Tag Archives: Mixing

Mercenary Maxims: Part 5

There are times when the bizarre, convention-breaking approach is what you need to survive.

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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Sometimes the only way out is through… through the hull.

You and I both have probably done it: Looked at the control settings on a console, loudspeaker manager, or really any piece of audio gear and thought: “What in blazes was this person thinking?” It’s not entirely without justification. There’s a general range of ideas in audio that make sense, and getting outside that range can indicate that someone doesn’t know what they’re doing.

It especially indicates that someone doesn’t know what they’re doing when a very odd configuration is dialed up without any listening being done. If you add to that an inability of the operator to explain why they did something (beyond “I always do it this way,” or “So and so did this”), then you have a good indication that the heterodox approach in play might not be advisable.

But what if they CAN explain why they’ve done something weird? What if they have listened, listened indeed, and come to the conclusion that the way to best get through the show is to really, REALLY twist the knobs? In such a case, the total acoustical result – what you can hear, in other words – is the deciding factor about something being “right.”

Orthodox methodologies are a proper starting point. Going into the solving of an audio problem with a rational baseline helps with not solving the original problem AND a new one before you’ve made any real progress. What you have to watch out for, though, is the belief that “this should sound right because the knobs are pointing in a reasonable direction.” That’s not always true. I’ve said before that I’ve been in stage-wash situations where high-pass filters were set in the kHz range. The settings looked wrong, but sounded much cleaner than the alternative. I’ve had reverbs fed from pre-fader sends when they were wanted in monitor wedges. Post-fade is the normal way to go, yes, but you have to take a different route if your options are limited and you don’t want the verb in the wedges to change as your FOH mix changes.

Sometimes you have to cut your way out. The important thing is to get the experience necessary to know when doing something drastic is truly required, and also to know when it’s neither required nor justified.

 

 


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.


I’ve Never Disliked The Sound Of A Console

There are plenty of controls I didn’t like, though…

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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’ve talked about this before, but it’s on my mind again.

As of today, I’ve clocked nearly 24 years of involvement in live audio. In that time, I’ve had hands-on time with mixers by Ramsa, Peavey, JBL, Behringer, Soundcraft, A&H, Yamaha, Tascam, Avid, Solid State Logic, Amek, Neve, and…ah…and…at least one more that I can’t remember for some reason. Some of them were worth tens of dollars. Some of them were worth tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. Some of them were analog. Some of them were digital.

I never once had a problem with how any of them “sounded.” I have never been in a situation with a real band in a real room and said to myself, “Gee, this would sound so much better if I had a [consoleName].”

I’ve disliked control layouts, though. I’ve wondered why the big, fancy, industry darling didn’t have conveniences that a console costing less than 1/10th of it had. I’ve encountered fixed-width midrange EQs that were metaphorical equivalents to carving a turkey with a tractor-trailer hauling 17 tons of other, very alive and extremely enraged turkeys bent on world domination HUMANS, YOUR HUBRIS WILL END YOU! WE ARE COMING! GOBBLEGOBBLEGOBBLE!

Sorry, what were we talking about?

Yes, I’ve encountered some consoles that sounded terrible because an internal connection had worked loose, or a button contact was grunged up. When everything was working, though, all the mixers in my experience have passed audio just as well as anything else. Then, that audio hit outboard processing, loudspeakers, and acoustical environments, and all bets were off. There are plenty of people who might ask, “What console do we need to buy to make this place sound better?” and I might answer:

“Forget the console. You need a bulldozer, municipal construction permits, an architecture firm, and a bunch of money to build a room that’s actually suited to live music.”

I can not recall a single instance in my life where I disliked the sound of a show and could confidently attribute that dislike to a deficiency in the basic audio-handling properties of a mixing desk. Operators, input/ output transduction, and environmental factors are sonic influencers possessing orders of magnitude more significance.


Rusty Halos And Screaming Feedback

Your biases can kick your own butt.

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 am sometimes hired to go in and fix things.

Such was the case with a recent event at a small but classy amphitheater. The show promoters had brought me in because of severe problems they had encountered on the previous attempt. A year earlier, the show had been badly marred by persistent feedback issues, and there was a real (entirely founded) concern that the house crew was simply not up to the task.

“The monitors were SO LOUD,” it was said to me, and I was sure I could make things better. Firstly, I would be sure to run things at a reasonable volume – and the rest would surely be academic.

Thus, I got the gig. Then we had a site visit. At the end of the visit, I made a plan: I would take some of the realtime workload off the house FOH engineer by running monitor world. They had all the loudspeaker hardware we needed, so I’d just bring a console and a split. No problem!

The day came, we patched in, and started line checking. Everything was fine, although I felt like I had to be “on the gas” to get a reasonable amount of SPL from the wedges. Nothing truly weird there.

The first act was a couple of tunes in when the trouble started. Feedback started building up, getting progressively worse until a mic on an acoustic guitar blasted off with a shriek that drove the input into clipping. I quietly rolled my eyes at the FOH engineer, thinking that they were winding things up without any necessity. At the same time, the lead performer got on the mic and asked for the gains on everything to be dropped. I did so, not believing that anything was wrong with monitor world, but definitely wanting to make an audible change for the purposes of keeping everybody calm. I mean, hey, FOH was not to be trusted. (This is a general rule. If you’re on monitor duty, FOH is the problem. If you’re on FOH, monitor beach is at fault. If everything is fine for audio, look out! Somebody in lighting is about to screw up.)

Anyway.

Things did indeed settle down, so I thought, “Now we can get monitor world back to where it’s supposed to be. The performers will be happy to hear themselves again.”

*Screeech!*

“Geeze, FOH…” I thought.

The stage manager asked me if there was anything I wanted to relay up to the FOH mix position. “Yeah, let’s pull the whole mix back 6 dB.” Everything seemed okay. I tried to get things back to normal in monitor world, and *Screech!*

Holy crap. The problem was on MY SIDE of the equation! As realization dawned, my brain actually started to work. There was no way that FOH would feed back in that frequency range, unless they were running at a ludicrous volume. It was monitor world. It couldn’t be anything else than monitor world. FOH was just fine…I was the idiot for the day! I had given FOH a “rusty halo,” which is the assumption of continuing inadequacy after a bad experience. Sometimes people deserve a rusty halo, and sometimes not. This was a definite case of “not.”

I’m still not sure quite what happened. The only explanation that seems at all reasonable to me is that the powered wedges we were using somehow underwent an unexpected increase in onboard gain. How that was precipitated, I can’t really guess, though the monitors that seemed to be giving me trouble were exposed to heat and sun until shortly before the trouble began. (A general cooldown of the components in the boxes seems like a farfetched reason to me, but that variable does correlate with the problem appearing. Correlation is not necessarily causation, but still.)

It was revealed later that the monitor wedges we used almost always seem to do something strange to the house crew. We say that it’s a poor craftsman who blames their tools, but if your tool is inadequate or dangerous then you can’t possibly do your best work. My guess is that the personnel at the venue are perfectly adequate to their tasks, and faulty equipment is their downfall. The same thing happened to me as what I imagine happened to them: They had things working perfectly well at soundcheck time, and then the wedges launched themselves into orbit. “The monitors were SO LOUD” had just become part of my own reality, which leads me to believe that I encountered the same issue as they did the previous year.

In the end, though, the important lesson was that I didn’t take the appropriate actions at an appropriate speed, because I was assuming that my side of the mix could not possibly be at fault. No! Your side of the show can ALWAYS be the problem. Look. Listen. Consider. Act.


The Other Problem With All Those Open Mics

It’s not just feedback – it’s sound quality in general.

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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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Sound craftspersons commonly moan and groan about having a ton of open mics – especially vocal mics – on their stages. The biggest gripe, of course, is feedback. Every single sound-to-voltage transducer on deck increases the system’s “loop gain” when their channel is open. More loop gain makes things more unstable.

There’s another complaint to be had, though. It’s the composite problem where bleed causes “defocus,” headroom consumption, and poor overall mix tone.

To be both snarky AND up-front for a bit, let me say that I almost always offer up an enormous, mental eye-roll when someone says, “There are [x] of us, and we all sing.” My instant judgement is: “Actually, there are [x] of you, and maybe two of you can actually sing. The rest of you can carry a tune, but don’t really have the power or consistency to compete with a rock band.” And inevitably, it’s a situation where people only vocalize when the fancy takes them, so I have to leave all those channels open and CRANKED, just in case someone has a two second harmony part here or there.

So, why all the snarking and sighing?

It’s because, in a live-sound situation, signal-to-noise is a fraught topic. That is, the concept goes beyond the traditional measure of random electronic voltage versus the desired signal in the circuit, and ends up in artistic and acoustical territory. In an environment with a real band in a real room, the sound that corresponds to the channel label (Lead Vocal, for instance) is the signal, and absolutely everything else is noise.

Absolutely.

Everything.

Else.

…and there’s a lot of noise, noise which is also considered signal when you get to the channel that’s supposed to be carrying it.

Anyway, you’ve got all these vocal mics, and they’re all wound up hot, and a very large percentage of the time they are amplifying a bunch of information that isn’t vocals. That’s the bleed problem, and it leads to the other issues I mentioned:

1) “Defocus” – Where other sounds on stage, especially percussive ones, end up having multiple arrivals due to going through their close-up mics AND the other mics spread around. The problem gets worse in more acoustically live settings, because the other open mics also amplify the indirect sound that arrives at a different time than the direct sound which ALSO arrived at a different time. This transient-smearing can make a mix much harder to “parse” for musical information, because the boundaries between different musical elements are no longer as well defined.

2) Headroom Consumption – Have you ever driven a system to its limits with, say, drums…through the vocal mics? I have, on more occasions than I care to remember. All the noise flowing through those open channels uses up your power budget very quickly. You end up with no room to make those big, fun, transients, because you’ve soaked up all your headroom with a continuous wash of everything except what you actually want. A further side-effect of all this is that your mix feels uncomfortably loud, because everything is smashed together without enough contrast.

3) Poor Overall Mix Tone – All the bleed being amplified tends to cause a buildup of midrange and high-frequency energy that can make a mix teeth-clenchingly uncomfortable for audiences. Sure, you can slap an EQ on everything, but now you’ve messed with your vocal intelligibility, so…

Now, of course, there are things you can do. You can get a a set list with pointers on who’s doing what. You can aggressively run mutes, assuming good sight lines and a fair amount of rehearsal time. You can try to isolate your mics in various ways. You can use rehearsal time to figure out how to get the backline down to a level that works well with what the vocalists can deliver.

But in the end, the best approach has been (and will always continue to be) vocalists with excellent power and tone, and the giving of vocal mics only to those people.


Start From The Top

When working on mixing a “bass” instrument, don’t necessarily start with the low frequency information.

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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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Whenever I have a problem (that is genuinely my problem and not because of the instrument or player) where a bass guitar, kick drum, or other “LF” instrument is just a pile of boom or indistinct rumble, it’s often because I failed to “start from the top.”

Or, the middle at least.

You see, it’s not really all about that bass. I’ve said many times that low-frequency information IS important and part of “the fun,” and that hasn’t changed for me. In truth, though, a mix stands or falls on the absolutely critical midrange (where almost all the musical information actually sits). It’s my very strong opinion that the midrange information, then, should be what you start with whenever possible. The “impact” of a kick drum? The sound that makes that giant percussion instrument sound like it’s aggressive and smashed against your nose? That’s almost always high-mid information and up. The definition and character of a bass guitar that really gives it the ability to speak in a musical way? Low-mids and up.

So, I say to you, get those areas right first. Yank down your aux-fed-sub drive sends and roll those channel HPF filters up. Use a low-shelf EQ as a sledgehammer if necessary. Especially do this, and do it more aggressively if you’re starting from what sounds like a muddy mess. Then, start pushing that fader upwards. You may need to run your preamp or trim level a bit hotter than you’re used to, but eventually, you should find a place where what’s still passing through ends up dropping into place with the rest of the band. If you’re just listening to one channel at a time, then you can ballpark yourself by finding a satisfying blend with the wash coming off the deck.

After that’s done, THEN start letting some bass frequencies through. You may find that you need a lot less LF than you first thought, especially if you were driving the deep-down sound hard in an effort to hear the instrument in question. I find it quite trivial to create a whole maelstrom of booming slop if I’m using the subwoofers to push something like a kick drum into the right place against everything else, but I find it much harder to make a mess if I park the “click” in a handy place, and then gently move the bottom into alignment afterwards.

It’s a bit counter intuitive, I know, but I can’t remember a time where I put the mids and highs under a microscope first and ended up with a result I disliked. At the same time, I can easily remember all kinds of situations where I didn’t, and subsequently backed myself into a terrible-sounding corner by starting with a bunch of unreadable low end.

Oh, and here’s a postscript bombshell for you: I have a sneaky suspicion that, for many engineers, the subwoofers they end up saying are the punchiest are actually very similar to other offerings in the general class. My guess is that the REAL difference was how the full-range PA mated with those subs, and that’s what got their attention.


The POTH Commentaries – Monitor Engineers Are An FOH Engineer’s Best Friends

A good monitor engineer makes life so much easier.

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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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Let me tell you about a sound craftsperson called Jason Knoell. Jason Knoell runs H2 Audio out of Provo Utah, and he was the monitor engineer on Pigs Over The Horizon. He made my life so much easier, it was almost too easy.

Jason works with Advent Horizon (the core of the POTH lineup) on a regular basis. With that being the case, he was a natural choice for me to bend my rule that monitor world is not a junior-level position. Let’s be honest, I was also being selfish; I wanted to SEE THE SHOW, DANGIT! In any case, Jason knows what he’s doing. While he’s technically junior to me, industry-wise, he’s not “the new guy” by any means. He’s built a reputation with Advent by doing good work, and I knew that I needed an extra pair of hands on the gig. If I was going to pull off both an FOH mix and the run of the lighting computer, someone else would have to be on point with taking care of the band and FX cues.

Thus, Jason.

(I should also clarify, if I haven’t already, that the only way for junior-level audio humans to become senior-level is for them to take on additional responsibility. At some point, a newer engineer has to run monitor world, or they will never learn how.)

Anyway…

The first major consequence of having someone else running monitors is that my role shifted. For Jason, my job was to be his system tech until everyone was settled in on deck. This meant that, as much as possible, everything was set up, tuned, and “pre-dialed.” The functional goal was that Jason would be able to walk up to the console and get the players what they wanted in a fast, frictionless manner. You better believe that, long before Jason arrived, I spent time trying to get the monitors to have a laser-flat magnitude curve, and also that I wound up the vocals in those wedges to find and correct any problem areas – if the engineer is fighting with the system, the system tech hasn’t executed properly.

The second outcome was that my life at FOH was bliss. I barely had to think about the sound on deck at all. I didn’t have to keep an eye out for players with mix changes. I just had to get the FOH PA to comport with what monitor world was doing. Being able to pour my entire attention into that task was a dream come true. In fact, I might go so far as to say it was one of the easiest, “full production” rock-band mixes I’ve ever done. Sharing the mental workload with another person meant that the “struggle factor” I usually associate with a complex gig simply wasn’t there.

The experience also highlighted that I need to make sure to remember to spend significant time in monitor world myself. I also need to keep some “both sides at once” experience in my toolbox. Mixing for the folks on stage is a perishable skill, and it’s imperative that I maintain a good grasp on it. When life gets too easy, an audio human is liable to get soft – and I don’t want that.

But anytime Jason wants to mix monitors for me, he’ll be very welcome.


The POTH Commentaries – Turbo Surround Reverb

It was actually a “mistake,” but I kept 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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Many things are discovered by accident. The glue for Post-It notes, for instance, was apparently an unintentional result of trying to create a much stronger adhesive. Gated reverb for 80’s-era drum tracks was also a case of “we didn’t intend to do this, but we liked it.” In the same way, Pigs Over The Horizon featured a vocal reverb with nifty characteristics that I didn’t plan out at all. In fact, at the time of the show I was a little surprised by its behavior, only realizing what I had done at a later time.

I had made the decision that any time-based FX processing for the show would be heard from the surround loudspeakers I briefly mentioned earlier. So, into the surrounds went my delay and reverb returns. What I noticed during the show was that, when Rylee, Grant, or Lisa “got on the gas” with a powerful vocal part, the surround reverb would launch like a rocket and punctuate that phrase. When they backed off, the reverb was much more tame. It was a cool bit of drama, so I kept it.

But what was really happening?

A habit that I’ve gotten into as an FOH mix human is to aggressively limit my main outputs. I don’t necessarily recommend my craziness to other people, but for me, the setup operates as a sort of automatic vocal rider, plus a method for keeping a mix in a bit of a box. I can, essentially, decide precisely how much the FOH PA gets to contribute to the overall volume of the show, and then set a “do not exceed” point. With the right settings in place (and a really excellent band on deck, of course) I can smack the limiter with the vocals – which helps to keep the lyrics on top without ripping people’s heads off. (Or, more precisely, it doesn’t rip people’s heads off any more than is necessary.)

So, for POTH, I definitely had that limiter in place. Here’s the key, though: It was NOT applied to the surround speakers. I had completely glossed over setting output dynamics for them. So, a big vocal part would happen, and go into the reverb send at full throttle. The dry signal would continue on to the main bus, where it got brickwalled…and the wet signal would blast through the unlimited surrounds. This “ex post facto” level adjustment to the dry vocal meant that my dry/ wet mix was suddenly tilted more in favor of “wet.” On the other hand, if a vocal part wasn’t smashed into the limiter, then my set proportionality was mostly untouched.

In a way, what I effectively had was an upward expander on the reverb send. A totally accidental one. Was it, technically speaking, “wrong?” Yes. Am I going to keep the basic idea around if we get to do the show again? Also, YES! It was cool! (Well, I thought it was…)


The POTH Commentaries – VCAs/DCAs

VCA/ DCA control is very handy, especially for “non-homogenous” routing situations.

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.

Author’s Note: This article is the first in a short series that addresses concepts and happenings related to Pigs Over The Horizon, a Pink Floyd tribute starring Advent Horizon and Friends.


When you start working with more full-featured consoles, you’ll likely run across something you might not have seen before. It’s a control feature called the VCA, or sometimes DCA on digital desks. What is this strange creature? What is it good for?

First off: A VCA is a Voltage Controlled Amplifier. The “D” comes in as a way to say that the same concept is being applied in the digital realm. (In my opinion, a digital system has it much easier, because you don’t have to work with analog circuit logic and the complexities of components or circuit layouts that come with that whole business.) The whole notion rests squarely on how it’s possible to build gain stages that modify the applied change to an audio signal in proportion to a separately applied control signal. If you have a number of control signal generators available, and can choose which control signal to apply to other gain stages, then you end up with a number of VCA/ DCA assignments. Connect a fader to the control signal generator such that the control signal is modified by that fader, and you have a VCA that’s intuitive to manage.

The VCA/ DCA concept, then, is that of a control group. When you assign faders to a control group, you are directing the console to maintain the relative balance that you set amongst those faders, while also giving you an overall level control for all of those channels at once.

“Like routing all those channels through a bus?” you ask.

Yes and no. The magic of the VCA/ DCA is that you get bus-like level management, but your routing is unaffected. In other words, VCA/ DCA groups are control groups independent of audio signal considerations. This was a big deal for me with Pigs Over The Horizon, because of how we did the playback FX.

The playback FX were in surround. Two channels were routed up front (in mono, actually), with two more channels that were sent directly to surround left and surround right, respectively. Once the surround channels were “lined up” with respect to each other and the feeds to the front, I didn’t want to change that relationship – but I DID want to be able to ride the overall FX cue volume if I had to.

I couldn’t achieve what I wanted by busing the four FX channels together; They would all have ended up going to a single destination, with no way to separate them back out to get surround again. By assigning them to a DCA group, though, it was a cinch. The routing didn’t change at all, but my ability to grab one control and regulate the overall volume of the unchanged balance was established.

Of course, busing is still a very important tool. You need it whenever you DO want to get a bunch of sources to flow to a single destination. This might not just be for simple combining. You might want to process a whole bunch of channels with exactly the same EQ and compression, for example, and then send them off to the main output. If that’s not what you’re after, though, a VCA/ DCA group is a great choice. You don’t chew up a bus just for the simple task of grouped volume control, and if you change your mind on the routing later it’s not a big deal. Your grouped controls stay grouped, no matter where you send them, again, because of that “independence” factor. The VCA/ DCA has nothing to do with where signals are coming from or where they’re going – it only changes the gain applied.

I personally am not as heavy a user of VCA/ DCA groups as some other audio humans, but I see them as a handy tool that I may end up leveraging more in the future. I’m glad I know what they are, because they’re a great problem solver. If your console has them, I definitely recommend becoming familiar with their usage. The day may come when you need ’em!


Gig Log: IAMA LCS (May 4, 2018)

What matters is if other people enjoy the show.

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.

Job Type: Recurring concert series.

Venue: The South Valley Unitarian Universalist Society

Load-in: I couldn’t get my regular spot, because I was very early and a bunch of folks were there for another event. I did remember that using the stairs is a terrible option, and so I walked the gear around on the sidewalk instead. I felt much less tired afterwards – no data on any time differential, though. As happened for the previous LCS, I had setup help come in at exactly the right moment to cap things off.

Load-out: Many hands continue to make light work, and my new technique (which is to pack and load out progressively, rather than to pack everything first and then load everything out) feels pretty good. It might be faster, or it might not – although I’m pretty sure we set a load-out record on this go-around. I’m learning that LCS teardown is more about me managing the process than being hands-on with gear all the time.

What Went Well

  • Working with old friends: The first act, Pat And Roy, were folks I remembered well from my Fats days. They know me, I know them, and both parties are aware of what the other party needs. Shows with people you’re acquainted with are like a good open-house gathering with a jam session attached; You get to be comfortable and enjoy yourself.
  • Making new friends: Whenever an act says, “that was some of the best sound we ever had,” that’s a great feeling. It’s an especially great feeling when it’s your first day with that group. I will also say that it’s quite amazing how just getting the basics right (showing up, having your monitor rig tuned somewhat sanely, generally giving a hoot about the goings on) will get you a long way towards getting the “best sound ever” nod.
  • Yes, you can do a big, bluegrass band unplugged: There were a LOT of instruments and open mics up on the deck for the second act, but there weren’t any real problems. We had a couple of short feedback chirps at one point, but nothing that had to be battled with over the course of the set. The key, of course, is a great band that knows how to be a band before a PA system gets added. All they needed was a bit of “fill” from monitor world, where the foldback blends gently with the acoustic output of the instruments. Screaming-hot monitor gain is the gateway to many problems, so not needing that kind of setup fixes lots of issues by way of prevention. The same goes for FOH, of course. There was no call to be ear-splittingly loud, especially because the basic blend was already there from the performers themselves.

What Could Have Been Better

  • Why doesn’t this feel better than it does?: For all the good points of the show, I must admit that I spent my entire time at FOH with the sensation that I was struggling with it. In hindsight, I think that my real worry was how the overall sound of the show wouldn’t “clean up” to my liking. I was really keyed into all the room reflections I was hearing, while trying to be ginger with both volume and EQ. I eventually got to a pretty good place, but it took me a long time to get there – and even then, I didn’t feel that I had a truly crisp, defined mix going. (To be fair, I think the only person who was even a little bit unhappy was me, so…)

Conclusion

This was the close of my second season with the IAMA LCS, and I’m glad to be coming back on for a third round.