Summer Set Music & Camping Festival 2015
Dynamic Range of Live – and Life
In between mixing FOH for (and tour managing) Blue Öyster Cult, our ace correspondent Steve La Cerra comes up with some highly utile — and always entertaining — writings on audio basics in his “Theory & Practice” column, found on page 57. A couple weeks ago, we chatted about a topic for this month’s entry and decided that something about gain structure and dynamic range would be appropriate. After all, these are two fundamentals that play an essential role in achieving good sound, yet sometime cause confusion when mixing (pardon the pun) reality with theoretical abstracts.
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It’s More than Just Waxing Nostalgic
Drum roll, please…. Ta Dah! This year we’re celebrating the 15th annual Parnelli Awards. This is a fact I am very proud of, and I am sure Parnelli Awards co-founder, Patrick Stansfield, is looking down at us from his production office in the sky, smiling as well. It seems just yesterday the Parnelli Awards were a gleam in our collective eyes. But now, 15 years later and with 37 of the top production people in our field honored, we have hit a milestone year.
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Mixing the Piano Man
Brian Ruggles’ Scenes from a Lifetime with Billy Joel
Billy Joel is a Long Islander, from the tips of his ivory-tickling fingers down to his sustain-pedaling right foot, and likes to surround himself with similars. So our story begins with a young Brian Ruggles kicking around those same stomping grounds in the late 1960s. The two grew up in neighboring towns, though “I was more middle class compared to Billy, who, as he puts it, was lower middle class,” Ruggles says. As Joel was cycling through several bands, so was Ruggles who, although a drummer and guitarist, was principally a lead vocalist.
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Hot New Theater/PAC Projects
“The show must go on” still rings true every day in thousands of theaters and performing arts centers worldwide. However, these days, savvy facility directors realize the importance of a great sound system, especially as audiences — accustomed to hearing high-performance audio systems in live concerts and local bijous — are putting demands on facilities to provide a first-class performance experience, where intelligibility and musicality are just as important as rock ‘n’ roll SPL’s. With than in mind, we present this look at some recent installation projects — both new and upgrades — that reflect the current state of the art in venues both large and small.
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Aspen Music Festival
Mention the phrase “music festivals,” and the images that usually come to mind are packed, hot, dusty outdoor venues with multiple overlapping stages blasting rock, country, pop, hip-hop, EDM and so on — or perhaps even the mud pits of the original Woodstock. The throbbing bass from such events can easily carry for miles.
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Pat Quilter, 2015 Parnelli Awards Audio Innovator
Nothing is as simple, basic and essential in the live event arena as the amplifier, and no one powered the business quite as well as Pat Quilter. He founded QSC Audio, proved that clean, reliable amps are possible, and he did it with genius, hard work and an astounding work ethic.
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Using Measurement Microphones
Sometimes, Placement is Everything
Some of the most common questions I’m asked when teaching the Smaart measurement software classes for Rational Acoustics concern microphone placement. Among these are: “Where do I put my mic to get a useful measurement,” “does the position/aim of the mic matter,” and “how many measurement positions do I need?” When you think about it, it’s an interesting proposition to assume we can make a useful measurement of complex electro-acoustical systems loaded into a performance space having a volume in the thousands of cubic meters and have the result somehow summed up at tiny microphone capsule points in space.
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Mini-Size Line Array Systems
Sometimes, bigger isn’t better, as anyone who has tried to park a Humvee in Manhattan can attest. In the past year, we have covered large… Read More »Mini-Size Line Array Systems
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Fundamentals of Conductivity
When studying engineering in university, the first few terms learned are similar for everyone — regardless of their eventual specialization into a different type of engineering. In the same way, there are certain topics that are elemental building blocks everyone in the audio and event production industry should be familiar with. At present we’ll look at conductivity, the electronic lifeblood behind our industry. Without electricity, and conductors to direct it, there would be no professional audio!
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