Tag Archives: Priorities

To Hurry Is Useless

“To hurry is useless. The thing to do is to set out in time.”
– Jean de La Fontaine

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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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Especially when it comes to show production, I will say this when it comes to time management:

If you’re in a hurry, you’re doing things the wrong way.

Of course there are exceptions. When a million things that you couldn’t have foreseen suddenly fling themselves at you, teeth gnashing, you can’t blame yourself. It’s entirely possible to get all your ducks in a row, only to have a vanload of psychotic kleptomaniacs with a fondness for waterfowl show up on the scene. The next thing you know, your ducks are gone.

I’m not here to argue the (bogus) point that you’re responsible for every eventuality, just because you have a certain position of responsibility on a show. That kind of thing sounds good for corporate motivational posters, but it’s as helpful as a greasy hammer when it comes to real life.

What I am saying, though, is that boredom is infinitely preferable to panic, and that you can often choose to not be in a pressure situation. You just have to allow yourself significantly more time than you think you need. If everything goes perfectly, then you can lounge around and enjoy being done. If everything does NOT go perfectly, you still have some cushion to work through your conundrum.

Again, what I’m talking about is when there are clear choices involved.

There are people who have a habit of thinking, “We can set up for our gig in the space of [timeframe], so we’ll show up at [timeframe] before doors.” These people CAN have a good show – if everything goes their way, and the folks supporting them are really top-shelf. If anything (at all) goes pear-shaped, though, the trouble will be very serious. The show probably will be late, or on time but something of a mess. The stress factor will be increased, and live music is plenty intense without any additions, thank-you-very-much-folks.

It’s also entirely possible to show up with plenty of time to spare, and then use that spare time poorly. I remember one show that I did where everybody, including me, was plenty early. We got the band’s gear all set up. I had a basic mix dialed in for the wedges before anybody else arrived. (I’ve told this story here before, I believe, but with somewhat less detail.)

And then, we didn’t soundcheck. The band wasn’t interested, for some reason. I stood by my console at FOH, and waited. As Douglas Adams would have said, nothing happened. Then, suddenly, and with no warning…nothing CONTINUED to happen. Roughly 90 minutes passed this way, as I remember.

Finally, at pretty much the precise moment that the band was to start, they took the stage and proceeded to do what they should have been doing all along: Soundcheck. Except, we had no time. We had to pretty much be in full swing immediately. Nothing was really where it was supposed to be, and so there was this flurried and chaotic activity of trying to dial everybody in all at the same time. Everybody needed something fixed in the monitors, and as I focused on one person, another player’s requests got lost. The drummer, in particular, had precisely what he didn’t want (a lot of everybody else’s vocals), and he wasn’t really in a position to communicate clearly about it. I think the poor guy suffered through a significant part of the first set before anything could be done. It all wasn’t a complete trainwreck, but it was an infinitely bigger sandwich-o-crap than it actually had to be.

To be brutally frank, the band could have socialized for a whole hour before downbeat – with everything being in place for downbeat – if we had only taken 30 minutes to get things dialed in beforehand. It might not have even taken that long.

There’s a big difference between not being able to put your ducks in a row, and not even attempting to arrange those little birds in a linear fashion. Why be in a hurry if it’s not necessary?

Music Is So Much More Than Recordings

A Schwilly guest post.

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“Before anyone could even begin to think of selling something as antiquated as a physical record, there were centuries upon centuries of successful and unsuccessful musicians.”

The entire article is available (free!) at Schwilly Family Musicians.

We Are Water Flowing Downhill

If you’re stuck, try to go around.

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One of the most lethal threats to successfully pulling off a show is getting stuck.

Or, rather, agreeing to remain stuck when you don’t have to be.

We’ve all seen it happen. You’re setting up and dialing in, and something won’t cooperate. The entire flow of show-prep suddenly diverts towards making that thing cooperate. Minutes pass as more and more resources are devoted to solving the problem. An hour goes by, and you’re still stuck, and you look up, AND IT’S 15 MINUTES TO DOORS, HOLY CRAP!

I’ve been there. I’ve been there (and been guilty of perpetrating it) when a snag has brought an entire production – even a decently planned one – to a grinding halt for far too long. So what do you do?

One thing you can do is learn the lesson of water flowing downhill.

Zen And The Critical Path

Consider the stream flowing down a rocky bed. The current has a destination which it must reach, yet there is impedance to the flow of the liquid. The rocks are obstacles. Snags. The water cannot flow through them.

Yet the water is untroubled. It merely flows around the rocks, acknowledging the stones by slowing – yet not stopping. The water continues down the critical path, and thus overcomes the rocks without overpowering them. The current strives against the impedance without effort.

The water does not confuse an obstacle in the path with the ending of the path.

Too often in troubleshooting, we make the assumption that we can not move onto solving the rest of a problem until we have solved each piece of the conundrum in some arbitrary order. However, this is rarely the case. Many shows are inherently “parallel” in nature. The lead vocal has a route to the PA, and the kick drum has a route to the PA. Those routes are very likely independent of one another until they are summed into an output path. If the kick drum’s independent route fails, but the lead vocal can still make it, you have a workable show. It may not be the exact show you were hoping for, but you still have a show.

The critical path is getting whatever MUST go through the audio rig to go through it. Everything else is a bonus. The vast majority of small-venue shows can come to a workable conclusion with nothing but the lead vocal working. Like I said, that may not be the best possible show – but it will still be recognizable as a show. If you hit an obstruction that you can’t quickly clear, take a moment and think: “If this can’t be made to work, is it truly the end of the show?”

If you answer in the negative, you are snagged on something that is NOT on the critical path. Flow around it. You can always come back to it later, but for now, you need to focus on arriving at the minimum viable product. In many cases, people only get stuck on a technical problem because they “assent” to being stuck. They decide to stop and bang away at the issue when there is no physical reason that other (actually more critical) issues could not be addressed first. The longer they consent to remaining obstructed, the more that the effort required to handle the rest of the show is concentrated into a shorter span of time. At some point, a threshold of panic is reached. This is a bad scene.

Do not confuse an obstacle in the path with the ending of the path. We are water flowing downhill.

The Rise And Fall Of A Small Venue – Part 2

Having all the top-shelf toys isn’t always necessary.

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Mario and Mishell really got the foundation of Fats in the right place.

Look closely enough at the composite picture above, and you can make out the original FOH PA. That original setup was two, JRX full-range boxes and a single JRX sub. Now, it’s true that the sub eventually got moved upstage for the drumfill, replaced by two Peavey boxes that I had wanted to sell. However, it’s important to note that everything in that original, functional setup was used – continuously – from that first, fateful show with Wes’s band to the mainstage’s final night.

Let that sink in.

With one or two exceptions due to a bad power switch on an amplifier, ANY SHOW anybody heard at Fats came through the core of the original PA. A JRX rig isn’t a two-million dollar setup from Meyer Sound, but it still sounded just fine and was more than adequate for the needs of the venue. By the end, that system had a lot of miles and a lot of smiles associated with it. In terms of overall return on investment, those entry-level JBLs were probably the best value of anything ever purchased for shows at Fats.

Now, let me tell you about what makes the “good ‘ol days” the “good ‘ol days:” It’s the people, the love, and the dedication.

It wasn’t the load in and load out.

Back in “the good ‘ol days,” I loaded in and out almost as much as the bands did. I brought in a snake, extra mics, a mixing console, monitors, and some sundries – and, when the weekend was through, I took them out again. I was often the first person in and the last out. It was acutely exhausting, but it was great in its own way.

It wasn’t the acoustical environment.

The original version of the basement had no acoustical treatment at all, beyond the carpeted stage. The upstage wall was corrugated metal. Anyone who, in later times, thought that Fats was a loud venue probably wasn’t around for the first part of my tenure. The very live (and thus, LOUD) room necessitated a lot of PA if you wanted to balance the mush with some sort of clarity. I regularly ran the system all the way up to the clip lights…with vocals! I didn’t want to tear anyone’s head off, but I often did.

It wasn’t the world-class production.

The gear we had available was certainly decent enough, but it was sparse and limited in its performance. In the early days, bands got a handful of mixes on compact wedges. The console that I brought in was a bit of a dinosaur, built in the age when the Elves forged rings of power…and digital-mixer manufacturers hadn’t yet discovered that EQ on the buses was actually a stonking-great idea. (Oh, Tascam. Your design choices make me chuckle so.) Our stage-lighting consisted of three bulbs, bare, in saturated colors, connected to a group of sockets run on a single dimmer switch. Nobody was going to confuse us with The Depot or The State Room.

But what we did have were great people, a love for music and the people who make it, and the dedication to do everything we knew how to do as best we knew how.

The original downstairs serving team of Mario and Krista set the tone and the bar – no pun intended – for all future crews. With the three of us there, what you had was a no-bull group of music fans who wanted to hear good tunes and treat people the right way. Krista blended a razor-sharp sense of humor with a honed instinct for the real craft of bar service. She could sing along with pretty much any walk-in music I had, and never had any trouble making friends any musician who walked in the door. On Mario’s side, there was a special sort of presence to the room with him, an owner, being hands-on with the proceedings. Mario is the sort of gentleman who gets respect due to people just wanting to respect him. He was the craftsman who took the basement from a run-down storage area to an actual venue. He was absolutely fearless about “getting dirty” in pursuit of a job being done, and as a drummer, he could talk shop with any band in the room.

Mario was ENTHUSED about what was going on with every aspect of a show, and some of my fondest memories of Fats are the pre-show conversations we used to have about bands and live-production. We could kill hours with chit-chat about mics, speakers, guitars and the people who played them, drum techniques, and anything else you can imagine that had to do with music. We called those times “The Calm Before The Storm,” and there wasn’t much that could equal them.

Like I said, we didn’t start out with all the cool toys. Even so, bands seemed to get a real kick out of the place. There’s a reason that this quote survives: “They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel.” I think bands responded to being wanted. I think bands responded to a crew that wanted to do everything possible with what was available. I think bands responded to venue management that was all about being fair, folksy, and easy to work with. I think bands responded to seeing that the point of the basement was to have music: The stage was a focal point instead of an afterthought, and the show was meant to be the reason you were down there.

Zero musicians probably remember how loud (or not loud) those mini-monitors were, but I’ll bet a whole bunch of musicians remember being treated like they actually mattered to somebody. I can’t remember any band that, upon being asked, did not want to sign the wall where players recorded their presence at Fats.

As a final point, I’ll also say that part of what made those early shows “the good ‘ol days” were the first experiences in that room with all the great talent Mishell booked. It didn’t matter that that the system didn’t do “crushing, Reggae dance hall bass.” Wasnatch and Dub Symptom still knew how to party. It didn’t matter that we couldn’t do ultra-minute surgery on every aspect of a guitar sound. Stonefed and Marinade still jammed hard enough for the crowd to fog the mirrors. You do have to have the basic tools, but past that, the actual humans involved in the music are what makes it work or not.

Even in the early days, Fats definitely worked.

First, Do No Harm

Doing nothing is perfectly acceptable when the alternative is to wreck something.

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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.

How To Spend A Ton Of Money

Really loading up your credit cards is easily done. Just keep trying to solve problems by modifying variables unrelated to those problems.

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The room was an acoustically hostile firestorm of reflections and standing waves.

The band’s backline was barely functional.

The guitar amps had all the midrange dialed out.

A really expensive console with different mic pres would have TOTALLY fixed all that.

Right?

An Audio Human’s Guide To Auditioning Pretty Much Everybody

My latest for Schwilly Family Musicians.

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“Now, why in blue-blazes would a live-sound engineer talk about auditioning people for your band?

Simple.

I deal with the fallout if you louse it up.

There have been many instances in my time where I’ve had to struggle with a band containing at least one member who was a terrible fit for actually playing shows. It usually makes for a frustrating and bad-sounding gig, in which a large amount (maybe all) of the available electro-acoustical headroom for the show is DEVOURED in trying to fix the problems. Nothing is left over to otherwise translate the show to the audience in a cool way. It’s all been spent on mere survival.”

Read the rest of this article (for free!) at Schwilly Family Musicians.

Public Speaking, PA Systems, And You

Just like a concert, what we want is the best possible show at the lowest possible gain.

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The inspiration for today’s article comes from Resli Costabell, a corporate trainer and professional speaker. She dropped by the Small Venue Survivalist’s Facebook page a few days ago, and left a note:

‘I know you’re about playing music, and I’d also be keen to hear your tips for speakers. Not speakers as in “big black box that pours out sound.” Speakers as in “human being talking.”‘

The great thing about sound for any event, whether that event is based on music or spoken word, is that the physical principles involved don’t change. At all. Sure, there may be differences in specific application, but all the science remains as it has always been. As such, any problems that occur will tend to crop up when there’s an attempt to “Captain Kirk” a situation: “Ya can’na change the laws of physics, Cap’n!”

As I’ve said before, sound reinforcement is all about the best possible show at the lowest possible gain. The first thing we have to figure out, then, is what is critical to the success of the event, and what isn’t. I, and many other audio humans, have been witness to situations where a non-critical element becomes prioritized to the point where it wrecks the experience of the critical parts. The major culprit for public speaking?

Visual Orientation At The Expense Of Sound

This is not, in any sense, about sound craftspersons believing that they are at the center of the Universe. This is about how audio itself IS the center of the Universe at any event where the primary mode for you to impart information is speech. If your engagement with your audience is based on an auditory event (talking, that is), then everything else MUST come second to that. It’s perfectly fine for that second-place finish to be “close.” Yes, you should look professional. Yes, your slide deck should be projected as beautifully as is possible. Yes, it’s good for you to be appropriately animated on stage. Yes, you should be able to hold yourself in a comfortable way. Yes, it’s great to be able to get right up to the first row of attendees.

Yes, but…

If any of that gets in the way of you being heard clearly and comfortably, then it has to take a back seat. If it doesn’t take a back seat, then the brutal, uncompromising, feral, and downright vicious physics of sound will begin clawing and biting at your event’s success. Gain is added to mics until the system begins to noticeably destabilize. More and more equalization is applied, assuming someone is around to apply it. The sound gets more and more “hacked up.” Eventually, an unpleasant equilibrium is reached where your talk is perhaps audible, yet of an irritating tonality, tough to actually parse, and given to “ringing” in a distracting manner.

Don’t be distraught! There are things you can do to fix this.

Prioritizing Audibility

Avoid Scrimping On Audio

An alarming number of presenters will spend enormous amounts of money on signage, computer graphics, handouts, goodies, nifty chairs, nice tables, uplighting, gobo projectors, and floral arrangements…and then have almost nothing left for audio. This is an inappropriate prioritization if speaking is the core of your audience engagement.

Instead, get your sound right first. If you are having AV provided for you, go for the best system available that makes sense. You don’t need a rock-concert rig to speak to 100 people in a breakout room, but a nice mic, a flexible mixer, and some decent loudspeakers on sticks are a much better approach than some $20/ day “mini-PA” that sits on a table. You might also want to consider owning your own PA. A few bits and pieces can sometimes outperform an installed AV system. Also, it can be very nice to have a flexible “front end” if the installed coverage is great…but the controls are poor.

This point is especially important because it underpins the rest of my particulars. With all of my following concepts, I am assuming that a correctly set up and reasonably tuned PA system is being employed. A sound system that is simply inadequate can not be correctly setup or reasonably tuned to best fit your presentation. A very nice system that is not working properly is not very likely to meet your needs.

Get Help

A competent sound crew, able to listen as though they were audience members, is an enormous help to your event. If some part of the system begins to misbehave, a dedicated craftsperson can begin to act on the problem while you continue on. Small issues can be corrected quickly, without you having to think about them. This isn’t even to mention that you can do other things while the audio rig is being set up.

The alternative is that you have to do double duty. There is a point where you alone simply cannot maintain your presentation’s flow and manage audio problems in parallel. Also, it is very hard for any “set and forget” system (whether meaningfully automated or not) to compete with a knowledgeable human operator wielding an appropriate set of tools. A crew, even if it’s just one trustworthy helper, that’s dedicated to your event alone does cost a bit more. The dividends paid from that investment can be enormous, though.

Mic Choice And Technique

For the love of all that is good, please get over any hangups you have regarding blocking your face with a microphone. Microphones work best when the apparent sound pressure of your voice is VERY large when compared to the apparent sound pressure of anything else – the PA system being a valid example of “anything else.” The louder your voice is at the capsule, the less gain is needed. Making your voice the loudest thing at the mic capsule means using a directional mic and holding that mic as close to your mouth as you can. If the overall result of sounds bad because of plosives (“p” and “b” sounds which “boom” or are otherwise problematic), then change the mic position so that the airstream from your mouth is less direct. You can try parking the front of the mic on the tip of your nose, or just below your bottom lip. Be careful not to tilt the mic so that you’re effectively talking into the side of the element. The front is where a directional mic is most sensitive and sounds the best.

Yes, holding a mic in this way is going to cause some sight lines to your face to not be the best. Remember, please, that the audibility of your speech must be the winner of all arguments. I do sympathize with the needs and wants of people running video. I recommend a cordial, polite, and firm stance that three-quarter and profile shots be used if there is a concern over straight-on views.

Implicit in the first paragraph is that a handheld mic is best. A headworn unit can be okay, but it must be placed carefully. Again, the mic should be as close to your mouth as is possible, but bear in mind that many headworns are not meant to be placed directly in front of the mouth. Their “pop-and-blast” filtering is inadequate for that approach. The corner of your mouth is the target area for many of these mics. Get the mic as close to that area as you can, and then ensure that it stays where you’ve put it.

Under no circumstances should your preferred solution be a lavalier mic attached to your jacket or shirt. Holding a directional mic at the level of your chest would not be acceptable, so I have no idea why doing the same thing with an omnidirectional unit would be considered a reasonable approach. With speech, lavalier microphones are indeed useful for “after the fact” video productions. For realtime sound-reinforcement they are simply inappropriate, and if anyone disagrees with me on that point, well, I just don’t care. I will gladly enter a competition where a properly placed lavalier and a properly placed handheld are set against each other in a battle of gain-before-feedback; I am confident that the handheld will be victorious.

Vocal Power

Just a while ago I said that, “Microphones work best when the apparent sound pressure of your voice is VERY large when compared to the apparent sound pressure of anything else.” This really is THE first principle of getting things right when speaking publicly with a PA. In the same way as a powerful singer makes concert sound much easier, so too does a powerful speaker. In fact, the PA system as a whole works best when your voice’s acoustical output is a “very hot” signal.

Speak as loudly as you can without straining. Straining your voice will tire you out, maybe damage your vocal cords, and produce unpleasant overtones that irritate your audience. Without getting to that point, speak as though you had no mic and no PA system. This will help ensure that the direct sound of your voice from your mouth is the largest possible acoustical signal the microphone can encounter. You probably will not be “too loud,” but if you are (and if you’ve followed my advice about getting good gear and good help), you can very easily be turned down. Effectively reducing a system’s gain is trivial when compared to increasing the gain. Reducing overall system gain reduces “smear” from sound looping back through the system, which helps make the presentation sound better.

Where Do You Stand?

Following on some more from my “first principle,” you should seek to stand as far behind (or out of the way of) the PA system as you possibly can. The PA is not for you to hear the sound of your own voice. It is for your audience to hear you. The closer you stand to the PA loudspeakers, and the more you stand in front of them, the greater their apparent sound pressure is from the mic’s standpoint. This, of course, works against your voice being a very large signal when compared to other arrivals at the microphone.

This is another situation where sight lines may suffer a bit for some people. It depends on how the PA is deployed. As always, this is unfortunate, but your voice’s audibility must be the top priority. Your message will probably survive people not being able to see all of you at all times, but it may not survive people not being able to hear.

Acoustical Awareness

A sad fact of life is that many of our gathering spaces are built to hold many people while looking grand…and sound terrible while doing so. In the same way as musicians must be aware of how each player’s sound fits in with other sounds, so too do you have to be aware of your voice and the room. Intelligibility is key, and difficult acoustics ruin intelligibility. The sound of the room’s reverberation can easily “run over” and mask new sounds, even if it’s in a relatively subtle way. For intelligibility, you must have separation between the direct sound of your speech, and the indirect noise of previous sounds that are bouncing around the space.

To some degree, system tuning can help with this, but it’s just a “patch.” If a certain frequency area tends to build up, that area can be de-emphasized in the PA – but you have to be careful! Too much de-emphasis and it will be very obvious that a strange-sounding audio system is firing into a reverberant room. It is simply impossible to equalize one’s way completely out of an acoustical problem. Also, simply adding volume to the sound system doesn’t really help either. The audio system is a sonic emitter in the room, just like any other, and as such the room reverberation is proportional to whatever the PA is doing. A louder PA just means louder reverberation, and also a PA that’s less sonically stable. (Remember: We want the lowest possible gain.)

If PA volume isn’t the answer, then you have only one other element to work with: Time.

In a reverberant room, you MUST slow down. You have to allow for the reverberant sound to die off so that the next sonic event (a word or sentence) is separated from all the garble. Slowing down means that you may have to condenser your presentation, or allow for extra time.

There are some volume adjustments that work, but they have to come from the way you talk. Try to add a bit of emphasis to the “hard” sounds in your speech. Hard sounds act as signposts regarding where words start and end, and are critical to people figuring out what you’ve said if some of the other information is lost. Enunciating those bits mean that they stick out from other sounds, which gives intelligibility a boost.

Of course, if you can, you should pick a space with excellent acoustics for spoken word. That is, a room with a very short reverb time and very low reverb level. The larger such a room is, the more expensive it tends to be – and that loops right back around to not scrimping on audio.

Projector Hangers

Just throwing a bunch of sound into a room is NOT pro-audio.

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Since pre-school, I have known that calling people names is not a very nice thing. It’s not something that Winnie The Pooh would do, except by mistake, and if he did make that mistake, the end of the episode would have all the residents of the Hundred-Acre Wood coming together to learn a very special lesson. Eeyore would say something unintentionally funny. Christopher Robin would say “Silly old bear.”

But I sometimes do invent derogatory names for people and organizations. I especially invent those names when people or organizations manage to get things wrong in a very complete and glaring way – particularly when it comes to live audio.

(In the name of fairness, let me present that audio-humans are sometimes called “Squeaks.” It’s a reference to some of the unpleasant sounds we’ve been known to make, which includes feedback. I believe I have earned the label on more than one occasion.)

Anyway.

Events over the last couple of weeks have led me to concoct the epithet, “Projector Hanger.” A Projector Hanger may also be called a “D!@# Projector Hanger,” or a “G!@ D!@# Projector Hanger,” or even a “F!@#$%^ PROJECTOR HANGER,” depending upon just how much of a metaphorical mess they’ve left for folks like me to clean up.

Metaphorically.

A Projector Hanger is an A/V integrator who has no business installing a public-address audio system (because they have no clue about what makes such a system actually work well), yet installs such a system anyway. They attach this fundamentally screwed-up monstrosity to the bit of the install they actually do understand: A reasonably bright projector, maybe with HD capability, which is pointed at a screen and supplied with various inputs at some convenient location. This final bit of behavior actually provides a gateway to identifying – and hopefully avoiding – Projector Hangers.

Point-N-Shoot

Projector Hangers are adept at directly firing some sort of light emitter at a reflective target, such as a proper screen or brightly-painted wall. They seem to assume that this is the way to go for everything, and so they have an alarming tendency to fire sound emitters (loudspeakers) directly at reflective targets. Reflective targets like…hardwood floors. This creates an acoustical crapstorm of multiple, secondary arrivals, ensuring that everybody in the room is sitting as deeply in a reverberant field as may be practicable. Intelligibility drops like a rock as transients from words spoken into a microphone smear, bounce, ricochet, and rattle to the maximum extent possible. Gain before feedback throws up its hands and takes a sick day as overhead loudspeakers fire into the sides of microphones, and also as those microphones pick up even more re-entrant noise from the vortex of acoustical reflections.

(A primary indicator of a Projector Hanger is that the audio side of the system LOOKS nice, being unobtrusive and able to blend in with the decor, but the actual audio from the audio side SOUNDS awful.)

More Is Better, Right?

The Projector Hanger is a lover of large images. Wide throw. Multiple screens. Make sure everyone can see it! They apply this same mentality to audio, seemingly thinking that the key to everyone hearing well is for everyone to just hear something. Anything!

To accomplish this, the Projector Hanger installs a lot of speakers, with the intent that sound should be sprayed everywhere. So, even before the sound from all those loudspeakers smacks into the floor, a nightmare of multiple arrivals and destructive interference has been summoned. Also, the Projector Hanger can be counted on to compound this problem by deploying loudspeakers in spaced pairs. (The ability to reproduce stereo sound from a playback device is paramount, even if the critical application for the system is to reinforce the signal from a single microphone.) These spaced pairs further aggravate the multiple arrival and interference problems, and also feed the gaping maw of the acoustical issues: Why just hit the floor with a bunch of sound when you can also hit the walls!

Math Is Hard

Another indicator that a Projector Hanger has been on the loose is when equal numbers no longer correspond. For example:

The Projector Hanger, wishing to be helpful, installs an easy-access XLR jack for a microphone line. The jack is labeled “Mic 1,” and the label even looks like it was silkscreened directly onto the jackplate. It all looks so PRETTY.

They then permanently wire the output of that jack to a set of terminal blocks on a super-classy input mixer and amplifier. The control knobs on the device were clearly labeled at the factory, so that a person could easily find the gain controls for various channels. It would make sense, then, that the jackplate labeled “Mic 1” would be wired to “Input 1” on the mixer-amplifier unit. Of course, that’s not what happens. In an astounding bit of mental gymnastics, perhaps influenced by the literary horrorscapes of HP Lovecraft, the Projector Hanger decides that “1” is actually equal to “2.” That’s where the jack is wired. Input 1 is actually used for the installed wireless system – but no labeling is put in place to clear this up.

One day, an audio-human ties into the system through “Mic 1.” All the knobs on the mixer-amplifier are down, meaning that no signal passes through the system. The audio-human rolls the volume up on “Input 1,” but no noise is heard. The audio-human naturally thinks that there’s a cabling problem, and proceeds to waste a huge chunk of time looking for the bad connection. Eventually, the sound craftsperson gives up and deploys their fallback option – only to later discover that the whole mess was caused by a moronic, undocumented connection scheme.

I can see the argument in my head right now.

Projector Hanger: “Why didn’t you try more knobs?”

Sound Person: “Why can’t YOU COUNT?”

The Backup Is Better Than The Primary

The interface (or, perhaps more appropriately, catastrophic collision) between a pro-audio tech and a Projector Hanger is highly instructive in other ways. I mentioned above that a series of problems might force an audio human to take an alternate route. This alternate route might have been, say, patching into a single, inexpensive, powered loudspeaker sitting on a tripod stand.

Now then.

Before this particular debacle, the sound person had been trying valiantly to spray-paint the acoustical turd that the Projector Hanger had created. To this end, a very large number of parametric EQ filters had been used. By “large number,” what I mean is, “all that were available.” The EQ transfer function applied to try to make the system usable was (quite frankly) insane, and was implemented across two processors. One was patched across the total output of the audio human’s mixer, and the other was inserted on a wireless headset.

When the fallback solution was implemented, the tech bypassed all the EQ. All that crazy finagling could not be counted on to be helpful in the situation, so it was better to start from scratch. This was unfortunate, but the operator was poised and ready to fight any problems in realtime. Some faders for wired mics were pushed up on the console.

The sound was, actually, very good. With nothing beyond basic channel EQ, the single, ugly, cheap loudspeaker on a stick was handily beating the CRAP out of the multi-unit, nice-looking, expensive install. The headset mic also had plenty of usable gain, although the audio human did use a few inserted filters to clean up a bit of mud and harshness. When an emergency-implemented “I don’t know what else to do, so let’s just get through it” solution works better than the thing that was all planned out…

…you might just have had a run in with a Projector Hanger.

Let ‘Em Get Away From It

Maximum coverage isn’t always appropriate for small venues.

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I love the idea of a high-end, concert-centric install.

It excites me to think of a music venue where the coverage is so even that every patron is getting the same mix, +/- 3 dB. Creating audio rigs where “there isn’t a bad seat in the house” is a point of pride for concert-system installers, as well it should be.

Maximum coverage isn’t always appropriate, though. It can sometimes even be harmful. The good news is that an educated guess at the truly necessary coverage for live audio isn’t all that hard. It starts with audience behavior.

What Is The Audience Trying To Do?

Another way to put that question is, “What is the audience’s purpose?” At my regular gig, the answer is that they want to hang out, listen pretty informally, and socialize. This is an “averaged” assessment, by the way: Some folks want to focus entirely on the music. Some people barely want to focus on the tunes at all. Some folks would hate to be stuck in their seat. Some folks wouldn’t care.

The point is that there’s a mix of objectives in play.

This differs from going to show at, say, The State Room or, even more so, at Red Butte Garden. My perception of those events is that people go to them – paying a bit of a premium – with the intent to focus on the music.

At my regular gig, where there’s such a diversity of audience intent, perfectly even coverage of all areas in the room is counterproductive to that diversity. It forces a singular decision on everyone in the room. It essentially requires that everybody in attendance has the goal of being primarily focused on the music as a foreground element. This is a bad thing, because denying a large section of the audience their intended enjoyment is likely to encourage them to leave.

If they leave, that hurts us, and it hurts the band. As much as possible, we should avoid doing things that encourage folks to vamoose.

So, I’m perfectly happy to NOT cover everything. The FOH PA is slightly “toed in” to focus its output primarily on the area nearest the stage. The sound intensity is allowed to drop off naturally towards the back of the room, and there’s no attempt at all to fill the coverage gap off to the stage-left side. People often seem to congregate there, and my perception is that many of them do it to take a break from being in the direct fire of the PA. They can still hear the show, but the high-frequency content is significantly rolled off (at least for whatever is actually “in” the audio rig).

If I knew that almost everybody in the room was primarily focused on the music, I would take steps to cover the room more evenly. That’s not the case, though, so there are “hot” and “cool” coverage zones.

Cost/ Choice Parametrization

Another way to view the question of how much coverage is appropriate is to try to define the value that an attendee placed on being at a show, and how much choice they have in terms of their position at the show. This is another sort of thing that has to be averaged. Not all events (or people) in a certain venue are the same, so you have to look at what’s most likely to happen.

When you state the problem in terms of those parameters, you get something like this:

If the cost of being at the show is high (in terms of money, effort spent, overall commitment required, etc.) and the choice of precisely where to take in the show is low (say, assigned seating), then it’s very important to have consistent audio coverage for everyone. If people are paying hundreds of dollars and traveling long distances to see a huge band’s farewell or reunion, and they’re stuck in one seat at a theater, there had better be good sound at that seat!

On the other hand, it’s not necessary to cover every square inch of an inexpensive, “in town” show, where folks are free to move around. If the coverage isn’t what someone wants, they can move to where it is what they want – and, if they can’t get into the exact coverage area they desire, it’s not a huge loss. For a lot of small venues, this is probably what’s encountered most often.

Now, please don’t misconstrue what I’m saying. What I’m definitely NOT saying is that we should just “punt” on some gigs.

No.

As much as possible, we should assume that the most important show of our careers is the one we’re doing now.

What I’m saying is that we need to spend our effort on things that matter. We have to have a priorities list. If people want (and also have) options available for how they experience a show, then there’s no reason for us to agonize about perfect coverage. As I said above, academically perfect PA deployment might even be bad for us. They might not even want to be in the direct throw of our boxes, so why force them to be? In the world of audio, we have finite resources and rapidly diminishing returns. We have to focus on the primary issues, and if our primary issue is something OTHER than completely homogenous sound throughout the venue, then we need to direct our efforts appropriately.