Tag Archives: Priorities

Why We Didn’t Use The EAWs

We already had a solution, why waste it?

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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 have plenty to say about a recent foray into a decidedly NOT small venue. Pigs Over The Horizon got booked into The Depot for a night of Pink Floyd madness, and it was astoundingly fun. (That the place was full certainly helped.) I thought I’d start with an absolutely critical piece of the show’s success: Monitor world.

The captain of monitor beach for Pigs is Jason Knoell, not me. As I’ve said before, my job when it comes to Jason is to provide a good starting point. After that, getting out of the way is my major calling.

Now, The Depot is home to a significant collection of EAW JFX260 monitors. We didn’t use any of them. Instead, we brought in our own solution of Yamaha DBR12s and Alto TS312s for most onstage noises, with a “Frankensteined” drumfill of Turbosound subs and JBL Eon tops.

Why? Why forgo some “pro-touring” grade boxes for units you can buy at Guitar Center for a few hundred smackers a piece? Well, it comes down to two things, really:

1. We had a solution already.

I’ll talk more about the specifics of the solution at a later time, but this was the major driver behind my decision. We had a good two days of tech rehearsal before the show, and for me, the best use of that time was to get an onstage solution dialed up. That way, we would be as far along as possible once we got into the real venue; Not starting from scratch, in other words. Jason could recall his monitor mix, and it would be mostly correct. Some tweaks might be necessary due to a transfer into a different acoustical environment. That’s an inescapable thing…but a 100% escapable thing is changing over to different boxes.

Don’t get me wrong, here. I have tons of confidence that an EAW monitor is a well-behaved, easily tuned loudspeaker enclosure. The point is that I knew that what we already had was working exactly as people wanted. I also knew that we wanted to spend the absolute minimum time in the venue “fiddling.” Moving to a different box would likely be a step backward in both respects. We could certainly have a chance at getting lucky and not having any issues, but luck is not how complex shows end up coming off well.

2. The improvement from the EAWs would only have been marginal.

We’re at a point now where internal powering and processing makes affordable loudspeakers pretty darn good. Would the EAWs have gotten louder? Maybe, but likely only by a couple of dB – and we weren’t running anything into its limiters anyway. As such, more level would have been a moot point. Would a JFX260 have sounded better? Again…maybe? Or maybe not, depending on the preferences of the musicians. The Altos and Yammies are tuned well enough out of the box that running them flat and getting good results isn’t a struggle. I don’t think Jason had to fight their transfer functions at any point. It’s not like we were having trouble with unruly monitors, where an EAW would have made an ocean of difference. The potential upgrade would have been minor, and mostly aesthetic, and nobody was complaining anyway.

When you add it all up, moving to the in-house monitor wedges would have been mostly an “on-paper” upgrade of questionable effectiveness. JFX260 enclosures are certainly classier than what we brought in, but going with what we knew and had dialed up to our precise specifications was (in my mind) the smart play.

 

 


Mercenary Maxims: Part 5

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

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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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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.

 

 


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.


Listening To El Ridiculoso

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

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

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

If it’s there, you WILL hear it.

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

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

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

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


The Q2Q Problem

Instead of being arrogant…communicate!

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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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Maybe you’ve seen this comic from Q2Q. In it, an unhelpful audio operator flatly refuses to increase a monitor send, and then condescendingly justifies himself by claiming that doing so will make the show sound bad.

To quote The West Wing: “This is why good people hate us.”

It’s been pointed out that Q2Q is a comic about theater, which has different norms for sound reinforcement than Rock And/ Or Roll. It’s been pointed out that the omnidirectional microphones commonly used in musical theater productions aren’t so great for “folding back” into monitor world, because they’re…you know…omni.

I know all that. It’s irrelevant.

What’s on display in the comic is crap behavior and poor attitude that should be unacceptable on any professional crew. Folks, if you are an audio human, your job is TO HELP PEOPLE PERFORM. It is not to get your own definition of the perfect mix at the expense of everyone else, whilst simultaneously acting like you’re the grand ruler of the universe.

If your defense for flatly refusing a change on deck because it will make your precious, FOH mix sound “bad,” I have some words for you: Cowboy the heck up. Work those channel EQs to find a decent compromise. Roll those high-passes up and create an acoustical crossover between the stage wash and the FOH PA. Bus your vocals together and insert an EQ there. Audio craftspersons are paid to deal with the difficulties involved in making as many people – sometimes with conflicting needs – as happy as possible. (Within limits, of course, but the more-monitor issue is 100% within those limits.)

Further, if you are physically unable to make a request happen, I can assure you that treating your performers with contempt for making the request is the wrong idea. Get your butt out from behind the console, and go talk to someone. Take 10 seconds to explain why there’s no more gain-before-feedback available to the system, or that you’re out of sends, or…whatever it is. It’s not their job to know all that stuff by heart – it’s yours.

…and yes, it is your job to be able to interface with the players and kindly educate them when necessary. In other words, you have to recognize them as human beings who are actually capable of understanding what’s going on. If, after doing so, you’re still getting ridiculous demands, you still have to be a professional about it.

After 22-ish years of doing this, I’ve learned many things. One of the most important things is that top-shelf production support is really not about having all the biggest toys, newest whiz-bangs, and being able to say that you’re a crack operator of [insert large-frame console here]. Those things help. They are sometimes necessary. But they matter very little without the basic elements that so many people alarmingly miss: Showing up on time. Doing what you said you would do. Caring about the show. Taking the performers seriously. Being pleasant. Treating people like actual people.

I’ve walked away from shows that I didn’t think went very well with people still being all smiles, not on the force of “mad mixing skillz,” but just being willing to give a thumbs-up and take a crack at whatever was asked for. So, be nice. And if someone asks you for more [something] in the monitors, at least try, please.


Not Everybody, Not All The Time

Care about everything you can, then be okay with everything else.

Please Remember:

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

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A letter to myself and others:

You can’t please everybody all the time.

You can try, of course, and you should. Show production is a service industry that’s always been a service industry. It always will be. Getting the maximum number of people to be delighted with the show IS your job.

But 100% satisfaction for everybody is very difficult to get to. Somebody will always manage to sit in the seat where the PA coverage isn’t quite right. Somebody will inevitably wonder why you didn’t make Band A sound like Band B, even though Band A has made arrangement choices such that they CAN’T sound like Band B. You will never have enough subwoofer for “that one guy.” Someone is going to lecture you on how their preferred snare-drum sound is THE key to a rock mix.

There is nothing so good that someone, somewhere will not hate it. So says Pohl’s law, if the Intertubes are to be believed.

You’re going to have to make choices about what to prioritize. That’s part of sitting in any of the chairs involved in show control. By necessity, you will be making choices (many of them, at high speed) that have real – though usually ephemeral and ultimately benign – effects on the lives of a sizable number of people. You must therefore cultivate an assuredness, an appropriate level of confidence that you are doing the right thing. Beyond having a strong appreciation of personal and collective aesthetics, this confidence will be greatly bolstered by understanding the physics involved in this job. If you know what’s possible and what’s not, you will be less rattled when someone accuses you of not having done the right thing…when their right thing wasn’t a feasible thing anyway.

It’s right to take all concerns seriously, but not all concerns can be treated with the same level of seriousness. Start by making as many musicians as happy as you can. That’s your baseline. If you get the baseline done, and somebody else isn’t happy, consider if that person is writing the checks for the event. If so, working out a compromise will probably be in order. An extreme case might require that you just do as you’re told. After you get that squared away, you can start being concerned about other considerations brought to your attention. If you can take care of them without changing the happiness level of the check-writer or the players, go ahead.

If not, be polite, but don’t worry too much. Even big-dollar gigs can’t deploy enough gear to fix everything.

Do your best, have fun, and try to get as many other people to have at least as much fun as you’re having. Do maintain care for the outliers, but don’t agonize. It won’t get you anything, anyway.


It’s Not About The Gear – It’s About Receipts

Sure, it’s a cool toy – but can you make money on 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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If you want to hear great wisdom about the business of sound and music, you should seek out Tim McCulloch over at Pro Sound Web. Just recently he was advising another audio human to “get very real” with a band about demanding a certain console for a tour. Having gotten the strong whiff that the choice of mixing desk was basically one of vanity, Mr. McCulloch dropped the proverbial load of bricks: The gear you take on tour is – and should be categorized as – an expense. The merch and tickets you can sell are profit. (So, decide if you want to make a profit and then act accordingly.)

Of course, the application of this to band tour-o-nomics is self explanatory. With just a bit of imagination, though, you can see how this applies everywhere – especially to audio craftspersons who own equipment.

The gear you own is an expense. It’s always an expense. It’s an expense when you make a full or partial payment for purchase. It’s a debit if you’re making leasing payments. It’s a negative ledger entry every second of every day, because its value depreciates forever in an asymptotic slide towards $0. It’s also a constant drain because you are always paying to store, maintain, and replace it (even if you don’t see a bill directly).

The above is a big reason behind why Tim McCulloch will also tell you that “Excess capacity is infinitely expensive.”

Anyway.

Equipment does not represent profit. It’s a tool that can be used to generate profit, but if you want to imagine the audio business as an airplane, gear is a constant contributor to weight and drag. What you need to keep going is lift and propulsion – profit, that is. Receipts. Money coming in. As such, every purchase and upgrade plan has to answer one question: “How will this increase my receipts?”

The harsh truth is that, past a certain point, just being able to get louder probably won’t increase your receipts.

Past a certain point, being able to rattle peoples’ rib cages with bass probably won’t increase your receipts.

Past a certain point, “super-trick,” spendy mics probably won’t increase your receipts.

A nifty new console probably won’t increase your receipts (not by itself).

What many of us (including myself) have a longstanding struggle with understanding is that what we THINK is cool is not necessarily what gets us phone calls. Meeting the demands of the market is what gets the phone calls. For those of us with maverick-esque tendencies (like Yours “Anti Establishment Is Where It’s At” Truly), we have to take care. We have to balance our curiosity and experimental bent with still being functional where it counts.

We CAN be bold. In fact, I think we MUST be bold. We ought to dare to be different, but we can’t be reckless or vain. If we’re in a situation where our clientele encourages our unorthodoxy, we can let ‘er rip! If not, then we have to accept that going down some particular road might just be for our own enjoyment, and that we can’t bet our entire future on it.

By way of example, I can speak of my own career. I’m currently looking at what the next phase might be like. I have a whole host of notions about what upgrade and expansion paths that might entail. I’ve also gotten on the call list of a local audio provider that I really, really enjoy working with – and the provider in question is far, FAR better than I am at scaring up work. With that being the case, some of my pet-project ideas are going to need a hard look. In devising my upgrade path, it’s far smarter for me to talk to the other provider and find out what would dovetail nicely with their future roadmap, rather than to just do whatever I think might be interesting. Fitting in with them means a chance at more receipts. More receipts means I can do more of what I love. Doing more of what I love means that I might just have enough excess capital to do some weird experiments here and there.

I don’t say any of this to dampen anyone’s enthusiasm. I say this so that we can all be clear about our choices. There are times when we might declare, “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!” It’s just that we sometimes say that without realizing that we’ve said it, in terms of business decisions. If we’re going to buy tools to make money with, it’s a very good idea to figure out what tools will actually serve to make money.


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.

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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.


Console Envy

When it comes to sound quality, any console capable of doing the show will probably be fine.

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

Which console sounds best? The one with the features you need. If an inexpensive mixer has all the necessary features for your shows, spending more doesn’t have much of a point.


Baskets, Bees, and Flies

Quality generally beats quantity.

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.

Sometimes, more IS more. It doesn’t matter how nice your mic cables are if you don’t have enough of them. If the show absolutely requires 24 channels, and you have a console with 16 really amazing channels…well, you’re still short by eight.

Yet, there are still plenty of instances where “a handful of bees is better than a basket of flies” (as Moroccans might say).

For instance, some folks are really hung up on the idea that a “main” PA speaker should be built around a 15″-diameter low-frequency driver. The idea is that bigger is better, but that’s not always so. Given a choice, I’ll take a good box built around a 12″ cone over a mediocre offering constructed around a 15. A well-designed 12 can be kinder to the vocals, because the cone driver is better at “playing” higher and covering the range that a small horn-driver can’t quite reach down into. Sure, the 12 probably won’t go as low, but if you want to be “loud” below 100 Hz you’re going to want subwoofers anyway. (For the record, I would never turn my nose up at a perfectly decent box that used a 15 or two.)

Also talking about speakers, there are people who believe a PA with more boxes is superior to a rig with fewer. The problem is that you have to take deployment into account. If you already have the necessary horizontal and vertical coverage happening, more boxes just act to cause more interference problems. The system looks cool because it’s bigger, and it gets louder because there are more boxes, but it doesn’t actually sound better. It might even sound terrible with all that comb-filtering going on. Coverage is sort of like what The Mad Hatter said to Alice: “When you get to the end, stop.”

This applies to bands too, especially when it comes to vocalists. One really brilliant singer with one mic is almost always light-years better than a whole group of vocalists of questionable quality. Beyond the basic aesthetics, not-so-hot singers tend to require a lot more gain to be heard (because they usually haven’t developed much vocal power), and that can easily lead to a system being run on the knife-edge of feedback all night.

…and speaking of people, how about crew-members? Any day of the week, and twice on Sunday, I’ll gladly take one knowledgeable, pleasant, and punctual helper over 15 punters who are late, surly, and have no idea what’s going on.

Tossing more and more junk at a problem rarely fixes the problem. You might eventually smother your issue or manage to distract from it, but the bugbear is still sitting beneath the pile. Applying a sufficient fix, on the other hand, works very reliably. There are times when you need “more.” There’s no getting around that. However, it’s important to avoid using “more” as a substitute for having what will actually do the job effectively.