Tag Archives: Professionalism

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.


We Are Water Flowing Downhill

If you’re stuck, try to go around.

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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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.

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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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.

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.


When Your Work Speaks For Itself, Don’t Interrupt

Schwilly Family. Guest post. You know the drill.

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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“One of the most plainly visible examples is when, without irony, a musician tells the audience that the music being presented is bad. It seems like an embrace of one’s own limitations, and there’s nothing wrong with owning a total miscue, but there’s a problem with claiming – as a matter of regular course, and with a palpable sense that you mean what you say – that your art is crap:

The danger is that somebody might believe you.”

The whole article is available at Schwilly Family Musicians.


Load Out Begins Immediately Upon Load In

Everything is prep for something 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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You may not have known this, but loading in and loading out aren’t different processes. They are the same thing. Setup and teardown also share this behavior.

Basically, every part of doing a show is the preparatory step for what comes after it. If you’re lazy about the prep (and we all get lazy from time to time), you are making the next bit harder.

For example, let’s say that you load in a show with gear going absolutely everywhere. It’s spread out all over creation. There’s no plan, at all, for how things should be grouped. It all looks like a giant two-year old was given a set of blocks that look like flightcases, amplifiers, and storage tubs, and that two-year old suddenly decided the world was unfair and threw a major fit.

Nobody knows where anything is, exactly. Not even you.

How do you think setup is going to treat you, starting from a place of chaos?

If setup treats you poorly, how will the show go?

If the show goes poorly, as most amalgams of entropy and stress tend to do, how will teardown go?

If teardown is a ball of stress, sullenness, “I don’t care, just throw it in,” and general capitulation, will loadout be easy on you?

What will the next show be like, probably?

Problems cascade. It’s just like breaking a microphone’s cable: For that microphone, every other connection is effectively broken. If any part of the show is afflicted with disorganization, every other part of the show will suffer from the effects.

On multiple occasions, I’ve been told that I run a very tight stage. That is, I try to start with things in a neat and orderly configuration. I’ll tell you right now that such habits, for me, are not just about aesthetics. Yes, I do appreciate the look of a clean and organized show. I’m aware of the “political” implications of presenting that kind of setup to musicians, and I think those implications are worth the effort all by themselves. However, it’s also about survival, plain and simple.

There are people in this business who I term “sound ninjas.” They can take any mess and make it functional in the space of a few seconds. I’m not so skilled as to pull that off. I have to be able to understand what’s going on with the rig, and have some “homework” done if I’m going to do a decent job at selective noise-louderization. If the system looks like some giant violently vomited black spaghetti and steel poles all over the place, I’m going to have a bad time.

So, I try for the opposite, because I want to have a good time.

…and, of course, any show will involve the setup racing towards the maximum possible entropy. If the system’s entropy – the chaos and disorder involved – starts as low as you can get it, then its end value will be as low as the circumstances allow. If the entropy starts high, it’s only going to get higher by the time you’re ready to pack and leave.

Pack the boxes neatly, and it will be easy to find things at the next setup. It will also be much easier to setup in an organized way.

The show will be pulled off much more easily.

The end level of disorganization will be lower, making it easier to pack neatly.

Pack the boxes neatly, and it will be easy to – (You get the idea.)

The time and effort required to make a show happen can not be created or destroyed. It can only be transferred around. Spread it evenly, and the process stays manageable. Pack it all into one huge lump, and you may not be able to handle it all.


VRX Brackets

One word: No.

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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Before I begin, I want to make it clear that I do not have any “hands-on” time with the VRX series by JBL. However, I know enough about how they are supposed to be used to “be dangerous.” Also, depending on your perspective, this may not really be small-venue material.

Now then.

It has come to my attention that some folks are using 3rd Party and/ or homebrew suspension brackets so as to defeat the built-in angle on VRX loudspeakers. That is, VRX loudspeakers naturally array in an arc, and there are people out there who are arraying them in a straight line.

Please, do NOT do this.

The first thing to talk about is the safety problem. I am not one to say that different and weird things can’t be tried if you’re careful. However, suspending loudspeakers anywhere that a rigging failure could cause injury or death is not a trivial matter. Such a situation is generally inappropriate as a test lab. Also, if something does go horribly wrong, using ONLY approved hardware is far less of a liability than deploying a non-manufacturer-approved solution.

If you are using rigging hardware that is not approved and endorsed by JBL for mounting VRX boxes, then stop.

The next thing to talk about is the audio side, and also the perception side.

A VRX system is a “constant-curvature array.” JBL even says so. JBL also calls VRX a “line-array.” However, everything I have read on this subject (mostly commentary from people who are far higher-up in this business than I am) indicates that the two terms are not actually compatible. A constant-curvature array is a vertically-oriented point-source deployment. It is not meant to behave as a classical “line source,” although the boxes will interact greatly at lower frequencies. I strongly believe that JBL labels the VRX system with the line-array name because of marketing: People associate “line-array” with “better” or “professional,” so there’s an incentive to refer to a vertically-deployed loudspeaker system as a line-array.

VRX hangs in an arc because it is supposed to. It is designed around that kind of deployment. Defeating the built-in angles and hanging the boxes straight down is against the entire design concept of the system. The boxes are not designed to array that way acoustically or physically. A straight-down hang of VRX causes the box outputs to interact (and interfere) in a way that is actually unhelpful in terms of total audio quality. It may be that a straight hang gets somewhat louder, but the phase interactions – especially at high frequencies – really aren’t what you want.

If an actual, JBL, multi-angle-capable line-array is what you want, then buy a Vertec system. (Or, if you want a system that only hangs straight-down and manages coverage through processing, look into Anya.)

Once again, please understand that I do encourage experimentation and “weirdness.” However, in the case of highly-engineered loudspeaker systems, I must very much recommend that they be treated like medication. (Use only as directed.)


The Splendid Magic Of The Set-List

It’s basically rune-paper of future-sight.

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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Some of the best bands I work with have never, and probably will never hand me a set-list. This is important for me to say, because I otherwise might give the impression that bands who don’t hand set-lists to audio-humans are falling short of being professional. That’s not what I’m trying to get at.

What I AM trying to say is that providing a PA driver with a set-list, especially an annotated one, can be a very good thing for everybody. When well done, a document such as the one pictured is actually very powerful. When you get right down to it, what you’re providing a sound craftsperson is something that you might only expect to find in the fantasy worlds of JRR Tolkien or D&D:

A set-list is, for all practical purposes, a low-level, magic scroll of foreknowledge and telepathy. It grants people like me a bit of prescient vision into what you’re going to do next, and this can be a nice enhancement to your show.

If an audio operator knows what’s going to happen, they can anticipate the event and be “right there” when it’s time, instead of having to catch up. There’s less chance of an awkward delay between something needing to be addressed and the appropriate action taking place, because the audio-human can address the issue (or be ready to do so) without the issue having happened first. “Scrambling” can be greatly reduced by the application of a well-formed set-list.

Examples

The set-list pictured above is clean and organized, and it also packs an enormous amount of “procedural information” into a small space. All that’s required is for me to interpret it correctly for the specific situation. For instance…

“Megaphone” – This is going to be loud, band-limited, and the loop gain through the megaphone may contribute to feedback problems. Be ready to deal with that.

“VD” – Vincent D, who’s sitting in with us, is going to have prominent vocals on this tune. If you’ve pulled him down to save loop-gain for other things, you’ll need to be prepared to push him back up and otherwise adjust.

“Harp” – There are prominent harmonica bits in this tune. Be thinking about where to put the fader for those.

“Banjo” – This instrument is not going to sound the same as the guitar that’s normally plugged into that amplifier. You might need to pull some fast work with your channel EQ if things are really out of whack, and you might also need to “get on the gas” with the fader.

“Acoustic Guitar” – This is plugged into that direct box which you’ve connected to a channel that is currently muted. You’re going to need to unmute that channel, or things will be awkward for a minute.

The other thing about that little piece of paper is that it tells me an expected start and end time. This is great, because I don’t have to wildly guess at when the band will go on, nor do I have to speculate about how long they’re planning to go on. They’ve told me. (This is also an indicator of Hectic Hobo’s professionalism. They have a plan regarding their spot in the lineup, and they’re going to try to stick with that plan so that Tycoon Machete gets to utilize their slot to the fullest.)

Making Your Own

If you decide that you want to provide your friendly, neighborhood noise wrangler with a set-list, I can give you a few pointers as to what works best:

  • Maximize your simplicity. Try to find the most basic way possible to convey the information you want to convey. Color coding, for instance, IS neat, but if I need to consult a “map key” to remember what all 20 of your colors mean, you may be getting in your own way. (Also, some folks are colorblind, and colors are harder to discern in low-light. See below.)
  • Make things highly readable in low-light. Big, blocky, and simple fonts, plenty of “whitespace,” and generally high-contrast help with this in a big way.
  • Avoid skimping. If you think something’s important, include it. If that means printing out several sheets in order to play nicely with the first two points, so be it.
  • Don’t take offense. Some audio-humans won’t seem to care about your show, or your set-list. Give them the opportunity to care. Maybe they will. If they don’t, at least YOU tried.

For those of us who do care, and do read set-lists, I can tell you that being able to partially read your mind and see a little ways into the future is a super-spiffy power to have. A little bit of paper from you can grant that power.


Why Does That Bass Rig Sound So Much Better Than Mine?

It’s probably being operated in the service of music rather than “sound effects.”

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.

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

One of the perks of my job is that I get to regularly hear great bass players. My saying that might surprise some folks, because I’m NOT in the camp that believes that kick and bass are the most important elements of a song. My priorities list is not, however, my “want” list. Believe me, I WANT great bass. It most certainly is part of the whole experience, and if it’s not in the right spot, the experience isn’t all it could be.

So, when I get great bass, I’m a happy guy. If I’m getting great bass, it’s because the player knows what they’re doing. Obviously, being able to actually manipulate the stringed instrument is key, but there’s another element. That element is the rig, and the effective use thereof.

The “effective use” bit is REALLY important by the way.

I’ve seen lots of bass-amp setups over the years. Just sitting on the deck without making noise, some of them were more impressive than others. What’s amazing is how little that actually tells you. I’ve heard relatively diminutive rigs that were a joy to work with, and giant setups that made me check a clock every two minutes: “This is painfully bad. Is it time to go home yet?” (Yes, I’ve also had impressive looking setups that sounded fantastic. Case in point – the rig pictured above, which belongs to Ray Opheikins. Ray IS Geddy Lee, as far as I can tell.)

Whether the “I love the sound of this bass-player!” experience was coming from a big or small setup, I’m pretty sure I can distill the root cause down to one thing: The bass rig was being used to perfectly fit into a musical part, rather than to create “sound effects.” That is, the player’s main goal was to produce actual notes that all matter, instead of just rumble and boom. The mental maturity required for this is significant, but that’s beyond the scope of this article. What I really want to talk about are some of the technical aspects of making this happen.

We Built A Hill, But We Wanted Flat Ground

All sorts of folks fall into the rumble-n-boom crowd, but one particularly troubled subgroup is the “bass knob all the way up” tribe. This is a well-intentioned crew. They want to have fun, and they want the crowd to have fun, but they think that the fun is contained primarily in the feel of deep bass. So…they gun the lowest frequency controls on their tone stacks. What they think is happening is that they’re grabbing the deep end only, but that has a good chance of not being the case. What’s really likely to happen is that they grab the subwoofer material AND a big pile of peaky, muddy, boomy, garble that lives above that…and is proportionally much louder.

Now, I can’t substantiate all of this directly, but I can put forth a model that I think fits into my experience.

The misconception that I think is occurring is that the player is assuming the overall response of their rig to be flat down to 0 Hz. However, my guess is that many bass setups look more like this:

basscurve1

It’s possible to flatten that response all the way down to 40 Hz (a hair below the normal tuning of a bass guitar’s E string), but it requires a couple of precisely placed and highly flexible parametric filters.

basscurve2

Precisely placed and highly flexible parametric filters aren’t usually what you find on a bass amp. If you’re talking about the low end, you probably have a shelving filter with a corner frequency of 100 Hz. Turn it all the way to the right and add it to the natural response of everything, and…

basscurve3

You get this huge “hill” between 75 Hz and 200 Hz, with a bit of a peak around 150 Hz. Depending on the instrument, the player, and the room, this can be a real recipe for mud, overwhelming resonance that’s nasty to listen to, and “one-note bass” (where a few tones really pop out, and everything else disappears). It’s entirely possible for the actual frequency response of a real rig in a real room to be far more extreme than what I’m depicting here. That means the addition from the low-frequency boost makes things even worse. Yes, the deeper tones did come up, but a lot of other material also rose in level…and in higher proportion. Plus, the higher frequencies, where the actual clarity of the bass comes through, are in danger of being drowned.

Irony: It’s Not Actually “All About Dat Bass”

The preceding fits into my next point, which is, surprisingly, that really effective bass isn’t necessarily “deep.” It can be, of course, which is seriously fun.

But really good bass, bass that can work beautifully in a song and sound as good as possible in lots of different venues, seems to rely far less on “deep” than “smooth.” Also, the “smooth” has to happen rather higher than might be intuitive.

First, there are lots of PA systems out there that I would personally consider to be “pro” that are very definitely NOT flat down to 40 Hz. At that point, they’re probably at least 6 – 10 dB down from the rest of their passband. In other words, the flat-tuned system might play at a certain sound pressure when driven with 1000 watts at, say, 1 kHz. If you wanted that same sound pressure at 40 Hz, you would need to be able to safely drive the system with 4000 to 10,000 (!) watts. A PA that can actually deliver 40 Hz or below at a comparable level to the midrange is a large, expensive creature with a voracious appetite for electricity.

Second, even dedicated bass cabs don’t go that low. The venerable and much coveted Ampeg 8X10 is advertised to be 3 dB down at 58 Hz, and 10 dB down at 40 Hz.

Now…

I’m not saying that a combination of playing style, EQ, and compression can’t compensate for that. You might be able to pull everything else down to match that 40 Hz level.

But do you see how that proves my point?

If you pull everything else down to match the really deep frequencies, you’ve created a very smooth response at the cost of total output. (This is not a bad tradeoff, unless you don’t have enough output, at which point the rest of the band needs to give you some space. Seriously, you don’t need new gear. They need to cooperate with YOU. Anyway…)

The smoothness is the key – and it’s especially key in the critical range of about 80 – 320 Hz. That’s a two-octave band which starts at the first harmonic of your low E string. As a sound operator, I’ve found that when the 80 – 320 Hz area is gotten right (both in and of itself and with any tweaks necessary to fit the band) the bass player’s contribution tends to be nicely audible at all times and in a wide variety of positions within the venue. That passband is reliably doable by a wide variety of bass amplifiers and PA systems. Keeping that range smooth, with gentle transitions to the rest of the audible frequency band, is also a great weapon against bad acoustics and poorly tuned PA systems. You’re far less likely to aggravate a nasty standing wave for the folks standing in the areas where the peaks form, and you’re also far less likely to aggravate a peak in the audio system’s response.

Also, if you start with a really smooth rig, you have the option of dialing in a peak or dip to fit the band’s sound. If the amp’s “starting point” response looks like the Himalayas, you’re stuck with that being stamped onto whatever else you’re trying to do.

Again, it’s not that deep bass isn’t cool. If that’s THE thing your sound stands or falls on, though, then you’ve put all your eggs into a small basket that’s easy to get wrong. Some of the best bass players I know have setups that will definitely go low – but that going low is in very careful and tasteful balance to other frequencies. The feel of the earth moving is a flavor enhancement to the basic and critical meal of all the notes being audible and properly proportioned to one another. If that fundamentally critical musical food wasn’t translated, I would no longer consider those players to be some of the best around.

There are other bass players that I know who I also consider to be top-shelf.

And their rigs don’t go very low.

But they are smooth and balanced, and fit perfectly into the equation of the band. That’s what really matters, and what really impresses me. Fourty Hz is rad for a minute, but there’s a universe of sound way above that neighborhood that’s necessary for being mind-blowing through a whole set.


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?