Tag Archives: Gig Planning

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.

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

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.


Mercenary Maxims: Part 3

A LOT can go wrong – and you can still survive – if you have backups.

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. Original photo is a CC0 found at Pixabay: https://pixabay.com/en/aircraft-military-thunderbolt-a-10-1008284/

Close Air Support Covereth A Multitude Of Sins

Do you know why some folks stay very, very calm when a show is beset by multiple failures?

There are many possible reasons, some of them involving good internal psychology: An ability to put things into perspective and not panic is very important. At the same time, real fallback options, both physical and those based in planning, are critical when your bacon requires saving. I’ll even go so far as to say that the planning part takes the crown. Not everyone can have a whole pile of spare mics, extra cables, or even a whole console left over in case of an emergency – but everyone can take the time to think through what might go wrong.

Some production crafts-humans only ever think about what it takes for a show to happen the right way, and don’t bother to ponder the failure points. Those folks have a much steeper hill to climb when it comes to maintaining control in a tough situation, because they have no mental preparation. In contrast, the audio and lighting people who have stopped to ponder “what do we do if [insert piece of gear] fails?” have a big lead. They’ve already been to the failure point in their head. They’ve seen the mountain! So, if a problem occurs, they’re not in completely unfamiliar territory.

Thus, ask yourself: What are the critical pieces for the show? Where can you yank bits and pieces from in case one of the critical pieces fails? What if you lose half your inputs – how do you keep going? If FOH dies and there’s no spare, how would you go about creating an FOH mix from monitor world? How about the other way around? How do you rearrange things if you lose a wedge 10 minutes in? How would you repurpose a subwoofer amp to drive a pair of monitors if another amp died? If one of your lights quits all of a sudden, what other light can you quickly take “offline” to keep things symmetrical? What in your rig is the most likely thing to misbehave at a critical point?

Having thought some things through, have an internal checklist that you can run through. You want a procedure, even if only roughly outlined, that you can go through without thinking too much. This protects against panic and keeps your fixes moving at the highest speed possible.

…and know your gear! Know what extra inputs and outputs you have. Think about what you could adapt to feed something else, even if it’s not the standard method. There all kinds of unorthodox ways to survive disasters of various magnitudes, and if you’re familiar with what your equipment can do you can dream up some pretty interesting solutions.

I encourage you to have all the backups you can afford, and are able to bring with you. That includes the backups that are “merely” contingency plans sitting in your head. One the day when you encounter a failure, you will have a much better chance at being the calm and cool one in the bunch.


Delayed Response

My plan worked – and much more smoothly than I was anticipating.

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 past Saturday, I implemented my plan for delay speakers at IAMA’s Bluegrass Night. I can report the following:

1) The plan basically worked as expected, with a few caveats. I ended up setting the delays at around the 70-foot mark rather than 80, because 80 felt like it was a little too far back. (There were also some handy trees at 70 feet that worked as natural barricades for the delay stands.) I just “eyeballed” (ear-canaled?) the delay-speaker sound level.

2) Switching out the time-correction on the delays had a very interesting effect. They were loud enough, and close enough to the main PA that de-aligning them didn’t sound like a total mess. The extra volume tended to mask some of the “slap” from the propagation delay. However, when all was time-aligned with the main rig it seemed that the two setups blended into one another nicely. With the correction bypassed, my brain instantly “localized” the delay speakers as a sound source. In some cases the effect was fairly subtle, but when listening to playback that had strong timing cues the result was very noticeable.

3) I’m not sure if it was really the fault of the delays, or if it was more to do with my mix position overall, but I did get the sensation that achieving clarity/ intelligibility in the mix was a touch challenging.

4) I must have guessed right about the level for the delay speakers, because nobody complained at me about the overall mix being too hot or too quiet.

5) What I might do differently on my next attempt would be to set up the delays as another full PA with subwoofers. My decision to cluster all of my subs at the front of the stage seemed basically okay, but I also got a bit of a sense that it would have been better to have more bottom-end support for the crowd sitting further back.

Not bad for a first try, I’d say.


A Plan For Delays

I think this should probably work. Maybe.

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.

Last year, I did a show at Gallivan Plaza that really ought to have had delays, but didn’t. As a result, the folks sitting on the upper tiers of lawn didn’t get quite as much volume as they would have liked. This year, I intend to try to fix that problem. Of course, deploying delays is NOT as simple as saying “we’ll just deploy delays.” There’s a bit of doing involved, and I figured I would set out my mental process here, before actually having a go.

Then, after all is said and done, we can review. Exciting, no?

So, here’s the idea:

A) Set primary FOH as a “double-hung” system. Cluster the subs down center, prep to put vocals through the inner pair of full-range boxes, and prep to send everything else to the outer pair. Drive the main PA with L/R output.

B) Have the FOH tent sit on the concrete pad about 60 feet from the stage.

C) At roughly an 80 foot distance, place the delays. The PA SPL in full-space at that point is expected to be down about 28 dB from the close-range (3 feet/ 1 meter) SPL.

D) Place a mic directly in front of one side of the main PA, and another mic in the center of the audience space, at the 80-foot line. (The propagation time to the delays will be slightly different depending on where people sit, so a center position should be a decent compromise.) Using both mics, record an impulse being reproduced only by the main PA. Analyze the recording to find the delay between the mics.

E) Send L/R to Matrix 1, assign Matrix 1 to an output, then apply the measured delay to that output. Connect the output to the delays. Also, consider blending the subwoofer feed into Matrix 1 if necessary.

F) Set an initial drive level to the delays so that their SPL level is +6 dB when compared to the output of the main PA. The added volume should help mask phase errors with the delays for listeners in front of the delay speakers, due to the contribution from the main PA being of much reduced significance…but it may also be possible that the added volume will be a problem for people sitting between the delays and the main PA. “Seasoning to taste” will be necessary. (For people sitting between the main PA and the delays, the time correction actually makes the delays seem to be MORE out of alignment than less, so the delays being more audible is a problem.)

So, there you go! I’ll let everybody know how this works. Or how it doesn’t.


An Open Letter To Event Planners

We need to be more clear with each other about what it takes to do things the right way.

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.

Dear Event Planners,

My name is Danny Maland, and I’m what would commonly be called “a sound guy.” A/V. An audio human. Show crew. That kind of thing. I’d like to take a moment to address an issue that has caused me some problems over the years. I don’t know if it’s trending towards worse or better, but as a person with an engineering mindset, I usually pick “assume the worst” and go with it.

Now, before you mentally check out, please be assured that I’m going to stay away from snarky finger-pointing here. We’re all on the same team, and actually, I think that production has not always been good at being on the same team with you. My feeling is that we spend lots of time failing to explain our needs to you, and so assumptions get built that lead to poor outcomes. With that on the table, let me lay out the crux or nexus of this whole thing:

When it comes to the spacetime continuum, production needs a lot of it. A lot of all of it – both space and time.

There’s a significant amount of pressure out there to compress both schedules and square footage. Time is money, space is money, and both together are a lot more money. Clients like to save money, and so do I, but value-engineering live music is not something I can recommend. Any show, even one that is a repeat performance, is itself a singular event that can never be repeated. All of us have exactly one chance to get it right, and squeezing anything that supplies the endeavor (space, time, electrical power, etc.) increases the chance of a trainwreck.

You don’t want that, and neither do we.

As an event planner, I’m going to guess that you like specifics. So here are some for you to consider about space and time.

1) If you’re going to have a full band with pro-production at an event, please consider a 20 foot wide by 20 foot deep area (or about 37 square meters total) to be the bare minimum space for it all to happen inside. I know that some people will say, “That’s overkill!” but I really do mean this. Bands that are forced to be right on top of each other don’t perform to their full potential, and close quarters makes for mic-to-mic bleed that hampers a good mix. Feedback also becomes a real pain when the performers are in very close proximity to the PA system. Yes, some permanent venues have a smaller area to work with, but remember that we may be bringing everything with us. We don’t have the ability to do a fully maximized and tweaked install at the drop of a hat. We need cushion, especially when we’ve just loaded in and everything is spread out.

2) For scheduling, please have any production that’s self-contained with the music set to arrive a minimum of four hours prior to soundcheck. If you’re in a situation with no real loading dock, add another hour or two. We need lots of time to set and tune, especially when the space is one we’ve never been in before. You might think you want us to “throw and go,” but that’s not going to get you great results. I’ve gotten lucky on plenty of throw and goes, but not so lucky on others. I don’t think you want your event to be a luck-based mission. That’s too much uncertainty with too much money and reputation on the line.

The client may push on these things. The event space may try to get you to cut down. Please stand firm! We need your help to get this right.

So, that’s it. Let’s be sure to uncompress everything and work towards better results. Like I said, we’re all in this together. Our success is your success, so let’s work as a team to produce amazing things.

Best regards,

Danny


Gig Log: USIC Fundraiser (March 10, 2018)

Acoustic-o-rama.

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’ve been asked if I can start writing up gig-logs. Thoughts about shows can be a bit of a touchy subject; When things don’t go well, folks can think they’re getting the blame. At the same time, treated carefully, there’s likely to be a wealth of teachable moments packed into any retrospective of a production.

So, yeah – let’s give this a try!

What Went Well

  • Advance information was key: I knew beforehand that I would have a healthy number of inputs and monitor mixes to contend with – AND that most of the heavy lifting would be done with instrument mics. Not having to figure things out at the last minute made life much smoother.
  • Lessons learned from others’ experiences are helpful: One of the best pieces of advice I’ve gleaned regarding “instrument mic” shows is that you should be very, very wary of making monitor world too loud right out of the gate. Start quiet, and then add on as needed. I’m pretty sure this concept saved my butt later. (I think this concept is true for every kind of show, actually, but shows with a lot of mics will kill you much faster if you forget.)
  • Build the show file at home: As per my usual, I walked into the space with a USB stick that had basic FOH and monitor-world console configurations preloaded. As soon as I was ready, I called up my scenes. I was then in a place where I could make “grab-n-go” tweaks without having to look at every parameter on everything. Having your routing, scribble strips, high-pass filters, channel compressor ratio/ timing parameters, and basic monitor-bus EQs in place will save you a LOT of time at the show.
  • Save your back: Putting the digital stagebox on a chair was one of the best ideas ever. I didn’t have to bend all the way down to interact with it, which was a lot faster and a lot more comfortable than the alternative.

What Could Have Been Better

  • Perishable skills are perishable: It took me a minute to get my head re-wrapped around thinking about two separate consoles that have to be recalled individually. I haven’t had to do that since the summer, so I’m out of practice and a little slow. I also tend to forget that acoustic instruments have solid output, but also tend to be farther from a mic than a “rock” vocal. Consequently, you have to be willing to get on the gas a bit more if folks really want to hear the monitors. If you haven’t done this kind of work in a while, you might be a bit surprised.
  • Scheduling is hard: I gave myself four hours to load-in, power, set, and line-check an 18 input show with five monitor mixes, a “double-hung” PA, and two light trees driven with DMX. I just barely got to “soundcheck ready” in time. I need to spec more of a setup buffer when I’m flying solo.
  • Almost but not quite: I’m used to being able to grab a direct-input instrument and put it confidently front and center when a solo comes up. With miced instruments, I have to be more ginger. Certain lead parts didn’t pop out in quite the way I had hoped.
  • That wall, though: The room is actually pretty okay, but I can’t say I’m a fan of the big, blank, flat wall right behind the stage as an acoustical feature.

Conclusion

The show came off well, with an appreciative crowd and musicians who seemed pretty happy when it was all said and done. I call that a win!


The Mystical Guarantee

Getting paid a guarantee means you guaranteed something valuable to someone 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.

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

Ah, the perennial discussion: “Should local bands get paid from the door, or a guarantee?”

I’ve touched on this subject before, but I’ve never gotten into this aspect directly. I believe I can give you a definitive answer:

Any band, at any level, can get paid a guarantee – but only if they can guarantee something that’s “business-valuable” to the person writing the checks.

Business-value is different from other values. It’s revenue and profit, pure and simple. There are bands out there that argue in favor of a guarantee everywhere, due to their hours of practice and expensive equipment. I must be blunt. None of that represents any business-value to a venue. Zilch. Zippo. Nothing. You know what does?

People paying money for whatever the venue sells. Some venues sell admission. Others sell things that people can consume. Others sell both.

If booking you appears to be a direct cause of the venue making money, you will also make money. If booking you several times begins to present a statistical pattern, a pattern where bringing you on results in an average amount of revenue and profit for the venue, a guarantee becomes far more possible. Until that pattern becomes established, you aren’t “guarantee” material for that particular establishment.

Of course, some places pay everybody a guarantee. This is a great thing, and it comes from that room having enough overall income to support it. If I were to ever run my own place again, I would hope to be able to do that. However, if it didn’t end up being possible, I wouldn’t be sitting there beating myself up over it. There are plenty of great places that do, in fact, care about music and musicians, but are not economically able to pay a guarantee to everybody. I spent a few years running one such place, and then several more years working for another such outfit.

The music business does not run on some exotic model of risk and reward. It’s just like everything else. If paying every band a set amount (or even just a set “base”) is of manageable risk and significant reward, it will happen. If not, it won’t. If you must have a certain amount to pack in your gear and play, I can respect that, and I would encourage you to find and tailor your show to the places that will pay up, “rain or shine.”

I would also ask you to recognize that proportional payouts are not automatically a sign of greed or other moral failing by a venue operator. If you haven’t looked at the whole picture, please look again.


Hitting The Far Seats

A few solutions to the “even coverage” problem, as it relates to distance.

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 article, like the one before it, isn’t really “small venue” in nature. However, I think it’s good to spend time on audio concepts which small-venue folk might still run across. I’m certainly not “big-time,” but I still do the occasional show that involves more people and space. I (like you) really don’t need to get engaged with a detailed discussion regarding an enormous system that I probably won’t ever get my hands on, but the fundamentals of covering the people sitting in the back are still valuable tools.

This article is also very much a follow up to the piece linked above. Via that lens, you can view it as a discussion of what the viable options are for solving the difficulties I ran into.

So…

The way that you get “throw” to the farthest audience members is dependent upon the overall PA deployment strategy you’re using. Deployment strategies are dependent upon the gear in question being appropriate for that strategy, of course; You can’t choose to deploy a bunch of point-source boxes as a line-array and have it work out very well. (Some have tried. Some have thought it was okay. I don’t feel comfortable recommending it.)

Option 1: Single Arrival, “Point Source” Flavor

You can build a tall stack or hang an array with built-in, non-changeable angles, but both cases use the same idea: Any given audience member should really only hear one box (per side) at a time. Getting the kind of directivity necessary for that to be strictly true is quite a challenge at lower frequencies, so the ideal tends to not be reached. Nevertheless, this method remains viable.

I’ve termed this deployment flavor as “single arrival” because all sound essentially originates at the same distance from any given audience member. In other words, all the PA loudspeakers for each “side” are clustered as closely as is practical. The boxes meant to be heard up close are run at a significantly lower level than the boxes meant to cover the far-field. A person standing 50 feet from the stage might be hearing a loudspeaker making 120 dB SPL at 3 feet, whereas the patrons sitting 150 feet away would be hearing a different box – possibly stacked atop the first speaker – making 130 dB SPL at 3 feet. As such, the close-range listener is getting about 96 dB SPL, and the far-field audience member also hears a show at roughly 96 dB SPL.

This solution is relatively simple in some respects, though it requires the capability of “zone” tuning, as well as loudspeakers capable of high-output and high directivity. (You don’t want the up-close audience to get cooked by the loudspeaker that’s making a ton of noise for the long-distance people.)

Option 2: Single Arrival, Line-Array Flavor

As in the point source flavor, you have one array deployed “per side,” with each individual box as close to the other boxes as is achievable. The difference is that an honest-to-goodness line-array is meant to work by the audible combination of multiple loudspeakers. At very close distances, it may be possible to only truly hear a small part of the line, and this does help in keeping the nearby listeners from having their faces ripped off. However, the overall idea is to create a radiation pattern that resembles a section of a cylinder. (Perfect achievement of such a pattern isn’t really feasible.) This is in contrast to point-source systems, where the pattern tends towards a section of a sphere.

As is the case in many areas of life, everything comes down to surface area. A sphere’s surface area is 4*pi*radius^2, whereas the lateral surface area of a cylinder is 2*pi*radius*height. The perceived intensity of sound is the audible radiation spread across the surface area of the radiation geometry. More surface area means less intensity.

To keep the calculations manageable, I’ll have to simplify from sections of shapes to entire shapes. Even so, some comparisons can be made: At a distance of 150 feet, the sound power radiating in a spherical pattern is spread over a surface area of 282,743 square feet. For a 10-foot high cylinder, the surface area is 9424 square feet.

For the sphere, 4 watts of sound power (NOT electrical power!) means that a listener at the 150 foot radius gets a show that’s about 71 dB. For the cylinder, the listener at 100 feet should be getting about 86 dB. At the close-range distance of 50 feet, the cylindrical radiation pattern results in a sound level of 91 dB, whereas a spherical pattern gets 81 dB.

Putting aside for the moment that I’m assuming ideal and mathematically easy conditions, the line-array has a clear advantage in terms of consistency (level difference in the near and far fields) without a lot of work at tuning individual boxes. At the same time, it might not be quite as easily customizable as some point-source configurations, and a real line-source capable of rock-n-roll volume involves a good number of relatively expensive elements. Plus, a real line has to be flown, and with generous trim height as well.

Option 3: Multiple Arrival, Any Flavor

This is otherwise known as “delays.” At some convenient point away from the main PA system, a supplementary PA is set. The signal to that supplementary PA is made to be late, such that the far system aligns pleasingly with the sound from the main system. The hope is that most people will overwhelmingly hear one system over the other.

The point with this solution is to run everything more quietly and more evenly by making sure that no audience member is truly in the deep distance. If each PA only has to cover a distance of 75 feet, then an SPL of 90 dB at that distance requires 118 dB at 3 feet.

The upside to this approach is that the systems don’t have to individually be as powerful, nor do they strictly need to have high-directivity (although it’s quite helpful in keeping the two PA systems separate for the listeners behind the delays). The downside is that it requires more space and more rigging – whether actual rigging or just loudspeakers raised on poles, stacks, or platforms. Additionally, you have to deal with more signal and/ or power runs, possibly in difficult or high-traffic areas. It also requires careful tuning of the delay time to work properly, and even then, being behind or to the side of the delays causes the solution to be invalid. In such a condition where both systems are quite audible, the coherence of the reproduced audio suffers tremendously.


If I end up trying the Gallivan show again, I think I’ll go with delays. I don’t have the logistical resources to handle big, high-output point-source boxes or a real array. I can, on the other hand, find a way to boxes up on sticks with delay applied. I can’t say that I’m happy about the potential coherence issues, but everything in audio is a compromise in some way.


Failure To Failure

Break, fix, break, fix, break…

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.

Churchill once said that “Success is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.”

That’s also one of the best descriptions available for live sound and live music in general.

If you’re going to ever relax and enjoy the process of mixing a real show in a real room, I can tell you that you MUST embrace not getting everything right (especially not on the first try). This does not, in any way, negate my persistent insistence that you must plan and prepare carefully. What all the planning and prep does is prevent the inevitable failure or misstep from being catastrophic. It gets you closer to being exactly right on the first try, but it will rarely (if ever) actually take you all the way there and drop you off at the curb.

To be a live-sound mix-creature means living a life of screwing up and fixing that screw up, iteratively and in real time. Eventually, you get the mix to a place where you can live with it. You may even settle the show’s sound into a state where you love it. Those moments are sublime, and the more you combine a dedication to your craft AND working with great players, the more of those moments you get. It’s just that there’s always a bit of a journey to go on to reach that little bit of paradise, show to show. The process isn’t necessarily painful – sometimes it’s as simple as pushing a few faders up, unconsciously realizing that the channel level isn’t quite right until you reach the correct blend.

Of course, at other times you’ll be sitting there, wielding a parametric EQ like a sledgehammer as you try to figure out why the weird resonance in the stage-right acoustic guitar just won’t go away.

Not everybody finds it easy to accept this. I was dragged in kicking and screaming. For those of us who like to plan everything out neatly, the tendency of live shows to twist and squirm their way out of our carefully created holding pens is monstrously disconcerting.

At first.

After a while, though, you get used to the idea that the plan will get you started, and then you’ll throw it out almost as a matter of course. Figuring it out as you go becomes almost routine.

This also applies at the macro level. I just launched Concerts By Danny, a site that’s a platform for presenting shows that I’m either producing or just working for. There are public and private “sides” to the site, with the private side being a platform for managing the various logistical pieces that go into making a concert happen. As a whole, the thing is unfinished. It’s a classic case of jumping off the cliff and building a plane on the way down.

And I’m scared that the whole thing will blow up in my face. It’s very easy to fail at live music, especially when it comes to putting on shows of your own. The whole idea might be a complete boondoggle. There are times when I feel utterly stymied, thinking about all the ways the entire idea could go completely wrong and be a huge waste of time. To this point, though, I’ve managed to push past the fear and continue moving forward.

I tell myself, “The worst that can happen is that everything will completely suck, and it’s unlikely that absolutely everything will crash and burn, so…whatever. Let’s see what happens.”

And interestingly, that’s about the worst thing that can happen to the mix of a live band. So, what do you do? Well, you try to figure out which thing is causing you the most trouble, and then you try to correct it. And then you do that for the next problem, and the next problem, and so on. Eventually, you get something that works – or you realize that you’re on a dead-end street, and you cut your losses.

The point is to keep moving and to stay interested, from fader move to fader move, EQ change to EQ change, and from show to show.


A Monitor Layout For A Rock Show

Sometimes you’re thinking about audio, and sometimes not.

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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The picture attached to this article is an important reference point for the text. What you’re looking at is a scale drawing of the stage and monitor rig for the Sons Of Nothing: Clarity 10th Anniversary show.

So…why did it all end up like that?

The first thing that drives monitor placement is the stage layout – or, more precisely, where the actual players are going to be. In general, what we want to do with wedges comes down to one, simple rule: We want the loudspeaker output to hit whoever is supposed to be listening to it, while hitting as little of anything else as possible.

Of course, that rule gets bent (or simply taken outside and used for target practice with heavy artillery and wiffle bats) for various reasons, but it’s the starting point.

Down front, the plan was to have up to three people in play at any given moment. A guitarist downstage right, a solo vocal or solo guitar downstage right center, and a bassist parked down center. The down left riser was a dedicated space for a separate “keys and guitar” world. Center right was to be the land of woodwinds.

Upstage was split because of a need to run video. Sons Of Nothing uses projection as a key part of the concert, and in this case, front-projection was the order of the day. That meant that we needed a clear shot for the projector to fire “through” the band and onto the back wall. To get that open space, we put the drum riser off to the stage right side, and the backup-vocal riser went the opposite way.


Now, with the rule that I stated above, the natural inclination would be to always get a loudspeaker delivering a foldback mix as close to the players as could be physically managed. That’s not a bad rule of thumb. In fact, that’s a huge advantage of in-ears; You get to put the monitors so close to the player that they are partially inside their head, and only deliver usable output to that musician.

But an important realization is that live-sound is not actually about the best sound, as divorced from everything else. Rather, what we’re trying to do is create the best show, which is a holistic exercise.

Hence, the three downstage wedges were set on the floor, rather than up on the deck. The difference in distance was negligible, but a couple of very nice advantages were gained. Advantage 1 was that the loudspeakers no longer had as much physical contact with the riser, so they didn’t transfer as much vibration to the stage. Advantage 2 was that rather more of the main riser was available for actual people and the things they need to have to play well – like guitar-effect pedal boards.

A natural tendency is to set a player’s wedge such that it’s centered in front of them. In most circumstances, this is a reasonable idea. With a mono mix, most people like getting the output into both ears equally. There’s a problem, though, when keyboards enter into the equation. Physically, they’re pretty big and solid, and thus are very good at blocking the oh-so-critical “intelligibility frequencies” from a loudspeaker. Plus, keyboards can’t hear. It’s waste of output to fire a wedge into the bottom of a keys setup.

That’s why the keys wedge is off to the side. That placement allowed the sound from the drivers to have a clearer path to an actual human ear. A big help with making that placement work was the use of supercardioid-pattern microphones. Their pickup null points are at an angle to the rear of the mic (rather than straight back) and they have a tighter pattern in general. That helps significantly in being able to get enough output from a box that’s coming in from a diagonal. (With supercardioids and a monitor directly in front of the player, having the mic parallel with the floor helps to get that wedge firing into the least sensitive areas of the pattern.)

I would have liked to have put the keys wedge on the floor, but I was worried that the necessary distance for a good angle would be too much of a tradeoff.


Talking about the upstage folks, it might seem a bit weird that the backup-vocal wedge was set so that the riser partially blocked its output. There is an explanation though. First, I was concerned about chewing up real-estate on that platform, because there wasn’t much to go around. Second, some blockage from the riser was actually helpful. Plenty of sound that needed to get to the vocalists’ ears could still get there, with “splash” from the back wall mostly heading up into the acoustically treated ceiling. If the wedge had been up on the riser with the singers, there would have been a lot more spatter in general, and a lot of those reflections might have headed directly for the vocal mic in keyboard land.

The drumfill was an exercise in compromise. From a purely audio-centric perspective, it would probably have been best to to put things on the stage-left side of the drummer, with the full-range wedge off the sub and pointed upwards. The backup vocalists wouldn’t get blasted with the drummer’s monitor mix, and excess spill would go up into the ceiling. Unfortunately, logistics got in the way of this. Most of the square-footage on the drum riser was needed for…you know…drums, and so the “idealized” drumfill setup was too greedy for space. It also would have made it very hard, or maybe even impossible for the percussionist to enter from stage left as was planned. Stacking the drumfill on the left would have blocked the video.

So, a tall stack on the up-right corner was the solution.


One bit that I haven’t yet discussed is that lonely subwoofer that’s just upstage of center. What the heck is that?

Well, remember that down-center was the bass-player’s territory. As an additional wrinkle, no bass backline was brought in, except for a wireless rig. Such being the case, we needed to ensure that adequate low-end was produced for the folks on stage. Sonically, it would have been better to push the subwoofer downstage a bit (to reduce the time-arrival difference between the low-frequency information and everything else), but it seemed more important overall that it just not be in the way. So, I set the box flush with the drum riser, dialed the internal crossover for about 90 – 100 Hz, pulled the high-pass output to the down-center wedge, and the bassist ended up with a triamped monitor rig that could make some rumble without being run hard.

As far as I could tell, the overall setup was a success. Now, if only the woodwinds monitor hadn’t become unplugged at an unhelpful time…