My dog LOVES it when we play with the hose. She gets soaked which is the BEST, and she gets a drink, which is the BEST, and she gets to pounce and jump, which are also the BEST.

I like it when we play with the hose, because it gets me thinking about audio nerdiferousness. (“Nerdiferousness” is definitely a word, because I just made it up.)

Making the hose fun requires a nozzle, and this is similar to loudspeakers for live music. Making live-audio speakers fun also requires a nozzle (a horn) for the high frequencies, at least for the conventional enclosures that most of us use. As usual, it all comes down to an impedance problem.

The hose isn’t very much fun with the nozzle removed, because the pressure delivered to the dog is too low. There’s no lack of motive force to get the water out of the hose, and indeed, running without the nozzle gets a greater volume of water to transfer out of the hose and into the environment on a second-per-second basis. The thing ruining all the joy is that the hose output impedance is quite high, and the input impedance of the world outside the hose is very low. That is, the tubing has a pretty small cross-section in the grand scheme of things, and that cross-section very suddenly turns into an effectively infinite cross-section when the hose ends and the rest of the world begins. Without a tremendous amount of pressure behind the water – far more than the municipal supply can provide – the water merely tumbles out the end and doesn’t travel very far.

It’s entirely similar to an electrical pathway. Motive force (voltage) or pressure drops as flow travels across paths offering resistance, with the motive force dropping to zero at the end of the circuit. If a high-resistance pathway is followed by a low-resistance pathway, more of the voltage is lost across the high-resistance component. The bigger the difference, the larger the drop. So, if a high-impedance hose directly couples to the very, very, VERY low impedance of the world around it, the pressure drop between those two environments is basically all the pressure available.

The point of the nozzle, then, is to increase the apparent impedance between the hose-end and the world. It does this by restricting the output flow. The force behind the water doesn’t change, but the apparent pressure is greatly increased due to that force being applied over a very small area. So, if we’re willing to accept coverage area, we can get a high-pressure jet that the dog finds highly amusing.

It’s very similar with horns and loudspeakers. A loudspeaker driver, particularly a high-frequency driver, can make plenty of pressure. HF driver’s are also high-impedance devices from an acoustical standpoint. They’re much “stiffer” than air. The bugaboo, then, is that the world beyond that HF driver is very low impedance. The available energy flat out transfers poorly when there’s a sudden transition between the driver and the environment. Just like the hose, if we’re willing to accept a smaller coverage area, we can create a better energy transfer situation. The horn changes from a restricted space to a less restricted space over a certain amount of travel, which means that the environment the driver directly couples to is much higher in impedance than an immediate change from itself to free-air. It’s a much more efficient use of the available energy. The gradual transition results in rather more pressure transfer from the horn to the outside world in the first place.

It was just a few months ago that I was on a Zoom call that featured a gaggle of audio industry notables. Big-league folks. People that you may actually have heard of. The call was in regards to a new service available in the industry, and how it might work in the future. (I’m being vague because I don’t know the status of the service in terms of public availability.) At one point, I piped up about a feature that wanted; it would have made the service very valuable to me.

“I don’t think that should be offered. That’s just not what the service is for,” said one of the other participants.

Let me tell you, there is no feeling exactly like being shut down in the full view and hearing of leaders in your business. Encouraging ain’t what it is.

If it would have been at an earlier point in my career, I might have felt a bit crushed. That’s not how I felt, though. Stung? A bit. Disappointed? Yes. Embarrassed? Certainly. Not devastated, though – because over the years I’ve come to realize some truths about myself and the industry.

First: Even among oddballs, I’m an oddball. My approach to the production of live music, and the business of live music, is different from a lot of the other audio humans out there. Look at this website: I’m not interested in one more review of one more piece of gear that’s only incrementally different from everything else. I’m not interested in a “bag of tricks” mentality. I’m interested in strong basics, making the physics work for you when you can, and then choosing to NOT fret over everything else. I’m interested in getting results through means that are unconventional. I’d rather have fun and be able to experiment than slavishly chase after the shows, gear, and deployments that are industry standard.

(Knowing the industry standard is appropriate and helpful, certainly. However, there comes a time when you see the limitations and would prefer to redefine the standard, rather than run after it.)

Second: Industries are not made “for” oddballs. When something becomes commoditized to any degree at all, there is a certain safety-in-the-known-middle that takes hold. The services and attitudes that grow up in the industry, then, inevitably serve that known middle. This is NOT some sort of failing! It’s simply what I would call the physics of the business. If you don’t fit neatly into that middle ground, a lesser concentration of products, services, conferences, camaraderie, and approval will be “for you.” This is the same everywhere in life, to be brutally honest.

And so, with these truths in hand, you can make decisions about what you want at both large and small scales. There’s nothing wrong with pursuing the “known middle” if you find it satisfying. If you DON’T find it satisfying, though, you have to develop a comfort in not being catered to or understood at all times. Not everyone is going to get the proverbial “it” of what makes you tick, and in order to function long-term you’ll have to accept that.

Failure is part of this business. I’ve said many times that mixing a live show is “screwing up and fixing it a million times, very quickly.”

Some failures are worse than others, though. I’d even categorize failures into acceptable and unacceptable groups. Acceptable failures have the geometry of what I described above: Something that you can fix very quickly, and is really not noticeable to most observers. A mix not being absolutely perfect at any given point is an easy example of that.

Unacceptable failures, on the other hand, may not be correctable swiftly, and/ or are very noticeable, and at the extreme end of the spectrum can put people in physical danger. (A serious-injury-producing safety compromise automatically earns an “unacceptable” rating, no matter what.) If safety issues are excluded, though, what’s the worst kind of unacceptable failure?

The one where your employer looks bad – not just you. When the folks writing the checks are embarrassed because of something you did or failed to do, when other people regard them poorly because of their association with your lack of execution.

Ick. That’s an awful feeling. It’s like burning to a crisp from the inside, except that actually turning into charcoal would put you out of your misery.

How do you avoid that eventuality? It’s just like everything else: Do your homework. Resist the temptation to cut corners. Insist on a schedule that’s actually achievable in real life. Have a backup plan. (Especially if anything you’re doing involves wireless anything. Mics. In-ears. Remote console control. ANYTHING.) Assiduously refrain from making a promise that you don’t have a clear pathway for executing on. (“Tell ‘em whatever to get the job, and we’ll just figure it out later” is not an appropriate strategy for anything at any time.)

And what happens when you inevitably encounter a situation where you can’t avoid that feeling? If you’re in this long enough, you’re going to live through a trainwreck of some severity.

I can only recommend that you try to own your mistakes. Don’t attempt to BS your way out of trouble. Apologize, explain what went wrong, and how you didn’t account for it. In the most extreme cases, a reputation for honesty and humility may be all you have left to salvage. If that’s what you’re left with, then hold onto it. You’ll need it later.

The previous is not easy. I’ve been doing this for decades, and I still can’t always fight against the urge to justify myself. We have a powerful need for that as people, and beyond that baseline I think audio humans often develop a special need to be validated. We all have this latent desire to be seen as “the best,” and pretty much everything (including ourselves) threatens that desire.

But, as I said: Try. Practice owning your small mistakes so that a big one isn’t a completely novel experience. It’s just like anything. Running simulations makes you less likely to panic during the real thing.

There’s a bit of a story here.

Almost twenty years ago, I was a recent graduate of The Conservatory Of Recording Arts And Sciences. I loved the place, had done very well academically, and was ready to “go out there.” Take over the world. It was at that place I had met a man that I’ll call “The Guitar Player,” or TGP for short. We spoke at length and became friendly.

TGP was a middle-aged musician who had reached a certain amount of success as a younger player. Now, he said, he was ready to get back in the game. He wanted to start a record company with its own recording facilities – and would I like to run the technical side of things?

I couldn’t have possibly said no to that.

Now, you have to remember that this was right at the turn of the century. The Internet hadn’t upended everything yet, and the recording arm of the music industry still supported “the big studio” in a way that is much more in the realm of memory now. In my mind, the business was at a kind of peak that is unlikely to be repeated. It seemed entirely plausible that a kid just barely into his 20s could get snapped up and put in such a position as was being offered. I was hooked.

What followed was a tremendous amount of initial excitement and the slow unraveling of a dream. I saw a lot of warning signs, but talked myself and everyone around me out of interpreting them correctly. Meetings that would truly move the project forward always fell through. Deals would always be finished “in a couple of weeks.” When I got to the point of asking tough questions, TGP would get agitated and I would back off.

In the end, I was always complimented. Honored, even. Introduced as the guy who would be in charge of the coolest studio in Phoenix. There was a dinner at TGP’s apartment where I was treated like family. I think my presence was necessary for TGP to keep selling his story. In a way, my guess is that he was desperate to put something together that would work, and justify all the hype he was building. It was a Ponzi scheme, but the currency was life itself. The magic would happen, it just needed more time. More time. A little more time.

I couldn’t bail out. No sir. The music industry was full of stories where somebody took off, and a month later all the folks who stayed had hit it big. There was always exactly enough hope for me to hold on, until someone from the school finally showed me how all the pieces couldn’t possibly hold together. I can’t exactly remember how I felt, although I think a mixture of crushing disappointment and vague relief were the cocktail on offer. I said that I had to attend to some family business in California, and I was sorry I couldn’t stay on. I packed up my one-room apartment and moved to my Grandma’s place near the coast.

TGP said that family was the most important thing, and that he’d get me paid for my work. The money didn’t come, but I didn’t expect it to.

In the course of the saga, I was asked to create designs for the grand facility that would get built “once the lawyers had signed all the papers.” I took a couple of days and poured out my vision of what could be. Recently, in the process of cleaning out a bunch of old documents, I ran across my drawings again. I still have a sense of pride in them. You’ll see a bunch of monitor speakers laid out for 5.1 surround mixing. (The music industry was still pushing for higher fidelity and more playback channels, not realizing that convenient portability would win every battle for the hearts and minds of listeners in just a few years.)

Control Room A

Control Room B

Preproduction/ Songwriting

Studio Proper

When I post this article to Patreon, I’ll get a bit of money from my supporters. That means I’ll finally get paid for these designs after almost 20 years.

I also recently learned that TGP passed away. I think he managed to get a band together and play shows after the parting of our ways. I don’t know if he ever recaptured that sense of glory and triumph he had when he was young. But maybe he did.

In whatever case, I hope he sailed into the West and that he’s drenched in joy, playing a soaring solos at the great gig in the sky. I can’t be angry with him. The circle is closed.

At this point in my career, I am far more willing to turn down work than I used to be. A foundational part of that is due to how fortunate and privileged I am: As a dual-career (software-engineering is my other job), I simply am not 100% reliant on show production to pay the bills. Not everyone is as lucky as I am, and I need to acknowledge that immediately.

The next chunk of the foundation is that I believe very strongly in high-quality clients being a HUGE factor in becoming (and staying) a high-quality craftsperson. The evaluation of the quality of a client is not necessarily a set of hard-and-fast rules, but there are several metrics that come together in making a decision that is – at the very least – well informed.

• Is the effective day-rate worth the trouble?

  I’m in the camp that says, “Any show basically requires a whole day.” If the pay isn’t enough to compensate for a day’s worth of effort, then either other metrics fill the gap or the gig is declined.

• Regardless of any promised amount, was it easy or hard to get paid?

  This one’s a bit tough, due to it often being a bit of “ex post facto” experience, but it’s a great determinant for sticking with something or moving on. You can sometimes be surprised here. I once landed a house gig in a well-appointed venue sitting in the very fancy town around these parts. (The place where they have that big film festival every year.) Things seemed okay for a bit, and then my payroll check bounced. I was a bit shocked…and I didn’t hang around long. In contrast, my not-fancy-but-filled-with-love neighborhood-venue job that I had before? They never, ever failed to pay me on time and in full, even when they were just barely hanging on by their fingernails. I did five years there, and I miss that place.

• Is this going to be a repeat client that I can build a real relationship with?

  You can’t always know if a one-off will turn into something else, but you can take a guess. Established acts and arts organizations are better bets than random callers. The best “initial contacts” are the ones that say, “we want to hire you for a series of shows.” Gigs where they just need you to fill in can sometimes turn out well, but tend to be pretty weak in regard to this measure.

• If the gig involves an installed system, is the install decent?

  An in-house system need not be the latest and greatest, but it should be something that you’re interested in working with and fits your workflow. If the install doesn’t contribute to your success, or worse, is built in a way that impedes your ability to execute, that’s a big reason to walk away from a potential job.

• Are the people going to be great to work with?

  Great people make jobs of lesser swankiness anywhere from tolerable to desirable. One bad attitude makes the “room you’ve heard of with a band you’ve heard of” into a situation that I ignore calls for. The quality of the people involved with a gig is so critical that, in the cases of folks I’d rather not work with, they could offer me three times my day rate and I’d still have to think long and hard about taking the job.

• Am I able to bring a sense of quality to the table?

  The very best prospects are the ones where I can make improvements and take the show to a level where it hasn’t been before. If they just want someone to push the same buttons in the same ways as the last person, that’s far less worthwhile.

• Do they want to work with me, or just “generic A/V operator 975623?”

  This is very similar to the previous point. If you’re being brought into an opportunity where your specific talents are needed and desired, that’s an excellent possibility. If a client merely desires that you step in as an equivalent replacement, that’s not so enticing.

• Are the events going to be a blast?

  If you’re going to work with new technologies, do interesting work, learn a lot, and create art you can be proud of, that can be worth significant tradeoffs on the monetary side. On the other hand, a gig with decent pay that’s a grind will soon not seem to be a decent situation at all. If the day is going to be un-fun and not pay very well, there’s no reason to bother.

Please understand that none of this is meant to be “snooty.” I think it’s good to work some less-than-awesome gigs in order to get a sense of appreciation for the great shows. At the same time, the faster you learn that high-quality work is done for high-quality clients, the better.

When I compare January – September 2019 with January – September 2020, there’s a stark reality that emerges: My audio-human revenue is down 64%.

Yeowch.

But I’m still getting some shows and some work on that front, while big pieces of our industry are at a dead stop. It’s a bit surprising to me, but not without plausible explanation.

It has to do with my understanding of how the dinosaurs died out.

When the asteroid hit and the environment changed, being a huge creature with huge energy needs was no longer an asset. It was a liability. You might have been monstrously vigorous. You might have had oceanic reserves of nutrition.

But your size meant you burned through those reserves at a terrifying pace, and when the resources you relied on suddenly disappeared you were stuck. Stuck with being enormous and resource-hungry. Stuck with seeming so strong, yet being deceivingly fragile: Your environment was the source of your strength, not yourself, and when that environment ceased to serve, you quickly found your end.

I feel badly for the folks running a kind of shop that absolutely, positively requires large-attendance gigs in order to pay the bills. That sort of outfit has big resources, but also tends to have big outlays – outlays that often can’t be shut off easily. Big venues can’t simply offload a building and then get it back when it’s convenient, for example.

But, for those of us who are smaller and scrappier, who can find a market connected with house-shows and DIY, our troubles aren’t as existential. It’s not that there isn’t a famine in the land, it’s just that we can hold on with what’s available for a longer stretch of time. It’s not a guarantee that we’ll make it, but we may have better chances in a proportional sense.

I’m a lot less gloomy than I used to be. In some ways, I’m excited. An event that causes so much disruption to an industry can be a surprising source of opportunity for the folks who can look down the reshaped waterways of the business and go, “That looks interesting down there.”

I have real hopes of being one of the little creatures that emerges as the Earth warms again, blinking at the light of the sun.

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

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

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

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

Livestreaming bypasses the need for our translation.

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

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

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

What does this all mean?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m worried about my profession as a whole.

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