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On the Bleeding Edge

On the Bleeding Edge

Last month we discussed the increasing demand for live recording. This month, we take a look at how to get your raw tracks or mixes to the producer and/or band for overdubbing or approval. (Overdubbing on a live CD? I never knew there was such a thing! Tell it to the judge.) Whether you realize it or not, you have likely already participated in a form of digital audio delivery: that iPod you've got strapped to your arm is probably filled with MP3s that have been downloaded from the Internet. Granted, MP3s are relatively small files, and Lord knows the fidelity stinks, but the technological idea is there. Of course, things get complicated when file size increases, and any audio file we might be interested in has got to be huge. In other words, audio at 44.1 kHz/16-bit requires a lot of data. You can't fit a lot of audio at 44.1/16 into your iPod.

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Shows Need Labor, Too

I enjoy the Holiday season as much as the next guy, but quite frankly, the high cost of present-giving has left my bankbook crawling through January, and it's doubtful if it will be off crutches until March or April. Everything is just so damn expensive that, even if I do all my shopping at Target or Best Buy, my bankbook still gets its knees broken. Well, that's life, but fortunately for all of us, the big oil companies got into the Christmas spirit and, in the name of charity, raised the price of oil by only about 25 cents a gallon for the season. Tell you what. When I go visit the relatives during the holidays, it sure gets me in the spirit to top off the tank at "Bah Humbug Oil" before I leave on my journey. I guarantee that the ghosts who visited Ebenezer Scrooge will be making the rounds next year, but that's another story, and in the words of Tiny Tim Crachit, "God bless us. Every one!"

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Monitoring the Big Bang

When The Rolling Stones' "A Bigger Bang" tour came to Chicago recently, we had the opportunity to visit backstage with monitor engineer Mike Adams. It was a cold and windy October evening when Jack Kontney caught up with Adams before the show.

FOH: How did you get started as an engineer?

Mike Adams: I count my career from when I started getting paid on a weekly basis. That was 1981. It was a band called Green Dog, out of Denver, Colorado. As far as getting started, I took the long, stupid, hard road. When I was 16, I just started hanging around, getting myself into nightclubs and finding guys that made it sound really good, and just started trading out my labor for their knowledge. By the time I was 18, I was working all over the Denver area, mixing in clubs. And now here I am.

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Do the Math

[Editor's Note: At FOH, we find very few things more valuable than a combination of knowledge and passion. So, when we have a passionate, knowledgeable reader with something on his or her mind, we try to find space to print it. In the coming months, you will see more of this kind of content on the fohonline.com Web site and in some new electronic projects we are getting ready to unveil. In the meantime, check out what one reader has to say about stadium sound systems.]

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Ghost In the Machine

The band had just finished a 7:00 p.m. setup and sound check at a really cool club in Texas. It's a large stage with huge P.A. system, monitors, stands, mics, sound guy, etc. Most of the band took off to get a little rest before the gig while the guitar player stayed back to watch their equipment and warm-up.

So picture this: The amps are off. The place is starting to get a few people. He's in the dark back corner of the club strumming away, making no sound. Suddenly, everyone hears very loud guitar tuning over the canned house music .

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Life, Death & Iron Maiden

Concert sound isn't usually a matter of life or death, but leave it to Iron Maiden to be the exception. The iconic metal band's recent "Matter Of Life Or Death" world tour proves that after more than 30 years, they haven't slowed down a tick and still demand a P.A. that permeates sold-out arenas with full-range output, while also upholding the first commandment of metal: Make it loud.

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Digital Mixing Consoles

One of these days we'll get it right. We usually do an updated look at digital consoles in the January issue of FOH and last year (Or was it the year before? They're all kind of running together…) we tried to do something called "Digital Consoles for the Rest of Us" and to focus on products that you could afford even if you were not doing national tours and high-profile corporates. But, as we quickly learned, there just weren't any to be found in the price range we set.

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Yamaha EMX 5016CF Powered Mixer, Peavey Kosmos V2, ISP HDM 210 Monitors

Yamaha EMX 5016CF Powered Mixer

By Jamie Rio

I think it has been as least eight years since I reviewed the first Yamaha EMX board. It was nice, but really didn't have enough features and horsepower to propel a band or sound company into the big leagues. So here I am nearly a decade later. I don't know how many versions of this mixer have been produced, but I haven't reviewed one since the first incarnation. So, let's take a look at this unit.

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The Other Buildings

Generally speaking, when we think of house of worship installs, we envision FOH speakers, monitors, outboard gear, mics and a mixing console. That is obviously a very simplistic vision, but it does cover the basics. Well, a short time ago I discovered the "other buildings." Just about every church, temple, synagogue, etc., has additional multi-use buildings at the same location.

I got a call to give a bid on a portable sound system for the youth house of a church in Glendora, Calif. This building was a former home that the church had purchased and set up for the youth of their congregation. The youth pastor wanted a small system to be set up in the living room area with additional speakers to be installed out in the patio area. He also wanted this system to be portable so that, for various events, it could be set up out in the back yard of the house. However, the main use of this system was to provide programmed music for the youth who visited and volunteered at the house.

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Using Digital Effects Processors

While it is much lower in the procurement priority list, procuring and using digital effects processors is still something that requires a bit of thought. For professionals, choosing the right effects processor is more than the strength of the preset list or the user interface; it is a long-term investment and a gamble that the effects purchased will continue to be popular for many years of touring usage. Take the ubiquitous Yamaha SPX-90 effects processor; while very technically obsolete, it is still found today in many club installs, and the outboard racks of many regional and touring soundcos. Ditto for the Lexicon PCM-81, Roland SDE-1000, TC Electronic 2090 and Yamaha SPX-990.

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Wings of Desire

This month, we go way Off-Broadway to the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., and their co-production with Toneelgroep Amsterdam of Wings of Desire, a play based upon the famous Wim Wenders film about an angel (Damiel) who seeks to become human so that he can spend his life with a beautiful trapeze artist (Marion). The show uses a lot of sound, from an audio montage of the inner thoughts of citizens to an occasionally noisy two-piece group (guitar, bass, vocals), to help recreate the world of the epic film, and trapeze artist Mam Smith elegantly performs with silks to poetic effect.

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Parallel Universes

"Sector overlap" is the somewhat clinical term for what happens when technology creates a convergence between areas of expertise. For instance, going back a few decades for a more dramatic instance, what happened when you converged a pilot and a physicist is you got an astronaut.

An area of nascent convergence at the moment is in the domains of live event audio and fixed installation media. The taxonomy would seem to place them on one side of the aisle or the other: live sound moves around a lot and installed sound doesn't. But definitions can be deceiving. In fact, the overlap between the skill sets, both technical and business, in live touring sound and installed sound have more in common now than a decade ago, and in the process have actually diverged from music recording.

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