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From Studio To Stage

From Studio To Stage

Jeffrey "Raz" Rasmussen has heard all the Doobie Brothers records a million times in the dozen years he's been FOH mixer for Michael McDonald, the band's leading crooner. But he doesn't need them to recreate the dense and exuberantly sophisticated sound of those records when McDonald plays in concert.

"If you miss even a little trick, people will come up and tell you about it," says Raz. "Those records are everywhere–on the radio, in elevators. The fans know exactly how they sound. And that's what you have to do on stage–get those sounds and those moves down."

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Mixing In Margaritaville

The call came on a Monday–not the best time to get my attention. One of the PR folks for AKG was pitching a story on Jimmy Buffett. Jimmy has been a Sound Image client for 31 years, and I like the Sound Image guys, but what was really new about a Jimmy Buffett show?

"Well," said the voice on the other end of the line, "He has these lav mics sewn into his shirts."

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Regional Slants

All of us have mixed sound for track acts, right? If that isn't a broad enough question, how about: have you, at some point, played canned music through a system? This is an important question because the majority of us have some particular music we use to listen to the tonal quality of our rigs, or our clients rig, once we are set up. For the most part we have at least one CD player on hand for just such a task. You may even have a Teac CD/cassette machine. They sold a lot of those back in the day. But before I take us for a stroll down memory lane, let me get to the subject of my piece this month.

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Bleeding Edge

Way back in the late 1950s an engineer named Jack Kilby working at Texas Instruments developed the first integrated circuit (IC) or "chip." Kilby's IC consisted of a single transistor plus a few semiconductors, all on a small wafer of germanium (interestingly, engineer Robert Noyce simultaneously developed an IC using silicon at Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation). A few years later (round about the time a new band called The Beatles ruled the charts with songs like "I Wanna Hold Your Hand") Gordon Moore (one of the co-founders of Intel) predicted that–due to rapid advancements in manufacturing technology–the number of devices that could be engineered onto a chip would double roughly every 24 months. In the '80s Moore's statement became bastardized, and began referring to the idea that the number of transistors on a chip could be doubled every 18 months. Fast forward to the late-'80s/early-'90s and the personal computing industry adopted to the PC world what has become known as "Moore's Law": processing power doubles roughly every 18 months while the cost of this processing power remains relatively stable.

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Don't Get All 60 Hz Now

Throughout my many years sojourn within the world of live audio and production I have noticed, and become very aware of, an underlying hum that seems to permeate this specialized universe we all inhabit. Sometimes it's very quiet and other times it becomes overbearing in its volume, but it is almost always present. I have noticed it at large gigs, and I have heard it rear its ugly little head on small, seemingly simple shows. Often it is hard to pinpoint as it isn't centralized in one location, and frequently it stems from different sources. Many times this hum doesn't stop even after the gig is finished and many times I even hear it going on back at the shop. It's a hum that seems to be prevalent in our business and no, it's not a floating 60-cycle ground hum that I am speaking about, although a certain amount of "grounding" might be just the solution to alleviate this incessant hum that often clutters our best endeavors. What I am referring to is the grumbling and undercurrent of discontent that insidiously seeps into our work space regardless of one's position or capabilities. In the same way that I identify and attach the 2.5k frequency to a person prone to hysteria I also associate the 60Hz frequency with the grumblers and not so forthright complainers.

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The Year Of the Rat

Dave Rat is sipping on a red wine while absent-mindedly holding a cigarette more like a prop than an outright addiction. He's wearing a rumpled pair of shorts emblazoned with the Union Jack that are tailored more with Benny Hill in mind than the Tour de France. All in all, it could be a relaxing evening almost anywhere. That is, except for the fact that at the moment he happens to be in the center of an FOH and lighting fort in the middle of the Earl's Court venue in London, surrounded by 10,000 screaming fans halfway through a set by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, on the first and ostensibly most nerve-wracking night of a four-show stand. He turns to a visitor and winks, saying in a voice practiced at cutting through the crowd noise without seeming to strain, "I try very had to find ways not to have to really exert myself at a show."

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Giving Guitar Gods Their Due

Seventy inputs– most of them guitars–are a big enough challenge for any live engineer. Now factor in all of this: Those guitarists are all world-class players doing a show that tracks the history and influence of the guitar. The mix of players changes over the show's three-day run and range from acoustic-based classical and bluegrass to the searing electric vibe of Albert King and Eric Johnson. The show is seen as a possible "audition" for a theatrical run and is being recorded for a DVD. Oh yeah, and you are mixing in surround on some gear that is seeing its first public use in this country.

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Ghost Riders in the Club

Well, I had a show to do in Ybor City, Florida. It was a recording job with my remote truck. I went to the club the night before the show to get a good room sound. I set up the truck, ran out the snake and power, hooked up the split and put up the room mics. I had a great time and got a great sound out of the room, so I locked the truck up and headed home.The next day I got a call from the club: "There is a ghost on the stage and it pulled down all your stuff." Yeah, right, I'll be right over. That's what they said–ghost. OK. . .

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Live Mixing Times Three

It's 12:35 p.m. when I walk into Engine studios in Chicago. In 25 minutes The M's will be playing live for a small audience here, but their performance is going to reach a lot more ears. KEXP, the radio station from Seattle which is sponsoring this concert (and 10 others over the course of three days), will be broadcasting this performance live over the airwaves in Seattle as well as streaming it live in multiple formats over the internet and cell phones, keeping that stream available on their website for two weeks, possibly podcasting the performance, burning it to CD for later playback on the air and archiving it for possible inclusion on a live CD at a later date. That's a lot to think about for FOH engineer Scott Colburn, but he seems cool as he walks around the 11-piece band in his socks, swapping XLR cables on the lead vocalist's mic and checking the DI boxes on the string section (two violins and a cello — yes, it's a rock band). Of course, this calm might come from the fact that everything that can go wrong, already has. This morning, just after install, the ISDN line that fed the broadcast back to Seattle failed.

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Camco Vortex 6 Power Amplifier, APB Spectra-T Console, CBI Ultimate Starperformer Split-Box and Audi

Camco Vortex 6 Power Amplifier

By Mark Amundson

I have been hearing great things about Camco amps from visiting sound engineers from Europe in recent years. Now that the Camco Vortex series of amplifiers is distributed in the United States by Ashly Audio, it's easier for us all to get a look at these amps.

I was sent a Camco Vortex 6 amplifier, the mainstay of many Euro touring sound companies. The Vortex 6 puts out 2100 watts per channel into four-ohm loads with both channels driven with less than 0.1% distortion at 1kHz. And the Vortex 6 comes in a two-rackspace size with a 12.4 kilogram weight (27 pounds), and draws a polite 16 amperes at the 1/8th power representing normal operation at 120V.

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It's the Laws

Okay, time to get up on the soapbox again. It's probably my three quarters electrical engineering circuit analysis education, but why can't most newbie sound people figure out how much power, voltage and current is going into each of their speakers? I mean Ohm's Law and Watt's Law have been around since before Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, Edison sockets (for the light bulbs) and Edison receptacles (for plugging things into). So I guess it is time we had a refresher course on the basic electrical formulas, and those of you who know this stuff can guess the famous dead physicist's names that make up the laws.

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Blood, Torture And Audio Take the Stage

Playwright Martin McDonagh crafted a morbid masterpiece with his Tony-winning drama The Pillowman, which was covered in this column last year. If you thought he couldn't match the intensity of a show about an author of dreary children's stories whose grisly endings are replicated by a real-life murderer, think again. The Lieutenant Of Inishmore, which recently completed a four-and-a-half month run on Broadway, focuses on the fear and anxiety that spreads through a small Irish clan following the death of the cat of the one family member who happens to be a nasty local terrorist. The irony of a brutal killer who loses his marbles over the death of his closest furry friend is rich with irony and very black humor. The production features loud gunfights, hacked limbs, a blood splattered stage and an actual live feline.

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