Tag Archives: Attitude

The Majestic Grandeur Of Tranquility

Not everyone will appreciate it, but staying calm during a show is a really good idea.

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 didn’t really come up with the title of this article. Washington Irving did. I’m pretty sure Washington Irving knew basically nothing about production for rock shows, but he knew about life – and rock shows follow the rules of life.

One of the rules of life is that panic can kill you. It especially kills you in pressure situations involving technical processes. The reason why is pretty simple: Panic shuts off your rational mind, and a technical process REQUIRES your rational mind. When the…stuff…hits the fan, and you’re driving an audio rig, frantic thrashing will not save you. It will, instead, dig you an even deeper pit.

Calmness, on the other hand, allows you to think. The suppression of a fight-or-flight response means that your mental process is freed of having to swim upstream against a barrage of terrified impulses. You get more solutions with less work, because you’re able to linearly piece together why you’ve just been bitten in your ample, fleshy rear. Maintaining a tranquil, logical flow of problem solving not only means that you’re likely to get the problem fixed, it also means that you’ve got a fighting chance at finding your root cause. If you find and fix your problem’s root cause, your problem will stay solved. If all you do is mask the failure in a fit of “band-aid sticking,” you’re going to get bitten again – and soon, probably.

Another thing to keep in mind is that your emotional state is infectious in multiple ways. The most obvious connection is the simple transfer of mindset. If you’re seen as being in charge of the show – the person flying the plane, as it were – then you’re also unconsciously perceived as having authority over how to interpret the situation. If you, the authority are losing your crap, then the signal is being sent that the loss of one’s crap is the appropriate response to the problem. Deep down, we humans have “herd mammal” software installed. It’s a side-effect of how we’re constructed. Under enough stress, our tendency is to run that software, which obeys the overall direction of the group.

And the group obeys the leader. So, lead well.

The more indirect way that emotional state transfers is through your actions which affect others. The musicians on deck are not, of course, oblivious to what you’re doing with the console and system processing. If you’re banging away without much direction, eventually you will do something that seriously gums up a musician’s performance. This is especially true if you’re wildly tweaking every monitor channel in sight. One second, things are a little weird due to a minor problem. Then, you panic and start futzing around with every send and mute you can reach, and things get even weirder. Maybe even unusable. You don’t want that.

The majestic grandeur of tranquility, on the other hand, embodies itself in making precise, deliberate changes that mess with the performance as little as possible. It is engaging in the scientific process, running experiments and noting the results at very high speed. Being deliberate DOES slow down individual actions, but the total solution arrives more quickly. You end up taking the direct route, instead of a million side trips.

It’s Not Easy, And Not Everybody Gets It

If this sounds like a tough discipline, that’s because it is. Even being aware of its importance, I still don’t always do it successfully. (And I’ve had LOTS of practice.)

Also, some folks confuse serenity with inattentiveness.

I once worked a show where a member of the audience was a far more “high-powered” audio human than myself. This person worked on big shows, with big teams, in big spaces. This person knew their stuff, without a doubt.

The problem, though, was that the show was hitting some snags. The band had been thrown together to do the gig, and while the effort was admirable, the results were a little ragged. The group was a little too loud for themselves, and monitor world was being thrown together on the fly. It was a battle to keep it all from flying off the handle, and the show was definitely trying to run away. I was trying to take my own advice, and combat the problems surgically. As much as the game of “feedback whack-a-mole” wasn’t all that aesthetically pleasing, I was steadily working towards getting things sorted out.

Unfortunately, to this other audio-human, I didn’t look like I was doing enough. Their preferred method was to sledgehammer a problem until it went away, and I was NOT sledgehammering. Therefore, I was “doing it wrong.”

We ended up doing some pretty wild things to the performers in the name of getting things under control. In my opinion, the result was that the show appeared to be MORE out of control, until our EQ and monitor send carpet-bombing campaign had smashed everything in sight.

The problem was “fixed,” but we had done a lot of damage in the process, all in the name of “looking busy.”

To this day, I think staying calm would have been better for that show. I think staying calm and working things out methodically is best for all shows. My considered advice is (to take a page from Dumbledore) that everyone should, please, not panic.


Music Is So Much More Than Recordings

A Schwilly guest post.

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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“Before anyone could even begin to think of selling something as antiquated as a physical record, there were centuries upon centuries of successful and unsuccessful musicians.”

The entire article is available (free!) at Schwilly Family Musicians.


We Are Water Flowing Downhill

If you’re stuck, try to go around.

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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One of the most lethal threats to successfully pulling off a show is getting stuck.

Or, rather, agreeing to remain stuck when you don’t have to be.

We’ve all seen it happen. You’re setting up and dialing in, and something won’t cooperate. The entire flow of show-prep suddenly diverts towards making that thing cooperate. Minutes pass as more and more resources are devoted to solving the problem. An hour goes by, and you’re still stuck, and you look up, AND IT’S 15 MINUTES TO DOORS, HOLY CRAP!

I’ve been there. I’ve been there (and been guilty of perpetrating it) when a snag has brought an entire production – even a decently planned one – to a grinding halt for far too long. So what do you do?

One thing you can do is learn the lesson of water flowing downhill.

Zen And The Critical Path

Consider the stream flowing down a rocky bed. The current has a destination which it must reach, yet there is impedance to the flow of the liquid. The rocks are obstacles. Snags. The water cannot flow through them.

Yet the water is untroubled. It merely flows around the rocks, acknowledging the stones by slowing – yet not stopping. The water continues down the critical path, and thus overcomes the rocks without overpowering them. The current strives against the impedance without effort.

The water does not confuse an obstacle in the path with the ending of the path.

Too often in troubleshooting, we make the assumption that we can not move onto solving the rest of a problem until we have solved each piece of the conundrum in some arbitrary order. However, this is rarely the case. Many shows are inherently “parallel” in nature. The lead vocal has a route to the PA, and the kick drum has a route to the PA. Those routes are very likely independent of one another until they are summed into an output path. If the kick drum’s independent route fails, but the lead vocal can still make it, you have a workable show. It may not be the exact show you were hoping for, but you still have a show.

The critical path is getting whatever MUST go through the audio rig to go through it. Everything else is a bonus. The vast majority of small-venue shows can come to a workable conclusion with nothing but the lead vocal working. Like I said, that may not be the best possible show – but it will still be recognizable as a show. If you hit an obstruction that you can’t quickly clear, take a moment and think: “If this can’t be made to work, is it truly the end of the show?”

If you answer in the negative, you are snagged on something that is NOT on the critical path. Flow around it. You can always come back to it later, but for now, you need to focus on arriving at the minimum viable product. In many cases, people only get stuck on a technical problem because they “assent” to being stuck. They decide to stop and bang away at the issue when there is no physical reason that other (actually more critical) issues could not be addressed first. The longer they consent to remaining obstructed, the more that the effort required to handle the rest of the show is concentrated into a shorter span of time. At some point, a threshold of panic is reached. This is a bad scene.

Do not confuse an obstacle in the path with the ending of the path. We are water flowing downhill.


The Rise And Fall Of A Small Venue – Part 2

Having all the top-shelf toys isn’t always 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.

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Mario and Mishell really got the foundation of Fats in the right place.

Look closely enough at the composite picture above, and you can make out the original FOH PA. That original setup was two, JRX full-range boxes and a single JRX sub. Now, it’s true that the sub eventually got moved upstage for the drumfill, replaced by two Peavey boxes that I had wanted to sell. However, it’s important to note that everything in that original, functional setup was used – continuously – from that first, fateful show with Wes’s band to the mainstage’s final night.

Let that sink in.

With one or two exceptions due to a bad power switch on an amplifier, ANY SHOW anybody heard at Fats came through the core of the original PA. A JRX rig isn’t a two-million dollar setup from Meyer Sound, but it still sounded just fine and was more than adequate for the needs of the venue. By the end, that system had a lot of miles and a lot of smiles associated with it. In terms of overall return on investment, those entry-level JBLs were probably the best value of anything ever purchased for shows at Fats.

Now, let me tell you about what makes the “good ‘ol days” the “good ‘ol days:” It’s the people, the love, and the dedication.

It wasn’t the load in and load out.

Back in “the good ‘ol days,” I loaded in and out almost as much as the bands did. I brought in a snake, extra mics, a mixing console, monitors, and some sundries – and, when the weekend was through, I took them out again. I was often the first person in and the last out. It was acutely exhausting, but it was great in its own way.

It wasn’t the acoustical environment.

The original version of the basement had no acoustical treatment at all, beyond the carpeted stage. The upstage wall was corrugated metal. Anyone who, in later times, thought that Fats was a loud venue probably wasn’t around for the first part of my tenure. The very live (and thus, LOUD) room necessitated a lot of PA if you wanted to balance the mush with some sort of clarity. I regularly ran the system all the way up to the clip lights…with vocals! I didn’t want to tear anyone’s head off, but I often did.

It wasn’t the world-class production.

The gear we had available was certainly decent enough, but it was sparse and limited in its performance. In the early days, bands got a handful of mixes on compact wedges. The console that I brought in was a bit of a dinosaur, built in the age when the Elves forged rings of power…and digital-mixer manufacturers hadn’t yet discovered that EQ on the buses was actually a stonking-great idea. (Oh, Tascam. Your design choices make me chuckle so.) Our stage-lighting consisted of three bulbs, bare, in saturated colors, connected to a group of sockets run on a single dimmer switch. Nobody was going to confuse us with The Depot or The State Room.

But what we did have were great people, a love for music and the people who make it, and the dedication to do everything we knew how to do as best we knew how.

The original downstairs serving team of Mario and Krista set the tone and the bar – no pun intended – for all future crews. With the three of us there, what you had was a no-bull group of music fans who wanted to hear good tunes and treat people the right way. Krista blended a razor-sharp sense of humor with a honed instinct for the real craft of bar service. She could sing along with pretty much any walk-in music I had, and never had any trouble making friends any musician who walked in the door. On Mario’s side, there was a special sort of presence to the room with him, an owner, being hands-on with the proceedings. Mario is the sort of gentleman who gets respect due to people just wanting to respect him. He was the craftsman who took the basement from a run-down storage area to an actual venue. He was absolutely fearless about “getting dirty” in pursuit of a job being done, and as a drummer, he could talk shop with any band in the room.

Mario was ENTHUSED about what was going on with every aspect of a show, and some of my fondest memories of Fats are the pre-show conversations we used to have about bands and live-production. We could kill hours with chit-chat about mics, speakers, guitars and the people who played them, drum techniques, and anything else you can imagine that had to do with music. We called those times “The Calm Before The Storm,” and there wasn’t much that could equal them.

Like I said, we didn’t start out with all the cool toys. Even so, bands seemed to get a real kick out of the place. There’s a reason that this quote survives: “They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel.” I think bands responded to being wanted. I think bands responded to a crew that wanted to do everything possible with what was available. I think bands responded to venue management that was all about being fair, folksy, and easy to work with. I think bands responded to seeing that the point of the basement was to have music: The stage was a focal point instead of an afterthought, and the show was meant to be the reason you were down there.

Zero musicians probably remember how loud (or not loud) those mini-monitors were, but I’ll bet a whole bunch of musicians remember being treated like they actually mattered to somebody. I can’t remember any band that, upon being asked, did not want to sign the wall where players recorded their presence at Fats.

As a final point, I’ll also say that part of what made those early shows “the good ‘ol days” were the first experiences in that room with all the great talent Mishell booked. It didn’t matter that that the system didn’t do “crushing, Reggae dance hall bass.” Wasnatch and Dub Symptom still knew how to party. It didn’t matter that we couldn’t do ultra-minute surgery on every aspect of a guitar sound. Stonefed and Marinade still jammed hard enough for the crowd to fog the mirrors. You do have to have the basic tools, but past that, the actual humans involved in the music are what makes it work or not.

Even in the early days, Fats definitely worked.


First, Do No Harm

Doing nothing is perfectly acceptable when the alternative is to wreck something.

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 attend a church which throws parties on occasion. Those parties feature the tunes of The Joshua Payne Orchestra, a group that emanates (what I call) Wild and Wooly Jazz Weirdness.

To date, we have not run a PA system for the event. The JPO has brought in equipment that does playback, a bit of fill, and some announcements, but that’s it from the reinforcement side. Even this last winter, with the church’s PA sitting close-at-hand in the Impact Hub basement, we didn’t “do sound” for the band.

And I’m not upset about that.

After the party, Josh asked me about what I would do for them, soundwise, if I was to do something. I answered him as best I could in the moment, which was that I really didn’t know if I SHOULD do anything. That’s not to say there would be nothing I could do. It would be entirely possible, for instance, to “get on the gas” with the midrange of Josh’s guitar; There were times when his parts got just a touch swamped for my taste.

But I still wasn’t sure if I would be ready to jump right in and make that change.

The Holistic Experience

I’ve said before that I think live-sound is not actually about the best sound as divorced from all other factors. Rather, I hold that live-sound is all about getting the best show. It’s how the gestalt comes together, and the whole experience is more than just checking off a bunch of boxes. You might think that getting the best guitar sound ever, plus the best vocal sound in history, plus the coolest snare in the known Universe (and so on) would get you the best show, but that’s not guaranteed.

In the case of JPO, the theoretical question I had to put to myself was, “Will fixing this detail ruin the whole?”

Integral to the party atmosphere was the music being prevalent, but with room to socialize. That was definitely working out without the addition of a full-on FOH mix going on. The music was in pretty much exactly the right place.

Now, remember that live audio is an additive business. If I want to change something, I have to make things louder.

The problem, then, was that making a desired change might have created an overall experience which was always in balance…but a little too loud. If it’s a little too loud, people stop focusing on the nice balance and start to notice that they’re not enjoying themselves as much. That’s not what you want.

There’s also the issue that The JPO is an extremely professional set of players who construct non-standard sonic experiences. They’re used to listening to each other, and do not need “help” to pull off the music at a gig. Even more than with other bands, you can’t be sure that you know precisely what their intent is for a particular tune. This isn’t 4/4 rock in the pattern of verse/ chorus/ verse/ chorus/ bridge/ verse/ chorus. It’s not like the basic rules of music don’t continue to apply (they always do), but an engineer faced with an unconventional sound is best served by NOT being cocky about their knowing how the music is supposed to come across. Diving right in and changing everything in a frenzy isn’t likely to get you the correct results.

Without having a more intimate feel for what was going on, I didn’t want to say “Yeah, we should totally do this, and this, and this, and…” It was very important to recognize that the band was executing their craft beautifully, and that my first reaction to that on-point execution should be one of respectful observation.

Don’t Confuse Action With Effectiveness

I sometimes call this craft “Selective Noise-Louderization.” The more of it I’ve done, the more the “selective” part has felt important. Rather like music, a lot of the success in live-audio can come from what you refrain from doing. This can be a very tough part of the discipline to internalize, because there are TONS of internal and external expectations that we should be “doing stuff” with all the gear we have handy. We have systems that can melt faces, and consoles with highly capable processing built in – and that makes folks (and us) think that our job is to change things.

That’s not the case.

Our real job, our real discipline, is to do just enough to make the show do what it’s supposed to do, and then STOP. For certain gigs, this means being very hands-on. For others, this means touching almost nothing. Fiddling around with every possible knob and switch on the rig is easy; Figuring out what’s appropriate to do is hard.

We even face professional expectations to “just go for it.” I was once mixing a show where we were having some feedback problems in monitor-world. We had backed ourselves into a bit of a corner, and I was trying to maneuver back to stability without just hacking away at everything. A fellow tech was in the room, and this bothered him. In his mind, I should have been making huge changes to monitor mixes, yanking levels down, and just generally being active. My calmness looked like apathy – but I had good reasons. I wanted, as much as was possible, to preserve the on-deck mix and be as unobtrusive to the players as I could be. To my thinking, flailing around dramatically actually disturbs the performers more. Lots of “doing” can look impressive, but it can actually push the show farther off the rails. Making a non-emergency into an emergency is a bad idea.

Sometimes you have to do something deliberate. Sometimes you have to do something dramatic. Sometimes you have to resist the urge to do anything. The point is to not make things worse in the name of “showing up.” If you’re on station and paying attention, you already have showed up. If what the show needs is to be left alone, then just stand back and enjoy the music. Everything will be fine.


When Your Work Speaks For Itself, Don’t Interrupt

Schwilly Family. Guest post. You know the drill.

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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“One of the most plainly visible examples is when, without irony, a musician tells the audience that the music being presented is bad. It seems like an embrace of one’s own limitations, and there’s nothing wrong with owning a total miscue, but there’s a problem with claiming – as a matter of regular course, and with a palpable sense that you mean what you say – that your art is crap:

The danger is that somebody might believe you.”

The whole article is available at Schwilly Family Musicians.


Load Out Begins Immediately Upon Load In

Everything is prep for something else.

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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You may not have known this, but loading in and loading out aren’t different processes. They are the same thing. Setup and teardown also share this behavior.

Basically, every part of doing a show is the preparatory step for what comes after it. If you’re lazy about the prep (and we all get lazy from time to time), you are making the next bit harder.

For example, let’s say that you load in a show with gear going absolutely everywhere. It’s spread out all over creation. There’s no plan, at all, for how things should be grouped. It all looks like a giant two-year old was given a set of blocks that look like flightcases, amplifiers, and storage tubs, and that two-year old suddenly decided the world was unfair and threw a major fit.

Nobody knows where anything is, exactly. Not even you.

How do you think setup is going to treat you, starting from a place of chaos?

If setup treats you poorly, how will the show go?

If the show goes poorly, as most amalgams of entropy and stress tend to do, how will teardown go?

If teardown is a ball of stress, sullenness, “I don’t care, just throw it in,” and general capitulation, will loadout be easy on you?

What will the next show be like, probably?

Problems cascade. It’s just like breaking a microphone’s cable: For that microphone, every other connection is effectively broken. If any part of the show is afflicted with disorganization, every other part of the show will suffer from the effects.

On multiple occasions, I’ve been told that I run a very tight stage. That is, I try to start with things in a neat and orderly configuration. I’ll tell you right now that such habits, for me, are not just about aesthetics. Yes, I do appreciate the look of a clean and organized show. I’m aware of the “political” implications of presenting that kind of setup to musicians, and I think those implications are worth the effort all by themselves. However, it’s also about survival, plain and simple.

There are people in this business who I term “sound ninjas.” They can take any mess and make it functional in the space of a few seconds. I’m not so skilled as to pull that off. I have to be able to understand what’s going on with the rig, and have some “homework” done if I’m going to do a decent job at selective noise-louderization. If the system looks like some giant violently vomited black spaghetti and steel poles all over the place, I’m going to have a bad time.

So, I try for the opposite, because I want to have a good time.

…and, of course, any show will involve the setup racing towards the maximum possible entropy. If the system’s entropy – the chaos and disorder involved – starts as low as you can get it, then its end value will be as low as the circumstances allow. If the entropy starts high, it’s only going to get higher by the time you’re ready to pack and leave.

Pack the boxes neatly, and it will be easy to find things at the next setup. It will also be much easier to setup in an organized way.

The show will be pulled off much more easily.

The end level of disorganization will be lower, making it easier to pack neatly.

Pack the boxes neatly, and it will be easy to – (You get the idea.)

The time and effort required to make a show happen can not be created or destroyed. It can only be transferred around. Spread it evenly, and the process stays manageable. Pack it all into one huge lump, and you may not be able to handle it all.


The Splendid Magic Of The Set-List

It’s basically rune-paper of future-sight.

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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Some of the best bands I work with have never, and probably will never hand me a set-list. This is important for me to say, because I otherwise might give the impression that bands who don’t hand set-lists to audio-humans are falling short of being professional. That’s not what I’m trying to get at.

What I AM trying to say is that providing a PA driver with a set-list, especially an annotated one, can be a very good thing for everybody. When well done, a document such as the one pictured is actually very powerful. When you get right down to it, what you’re providing a sound craftsperson is something that you might only expect to find in the fantasy worlds of JRR Tolkien or D&D:

A set-list is, for all practical purposes, a low-level, magic scroll of foreknowledge and telepathy. It grants people like me a bit of prescient vision into what you’re going to do next, and this can be a nice enhancement to your show.

If an audio operator knows what’s going to happen, they can anticipate the event and be “right there” when it’s time, instead of having to catch up. There’s less chance of an awkward delay between something needing to be addressed and the appropriate action taking place, because the audio-human can address the issue (or be ready to do so) without the issue having happened first. “Scrambling” can be greatly reduced by the application of a well-formed set-list.

Examples

The set-list pictured above is clean and organized, and it also packs an enormous amount of “procedural information” into a small space. All that’s required is for me to interpret it correctly for the specific situation. For instance…

“Megaphone” – This is going to be loud, band-limited, and the loop gain through the megaphone may contribute to feedback problems. Be ready to deal with that.

“VD” – Vincent D, who’s sitting in with us, is going to have prominent vocals on this tune. If you’ve pulled him down to save loop-gain for other things, you’ll need to be prepared to push him back up and otherwise adjust.

“Harp” – There are prominent harmonica bits in this tune. Be thinking about where to put the fader for those.

“Banjo” – This instrument is not going to sound the same as the guitar that’s normally plugged into that amplifier. You might need to pull some fast work with your channel EQ if things are really out of whack, and you might also need to “get on the gas” with the fader.

“Acoustic Guitar” – This is plugged into that direct box which you’ve connected to a channel that is currently muted. You’re going to need to unmute that channel, or things will be awkward for a minute.

The other thing about that little piece of paper is that it tells me an expected start and end time. This is great, because I don’t have to wildly guess at when the band will go on, nor do I have to speculate about how long they’re planning to go on. They’ve told me. (This is also an indicator of Hectic Hobo’s professionalism. They have a plan regarding their spot in the lineup, and they’re going to try to stick with that plan so that Tycoon Machete gets to utilize their slot to the fullest.)

Making Your Own

If you decide that you want to provide your friendly, neighborhood noise wrangler with a set-list, I can give you a few pointers as to what works best:

  • Maximize your simplicity. Try to find the most basic way possible to convey the information you want to convey. Color coding, for instance, IS neat, but if I need to consult a “map key” to remember what all 20 of your colors mean, you may be getting in your own way. (Also, some folks are colorblind, and colors are harder to discern in low-light. See below.)
  • Make things highly readable in low-light. Big, blocky, and simple fonts, plenty of “whitespace,” and generally high-contrast help with this in a big way.
  • Avoid skimping. If you think something’s important, include it. If that means printing out several sheets in order to play nicely with the first two points, so be it.
  • Don’t take offense. Some audio-humans won’t seem to care about your show, or your set-list. Give them the opportunity to care. Maybe they will. If they don’t, at least YOU tried.

For those of us who do care, and do read set-lists, I can tell you that being able to partially read your mind and see a little ways into the future is a super-spiffy power to have. A little bit of paper from you can grant that power.


The Sublime Beauty Of Cheap, Old, Dinged-Up Gear

Some things can be used, and used hard, without worry.

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 really do think that classy gear is a good idea in the general case. I think it sends a very important signal when a band walks into a room, and their overwhelming impression is that of equipment which is well-maintained and worth a couple of dollars. When a room is filled with boxes and bits that all look like they’re about to fail, the gigs in that room stand a good chance of being trouble-filled. In that case, musician anxiety is completely justified.

In the past, I have made updates to gear almost purely for the sake of “politics.” I don’t regret it.

At the same time, though, “new n’ shiny” equipment isn’t a guarantee of success. I’ve had new gear that developed problems very quickly, but more than that, new and spendy gear tends to make you ginger (in the timid sense). You can end up being so worried about something getting scratched up or de-spec’d that you forget the purpose of the device: It’s there to be used.

And that’s where the sublime beauty of inexpensive, well-worn equipment comes in. You’ve found a hidden gem, used it successfully in the past, will probably keep using it successfully in the future, and you can even abuse it a bit in the name of experimentation.

Case Study: Regular Kick Mics Are Boring

I’ve used spendy kick mics, and I’ve used cheap kick mics. They’ve all sounded pretty okay. The spendy ones are pre-tuned to sound more impressive, and that’s cool enough.

…but, you know, I find the whole “kick mic” thing to be kinda boring. It’s all just a bunch of iteration or imitation on making a large-diaphragm dynamic. Different mics do, of course, exhibit different flavors, but there’s a point where it all seems pretty generic. It doesn’t help that folks are so “conditioned” by that generic-ness – that is, if it doesn’t LOOK like a kick mic, it can’t be any good. (And, if it doesn’t COST like a kick mic, it can’t be any good.)

I once had a player inquire after a transducer I used on his bass drum. He seemed pretty interested in it based on how it worked during the show, and wanted to know how expensive it was. I told him, and he was totally turned OFF…by the mic NOT costing $200. He stated, “I’m only interested in expensive mics,” and in my head, I’m going, “Why? This one did a good enough job that you started asking questions about it. Doesn’t that tell you something?”

Anyway, the homogeneity of contemporary kick mic-ery is just getting dull for me. It’s like how modern car manufacturers are terrified to “color outside the lines” with any consumer model.

To get un-bored, I’ve started doing things that expose the greatness of “cheap, old, and dinged up.” In the past, I tried (and generally enjoyed) using a Behringer ECM8000 for bass drum duty. Mine was from back when they were only $40, had been used quite a bit, and had been dropped a few times. This was not a pristine, hardwood-cased, ultra-precision measurement mic that would be a real bear to replace. It was a knock-around unit that I had gotten my money out of, so if my experiment killed it I would not be enduring a tragedy.

And it really worked. Its small diameter made it easy to maneuver inside kick ports, and its long body made it easy to get a good ways inside those same kick ports. The omni pattern had its downsides, certainly. Getting the drum to the point of being “stupid loud” in FOH or the drumfill wasn’t going to happen, but that’s pretty rare for me. At an academic level, I’m sure the tiny diaphragm had no trouble reacting quickly to transients, although it’s not like I noticed anything dramatic. Mostly, the mic “sounded like a drum to me” without having to be exactly like every other bass-drum mic you’re likely to find. The point was to see if it could work, and it definitely did.

My current “thing” bears a certain similarity, only on the other end of the condenser spectrum. I have an old, very beat-up MXL 990 LDC, which I got when they were $20 cheaper. I thought to myself, “I wonder what happens if I get a bar-towel and toss this in a kick drum?” What I found out is that it works very nicely. The mic does seem to lightly distort, but the distortion is sorta nifty. I’m also freed from being required to use a stand. The 990 might die from this someday, but it’s held up well so far. Plus, again, it was cheap, already well used, and definitely not in pristine condition. I don’t have to worry about it.

Inoculation Against Worry Makes You Nicer

Obviously, an unworried relationship with your gear is good for you, but it’s also good in a political sense. Consternation over having a precious and unblemished item potentially damaged can make you jumpy and unpleasant to be around. There are folks who are so touchy about their rigs that you wonder how they can get any work done.

Of course, an overall attitude of “this stuff is meant to be used” is needed. Live-audio is a rough and tumble affair, and some things that you’ve invested in just aren’t going to make it out alive. Knowing this about everything, from the really expensive bits to the $20 mic that’s surprisingly brilliant, helps you to maintain perspective and calmness.

The thing with affordable equipment (that you’ve managed to hold on to and really use) is that it feeds this attitude. You don’t have to panic about it being scuffed up, dropped, misplaced, or finally going out with a bang. As such, you can be calm with people. You don’t have to jump down someone’s throat if they’re careless, or if there’s a genuine accident. It’s easy to see that the stuff is just stuff, and while recklessness isn’t a great idea, everything that has a beginning also has an end. If you got your money out of a piece of equipment, you can just shrug and say that it had a good life.

Have some nice gear around, especially for the purpose of public-relations, but don’t forget to keep some toys that you can “leave out in the rain.” Those can be the most fun.


Simple Fixes For Simple Problems

Letting a person change lanes is easier than building them a faster car.

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 forgot to put this up last week. Whoops…)

On ProSoundWeb, a thread was started about harmonica feedback. The thread lasted for two pages, and one topic swerve. All kinds of suggestions were made.

But not a single suggestion was made that maybe, just maybe, the rest of the band might EASE UP A LITTLE and give the harp player some space.

The simple, free solution was drowned in a storm of trying to engineer a way out.

I have been guilty of this. I will probably be guilty of it in the future. Still…

Can we stop this, please?