than pressing them into a kind of service that a different filter is better for. Why approximate a shelving EQ with a peaking filter? Why not just use the shelving filter?

If you have the inclination, and flexible shelving filters you can apply to an output, try this yourself: Run a quick measurement of a system, and then try to find the spot in the trace that the response seems to “hinge” around. The place where, if you applied opposed shelving EQs, the resulting response would be essentially aligned throughout the loudspeaker’s normally usable range. Statistically flat; Balanced peaks and valleys in both the low-end and high-end. (When you see the traces and hear the results, you’ll know what I mean.)

You might be surprised at just how quickly and easily you can get a system to sound much more well-behaved using this method. Obviously, it isn’t going to work everywhere and with every system, but I think it’s well worth looking into.

The New Critical Path

The loudspeakers are ready to go much sooner now.

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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People get set in their ways, and becoming set in those ways happens pretty quickly.

It didn’t take long in my time as an audio human to establish my “flow of setup.” For years, I took the approach of getting all the gear into the room, then setting up the console, then setting up the mics, and then setting up everything else.

But I’ve changed recently.

These days, my approach is to get the console and loudspeakers going first, and then working on the mics and DI boxes.

Why?

Because I had a realization.

I was hit with this epiphany that the critical path to live-audio viability – the shortest distance to a PA setup that you can do any kind of soundcheck with – is power, console, loudspeakers, and THEN everything else. Before this revelation I had several instances of discomfort where I had all the mics ready, but the band rolled up and had to wait while I got loudspeakers patched in. This never turned into a huge problem, but it wasn’t the best situation to be in.

Of course, the preference is to have the whole system ready to make noise, mics and all, before the band arrives. Sometimes you can’t do that, though, and in such a case you’re much better served by having the output side of the rig ready. This is because you can always set and rough-in one mic at a time if FOH and monitor world can produce sound, but not the other way around. If you have all the mics ready, but the loudspeakers are lagging, you’re stuck with no progress until the loudspeakers catch up. Do things the other way, and you can at least have some forward motion on soundcheck as soon as someone is ready to get settled in.

This matters a lot when the schedule is tight, or made tight by some kind of problem with the show. (Even an “extrinsic” problem like bad traffic.) When your soundcheck time is about to run out, you want to be able to make some noise with what you have, because at least then you’ll have a clue about everything else that will have to be done on the fly. Monitor world is very sensitive to this kind of thing; It’s better to have an incomplete set of inputs in a “very correct” state on deck than everything patched but not mixed at all. Every input that’s feeding monitors appropriately is one more thing that you don’t have to scramble around with later at high volume.

I don’t know if anyone has had an experience like mine, but let me tell you, rediscovering your setup sequence is a huge breath of fresh air. Especially when it makes things better.

Seriatum Only When Necessary

There’s very little need to spend minutes upon minutes checking each isolated channel in FOH.

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 think it makes a lot of sense to go through each channel in a show and take a detailed look at it during soundcheck.

For monitor world.

In monitor world, I feel that there’s a real call to examine each input in turn, getting a tone that the players prefer on deck and spreading things around as needed. Doing things one at a time is especially helpful when running in high-gain situations, where feedback problems have to be tamed. Step-by-step strategies make those situations much more manageable, because it’s easier to pinpoint what’s ringing.

At FOH, though, I feel that channel-per-channel microscopy is rarely warranted.

It’s not that hearing things in isolation isn’t helpful to determine if a channel is way off in the sonic weeds. That’s quite sensible. What I don’t see, though, is the need to agonize over every single input for minutes at a time, simply as a matter of course. What counts is context, and over the years I’ve come to recognize that the perfect [insert instrument here] sound in isolation is often NOT the perfect sound for the whole band in the room. When checking drumkits, I like to hear the drummer play like they’re going to play, as opposed to “KICK KICK KICK KICK…” for an extended period. I find it rather more productive to slide the kick up over a regular rhythm, hearing how it works when emphasized and then dropped back into position. Maybe I don’t need that much clickiness in the top end…or maybe I need more, but that’s the kind of call that’s easier to make when there are other drums to compare with. Even better – when there’s a whole band to compare with.

It’s the same for guitar/ bass/ keys/ vocals/ whatever. With the musicians running a tune, I can get a sense of what’s going to work in a holistic way. If I gun the channel and something isn’t quite right, I’m still going to hear it if it actually matters.

And, to reiterate, I can always stop and ask to isolate something If I can’t figure out what’s bugging me.

My gentle suggestion, then, is to try an approach where monitor world gets dialed up, and the band can play together. As they do so, take that time to get FOH tones and blends. You may be surprised at how much more fun it is, and how informative it is, when you’re listening to actual music.

Low-Inertia Mixing

Life is different when small changes are very audible.

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 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.

To Stay Calm, Know.

If you want to stay cool, you have to know exactly what you’re doing.

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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Tomorrow morning will begin the process of The Great Gig playing a show we’ve been preparing for over the course of months. It’s an epic-scale undertaking involving a grundle of moving parts. Many of those moving parts are human. Many others are electronic. There are lots of ways for things to go wrong.

On The Great Gig, I’m variously listed as a technical director, producer, and FOH engineer. However you look at it, it’s my job to prevent things from going wrong in the first place, and if that fails, to un-wrong the things that have gone wrong, all with a view to making sure everyone else can do their job. That’s plenty to do.

I’m not nervous about it.

The reason I’m not nervous about it is because I feel a deeply rooted sense of knowing exactly how the show is supposed to work, and knowing how we get it all to work. I understand our audio and lighting signal flow, and how to get around failures. I can easily conceive of ways that we can route around problems or “degrade gracefully” otherwise. I’ve already troubleshot some problems in rehearsal.

I plan to stay quite calm throughout the whole process. I don’t know if I will be perfectly calm, but “calm enough” will do fine.

Intimate familiarity with your show, your gear, and how they interact is what breeds the ability to shrug off problems. The flipside is if the production is like magic to you. In that case – where you don’t understand what’s going on and how to keep it going on – failures and setbacks are apt to cause panic.

In the world of aviation, I’m convinced that the pilots who do the best work and survive gnarly situations are the ones who know everything about their planes. What the engines will do under stress, exactly what happens before and during a stall, the weird quirks in the fuel system, and so on. When something unexpected occurs, it’s just a matter of saying, “Oh, right, we can tweak this thing over here and make it home safely.”

It’s similar in audio. Luckily, nobody’s life is at stake if the FOH mix has a problem. Even so, being well acquainted with how to recover from a failure goes a long way towards making an encounter with that failure less frightening.

Stay calm, stay alive. Panic and die. Stay calm by knowing what you’re doing. Not just the procedure, mind you – know WHY the procedure exists. You’ll have a good shot, then.

Parallelogram

A letter to engineers entering the world of live audio.

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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Dear New Engineer in Live Music,

I’m glad you’re here. Seeing new folks in this business is good for me. Your enthusiasm and hungry desire to “learn it all” get me excited again. Thank you. This is place is kinda nuts, but it’s the good kind. Sometimes. It depends.

I need to tell you a secret. It took me a long time to learn it and understand it, even though its effects were obvious immediately. Getting a handle on this bit of arcana has changed my life as an audio human, especially as it relates to shows in tough rooms, or with loud bands. Or both.

Here it is.

You may be tempted to think of your PA system as being “in series” with the sonic events being created on the stage. It certainly would seem to be hooked up that way. You put a mic in front of a guitar amp, or a drum, or your connect a direct line to a bass rig, and you get a signal “after” the noise is made. That’s how it looks, but that’s not how it sounds. You’re making changes to things – big changes – but the show in the room doesn’t seem to be obeying you. This is especially troubling if your background is exclusively in studio work, where after-the-fact playback is a massive part of the job.

The truth is that the audio rig you’re operating is not in series with everything else, but in parallel. Sure, there might be a slight delay, but the sound in the room isn’t decaying into the noise floor before the PA gets involved. It all happens together. You’re a contemporaneous and combined process with everything else, which means your contribution increases the whole…and other contributions reduce your control.

Unless you completely overwhelm them, of course. In many cases, that involves such sonic intensity that folks will really dislike you for trying.

When you grasp all this, you’ll be much more comfortable with why yanking down that frequency in the lead guitar channel didn’t seem to do anything. You’ll have a much greater appreciation for how the sound of the drums in the room determines the sound of the drums with the PA. You’ll experience less of an unnerving sensation when the vocals start out garbled. You’ll begin to have a natural sense of when you can’t fix things, and be more comfortable in your own skin as a result.

You’ll be a better engineer at FOH or in monitor world. (Monitor world is a very cool place, and you should spend a good amount of time there if you can.)

My very best regards to you. Look me up sometime, so I can catch the wave of your joie de vivre.

Sincerely,

Danny

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.

If You Have To Ask

You don’t have “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.

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

I recently provided the PA for a gig powered by a generator. After my experience over the summer, you might understand if I was a bit nervous. My anxiety being sparked, I made no bones about what I needed: A generator capable of 14kW minimum. (See, when you’re connected to a municipal power grid, there are usually megawatts of capacity to spare when a big peak gets drawn. With a generator, there’s no such situation. You can’t get a 10kW peak out of a 2kW gennie. Physics is a harsh mistress.)

Well, guess what the show organizer did? They rented a GORGEOUS, 25kW diesel with one-button start. It came with a full tank of fuel, and get this: It left with a full tank of fuel. I think the continuous load on the unit at any given time was about 1200 watts. That’s less than 5% of the generator’s rated capacity; Statistically, it’s right on the border of significant vs. insignificant. We sipped at the well of power, and yet were sated, because the well was deep.

And that’s what you want, especially when the cost to rent portable power really isn’t that high. You want the gennie to be out of sight, out of mind, just like municipal power.

If you have to think about the generator, you got the wrong generator.

If you have to wonder if you got enough generator for the gig, you got the wrong generator.

It’s similar with PA systems as a whole, although I think the functional realities are harsher. If you have to ask if you have enough PA, you don’t have enough PA…and I bet that most of us, on a regular basis, don’t have enough PA. That is, we don’t have a functionally unlimited reserve of output that we barely touch as the show goes on. We regularly run our rigs at very large fractions of their total capability.

I’ve seen column-style portable systems run up to their limiters.

I’ve seen affordable “point and shoots” run up to their limiters.

I’ve seen three-ways stacked on double 18s where the system was run up to its limiters.

I’ve seen reasonably-powered, multi-box-hang array systems over a huge pile of subwoofers where the system was run up to its limiters.

Lest you get the wrong idea, all of those cases involved reasonable operators who were simply asking the rigs to deliver what they felt they needed to keep up with the needs of the show.

The audio side of audio is pretty unforgiving. Even a very solid system can be outrun by a band that’s moderately determined to be “extra loud.” The system capacity necessary to avoid thinking about that ever again is incredibly expensive and shockingly voluminous in physical size. Everything is a logarithmic curve, and that means the point of diminishing returns starts at zero capability.

It’s a sobering thought, yet when we realize how many of us navigate those waters regularly, we don’t have to be crushed by it. If we have to ask, we don’t have enough PA. Most of us will have to “ask” a lot in our careers. The economic and logistical factors that real shows deal with in real rooms are just that way.

I think.