Tag Archives: Listening

Getting Total Control Of Loud Is Even More Loud

Pushing 10 dB ahead of stage garble can be punishing for the crowd.

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 believe it was Mark Hellinger who once said that audio engineers don’t feel like they’ve got real control over a show until the PA is 10 dB louder than everything else. I’m pretty sure he was right, both due to my own experience and a bit of SPL math.

When adding SPL levels, you use the formula: 10 * log10(10^SPLa/10 + 10^SPLb/10 + …) to get your answer. So, if the sound from the stage is 100 dB SPL, and the PA is also making 100 dB SPL, you get 10 * log10(10^10 + 10^10), or 103 dB SPL. The implication there – beyond things simply getting louder – is that the sonic contribution from the stage is quite large in proportion to the FOH PA system. Wind up FOH to 110 dB SPL, and something curious happens. You end up with 10 * log10(10^10 + 10^11), or 110.4 dB. See that? The 110 dB from FOH essentially overwhelms the wash from the deck.

Great, right?

But think about how loud that is. Then, think about how loud it is if the band is REALLY cookin’, and monitor world is on the gas. You might have a band making 105 dB SPL or more. Thus, if you want to “get control” with FOH, you have to get things barking at 7 – 10 dB above that level. One hundred and fifteen decibels across the board (not just subwoofer material) is not much fun to most folks.

You have to watch out for your tendency to try for an FOH takeover all the time. It will often be your first instinct. It’s often mine. Even though I’ve managed to put it somewhat into check, I still have a strong bent towards guessing too high. I especially guess too high when there’s a lot of musically uncorrelated noise, like audience chatter. That’s not what I want to listen to, and I unconsciously build my mix around drowning out the conversation. Sometimes, folks are okay with that. At other times…not so much.

Be mindful of the numbers. Try to be careful. Have the idea that not being in total control of the sonic experience is okay, because the cost of total control may be marked discomfort for everyone around you.


Gig Log: IAMA LCS (April 6, 2018)

A miniature reunion of players from Fats.

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.

What Went Well

  • The people you know: Who doesn’t love working with people who’s music they enjoy? I knew going in that I was going to like the tunes and be familiar with the (very solid) players involved.
  • Unexpected help is always appreciated: I didn’t have my usual, trusty, IAMA LCS sidekick Lonnie handy on the show, but I tried to allow myself extra time. Then, about halfway through the setup, Chris showed up and gave that final push to get everything ready with time to spare. Hooray!
  • Three cheers for check going as planned: Everybody was around for soundcheck on schedule, so we could run in the correct order (reverse, that is, where the first act checks last). The initial dial-up went fast, so we had lots of breathing room between then and the show. Oh can’t every gig be like this from now on?
  • When the mixes for the bands did settle down, I felt like they had this nice, “Jazzy” quality. What I mean by that is the sound was very much about the interplay of material from about 150 Hz to 10 kHz; A sort of “discerning person’s” tonality that’s about subtlety instead of power, boom, and sizzle.

What Could Have Been Better

  • Something’s not quite right, part 1: I didn’t notice in soundcheck that I had this weird buildup at around 500 Hz. It was actually pretty subtle, until it interacted in strange, intermittent ways with the vocals of Ischa from MiNX. It took me a long while to find and correct the problem – issues that aren’t steady-state are much tougher to address.
  • Something’s not quite right, part 2: Also with MiNX, the fine-tuning of the guitar/ vocal balance fought back more than I was used to. I started out much too gingerly with the guitar for the actual set. I overcorrected, overcorrected again (in the opposite direction), then got things mostly right by using some pretty dramatic compression, and then backed off the compression which wasn’t quite the ticket, so…
  • Whoa, Nelly: I came out of the gate a bit too “gangbusters” with the percussion for The Will Baxter Band, swamping the keys pretty badly until I got myself under control. In contrast, I was too light on the bass being played by Adam’s left hand, and had to keep reminding myself to give it the volume it deserved. (I thought it was all okay an hour before, I swear.)

Conclusion

I felt like I struggled a bit with the actual show, but everybody – including me – seemed to go home happy. It’s not like my own fun was ruined or anything. I was just a little surprised for a bit.


Listening To El Ridiculoso

Playing music over a system that’s been tuned as flat as possible is very illuminating.

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 now have El Ridiculoso all finished and set up at home. Mario put this gorgeous coat of epoxy paint on the boxes, lending them a lightly textured and glossy blackness that I love. After getting all the individual enclosures hooked up, I tuned the system to be as flat as I could get it. (El Ridiculoso’s final form is pretty darn linear from about 40 Hz to 15 kHz, with a good amount of usable information beyond even that.) With my tuning in place, I started doing some listening.

I’ll start off by saying this. Music played over a flat-as-you-can-get-it system is music examined under an electron microscope. It’s an image with the sharpness dialed all the way up. There is no escape from anything, no glossing over of this or that. It’s a sonic reality that plants itself an inch from your face, and then starts waving madly. Music with a lot of “traffic” – a lot happening at once – can almost be an overloading experience for your brain.

If it’s there, you WILL hear it.

You might be surprised at what isn’t there, by the way.

You might expect, for instance, that a modern, “rock-mix” of a band like Rush would have a lot of thundering bottom end. That’s not really the case. Even some pop-dubstep really isn’t that heavy “down there.” Overwhelming LF isn’t what makes the mixes work; What the mix stands or falls on is the absolutely crucial midrange. If you get, say, 250 Hz – 5 kHz wrong, you may as well forget about everything else.

…and that reality feeds into points I’ve been making about live audio for quite a while. It feeds into points that other people have been making for ages: The low end does matter, yes, but not as much as you think it does. Balancing the bottom to the rest of the audio makes for the best overall experience, but the first priority is to get the mids to be musical. There’s no substitute for that, and trying to cover up a debacle in the midrange space with a lot of *BOOM* just makes for annoyance. Real punch is the interplay between LF thud and higher-frequency definition. Clarity is a real thing that you really need, and scooping a mix hollow KILLS clarity.

Maybe a bigger subwoofer pile isn’t what you need. Maybe some more time sorting out the firestorm of aural data that lives above the bass range is time better spent.


Entering Flatland

I encourage live-audio humans to spend lots of time listening to studio monitors.

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.

Do you work in live-audio? Are you new to the field? An old hand? Somewhere in between?

I want to encourage you to do something.

I want you to get yourself a pair of basically decent studio monitors. They shouldn’t be huge, or expensive. They just have to be basically flat in terms of their magnitude response. Do NOT add a subwoofer. You don’t need LF drivers bigger than 8″ – anything advertised to play down to about 40 Hz or 50 Hz is probably fine.

I want you to run them as “flat” as possible. I want you to do as much listening with them as possible. Play your favorite music through them. Watch YouTube videos with them passing the audio. When you play computer games, let the monitors make all the noises.

I want you to get used to how they sound.

Oh, and try to tune your car stereo to sound like your studio monitors. If you can only do so coarsely, still do so.

Why?

Because I think it’s very helpful to “calibrate” yourself to un-hyped audio.

A real problem in live music is the tendency to try to make everything “super enhanced.” It’s the idea that loud, deep bass and razor-sharp HF information are the keys to good sound. There’s a problem, though. The extreme ends of the audible spectrum actually aren’t that helpful in concert audio. They are nice to have available, of course. The very best systems can reproduce all (or almost all) of the audible range at high volume, with very low distortion. The issue is over-emphasis. The sacrifice of the absolutely critical midrange – where almost all the musical information actually lives – on the altar of being impressive for 10 seconds.

I’m convinced that part of what drives a tendency to dial up “hyped” audio in a live situation is audio humans listening to similar tonalities when they’re off-duty. They build a recreational system that produces booming bass and slashing treble, yank the midrange down, and get used to that as being “right.” Then, when they’re louderizing noises for a real band in a real room, they try to get the same effect at large scale. This eats power at an incredible rate (especially the low-end), and greatly reduces the ability of the different musical parts to take their appointed place in the mix. If everything gets homogenized into a collection of crispy thuds, the chance of distinctly hearing everything drops like a bag of rocks tied to an even bigger rock that’s been thrown off a cliff made of other rocks.

But it does sound cool!

At first.

A few minutes in, especially at high volume, and the coolness gives way to fatigue.

In my mind, it’s a far better approach to try to get the midrange, or about 100 Hz to 5 kHz, really worked out as well as possible first. Then, you can start thinking about where you are with the four octaves on the top and bottom, and what’s appropriate to do there.

In my opinion, “natural” is actually much more impressive than “impressive,” especially when you don’t have massive reserves of output available. Getting a handle on what’s truly natural is much easier when that kind of sonic experience is what you’ve trained yourself to think of as normal and correct.

So get yourself some studio monitors, and make them your new reference point for what everything is supposed to sound like. I can’t guarantee that it will make you better at mixing bands, but I think there’s a real chance of it.


The Power Of The Solo Bus

It’s very handy to be able to pick part of a signal path and route that sound directly to your head.

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 Video

The Summary

Need to figure out which channel is making that weird noise in the midst of the chaos of a show? Wondering whether your drum mics have been switched around? Wish you could directly hear the signal running to the monitor mix that’s giving people fits? Your solo bus is here to save the day!


Sounding “Good” Everywhere

This is actually about studio issues, but hey…

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.

My latest article for Schwilly Family Musicians has to do with the recorded side of life. Even so, I thought some of you might be interested:

‘Even before the age of smartphones, “translation” was a big issue for folks making records. The question that was constantly asked was, “How do I make this tune sound good everywhere?”

In my mind, that’s the wrong question.

The real question is, “Does this mix continue to make sense, even if the playback system has major limitations?”’


Read the whole piece here.


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.


Hard Surface Blues

The Acoustical Environment: It matters.

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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On the 30th of December, 2015, my (previously) regular gig hosted its final show. The building is going away, and we had to be out. We had already done the final mainstage show in the downstairs venue, but we had to have one more blowout to celebrate as many of our musician friends as we possibly could.

The show was six and a half hours in length.

The show was also upstairs.

As the night went on, and also afterwards, I was relieved to hear that people were pleased with the way things sounded. I was relieved because, for most of the night, I was standing at the console with my metaphorical head in my hands, saying, “This is not working. This is NOT working. It’s all a garbled firestorm of reflections. This is not working.”

See, I was very much used to mixing in the mainstage room. That venue had a pretty fair amount of acoustical treatment to the stage area, yielding a “live-end, dead-end” sort of design that worked pretty nicely. With a mainstage show you still had plenty of monitor wash, but a LOT of on-deck audio really was soaked up before it started banging around the room like a rabid ping-pong ball. This was also helpful for the FOH PA, because a lot of its spill was also absorbed. Combine that with the live part of the room having a pretty-darn-okay “short, rock-n-roll reverb,” and it really wasn’t too hard to wrangle audio in the basement.

But the upstairs, oh my goodness…

The picture up there tells quite a bit of the story. No acoustical treatment. A flat, glass, upstage wall. All hard surfaces everywhere. Oh boy.

There are two things I want you to get from this.

Thing 1: The Acoustical Environment Has A Tremendous Impact On Your Show

Decent gear that’s right for the application really does matter, but in the end, the room acoustics make a lot of highly consequential decisions that are – shall we say – “tough to appeal.” The flattest, most sonically neutral PA and monitors in the world are still subject to whatever environment they’re fired into. A beautiful-sounding PA that’s being used in an acoustically hostile room is ALWAYS going to be a beautiful-sounding PA being used in an acoustically hostile room.

Room acoustics are so important, and have such a huge influence that there are pieces of music which were written specifically for certain BUILDINGS. As in, “we can play this organ piece on almost any decent pipe-organ, but it won’t actually sound right unless the organ is in this one church.”

Soviet reverb adjusts YOU, comrade.

Anyway.

When you drop a performance into a different room, the performance is going to sound different. Maybe wildly so. There are all kinds of things that can happen to you, but in general, be aware that more reflectivity tends to play greater havoc with music that’s fast, and/ or built on a “dense” arrangement. In order for that kind of music to work nicely, you have to be able to discern where different sounds begin and end. Reverberation works against that; It lengthens the decay-time of sonic events, causing those events to “smear” across themselves and each other. Don’t be surprised if you have to pull back on “supporting” sounds in order to provide adequate separation for critical, detail-driven audio (like vocals). With the room-sound filling in lots of small spaces that would otherwise provide some contrast, you may have to exaggerate some proportions in order to keep things intelligible.

And notice that I said, “pull back.” In a tough space, the answer is not to start at the usual volume and push the lead parts even higher. You may very well run out of PA, or monitors, or audience tolerance, or all of those before you arrive at a workable destination. Start quietly so you’ll have room to get things separated. “Headroom” is not just a term for electronics, you know.

Thing 2: No, You Can’t Fix Acoustics With EQ

Please realize that you CAN alleviate certain acoustical problems with EQ. Also, please realize that, in many situations, EQ will be the only tool you can meaningfully use to help deal with some room issues.

I’m not saying that EQ has no place, and not to use it.

What I AM saying is that EQ can’t actually fix acoustics.

I used my “flagship” console for the upstairs gig. My flagship console has more powerful and flexible EQ than any other mix-rig I’ve ever used. Believe me, I was making use of that power and flexibility for the show. The show would have been much worse if I hadn’t used the tools at my disposal…

…but the problems weren’t truly fixed. They were just made more tolerable.

Acoustical problems are “time” issues. A sonic event becomes a longer event, whether by audible, discrete repetition, smooth reverberation, or something in between. Equalization is a tool for changing magnitude. Yes, equalizers precipitate those magnitude changes by way of manipulating the time domain, but they are not a tool which is useful for managing time.

The best you can do with an equalizer is to get a troublesome reverberation buildup to drop into the “noise floor” faster. This is not because you’ve managed to fix the acoustical problem, but rather because your input to that acoustical problem has been reduced. The reverb time at, say, 500 Hz has not changed in any way. What you may have succeeded in doing is to make the events at 500 Hz a few dB quieter, such that their decaying intensity becomes less audible against everything else more quickly.

In some rooms that can be enough, and it can be done without making the rig sound truly strange. At some point, though, the problems are so bad that getting the reflections to disappear into the noise floor via EQ creates bizarre results. A PA with a giant chasm torn into the midrange may not cause a huge buildup of reverb in that bandwidth, but it will also be painfully obvious that the PA has had all that midrange tossed into the abyss. (Reverberation is not the creation of sonic events at a certain frequency, but rather the lengthening of them. Kill all the bottom end in a PA to deal with a boomy room, and the sound will be very thin. Room acoustics don’t fill in what isn’t there. They combine with what is.)

To truly fix a problematic room, you either have to alter the room’s acoustical characteristics or find a way to avoid interacting with them. All that is beyond the scope of this article, so just walk away with this in mind: Venue acoustics matter a lot, being louder doesn’t help, and electronic processing may or may not be enough for you to reach the sonic destination you want.


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?