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Jumping Off the Road

Jumping Off the Road

There are those magical moments in the recording studio when musicians give birth to a song, yet it is when those same musicians play that song in front of an audience that it comes to life. Live sound mixers are in a unique position to watch as audiences and musicians respond to each other. Likewise, these Front of House engineers have to respond almost instantly to problems that arise, which can run the gamut from faulty gear to failing instruments to singers who might need a bit of technical assistance to hit all the appropriate notes. For many active producers working these days, including Ryan Greene, Don Gehman, Ross Hogarth and Mark Howard, this was the perfect training ground for the stresses and joys of the studio environment.

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Voice of a New Generation

Back in my days as a long-haired metalhead, I played drums and sang backing vocals for a band called Dagger. Love us or hate us, we were competent musicians who took pride in our ability to play and sing. The most widespread comment I received after a show was, "Who's playing the background vocal samples?" Interestingly, there wasn't anyone with a sampler or a tape machine hiding behind the curtain: We were simply singing backup vocals. I vividly remember spending countless nights rehearsing nothing but harmonies until we'd get them right. We wanted to sound like our CD.

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Regional Slants: Getting Large Through Being Small

Being in this biz for only 10 years, I guess it's safe to say that I am a baby. All of the biggest houses in the biz have been around for an average of 30-plus years, and a recent FOH poll revealed that a very small percentage of sound hire companies' owners are under the age of 40. I just celebrated my 38th birthday.

Three times in the 10 years HAS Productions has been around, it's lack of longevity in this biz has been questioned by a visiting FOH guy, all really big shows. In this biz, stakes are high and there are no second chances, so as crushing to my ego as it is, I understand their perspectives. With it only coming up three times, I guess I should feel fortunate.

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The Sound of a Higher Power

I was already seething and it was only two hours into the second day of a video shoot. The artist had chosen to play live with her band and record a full set of tunes to Pro Tools for a concert-style video. She had hired a well-known recording engineer who is much noted for his live productions and a video company that boasted a roster full of film and lighting luminaries. I had worked with the artist for quite a few years and was called upon to provide and mix the live audio portion of the video and recording. I was told that the artist was paying for the project out of pocket and was asked to keep the budget as low as possible. Wanting to be of assistance, I quoted a fairly low rate for the shoot, which included the equipment as well as my day rate for the three 12- to 14-hour days the production would require.

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Jay Phebus

Live engineer Jay Phebus is a lucky man. He has been mixing a band he loves, King's X, for more than two decades. Since 1984, when King's X was still a Midwestern circuit band, he has been their soundman, and by the early '90s he had also taken over as their tour manager following a string of short-lived TMs, which has made his job challenging, to say the least. While attending the University of Mississippi Phebus originally intended to enter the Air Force, but allergies prevented his admission into the flight program, so he answered the call when King's X–bassist/vocalist Doug Pinnick, guitarist Ty Tabor and drummer Jerry Gaskill–needed help and left school. Since then, he has toured the world with them, from headlining club gigs to opening slots for AC/DC. During downtime, he has mixed other artists, including Stevie Wonder, Vertical Horizon, Eric Gales, Galactic Cowboys and George Thorogood.

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The Sound of Sacred

At a time when churchgoing worldwide is on the decline, the stratospheric rise in attendance at Resurrection Life Church in Grandville, Mich., makes for a real study in contrasts.

Under the leadership of senior pastor Duane Vander Clok since 1984, this nondenominational Christian church has gone from 400 or so parishioners to serving thousands each weekend in every demographic–adults, children, teens, college-age, the elderly, as well as Spanish-speaking members from one main church campus and two satellite campuses. At present, weekend attendance hovers around 8,000 people, which puts them into the top 100 churches in the nation for attendance.

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Ego Check

The best disruption repair I ever saw didn't involve any human problem, but an electrical one. It was a blazing hot day at the Philly Folk Festival a while back. During an afternoon round robin at one of the side stages, among the performers was a "name" who obviously was none too happy to be playing to a bunch of hicks (comment: "If I knew I'd be doing workshops, I would have brought my knife so I could show you how to whittle.") and a fairly newly-established Susan Werner. Name brand had just finished a song, and Susan stepped up to the mic and launched into "So Heavy (When You're Holding Up the Ceiling)." About a minute into the song, something apparently shorted out in the amp, resulting in a 60Hz blast at about 120 dB. The soundman, after a brief attempt to correct the problem from the board, tore down behind the stage and pulled the plug, eliminating the noise, but leaving the stage 100% acoustic. When we could all hear again, we realized that Susan had waded out into the middle of the crowded hillside and was leading the multitudes in an a cappella chorus of "So Heavy". A minute or so later, the sound restored, she strolled back up to the stage and finished the song with amplification. She got a twominute screaming standing ovation. Name brand got polite applause and was not invited back.

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The Show Must Go On

Replacing a charismatic front man is never an easy task, and when that means someone with the vocal power and range and total command of the stage as the late Freddie Mercury, it looks impossible. Maybe it was a need to get back onstage or maybe the band just did not want the Broadway show We Will Rock You to be its last hurrah. (We Will Rock You did fairly poorly in a truncated Las Vegas run and closed earlier this year.) Side note: Yeah, the story line for We Will Rock You was silly–a quasi-sci-fi tale of a world without rock music and the rebels trying to revive it that did a passable job of stringing together the hits of Queen. But Mamma Mia! (a similar kind of show featuring the music of ABBA) is at least as silly, the music is not as cool and it remains a hit, running concurrent shows in London, Melbourne, New York and Las Vegas, and selling out seven years after its initial opening. Go figure.

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Midas XL8

"Digital Goes Midas." No, I didn't coin this phrase (nor did I have anything to do with the Matrixlike magazine ad). The phrase is the promotional tag Midas (Telex, Klark Teknik) hung on their new digital mixing console. I would have said "Midas puts the analog in digital." However, I am not an ad guy; I am simply a writer for FOH who found himself an invited guest of the Midas folks to witness the unveiling of XL8 digital desk.

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RSS S-4000 Digital Snake System

Anyone who does one-off or touring gigs has been there. It's late, it's been a long day and you have hundreds of feet of heavy snake to drag and coil into a box, which then weighs a ton, and you have to push it around to get it into the truck. Sometimes, if you are really lucky, the truck has no lift, so you get to muscle it up a ramp. It's one reason why we have been watching the development of digital snakes that transmit over fiber or CAT5 and fit in a case that you can carry onto an airplane without a sideways glance from the flight attendant.

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Small Rack, BIG SOUND

I love gadgets, buttons, knobs, faders, attenuators, meters and especially anything with blue LEDs on the front panel. What I never did enjoy was looking at a gaggle of wires behind the rack or actually ever having to move a rack full of stuff.

I understand the "need" for the confident and knowledgeable FOH person to have as much outboard gear as possible. All praise the elevated audio budget! But at some point, a 6-foot rack of processing for the fixed part of a fixed house system (or small portable system) just doesn't make sense anymore.

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Wireless Microphones, Part 2

In Part 1 of the Wireless Microphones piece, I described wireless mic limitations, preferred locations of mic and receiver, RF link budgets and antenna polarization. In Part 2, we'll cover radio frequency names, antenna patterns and compression/expansion circuits.

Superlatives

Us techno-geeks are quick to toss out acronyms like VHF and UHF without a care, hoping that no one will bother to ask why a user might choose VHF or UHF as the frequency band for transmission. Starting with HF (high frequency), we move up to VHF (very high frequency), then on to UHF (ultra high frequency), then to SHF (super high frequency) and, believe it or not, EHF (extremely high frequency). Each of these high-frequency superlatives stand for a range of frequencies, or bandwidth. HF has 3 megahertz to 30 megahertz, VHF has 30 megahertz to 300 megahertz, UHF has 300 megahertz to 3 gigahertz, SHF has 3 gigahertz to 30 gigahertz, and EHF has 30 gigahertz to 300 gigahertz. And these are all waves per second of radiated electromagnetic energy, better known as radio frequencies (RF).

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