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Once considered just a “music store” show, NAMM has evolved into a premier showcase for pro products for live sound, touring, and even the installed sound market. We make the annual pilgrimage to Anaheim for the Winter NAMM show after our holiday cheer has worn off and before the Super Bowl and Grammys get us all wound up again.
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Bob Seger: Rock and Roll Never Forgets
Blue-collar heartland rocker Bob Seger and his Silver Bullet Band spent last spring and this winter on their first tour since 2006’s Face the Promise tour, earning a spot right in the middle of Pollstar’s Top 25 North American Tours of 2011, selling over a half million tickets for 48 shows in 45 cities, and winding up like many good runs with a stop in my hometown of Jacksonville, FL.
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Crown I-Tech 4x3500HD Amplifier
Crown Audio is re-defining professional multi-channel power amplifiers, introducing their new flagship I-Tech HD Series 4x3500HD DriveCore Series 4-channel power amplifier. The “HD4,” as it is nicknamed, incorporates Crown’s sixth-generation Class I engine with DriveCore™ technology to deliver 3,500 watts per channel burst into four or two ohms.
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Column Speakers
Column loudspeakers have seen a resurgence of use, especially in the installation world. While the basic design dates back to venerable products like the Shure Vocal Master, advances in driver technology put modern column loudspeakers in a very different class from their historic cousins. Broadly, column loudspeakers consist of arrays of many small, closely spaced drivers. These may be full range drivers or multi-way systems. Column loudspeakers are, by nature, tall and narrow. They are usually installed in a vertically-oriented position, such as against the face of a proscenium, or next to a whiteboard.
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Florida’s Production Support Group
The Business of Being Up when Times are Down
Larry Schmidt’s “secret” can be summed up in three words: common business sense.
No fancy MBA here, just some business classes at a junior college and the patience to sit down with a sharpened pencil to just work through it has put him where he is today. It’s a spectacular year (and that’s not even counting the Parnelli Award the company received in 2011 for Hometown Hero Sound Company of the Year!)
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Beyerdynamic Touring Gear Drum and Percussion Mics
When I first discovered beyerdynamic microphones in the late 1990s I had no idea that the German company founded by Eugen Beyer has been around since 1924. I was also clueless to the fact that, by 1937, the beyerdynamic company had been designing and manufacturing microphones, headsets and other audio products. All I can say is that learning this information certainly sharpened my interest in the new Touring Gear mics I received and was about to field test. It just fascinates me that a company can survive and thrive for such a long time. They must be doing something right. That said, let’s take a look at the microphones themselves.
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Kaltman Creations Invisible Waves X Windows-based RF Spectrum Scanner
Kaltman Creations has been selling German handheld RF (and EMC) spectrum analyzers from Aaronia for several years now, as well a previous version of Invisible Waves, a Windows-based RF spectrum scanner. The new version, Invisibles Waves X is again comprised of hardware and Windows-based software components, but now the software’s user interface has been improved to provide a better RF command center.
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Allen & Heath GLD Live Digital Mixer
Allen & Heath’s new GLD is a user-friendly, cost effective and expandable live digital mixing system, conceptually based on the successful iLive series of digital consoles. A standard GLD 32 input system provides 28 XLR mic inputs that can be increased to 36 or 44 XLR mic inputs by adding one or two 8×4 expansion frames.
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Crackle, Snap, Pop
I am not a Roman Catholic, but I imagine this is what it feels like to enter the confessional. To expose my sins and hope fervently for the forgiveness that will make the rest of my life livable. What follows is a tale of woe, destruction, humiliation and anguish. I wish I could say it has a happy ending, but it doesn’t.
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Waves CLA-2A Classic Compressor
In previous columns, various Waves plugins that I use on vocals, horns, violins, electric guitars, bass guitars and drums have been discussed. By now it should be apparent that I like to use a lot of compressors. This current entry will focus on my compressor of choice for the acoustic grand piano: the Waves CLA-2A Classic Compressor.
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Electric Guitar Amplifier Miking
Since the dawn of time, engineers have struggled with the task of getting good guitar sounds on stage. One of the big issues is stage volume: the musician cranks it up to get “their sound” while the engineer and audience get blasted with ear-crushing levels from the stage. Inevitably, the PA has to be cranked up to overcome the stage volume. Let’s assume, for the moment, that the musicians you work with have their stage volume under control (whether it be via volume knob, moving cabinets off-stage, or threats of violence) so that you can actually hear the guitar through the PA and create a mix. There are some tried-and-true methods you can use to get great guitar tones.
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