Tag Archives: Mixing

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.

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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.


The Pro-Audio Guide For People Who Know Nothing About Pro-Audio, Part 5

Buses are what put the “mixing” in mixing consoles.

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 most common destination for a channel’s signal is a bus. Buses are really what make a mixer a mixer: They’re signal lines meant to carry and combine a number of individual channel signals fed into them.”

I wrote this article for Schwilly Family Musicians. The rest of it is available for free, right here.


Working With People You’ve Heard Of

It’s about the same as everything else, but turned up a notch or two.

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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Last weekend, I was A3 on a show featuring A Band You’ve Heard Of. What I mean by that is twofold:

1) There were three of us on the crew. I was the “junior” guy.

2) The headliner tours nationally on a regular basis.

I mixed monitors for the locals, the A2 handled monitor world for the headliner, and I ended up mixing the last 20 minutes (or so) of the headliner when the A1 decided that we were basically home-free.

If you’re wondering what it was like, well – it was similar to everything else. Bands You’ve Heard Of aren’t some sort of exotic creature, festooned in iridescent feathers and endued with arcane magics that mortals cannot fathom. They’re bands, and subject to all the same physical laws as any other band. There are some differences though, and in my mind it tends to boil down to expectations:

Regional and national acts tend strongly towards knowing exactly what they want, know how to ask for it, and are confident in asking for it.

…and really, what that means is they’re experienced. A good local that’s been around the block will exhibit the same behaviors. They aren’t sitting up on deck, trying to suss out the requirements as they go. They’ve got a system for getting in the room, a system for building their set up, a system for getting the sound on deck squared away, and a system for figuring out if FOH is how they think it ought to be.

There’s also a very good chance that they will push your rig, and the physics of the room, to its maximum reasonable limit. This isn’t a character flaw, or a bad behavior. It’s simply another bit of skill that’s picked up as musicians become seasoned. They will have played through sound systems that are truly world-class, and they will want you to get your setup as close to that performance level as possible. It’s where their comfort zone is; What they’ve gotten accustomed to.

There are some people out there who are attitude monsters, of course. Those folks will try to take everything BEYOND any reasonable standard, and then whine up a storm when it doesn’t happen. That’s not what I’m talking about here: The pros simply want to get everything possible out of the electronics and acoustics available to them, so as to achieve the performance that they expect to give – and that their fans expect to get. If something doesn’t seem right, and it also seems like that something could be fixed to become right, Bands You’ve Heard Of will let you know. They’ll be professional and courteous about it, certainly, but they won’t just let it slide. If the vocals don’t sound quite right in mix 1, well, we’re going to dig in and see if we can’t get them to behave.

As a final point, let me say that Working with A Band You’ve Heard Of is a great way to learn that our job is to get the band’s sound, not the other way around. Local crews are rarely engaged because they will “bring something unique to the songs.” Rather, we get the nod because we can provide the necessary gear, and the expertise needed to put that gear in a state which will satisfy the artist.

Working with acts that take it to the next level is a great way for YOU to be taken to the next level, so embrace the opportunities when you get them.


How To Tell If The Band Is Awesome

It involves you doing less.

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 was sitting there at the first IAMA LCS concert of the 2017-2018 season, just minding my own business. (Which is to say that I was minding both the audience’s and the band’s business, at least in terms of sound.)

Suddenly, it hit me like a ton of bricks. Tony Holiday and The Velvetones were fully in the groove and having a great night. Now, The Velvetones have always been a very good band. There have been many incarnations and cast members. Eeach iteration has marked some improvement over an older version, but there was never a point where Tony failed to bring a great lineup to the table. This particular ensemble on this particular night, though, had reached a remarkable apex. They had entered a zone that not many bands (even good ones) gain an ingress to.

They had reached the point where they, by the very nature of their rehearsal and experience, required no intervention from me in order to function perfectly as a band. I could have locked out my remote-control laptop, left the building, had a late dinner at a restaurant, and come back just in time for load-out, and the show would have been pretty much fine. I didn’t do that, of course – I needed to make some tweaks because the mix was being built entirely on the fly, and not all of my assumptions were complete or correct.

But that was the key: The only reason I needed to make adjustments was because I needed to change what I was doing to the band, not because a modification was required for what the band was doing to us in the seats.

The mix for a really good group should display characteristics that (I’ve heard) are what can be expected from a well-behaved airplane. The whole thing should have a tendency to settle into a stable, controlled trajectory, where you don’t have to sledgehammer or wrestle the ship into obeying you. This was one of those times, and it was glorious. The band was on point, and I didn’t screw it up. Such things are commonly referred to as “wins,” I believe, and are worth pursuing due to their sheer enjoy-ability alone.


EQ Propagation

The question of where to EQ is, of course, tied inextricably to what to EQ.

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 occasion, I get the opportunity to guest-lecture to live-sound students. When things go the way I want them to, the students get a chance to experience the dialing up of monitor world (or part of it). One of the inevitable and important questions that arises is, “Why did you reach for the channel EQ when you were solving that one problem, but then use the EQ across the bus for this other problem?”

I’ve been able to give good answers to those questions, but I’ve also wanted to offer better explanations. I think I’ve finally hit upon an elegant way to describe my decision making process in regards to which EQ I use to solve different problems. It turns out that everything comes down to the primary “propagation direction” that I want for a given EQ change:

Effectively speaking, equalization on an input propagates downstream to all outputs. Equalization on an output effectively propagates upstream to all inputs.

What I’ve just said is, admittedly, rather abstract. That being so, let’s take a look at it concretely.

Let’s say we’re in the process of dialing up monitor world. It’s one of those all-too-rare occasions where we get the chance to measure the output of our wedges and apply an appropriate tuning. That equalization is applied across the appropriate bus. What we’re trying to do is equalize the box itself, so we can get acoustical output that follows a “reference curve.” (I advocate for a flat reference curve, myself.)

It might seem counter-intuitive, but if we’re going to tune the wedge electronically, what we actually have to do is transform all of the INPUTS to the box. Changing the loudspeaker itself to get our preferred reference curve would be ideal, but also very difficult. So, we use an EQ across a system output to change all the signals traveling to the wedge, counteracting the filtering that the drivers and enclosure impose on whatever makes it to them. If the monitor is making everything too crisp (for example), the “output” EQ lets us effectively dial high-frequency information out of every input traveling to the wedge.

Now, we put the signal from a microphone into one of our wedges. It starts off sounding generally good, although the channel in question is a vocal and we can tell there’s too much energy in the deep, low-frequency area. To fix the problem, we apply equalization to the microphone’s channel – the input. We want the exact change we’ve made to apply to every monitor that the channel might be sent to, and EQ across an input effectively transforms all the outputs that signal might arrive at.

There’s certainly nothing to stop us from going to each output EQ and pulling down the LF, but:

1) If we have a lot of mixes to work with, that’s pretty tedious, even with copy and paste, and…

2) We’ve now pushed away from our desired reference curve for the wedges, potentially robbing desired low-end information from inputs that would benefit from it. A ton of bottom isn’t necessary for vocals on deck, but what if somebody wants bass guitar? Or kick?

It makes much more sense to make the change at the channel if we can.

This also applies to the mud and midrange feedback weirdness that tends to pile up as one channel gets routed to multiple monitors. The problems aren’t necessarily the result of individual wedges being tuned badly. Rather, they are the result of multiple tunings interacting in a way that’s “wrong” for one particular mic at one particular location. What we need, then, is to EQ our input. The change then propagates to all the outputs, creating an overall solution with relative ease (and, again, we haven’t carved up each individual monitor’s curve into something that sounds weird in the process).

The same idea applies to FOH. If the whole mix seems “out of whack,” then a change to the main EQ effectively tweaks all the inputs to fix the offending frequency range.

So, when it’s time to grab an EQ, think about which way you want your changes to flow. Changes to inputs flow to all the connected outputs. Changes to outputs flow to all connected inputs.


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.


A Weird LFE Routing Solution

Getting creative to obtain more bottom end.

Please Remember:

The opinions expressed are mine only. These opinions do not necessarily reflect anybody else’s opinions. I do not own, operate, manage, or represent any band, venue, or company that I talk about, unless explicitly noted.

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

This is another one of those case studies where you get to see how strange my mind is. As such, be aware that it may not be applicable to you at all. I had a bit of a conundrum, and I solved it in a creative way. Some folks might call it “too creative.”

Maybe those people are boring.

Or they’re reasonable and I’m a little nuts.

Anyway.

I’ve previously mentioned that I handle the audio at my church. We’ve recently added some light percussion to complement our bass-guitar situation, and there was a point where our previous worship leader/ music director wanted more thump. That is, low frequency material that was audible AND a bit “tactile.” In any case, the amount of bass we had happening wasn’t really satisfying.

Part of our problem was how I use system limiting. I’ve long nursed a habit of using a very aggressive limiter across the main mix bus as a “stop the volume here” utility. I decide how loud I want to get (which is really not very loud on Sundays), set the dynamics across the output such that we can’t get any louder, and then smack that processor with a good deal of signal. I’ve gotten to a point where I can get it right most of the time, and “put the band in a box” in terms of volume. Drive the vocals hard and they stay on top, while not jumping out and tearing anyone’s face off when the singers push harder.

At the relatively quiet volume levels that we run things, though, this presents a problem for LF content. To get that extended low-frequency effect that can be oh-so-satisfying, you need to be able to run the bass frequencies rather hotter than everything else. The limiter, though, puts a stop to that. If you’re already hitting the threshold with midrange and high-frequency information, you don’t have anywhere to go.

So, what can you do?

For a while, we took the route of patching into the house system’s subwoofer drive “line.” I would run (effectively) unlimited aux-fed subs to that line, while keeping the mains in check as normal, and we got what we wanted.

But it was a bit of a pain, as patching to the house system required unpatching some of their frontend, pulling an amp partially out of a cabinet, doing our thing, and then reversing the process at the end. I’m not opposed to work, but I like “easy” when I can get it. I eventually came to the conclusion that I didn’t really need the house subs.

This was because:

1) We were far, far below the maximum output capacity of our main speakers.

2) Our main speakers were entirely capable of producing content between 50 – 100 Hz at the level I needed for people to feel the low end a little bit. (Not a lot, just a touch.)

If we wouldn’t have had significant headroom, we would have been sunk. Low Frequency Effects (LFE) require significant power, as I said before. If my artificial headroom reduction was close to the actual maximum output of the system, finding a way around it for bass frequencies wouldn’t have done much. Also, I had to be realistic about what we could get. A full-range, pro-audio box with a 15″ or 12″ LF driver can do the “thump” range at low to moderate volumes without too much trouble. Asking for a bunch of building-rattling boom, which is what you get below about 50 Hz, is not really in line with what such an enclosure can deliver.

With those concerns handled, I simply had to solve a routing problem. For all intents and purposes, I had to create a multiband limiter that was bypassed in the low-frequency band. If you look at the diagram above, that’s what I did.

I now have one bus which is filtered to pass content at 100 Hz and above. It gets the same, super-aggressive limiter as it’s always had.

I also have a separate bus for LFE. That bus is filtered to restrict its information to the range between 50 Hz and 100 Hz, with no limiter included in the path.

Those two buses are then combined into the console’s main output bus.

With this configuration, I can “get on the gas” with low end, while retaining my smashing and smooshing of midrange content. I can have a little bit of fun with percussion and bass, while retaining a small, self-contained system that’s easy to patch. I would certainly not recommend this as a general-purpose solution, but hey – it fits my needs for now.


It’s Gonna Take A Minute

The secret to better shows is practice. Practice requires time.

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.

The Video

The Summary

We should strive to do our best work. The best work possible on the first try is usually not as good as the best work possible on subsequent tries – and we need to be okay with that.


More Features VS Groundwork

In this case, groundwork won: There wasn’t a compelling reason to lose 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.

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

The Video

The Summary

If you have significant prep that’s already done for one mixing system, you might want to avoid losing that effort – even if it would be to put a more powerful/ flexible mix rig into play.


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.

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

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!