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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.

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

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.

Low Q Bulldozing

Wow, those filters are wide…

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 yesterday, I was back on an analog mixer. I had ended up stepping in at an event, just for fun, and a Mackie VLZ 1604 was the tool provided.

…and guess what? As I’ve talked about before, the console sounded just fine. I don’t know if a VLZ’s preamps sound “like breaking glass,” because I take care to run them in their linear range (where a preamp ought to be run in 99% of cases). A 58 – or close cousin – run through a flat channel and into a SRM-series monitor or EON 615 sounds exactly as you’d expect: Listenable, with a touch of mud and/ or midrange bark.

It’s also true that you have to be noticeably more fader-happy when you don’t have all your favorite dynamics toys available. More than once during the day I found myself wishing for the ability to squeeze a channel a bit. That’s just part of the deal.

What really got me was the design decision to use a hilariously wide Q for the sweepable mid. The filter was so un-selective that the attendant gain setting was almost usable as an extra fader. You could make a channel unintelligible, or suck out its entire ability to express itself in the absolutely critical midrange, but actual tonal fixes were basically impossible. It’s hard for me to understand how such a design made it out the door; Didn’t anybody listen to it and try to use it for something before shipping a whole pile of units?

I try not to overuse EQ, but I’m still very reliant on it. My philosophy is “use as much as you need, in as crazy a fashion as you need, and then stop.” The problem here was that I was locked into choices much crazier than I needed, so I had to stop before getting the end result I hoped for. It’s not like it was a huge tragedy, or that anybody (including myself) was really unhappy with how the day turned out, but I’m more convinced than ever that a good, basic, and flexible toolbox for audio management is crucial for next-level results. (Knowing how to use what’s in that toolbox is a whole other discussion…)

Anyway, there’s a post-weekend rant for everybody to enjoy. 😀

 

The Downscale Dream

A bigger production rig than what I have is probably just excess capacity.

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 worked a wedding where I had to briefly mute the FOH PA. There was a pop-jazz quartet on stage, doing some tasteful material, and I was getting a balance worked up between the stage wash and the house. Then, an event coordinator walked up:

“It’s a bit too loud. They want the guests to be able to hold conversations in this area.” (About 15 feet in front of the stage.)

Trying not to sound like I was grinding my teeth, I said, “Okay, let me tweak this a little.” I proceeded to find my main output, and ratcheted the limiter threshold down a little more. I was already squeezing the main mix pretty hard, in an attempt to be as quiet as possible.

“That’s still too much.”

I dropped the threshold a little more, and realized that the limiter had now almost removed all of FOH’s contribution to the goings-on. That being the case, I muted the mains and told the coordinator that they were only hearing stage-wash at that point.

“Well…I guess that’s okay.”

She wandered away, and I was left standing with my tablet, wondering why people book bands when what they really want is some !@#$%^& bluetooth speaker with a Spotify playlist running through it.

***

Variations of this experience have become common enough for me that I now have this piece of advice for people who want to own a PA: There’s no need to be self-conscious about having a relatively compact setup. A couple of basically decent tops and essentially workable subs is plenty of FOH in a vast number of situations, and may in fact be capable of rather more output than what’s really desired.

I’m increasingly convinced that bands are often booked almost purely for the mystique and visual splash of people making music in a room, and almost definitely not for the excitement of “big sound.” Very few people want “big sound.” They don’t care about that perfectly sculpted kick drum that whacks them in the chest, or that studio-quality vocal that utilizes everything on your channel strip (plus a modeled Pultec EQ in the FX rack) to have that magic “purr” and “sheen.” They especially don’t care if you have to outrun the band and monitor world to get there, which can make hearing their buddies talk into a difficult project.

What they want is for the band to be there, but essentially ignorable against a conversation until their favorite – or new favorite – tune comes on. Then they get up and dance, and then they want to ignore the band again.

(Side note: I’ve heard people say that a big pile of subwoofer material is what gets people engaged and dancing. Horsefeathers. I’ve mixed plenty of shows where we had no LF cabinets at all, and people were in love with the band. Emotions are what do the trick – songs, that is – not the ability to rearrange furniture with a test-tone generator and an attitude.)

I do also think that this is all less true in festival and concert situations, but not entirely untrue. I have this nagging notion that, with the exception of EDM fans, most folks simply don’t conceive of the aural rockshow aesthetic in the way that many audio craftspersons and musicians do. That is, if they don’t necessarily get “the big sound,” they’re okay with it. It’s not so central to the experience that it has to be there, or their ticket purchase was worthless.

Obviously, there are exceptions. I’m not saying there aren’t. Some events are indeed booked around having impressive, in-your-face audio production.

And, of course, there are shows produced around having “big sound” as an artistic choice, and that’s a whole other thing. The Pink Floyd tribute I’m involved in is meant to have the biggest production possible. In certain ways, it’s an excuse to do big production as an artistic end in itself. The show is specifically built NOT to function as background information, which means Pigs Over The Horizon is awful at being an “event band.”

…but amazing at being a concert where the music is its own centerpiece.

***

Like with other areas in modern life, I have a strong sense of the middle being hollowed out. It used to be that, at all points, the “next step” in production was to double your capabilities. Now, though, I don’t feel that doubling the performance of my equipment would get me much of anything. It’s probably more like a 4X multiplier, or even more.

For example, a traditional, next-step upgrade for me would be to move to an all JBL PRX system. It would cost about $15000 USD to make that move, just looking at the hardware and ignoring the ancillaries for deployment.

What would that get me, though? Aside from bragging rights, not much. What I have on hand will do a mini-festival (like what’s pictured above) just fine, in terms of coverage and SPL. Incrementally improved performance won’t appreciably increase either my quality of life or the quality of life of the audiences that come to the shows I do, and the extra capacity is wasted on all the other gigs where Gallivan Center coverage and volume is the opposite of what’s desired. Even for the bigger events I get called on to provide equipment at, nobody has ever hired me because I could hit an SPL target or bring “Brand X” to the location. No – I was hired because somebody liked my work as an audio human and recommended me.

To actually get into something resembling rock-show territory at a place like the Gallivan, I’d need to be willing to hazard about $30k on arrayable loudspeakers and subwoofers, enough for main deployments and delays. Again, that’s not taking into account ancillaries like power distribution, flying equipment, a bigger cargo vehicle, etc, etc, etc.

Plus, I’d have to compete with all the established names that people are comfortable calling, but anyway…

***

Where we seem to be at is that truly midgrade systems (in the classic sense) are almost all excess capacity to satisfy our rock-show dreams, dreams that a lot of folks booking bands just don’t share. What might have qualified as legitimate expansions in the past now have a questionable business case. In terms of getting more work or serving our customers better, many possible moves are now essentially lateral.

For myself, I might do some shuffling to get more of my various bits and pieces of PA to match up. I might even consider some expansion in order to make myself happier as an operator. Even so, my personal dream is much more downscale than it was when I was younger. Having a huge pile of noisemakers is now something that I recognize as NOT being a pre-punched ticket to success.

If I have the opportunity to get more toys without a big risk being involved, I’ll consider it.

But I will recognize it as being mostly an artistic and personal decision, rather than a business strategy.


Losing My Cool

I get frustrated when problems that could have been avoided crop up and make us all look dumb.

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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To be fair, it wasn’t a nuclear-detonation sort of event. Here’s what happened:

I was working an evening that involved Someone You’ve Heard Of. There was a choral performance that involved playback, and I was hands-on with that to make the FOH engineer’s life more manageable. (I handled pressing go, stop, and trimming channel levels.)

No problem, right? Easy.

Where things didn’t work out is that we had two stages going, and the schedule got a little mangled. Along with that, there was no communication about exactly what was supposed to be happening in the moment. In theory, one stage was supposed to be resetting while the other was playing, but nobody was “riding herd” on that, so the stages were starting to interlace their performances: The main stage would do a tune, then the second stage would jump in and do one if we didn’t seem to be getting to the next tune fast enough, and so forth.

This worked out to a point, and then crumbled a good bit. It seemed like the other stage wasn’t ready, so we went ahead with a tune…and then, suddenly, “Stop! Stop!” (The second stage had started up.) I yanked down the music fader and ended playback. A beat of silence, as both stages had now pulled themselves up short, and then, “Go playback.” A few seconds in, and the second stage started AGAIN.

“Stop! Stop!” said the stage manager. “STOP!” said someone in the choir, turning to look at me like I was a doofus. As I yanked my fader and cut playback for the second time, I made a clear gesture and facial expression of exasperation.

I shouldn’t have done that. I shouldn’t have lost my cool.

…and there’s no “but” coming here. I’m not going to defend doing something I shouldn’t have done. What I am going to do is to explain why it happened.

As I’ve gotten more experienced, I’m finding it more difficult to gladly suffer bad planning that leads to shoddy execution, or just shoddy execution in general. I especially hate it when that shoddy execution makes apparent idiots of me and the people around me. I double-especially hate it when, as in this case, such a thing happens at what should be an event featuring varsity-level execution from everyone. This was a high-dollar, high-powered production, and a simple lack of someone (anyone) being willing to actually manage the two stages led to all of us looking like amateurs. It was near chaos, done live in front of an upper-crust audience.

Un.

Effing.

Acceptable.

I used to be better at hiding my emotions. I was more stoic once. I don’t know if that’s good or bad in general. When that intersects with the amount of pride I take in doing this stuff in the best way possible, I sometimes react poorly. When I’m caught off-guard, that’s more likely to happen.

I don’t want to lose my cool. I want to be a rock. I’m not a rock, though, and I internalize things easily. As such, I lose my cool sometimes. It’s not a great thing, but it is a thing.


The Pro-Audio Guide For People Who Know Nothing About Pro-Audio, Part 4

EQ, gating, and compression often happen in the context of a single channel.

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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“Our last stop was a tour of the input section on a mixer. Now, our journey will take us into channel processing.”

This article was written for Schwilly Family Musicians, and is available (for free!) here.


Simplify

A Schwilly Family guest-post about not being any more complicated than is necessary.

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.

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

“The more unnecessary complexity you add, the more the risk of an unintended result goes up – especially if you exceed the limits of your own understanding.”

The full article is available for free at Schwilly Family Musicians.


Outside Infinity

Check out live music from Utah at AMR.fm.

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.

If you are in need of having your face MELTED by some rock tunes, then you should come down to Fats tonight and get yourself some Outside Infinity. If you can’t come down in person, you can always give the live broadcast a listen at AMR.fm.

7:00 PM MDT is the scheduled start time, as customary.


STAGEmeme

STAGEmeme is: Witticisms about the world of pro-audio, stage lighting, and live performance.

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.

STAGEmeme is a side project that I’ve been chewing away at for a while. Part of the reason to do it was to create a more “purpose built” outlet for my wisecracks. Another reason was to try my hand at doing something substantive in PHP, from scratch. Another reason was to try to make some extra money by selling merch.

This site has ads, but I didn’t want STAGEmeme to have them. It just felt too much like an “exploit” in that context. Instead, you’ll see links to my Zazzle store, where you can buy STAGEmeme merch. I figured that being able to buy real, physical things that you can wear would be kinda nifty.

So, there you go.

You can visit STAGEmeme at http://stagememe.smallvenuesurvivalist.com/

Happy New Year, everybody!