Timeflies and Walk Off The Earth
Sound Co
Stewart Independent Production LLC
Venue
Merrilat Sport & Fitness Center
Adrian MI
Timeflies and Walk Off The Earth
The Time of the (Festival) Season
Okay, I don’t quite get it. It’s April. Up here in San Francisco, it’s pouring rain. Yet the festival season starts in just a couple weeks, with the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival kicking off for two fun (and work) packed weekends from April 11 to 13 and 18 to 20. It might be springtime, but I guess the chances of warm weather are better in the desert/Coachella Valley town of Indio, Calif. than up here in the fog belt.
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Jason Mraz and Raining Jane
Seemingly having far more fun than should be legally allowable, Jason Mraz spent March stopping at 1,500 to 3,000 seat rooms along the West Coast and performing with indie folk/rock quartet Raining Jane. Prior to this foray, the two musical parties have been collaborating here and there since 2007, and they are now about to push a full studio album out the door.
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Milestones: 30 Years of Hosa Technology
We spend our days working in a technology-driven and fairly young industry, where if a startup company can make it through its first five or ten years, that’s considered an accomplishment. So if a company reaches the 30-year mark — nearly a third of a century, as in the case of Hosa Technology — that accomplishment is quite impressive indeed.
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Digital Wireless Microphones
Just as consoles, signal processing and system control have eased into the benefits of digital, it’s little surprise that wireless mics are also making the… Read More »Digital Wireless Microphones
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Loudspeaker Horns – A Crash Course
Horns of various sizes and shapes have been with us since the formative days of professional sound reinforcement. Whether stacked on top of a bass bin in the early days, or carefully integrated into the injection molded housing of a powered loudspeaker today, horns are here to stay.
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High Altitude Audio: Sundance Film Festival Gets a Louder Soundtrack
Live sound is all about moving lots of air, and that was a particular challenge for the music shows at the Sundance Film Festival, which took place in Park City, UT, over 11 days in January. The thin air in Park City — an even 7,000 feet above sea level — challenges crewmembers at load-in as muscles beg for oxygen. Further up the road, a series of private shows held for guests at the Hotel Montage borders on hypoxia at 8,300 feet.
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Audio-Technica BP894 MicroSet Headworn Mic
Over the years, headworn microphones have become significantly more improved, with better performance from smaller, near-invisible packages. So last year, when Audio-Technica debuted its BP894 MicroSet — a design that takes a completely new approach to headworn microphones, I was intrigued about its performance — and sound.
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Alto Professional Stealth Wireless Speaker System
I’m one of those types who likes to avoid wireless if at all possible and I usually shake my head wondering why when a client or artist insists on using an RF mic when they never wander more than about five feet in any direction. So last year when Alto Professional announced its Stealth Wireless speaker system, I initially wasn’t too impressed. In most portable sound systems, adding another component (and level of complexity) just to replace 25 feet of cable feeds from a stagebox or snake to the mains just didn’t seem worth the extra effort.
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Deciding on a New Console System
In last month’s column, I expressed the opinion that the greatest challenge in making a digital console platform change is coming to terms with the data legacy of one’s digital history. Saved within the Avid VENUE platform, I have compiled and stored seven years of complete console data from several tours with James Taylor, Mariah Carey, Joe Walsh, Cher, Bette Midler and Five For Fighting. Among these archives are extensive input/output patches, complete channel libraries, EQ libraries, and individual libraries for an extensive number of Waves, TC Electronic, Trillium Labs and Avid/Digidesign plug-ins. I have repeatedly employed this store of information contained in these libraries to quickly and easily construct shows for varying band formats or random one-offs with entirely different bands. Having this dense repository of information literally at my fingertips is a luxury to which I have grown rather accustomed.
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Is It Live, or is it Memorex? (And Do We Need to Care?)
We never needed the word “analog” until digital came along. In the technologically antediluvian universe of pre-zeroes-and-ones, analog, like God, simply was, with no reason to have to somehow quantify it. Similarly, when Thomas Edison came along with his new-fangled recording machine, we then had to adapt our understanding of the word “live.” Before you could record it, music, of course, was always performed live. Edison’s invention led us to the irony of the “live” album, which had its heyday in the 1970s, as well as endless variations meant to fool not our frontal lobes but rather our limbic cores with phrases like “recorded before a live studio audience!” Is it live or is it Memorex? After a while, we seemed to stop really giving a damn.
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Are You Ready to Rumble? Getting a Killer Bass Sound, Part 2
Last month, we began discussing ideas on how to get a great electric bass sound onstage. If you missed it, you can check it out here: fohonline.me/1laHdMc. We examined how the sound of an electric bass can be seriously influenced by the phase relationship between the DI and the bass amp, and we looked at possible solutions.
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