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What's New(s)?

What's New(s)?

I have now rewritten this column three times. Every time I try I end up covering too much ground and just rambling. This is the last shot. In the past few months I have been involved in a number of conversations and situations that all forced the same basic question: What is news?

The easy answer is to quote Reuven Frank, the one-time head of NBC news who said, "NEWS is what someone wants to suppress. Everything else is advertising." That statement is at once overly broad, confrontational, outmoded and completely true. And smart marketers both know and take advantage of it.

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On The Bleeding Edge

Along with all of the other computerrelated technology we love to play with, synthesizers have planted a strong foot in the world of software. Only a few years ago, software synths were a novelty. Once they caught on, they quickly moved from the studio environment onto the stage. Now many acts are using software synths to augment or replace their hardware keyboards and rack modules for touring purposes. Let's take a look at why, and whether or not this is a good idea.

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Parnelli Innovator Honoree, Father of Festival Sound

All you need to know about Bill Hanley is this: as a kid he fondly recalls a local roller rink. But it's not the fun he had skating with his friends, or perhaps the scene of his first crush he most wants to talk about.

No, it's the speakers he speaks of with precision.

"I was skating every day and I fell in love with the music," he recalls. "There was this organ, and it was played loud with 12 Hammond B-40 tone cabinets and two 20-watt amplifiers with four 12-inch electro-dynamic loud speakers in a rink with excellent acoustics. I would go hear other, bad, sound systems and wonder why something couldn't sound as good as that roller rink."

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Regional Sound Companies Hailed as Hometown Heroes

Let’s have a tip of the glass for the hometown hero, the relatively little guy who shuns the mega-tours and life on the road, and focuses instead on serving the local community for fairs, festivals, theatre in the parks and one-off concerts.

Despite the differences in their respective regions, the number of full-time employees (ranging from one to 100) and length in business (10 years to 60 years), they have much in common. Most started out as musicians and offer a variation on Clearwing’s Gregg Brunclik’s “I started out as a musician but decided I wanted to eat” quip. And they all share a never-ceasing passion for quality sound, razor-sharp survival instincts and most indispensably, a sense of humor.

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Party On, Wayne. Party On, Garth.

In the world of live sound I have often heard the term "sexy" used to describe certain inanimate objects such as consoles, speakers and effect processors, either singularly or in combination with each other. For example, an engineer said to me that he had seen a Brittany Spears show and that "The rig was great, a very sexy set up indeed." He said nothing at all about the show or the very sexy star herself, but he did give me the whole run down regarding the audio system and the "luscious" sound that was produced by this very sexy system. My engineer friend is inspired by technology and has a passion for audio and all its related components and my assumption is that he uses the term "sexy" and "luscious" metaphorically to describe a desirable system which produces a full sound.

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Shockingly Good Sound

I'm part of a mid-size audio rental company, we rent for productions and will-call gear. One day a new client called and said, "I need to rent a mic." We said OK, and rented them a SM58. About two hours later the client called and asked us if we were trying to kill her husband.

Confused, I asked her, "Uh, how?" She said that they had plugged the mic in, and it shocked him.

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Taking it to the Stage

Going from the self-proclaimed "kid in the teenage garage band that happened to know the most about the sound system" to a career that includes stints with acts ranging from Earth Wind and Fire and Prince to Brian Setzer and Leann Rimes, Jeffrey "Raz" Rasmussen has been at the console for Michael McDonald for the last dozen years.

"By the time I was 15, I had put together a P.A. with my friend and we started to rent it out to other local bands when we weren't playing. I started to mix some of the shows, and the rest is history. I would mix many local bands whenever I wasn't playing. I worked at music store when I was 18 and started to do sound system installs. The next year I got hired by Speeda Sound, worked there for about two years, then moved to L.A. where I went to work at Studio Instrument Rentals running the audio department. I've also worked at NBC, Nickelodeon, Schubert Systems, Electrotech and even AVHQ."

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Sony PCM-D1 Linear PCM Recorder and Soundcraft MH2 Mixing Console

Sony PCM-D1 Linear PCM Recorder

by Steve La Cerra

[Wait a second, what the hell is a recording device doing as a Road Test in FOH? This is a LIVE audio magazine. OK, cool your jets a second. Yes, we have drawn a real line in the sand between live and studio, but that line is increasingly blurring and we have to address that fact. Also, when I saw this at a recent trade show all I could think of was how cool it would be to use to make real "room" recordings of gigs. So, that is the method to this particular madness. Read on…-ed.]

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Charting Budget Priorities

Maybe it's just me, but it really bothers me to see newbie sound system owners chase gadgets when so many parts of their sound system need help first. I hope some of this is redundant to you, but I want to spell it out now, and discuss some examples and rationale.

In summary, sound system budget priorities should be:

1. Microphones/DI's

2. Monitor System

3. Mixing Console(s)

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Daryl Kral Perks Up The Drowsy Chaperone

The Tony Award-winning spectacle The Drowsy Chaperone features plenty of singing, dancing and vaudevillian sketches in the old school tradition, but it is also a funny sendup, and loving homage, of those conventions. Essentially the show takes place in the living room of a Broadway aficionado (Bob Martin) who tells the audience about how he likes to sit and listen to his favorite shows of yore, including The Drowsy Chaperone. As he plays the soundtrack on his turntable (remember those?), his living room is transformed into a Broadway stage (albeit with his furniture) as the 1920s story of a rich movie star whose impending marriage to a stranger (and its potentially disastrous consequences) plays out before him. During the show, which he is essentially recreating in his mind, our narrator watches and even interacts with the performance, even if the actors do not know he is there.

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The Mixer In The Digital Age

An earlier column focused on how a couple of huge entities, AOL and its partners XM Satellite Radio and concert-meister AEG, and Live Nation, the Clear Channel concert spin-off, are trying to make leaving a music concert as eagerly anticipated an experience as going to it is supposed to be. Live Nation hopes to do this with after-show CDs hot off the on-site burners; AOL et al. want to do it with downloads. It's a format battle not dissimilar to ones taking place elsewhere in entertainment technology, most notably between the Blu-ray and HD-DVD formats for control of the post- DVD high-definition landscape.

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API 5500 Dual Equalizer Debuts at AES

JESSUP, MD–API Audio will debut the latest in the company's 19-inch rack mounted products–the 5500 dual equalizer–at the 2006 AES in San Francisco. Designed for recording, mixing and mastering applications, the single rack space API 5500 is a two-channel EQ package with an all-discrete signal path that combines the classic features of the API 550B four-band EQ module with the boost and cut precision of the 550D and the 550M mastering equalizer.

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