Tag Archives: Mixing

When Do You Want To Sound Good?

Great gigs are the ones that get “picked at.”

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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There’s a point where a guys starts repeating himself; I have certainly reached that point here. Nevertheless, repetition of theme without rote regurgitation of content can be useful. So, I’m going to talk some more about time, and gigs, and showing up, and how it impacts success.

And I’m going to do it by borrowing the words of Jason Giron from Floyd Show and Loss of Existence. There was an occasion where a fellow band member asked, “When should we come to soundcheck?”

Jason replied, “When do you want to sound good?”

I tell you, every so often you get to stand next to someone who can perfectly encapsulate a tome of wisdom into a single sentence. This was one of those times for me.

There are plenty of bands, individual musicians, and production humans out there who want to minimize their exposure time when it comes to a gig. This is understandable, because in Western society, time and money sit on either end of an equality symbol. The problem, though, is that minimizing your on-gig time has an alarming tendency to minimize your on-gig success. When it comes to show production, getting the really amazing things to happen requires “picking at it.” Picking at it isn’t time and money efficient, but it’s necessary to create magic.

If you want to really get comfortable with how everybody sounds on a stage with no reinforcement, and truly dial that in so that the future reinforcement will be maximally effective, you have to take the time to pick at it. It doesn’t happen in the space of a minute. You actually have to get up there, play some songs, and figure out how everybody fits around everybody else.

If you want to dial up a truly killer starting point for monitor world and FOH, you have to pick at it. You can’t just throw it all up there, run a few test signals through, and walk off for a bite. You have to actually go up on deck and listen to a real mic through a real wedge. And then listen to a real mic through multiple wedges. At high gain! You also have to listen to real music through the FOH rig. If you want an objective measurement of the system, you have to get out your reference mic and attendant software, and then take a few minutes getting a good trace.

If you want me to create the best monitor mix possible for you in that room, you have to pick at it. We have to go through several iterations of tweak/ listen/ tweak/ listen/ tweak – and we have to be able to do it all with calmness and rationality. Thirty seconds of panicked gesturing from a cold start ain’t gonna get you there, pilgrim.

If you want to build the FOH mix that effectively translates what the band is doing into the house, leveraging and flowing along with the natural sound of the group in the room…You. Have. To. Pick. At. It. Before doors. Or do you want to be futzing around, “finding yourself” for the entirety of the first set? People, please. Bands and audiences deserve better.

As an experienced “Selective Louderization Specialist,” I can tell you that sounding good (and getting everybody truly comfortable) takes at least an hour of work. Bare minimum. (There are plenty of bands that require much more time than that.)

And that hour does NOT start until everybody is in the same room, with all the gear working, and with the entire audio system pre-tuned for the appropriate performance. (A hint for sound people: You have to be really early if you want a fighting chance at this.) It’s not to say that it’s impossible to sound decent in a smaller span of time. It can be done, and sometimes it must be done – but why choose that outcome if it’s optional?

“I’m not required to smack myself in the face with a sharp object, but I’m going to do it! Eugene, hand me that axe!”

Really?

Assuming that it’s going to take no less than 60 minutes of effort to make your show spectacular, I encourage you to ask yourself the “Giron Question.” When do you want to sound good? Figure out when that time is, and then show up a lot earlier than that.


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.


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?


Why I Think Steam Machines Are Cool

My audio-human mind races when thinking of high-performance, compact, affordable machines.

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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“Wait,” you’re thinking, “I thought this site was about live shows. Steam Machines are gaming devices.”

You’re right about that. What you have to remember (or just become aware of), is that I have a strange sort of DIY streak. It’s why I assembled my own live-audio console from “off the shelf” products. I really, really, REALLY like the idea of doing powerful things with concert sound via unorthodox means. An unorthodox idea that keeps bubbling up in my head is that of a hyper-customizable, hyper-expandable audio mix rig. It could be pretty much any size a user wanted, using pretty much whatever audio hardware a user wanted, and grow as needed. Also, it wouldn’t be too expensive. (About $900 per 16X16 channel “block.”)

When I look at the basic idea of the Valve Steam Machine, I see a device that has the potential to be a core part of the implementation.

But let’s be careful: I’m not saying that Steam Machines can do what I want right now. I’m not saying that there aren’t major pitfalls, or even dealbreakers to be encountered. I fully expect that there are enormous problems to solve. Just the question of how each machine’s audio processing could be conveniently user-controlled is definitely non-trivial. I’m just saying that a possibility is there.

Why is that possibility there?

The Box Is Prebuilt

The thing with prebuilt devices is that it’s easier for them to be small. A manufacturer building a large number of units can get custom parts that support a compact form factor, put it all together, and then ship it to you.

Of course, when it comes to PCs, you can certainly assemble a small-box rig by hand. However, when we’re talking about using multiple machines, the appeal of hand-building multiple boxes drops rapidly. So, it’s a pretty nice idea that a compact but high(er) performance computing device can be gotten for little effort.

The System Is Meant For Gaming

Gaming might seem like mere frivolity, but these days, it’s a high-performance activity. We normally think of that high-performance as being located primarily in the graphics subsystem – and for good reason. However, I also think a game-capable system could be great for audio. I have this notion because games are so reliant on audio behaving well.

Take a game like a modern shooter. A lot of stuff is going on: Enemy AI, calculation of where bullets should go, tracking of who’s shooting at who, collision detection, input management, the knowing of where all the players are and where they’re going, and so on. Along with that, the sound has to work correctly. When anybody pulls a trigger, a sound with appropriate gain and filtering has to play. That sound also has to play at exactly the right time. It’s not enough for it to just happen arbitrarily after the “calling” event occurs. Well-timed sounds have to play for almost anything that happens. A player walks around, or a projectile strikes an object, or a vehicle moves, or a player contacts some phsyics-enabled entity, or…

You get the idea.

My notion is that, if the hardware and OS of a Steam Machine are already geared specifically to make this kind of thing happen, then getting pro-audio to work similarly isn’t a totally alien application. It might not be directly supported, of course, but at least the basic device itself isn’t in the way.

The System Is Customizable

My understanding of Steam Machines is that they’re meant to be pretty open and “user hackable.” This excites me because of the potential for re-purposing. Maybe an off-the-shelf Steam Machine doesn’t play nicely with pro-audio hardware? Okay…maybe there’s a way to take the box’s good foundation and rebuild the upper layers. In theory, a whole other OS could be runnable on one of these computers, and a troublesome piece of hardware might be replaceable (or just plain removable).

I acknowledge that all of this is off in the “weird and theoretical” range. My wider goal in pointing it out is to say that, sometimes, you can grab a thing that was intended for a different application and put it to work on an interesting task. The most necessary component seems to be imagination.


Compact Can Be Accommodated

When the PA is big and heavy, other things can be small and light.

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.

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

Related: A mouse can fit in a mouse-sized room, a dog-sized room, and an elephant sized room. An elephant can only fit in an elephant-sized room.

Meditate upon this carefully.

There’s also this bit about elephants and garden hoses.


EQ Or Off-Axis?

A case-study in fixing a monitor mix.

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.

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

I’m really interested in monitors. They contribute immensely to the success (or crushing failure) of a show, affect musicians in ways that are often inaudible to me, and tend to require a fair bit of management. I wrote a whole article on the topic of unsuckifying them. Some of the most interesting problems to solve involve monitor mixes, because those problems are a confluence of multiple factors that combine to smash your face in.

You know, like Devastator, the Decepticon super-robot formed by the Constructicons. The GREEN (and purple) super-robot. From the 1980s. It was kind of a pain to put him together, if I remember correctly.

Sorry, what were we talking about again?

Monitors.

So, my regular gig picked up a “rescue” show, because another venue shut down unexpectedly. A group called The StrangeHers was on deck, with Amanda in to play some fiddle. (Amanda is a fiddle player in high demand. If she’s not playing with a band, she is being recruited by that band. I expect that her thrash-metal debut will come shortly.) We were rushing around, trying to get monitor world sorted out. When we got to Amanda, she jumped in with a short, but highly astute question:

“The vocals are loud, but I can’t really make them out. They sound all muddy. Is there a problem with the EQ, or is it something else?”

Indirect

Amanda’s monitor was equalized correctly. The lead vocal was equalized correctly. Well…that is…ELECTRONICALLY. The signal processing software acting as EQ was doing exactly what it should have been doing. Amanda’s problem had to do with effective EQ: The total, acoustical solution for her was incorrect.

In other words, yes, we had an EQ problem, but it wasn’t a problem that would be appropriately fixed with an equalizer.

One of the lessons that live-sound tries to teach – over and over again, with swift and brutal force – is that actually resolving an issue requires addressing whatever is truly precipitating that issue. You can “patch” things by addressing the symptoms, but you won’t have a fix until you get to the true, root cause.

What was precipitating the inappropriate, total EQ for Amanda could be boiled down to one fundamental factor: She wasn’t getting enough “direct” sound.

To start with, she was “off-axis” from all the other monitors she was hearing. Modern loudspeakers for live-sound applications do tend to have nice, tight, pattern control at higher frequencies. As the frequency of the reproduced content decreases, though, the output has more and more of a tendency to just “go everywhere.” Real directivity at low frequencies requires big “boxes,” as the wavelengths involved are quite large. Big boxes, however, are generally not what we want on deck, so we have to deal with what we’ve got. What we’ve got, then, is a reality where standing to the side of a monitor gets you very little in the way of frequency content that contributes to vocal intelligibility (roughly 1 kHz and above), and quite a lot of sound that contributes to vocal “mud.”

Another major factor was that the rest of what Amanda was hearing had been bounced off a boundary at least once. Any “intelligibility zone” material that made it to Amanda’s ears was significantly late when compared to everything else, and probably smeared badly from containing multiple reflections of itself. Compounding that was the issue of a room that contained both people and acoustical treatment. Most anything that was reflected back to the deck was probably missing a lot of high-frequency information. It had been heavily absorbed on the way out and the way back.

Figuring It Out

This is not to say that all of the above snapped instantly into my head when Amanda asked what was wrong. I had to have other clues in order to chase down a fix. Those clues were:

1) Before the show, I had put the mics through the monitors, walked up on deck, and listened to what it all sounded like. For the test, I had a very healthy send level from each vocal mic to the monitors that were directly behind that microphone. Vocal intelligibility was certainly happening at that time, and although things would definitely change as the room changed, the total acoustical solution wouldn’t become unrecognizably different.

2) Nobody else had complained. Although this is hardly the most reliable factor, it does figure in. If the vocals were a muddy mess everywhere, I’m betting that I would have gotten more agreement from the other band members. This suggested that the problem was local to Amanda, and by extension, that a global change (EQ on the vocal channel) would potentially create an incorrect solution for the other folks.

3) On the vocal channel, the send level to the other monitors was high in comparison to the send level to Amanda’s monitor. This was probably my biggest and most immediate clue. When other monitors are getting sends that are +9 dB in relation to another box, the performer is probably hearing mostly the garbled wash from everything OTHER than their own monitor. If the send level to Amanda’s wedge had been high, I might have concluded that the overall EQ for that particular wedge was wrong – although my encouraging, pre-show experience would have suggested that the horn had died at some point. (Ya cain’t fix THAT with an equalizer, pilgrim…)

So, with the clues that I had, I decided to try increasing the send level to Amanda’s monitor to match the send levels to the other monitors. Just like that, Amanda had a LOT more direct sound, everything was copacetic, and off we went.