Last week, I got to spend a few days with students from Broadview Entertainment Arts University. The Live Sound class needs some honest-to-goodness shows to work on, so Bruce (their actual professor) and myself worked out a bit of a mechanism: I put a couple of gigs together every quarter, BEAU provides the room, I bring the PA, and we spend three days getting our collective hands dirty with building the thing.

Last week was the first round. As usual, I spent too much time talking and we didn’t get as far as maybe we should have. I also made some hilarious blunders, because everything involved in putting on a live gig is a perishable skill, and I sometimes have sizable gaps between productions. (For several minutes, I couldn’t find the blasted aux-in remap selector for my X32, even though I was on the “Input” routing page and staring right at it. I also absent-mindedly walked off the drum riser while I was mid-sentence. You can’t make this stuff up, folks.)

Anyway.

We had a really solid group of students all around. One of the most solid students was Patrick. Patrick is a guy who’s coming at this whole live-sound thing with a background in telecom. Telecom, like audio for entertainment, is the sort of business where you have to manage and troubleshoot every possible species of signal-transfer problem imaginable. Telecom skills are also becoming increasingly relevant to audio because of our increased reliance on high-speed network infrastructure. When all your audio, control, and clock signaling gets jammed onto a Cat6, it’s important to have some sort of clue as to what’s going on. (I have just enough clues to make things work. Other people have many more clues.)

As the story ended up going, we had a problem with my digi-snake. We got everything plugged together, and…oh dear. The consoles were only seeing one stage box, instead of both cascaded together. I walked over to the deck and started puzzling through things. Did the cascade connection get partially yanked? No. Did the boxes simply need a reset? No. Had I crunched the cascade cable at some point? No. I was on the brink of declaring that we’d just have to muddle through with one box when Patrick got involved.

Had I tried running a signal directly to the second box? Well, actually I hadn’t, because I was used to thinking of the two boxes as a unit.

Click.

Oh, look! The second box illuminated its green light of digital-link happiness.

Had I tried plugging directly into the secondary connection on the first box? Well, actually I hadn’t.

Click.

No happy-light was to be found.

I considered all that very nifty, but still being invested in my way of doing things, I failed to immediately see the obvious. Patrick enlightened me.

“The B-jack on the top box is the problem. Just connect them in reverse order, and you’ll have both. You can always change them around in the rack later.”

Of course, he was exactly right, and he had saved the day. (I was really glad were working on the problem the night before the show, instead of with 30 minutes to spare.)

The point here is that Patrick’s skillset, while not directly related to what we were doing, was fully transferable. He didn’t know the exact system we were working on, but he had plenty of experience at troubleshooting data-interconnects in general. He also had a distinct advantage over me. He was looking at the problem with a set of totally fresh eyes. Not being locked into a particular set of assumptions about how the system was supposed to work as a whole, he could conceptualize the individual pieces as being modular rather than as a single, static, integrated solution. I was thinking inside the flightcase, while Patrick was thinking outside the flightcase about everything inside that same flightcase. There’s a difference.

The whole situation was the triumph of the knowledgeable outsider. A person with the skills to make your plan work, but who isn’t yet invested in your specific plan may be just what you need when the whole mess starts to act up. They might be able to take a piece of the whole, reconfigure it, and slot it back in while you’re still getting your mind turned around. It’s really quite impressive.