Tag Archives: How-To

A Message To A Concerned House Tech

Take things personally, but not too much.

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 don’t know me, and I don’t know you. This is mostly because you’re not any particular person. You’re an aggregate character, an archetype that makes a regular appearance in one form or another. You have many avatars. These avatars ask questions, sometimes in person, sometimes on the Internet.

You’re worried.

You’ve been trying to do good work. You’re conscientious, always trying to get a better handle on your craft. You’ve had a string of shows that you felt good about, and then “it” happened. A band was booked at your place of work, and the results were nightmarish. The whole night felt like moving a rope by pushing it. You couldn’t get your mix to behave. The different parts wouldn’t blend together into a satisfying, holistic sound. Instead, you sat through several hours of sonic “Whack A Mole,” where one thing would be too loud, and then the next thing would be too loud, and then a whole other thing would be too loud.

In short, the show “fought” the whole way.

It was a roaring storm that improbably managed to combine shuddering murk with piercing shriek, and it made your ears hurt. It made other folks’ ears hurt. If you could have visualized the sonic splatter, it would have made a hyperactive toddler armed with pureed carrots and applesauce seem quite manageable.

You’re wondering if you’re any good at this audio stuff. You’re wondering if your reputation, and the reputation of the room you work for, have now been irreparably damaged. You may be storming around, barking exasperated questions like, “Why won’t musicians help me out? Why won’t they listen to me? What am I doing wrong?”

It’s good that you’re taking things personally. The truly awful people in the noise-louderization business don’t take any responsibility at all. They don’t bother to even consider if they should worry. They’re always right in their own mind, and you have managed to dodge that bullet. You want quality, and you’re willing to try for it. It bugs you when other folks aren’t on board. It worries you that maybe you don’t have a magic touch with audio; If you did, wouldn’t you be assured of perfectly consistent results?

I’ve been down this road. I still travel across it from time to time. I want to tell you to keep worrying, but not so much that you can’t put the worry aside and enjoy things.

Because, especially in live sound, you can’t fix stupid.

I realize that sounds very harsh. We’re supposed to be friends with, and respect musicians, and to say such a thing might bear the appearance of contempt. But it’s not contempt. It’s simply recognizing that the life of an audio human is to translate to the audience what’s already there (especially if you’re in a smallish room, where the band’s acoustical contribution is overwhelmingly high). If what’s already there isn’t much good, then everybody’s out of luck.

Our profession has a tendency to be compared to studio engineering. We use very similar tools. The basic vocabulary is the same. Shouldn’t we be able to overcome any difficulty? Get any drum or guitar sound we like? Tame any runaway sonic event? Massage any fractured ensemble into a respectable, even enjoyable gestalt?

Well, no, actually, because different disciplines can share both tools and vocabulary.

I have said this many times, but I will say it again. We are at the mercy of limited power, limited volume tolerance, and limited gain-before-feedback. The studio guys get to live in a world where all the audience hears is what comes through open-loop, after-the-fact playback. We, on the other hand, occupy that portion of the universe where life is realtime, where every part of the system interacts with and potentially destabilizes some other part of the system, and where completely reinventing the band would require us to be so loud as to require everyone to wear both earplugs and gun muffs.

The way the band sounds naturally is pretty much how they’re going to sound with a PA. A great PA, with truly top-shelf FOH control, in a very big room (or outside) will give you more options, but not infinite possibilities. Physics is a harsh mistress, because she makes no exceptions, but she is also a fair and ultimately predictable creature – also due to her not making any exceptions. As you get better and better at your craft, you will more readily identify just how much you can help a band along with what you have. You should use this power tastefully and wisely. You should ask yourself if you’ve done everything you know how to do, because that’s part of being a pro.

But you shouldn’t agonize, because you can’t fix stupid. None of us can. I have never, and you will never make a bad band sound good. It’s physically impossible. If you “make” a band sound good, the band probably wasn’t actually bad. (Remember that last bit. It’s very important.)

So, keep being conscientious. Keep asking yourself how you can get better. Keep showing up on time and doing your homework. Keep taking a personal interest in a show having a great outcome.

And realize that there will be things you can’t fix. As long as you did everything that was prudent to do, you can’t blame yourself. There are people who won’t get that, but most of them probably won’t be signing your paycheck. Let the rough experiences sweeten those times when the band is so good that you can’t possibly screw it up.

Keep on mixing.


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.


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.


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.

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

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.


Deterministic Troubleshooting

Audio systems can be counted on to be deterministic in every practical way, but you can’t always count on them to be the same system.

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.

In my experience, audio systems are deterministic creatures at the practical level.

That is to say, giving the system an input results in getting an output which has always been transformed in the same way. Introduce an input into a perfectly linear system which runs through a +6 dB gainstage, and you can count on getting your input, +6 dB, at the output. Give your input to a system with a nonlinear transfer function and a +6 dB gainstage, and you can be confident that the other end of the system will spit out your input signal, plus the filtering of the transfer function, and +6 dB of level.

I am, of course, excluding noise.

Electronic self-noise, if you’re being really picky, displays “random” behavior. The overall level and frequency content is statistically predictable, but the exact output at any given instant can’t be precisely foreseen. If you include the noise in your description of the output, then yes, you can argue that a sound system is non-deterministic.

But, let’s be real. At a mental level, whether we’re listening to a system or describing its behavior, we subtract the noise. There’s also the whole matter of best practices dictating that systems should be run in such a way that the noise is insignificant when compared to the signals, which makes that mental subtraction trivial.

Anyway – as far as I can tell, audio systems are deterministic in every way that really matters.

This, and a somewhat surprising component of it, can inform our concepts of troubleshooting.

Apparent Non-Determinism Makes Life Difficult

Notice that I said, “apparent.”

See, I was originally going to write this article by saying that a sound rig displaying non-deterministic behavior is one of the toughest things to troubleshoot. However, in thinking about things more fully, I’ve come to the conclusion that audio setups aren’t really capable of being non-deterministic. They can SEEM to become non-deterministic, but they aren’t actually. What truly happens is that you expected one particular system, but actually have something else.

Let’s say that you set up a FOH PA system. Everything is working nicely. You give it an input, and you get the output you expect from the loudspeakers. Groovy.

Then, when you’re not looking, somebody accidentally pulls the connection that links the console with all the downstream bits. Unaware of this, you return to FOH control and give the system an input. The output is silence. It’s not the output you expected, but the system hasn’t entered a non-deterministic state. Rather, what you have is a different system: A system that ends at the console. A mixing console that can’t pass its signals to an output transducer has an acoustical gain of 0. (Not 0 dB! A gain of 0. The signal is multiplied by 0. Any signal multiplied by 0 is 0.) The system, in truth, is both entirely deterministic and highly predictable. Any input to it results in no acoustical output.

So, no, the rig isn’t non-deterministic – it’s just not the system you expected to be in place. There is a reason that the setup is not behaving as expected, and that reason (a disconnected cable, in this case) can be isolated and corrected.

I recognize that this is small comfort to those of you, including me, who have been faced with intermittent problems. Intermittent failures are the hardest to fix, and the most nail-biting to endure, because you’re up against something that APPEARS to be non-deterministic. The output from a given input becomes unpredictable. You might be just fine for hours, and then things go very wrong, and then you’re fine for a few minutes, and then something else happens, and your blood-pressure goes through the roof.

Basically, you’re trying to debug multiple systems without knowing which system you’re currently debugging. (Good luck with that.) This is why I have been known to breathe a sigh of relief when a rig “breaks,” and has the decency to then STAY broken. When that happens, I only have to troubleshoot one system; A deterministic system which either has no output, or some output which is obviously and predictably not what I want.

If you’re faced with an audio setup that appears to be doing things at random, what you really have is – very likely – more than one system. Those systems are trading places at unpredictable times. Every one of those systems is deterministic, so what you have to do is stop all systems but one from manifesting themselves. If you can directly get that one system to be the setup that gives you the desired output, that’s great. If you can’t, though, that’s really okay. Even if the output isn’t what you ultimately want, causing your assemblage of gear to settle into one stable state will give you the leverage necessary to figure out what’s wrong and fix it. If the system seems to be non-deterministic, do what you have to do to make it appear to be as deterministic as it actually is. You’ll be back in control, and control is what you need in order to get things working again.


Buzzkill

Ridding yourself of hum and buzz is like all other troubleshooting: You have to isolate the problem to fix it.

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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Not all hums and buzzes are equally bad. Honeybees hum and buzz, but they’re super-helpful creatures that are generally interested in being left alone and making honey. Wasps, like the one pictured above, are aggressive jerks.

Of course, this site isn’t about insects. It’s about audio, where hum and buzz mean problems. Unwanted noise. Blech.

I recently got an email from a friend who wanted to know how to de-buzzify (I just made that word up) a powered mixer. When you mercilessly distill what I told him, you come up with a basic truth that covers all of troubleshooting:

The probability of an effective fix for a problem is directly proportional to your ability to isolate the problem.

Solitude

The importance of finding the exact location of a fault is something that I don’t believe I can overemphasize. It’s the key to all the problem-solving I’ve ever had to do. It doesn’t matter if the problem is related to audio signal flow, car trouble, or computer programming; if you can actually nail down the location of the problem, you’ve got a real shot at an effective (and elegant) fix.

The reverse is also true. The less able you are to pinpoint your conundrum’s place of residence, the more likely you are to end up doing surgery with a sledgehammer. If you can’t zero-in on a root cause, you end up “fixing” a certain amount of things that aren’t actually being troublesome. The good news is that you can usually take an iterative approach. All problems begin with “this system isn’t working as I expected,” which is a completely non-specific view – but they don’t have to end there. The key is to progressively determine whether each interrelated part of the system is contributing to the issue or not. There are lots of ways to do this, but all the possible methods are essentially an expression of one question:

“Is the output of this part of the system what I expect it to be?”

So…here’s a way to apply this to buzz and hum problems.

Desperately Seeking Silence

Talking in depth about the exact electrical whys and wherefores surrounding strange and unwanted noises is a little bit beyond my experience. At a general level, though, the terminology of “ground loop” provides a major clue. Voltage that should be taking a direct path to ground is instead taking a “looping” or “circuitous” path. A common cause of this is equipment receiving mains (“wall”) power from two different circuits, where each path to mains ground has a significantly different impedance. There is now a voltage potential between the two pieces of gear.

Bzzzzzzzz….

You can also have a situation where two device’s audio grounds are interconnected such that there is a potential between the two devices.

Hmmmmmmzzzzzzzz…

Anyway.

The first thing to do is to decide what piece of equipment you’re testing against. Maybe it’s a mixing console. Maybe it’s an amplifier. Whatever it is, you are asking the question from before:

“Is the output of this part of the system what I expect it to be?”

Or, more specifically…

“I expect this device’s output to be quiet, unless an audio signal is present. Is that the case?”

To answer that question, you need isolation.

WARNING: At NO point should you do anything to disconnect the mains-power/ safety grounds from your equipment. It’s there to prevent you from dying if the equipment chassis should become energized. In fact, as a start, try to verify that the mains-power sockets you are using actually DO provide a connection to “earth.” If they don’t, stop using them until they’re fixed. You may even find that your noise problem goes away.

To get isolation, start by disconnecting as much as you possibly can from the DUT (the Device Under Test). Of course, you’ve got to have some kind of way to monitor the output, so that might mean that you can’t disconnect everything. As much as possible, try to ensure that all mains-power grounds offer the same impedance – if it must stay connected, and it requires mains power, get all the power to connect to the same socket. A multi-outlet power tap can come in handy for this.

Is the output what you expect?

If yes, then something which was connected to your DUT’s input has a good chance of being the problem. At this point, if possible, treat each potential culprit as a secondary DUT in turn. If feasible, connect each suspect directly to your monitoring solution. If the ground loop manifests itself, and the suspect device requires mains power, try getting power from the same tap that the primary DUT is on. If the loop goes away, you’ve established that the two devices in play were likely having an “unequal impedance to ground” problem. If the loop stays in effect, you can jump back up to the beginning of this process and try again, but with the gear you had just plugged in as the new, primary DUT. You can keep doing this, “moving up the stack” of things to test until you finally isolate the piece of gear that’s being evil. (IMPORTANT: Any piece of the chain could be your problem source. This includes cables. You may need to pack a lunch if you have a lot of potential loop-causers to go through.)

If you can’t get the buzz to manifest when adding things back one at a time, then you might have a multi-device interaction. If possible, work through every possible combination of input connections until you get your noise to happen.

But what if the output on the original DUT was NOT what you expected, even with everything pulled off the output side?

At that point, you know that an input device isn’t the source of your trouble with this particular DUT. This is good – your problem is becoming isolated to a smaller and smaller pool of possibilities.

Try to find an alternate way to connect to your monitoring solution, like a different cable. If the problem goes away, that locates the cable as the menace. If you’re switching the connection, and the noise remains with no audio path, then the monitoring system has the problem and you need to restart with a new DUT. (If you’ve got a mixer connected to an amp and a speaker, and a ground loop stays audible when the mixer-to-amp connection is broken, then the amp is your noise source.)

If you’ve tried all that and you still have the buzz, it’s time to try a different circuit. Get as far away from the original mains-power socket as you can, and reproduce the minimal setup. If the ground-loop goes away, then you may have a site-wiring issue that’s local to the original socket(s). If the problem doesn’t go away, it’s time to take a field-trip to another building. It’s possible to have a site-wide electrical problem.

If the loop still won’t resolve, it’s very likely that your DUT has an internal fault that needs attention. Whether that means repair or replace is an exercise left to the reader.

Hopefully, you don’t get to that point – but you won’t figure out if you ARE at that point unless you can isolate your problem.


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.


On The Identification and Fixing of Live Show Arrangement Problems

An article I wrote for Schwilly Family Musicians.

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.

From the article:

“…In other words, arrangement quality is INVERSELY proportional to the musical corrective action required of the sound tech. Great bands with great arrangements don’t require me to fix anything. I just have to translate the songs through the PA – and actually, that’s a pretty good analogy. With a bad arrangement, I have to go beyond just helping the “onstage language” interface with “audience language.” If I’m able, I also have to correct the original grammar, fact-check, rewrite for clarification, and THEN translate.”

Read the whole thing here, for free.


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.

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

(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?


A Public Decision

The public may or may not treat a place in accordance with what an establishment is called, or what that establishment looks like.

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.

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

I’ve talked about this before. It’s a theme that I’ve returned to in various places. I’m covering it again because I think that it could do with having its own space. I find it to be especially relevant when the “periodic wave of blaming” comes back around to the idea that venues don’t promote live-music enough. I’ve covered that idea from different angles, with my current favorite approach being to point out that advertising is primarily for people who are already interested in something. (For instance, it makes sense to run broadcast-media ads for cars if you’re selling in the United States, because people in the USA are very likely to be car drivers.)

More to the point is pushing back against the idea that a place which hosts live-music can just decide to be a place where there’s a ton of “walk up” traffic. What I mean by “walk up traffic” is the phenomenon of people going to a public establishment for the establishment itself, rather than because a particular event is taking place at the location. The former is the traditional model for a bar, and the latter is the traditional model for a live-music venue. The point of consternation is the unspoken assumption that the public is magically compelled to abide by whatever label that the establishment has chosen for itself. If the public must accept that label, then the business not experiencing patronage consistent with that label must mean that the business is doing something wrong. If the business is doing something wrong, then getting something different to happen is just a matter of fixing whatever has gone awry. (The attitude seems to be that a proprietor can just advertise their way out of a difficulty.)

But this is not what my experience suggests. Over the past several years, I have come to strongly believe that the establishment’s chosen label is irrelevant in the face of what the public decides. Obviously, a business that is very strongly geared in one way or another will tend to be perceived in accordance with the setup. However, the lines are not always sharp and bright. Especially when an establishment has mixed methods for generating income, it can be easy to misjudge the primary view that the public takes of the business.

Is This A Music Place With A Drinking Service?

In the case of a bar or club, there are two major categories that the public can assign:

1) A place for drinking and socialization that offers music as an additional service.

2) A place for music that offers drinking and socialization as an additional service.

Whatever ends up being the primary pull to get folks in the door is what the establishment becomes. If the public’s consciousness labels a place as being a hangout – a spot you go to because it’s just generally fun to go there – then that’s how the business will operate. People just show up, and so booking live music is an exercise in figuring out what will keep the “walk-ups” in the building for a longer time. Flip that around, and the ballgame is very different. If the public decides that the business is a music venue that just happens to serve refreshments, then booking live music becomes the process of figuring out which bands draw a crowd. After that gets settled, the food and drink equation is worked to maximize what the already-drawn crowd will buy.

Different bands thrive in different environments. Groups that are more about getting paid for musicianship tend to be better served by a “hangout” model, whereas groups that are built on nurturing their own specific audience are more suited to a straight-up music venue.

Research Beats Assumptions

Where this becomes hairy is when assumptions are made. There are plenty of bands out there who are content to accept the designation that was originally applied by the proprietors, or the label that the band thinks is applicable. This can be a kind of self-deception. There are musicians who look at a place with a prominent bar, and immediately assume that the place runs on a walk-up traffic model. Remember, though, that the public has the final say. If the public has decided that the business is a music venue that happens to offer tasty food and cool beverages, they are unlikely to just show up to see what’s going on. Rather, they will stay home (or go somewhere else) until their favored band is booked in the room. THEN they’ll show up.

I suppose that a natural question to answer is how to tell one business from another. One starting point is to try to determine the focus regarding the band. A place with lots of production support (and/ or a stage that makes the band the focal point of the room) has a high chance of being treated as a music venue. A place where everything except music seems to be the focal point has a good probability of being perceived as a hangout. You have to couple this with a business query, though, because it’s possible for an establishment to be set up one way while the public treats it the opposite way. If you ask how many folks show up regularly on a particular night of the week, and get a firm number, then you might just be dealing with a place for drinking and socialization that offers music as an extra. (Geography matters of course, as well as whether or not there’s some kind of “house band” involved.) If your question returns an answer with a lot of variance, or just a general lack of certainty, you probably have a “music venue” on your hands.

In the end, the trick is to know how the public treats the business, and what works for you.