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Rolling Hills Is Alive with Music

One modern church gets maximum sound for a minimal cost

When the members of the Rolling Hills Christian Church started to discuss a multipurpose room built with top-notch audio and video gear to help them reach out to the community, Mark Thompson, principal of Clarity Audio Systems, was tapped for his expertise.

"They have a very contemporary worship style, and they wanted to be able to fully support everything they do in their services,” Thompson said, explaining the church’s goals. “In addition, they didn’t want to have to bring in outside audio for touring groups. Plus, they wanted the space to be available as a community center.”

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Winning the Bid

And keeping your standards high

Sound Sanctuary is a unique part of FOH, but it shares a common thread with every column, article and review in this book: We all like working in this business of sound (at least I hope we all do). I have made this rather obvious statement because I will be writing about a subject this month that is at the center of every live sound and install company — the process of bidding a job. Particularly, bidding an installation job whether in a house of worship or any other place, for that matter. (I am not going to talk about live sound bids, even though I do bid shows for various worship houses. Because of what I am currently working on, I will stick to install bids.)

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The Pursuit of Loudness

You can’t just look at the measurements —You gotta know what they mean.

It feels like my perpetual task in life is to get up on my soapbox and dispel myths and tell the truth about getting righteous sound pressure levels to the audience. What I want to do is weave the story of speaker-cabinet dispersion, power handling and sensitivity and attempt to explain why certain “grades” of speaker are pitched to various sound persons at different levels of the business.

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Road Tests

X5 HANDHELD CONDENSER VOCAL MIC
By Bill Evans

Any of you who have been reading FOH for a while have probably heard me openly refer to myself as a condenser slut when it comes to mics for vocals. I own a bunch of mics and am probably unusual in that I actually own more vocal condensers than dynamics. A condenser just has that “air” and open feel that it is tough to get from a dynamic, and I generally find that the audio quality of the vocals goes up substantially just by replacing dynamics with condensers.

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Allstar Audio Systems Puts Down Roots

And gets on the road to success. . .

A country singer, a tour bus and a new town were the ingredients of success for Mike Borne, who arrived in Nashville in 1979 after being hired to handle the FOH responsibilities for country singer T.G. Sheppard. Five years and 13 number one hits later, Borne decided that it was time to start his own company and get off the road. Thus, Allstar Audio Systems Inc. was born. 

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The Proof Is in the Pudding

Precise Corporate Staging and Alice Cooper team up for a good cause.

Thanks to an ever-widening web of generosity, dozens of underprivileged and underserved segments of the population are being helped in ways that were unimaginable just a decade ago. 

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Getting Good Tone for Golden Voices

They may have whisper-clean sound, but Celtic Woman’s not a secret anymore.

It might be understandable if you have not yet heard of Celtic Woman, but the “secret” that has enthralled millions of PBS viewers and myriad concertgoers will not be one for much longer. The group’s debut was the #1 album on Billboard’s World Music chart for 68 weeks, only to be bumped off by their Christmas album, then that release was knocked from the top slot by the group’s A Woman’s Journey earlier this year. Having notched three successful albums (including a recent Top 10 rock/pop entry) through massive public television exposure, the Irish folk/pop project offering both covers and originals has beguiled audiences with a quartet of pretty voices, a vigorous violinist, pulse-racing percussion and a smooth mixture of energetic and ethereal moments. Currently wrapping up a 100-plus show tour, Celtic Woman is becoming one of the biggest (yet quietest) pop sensations around. 

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Load In, Load Out Load of …

My two combined nightmares both deal with my band — supplying a P.A. to my own band and not having them help. As any anklebiter will tell you, it may not be a lot of gear, but it’s sure not a little, either! I need help to set up, and my band sure didn’t want to help out. As soon as I got to the gig the whining started. “That’s too much P.A. gear, Dave. You won’t need it all.” 

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Flying in Good Sound

Jeffrey Holdip and crew keep Canadian songstress Nelly Furtado sounding great no matter where she is.

I recently caught up with FOH mixer Jeffrey Holdip and the rest of the Towers Clair Showco audio crew for Nelly Furtado. Adamson’s Ben Cabot helped out for the first two shows of the Canadian leg of Nelly’s world tour by tuning the house system. He uses sine-wave sweeps with a multichannel version WinMLS by Lars Morset to equalize the Clair IO processors. He chose WinMLS because it’s the only portable multichannel measurement system quick enough to handle the time pressures of touring. Ben’s kit of six microphones, multichannel sound card and computer can easily fit into a laptop bag and be hand-carried onto an airplane. This was the first time I have seen WinMLS used on a major tour. I have used almost every measurement system on the market; I think that tuning the house before the artist sound check with WinMLS and using Smaart when the band plays is ideal for getting the most useful measurements. Most speaker manufacturers use sine-wave sweeps because they’re accurate even when there are extraneous noises. With a sine-wave sweep you can get usable measurements even if there is hammering and banging going on. 

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Applauding the Ovation

An intimate room gets the star treatment.

Jeff Thompson has what they call in the business a conversation stopper. He’s used it a couple of times now while working with tour managers who are advancing a show at the Ovation Lounge in the Green Valley Ranch Resort in Las Vegas, where he serves as the entertainment production manager. “They’ll ask me what kind of boxes we have, and I tell them L-ACOUSTICS KUDOS,” he said. “Then they ask about monitors, and I tell them that we have L-ACOUSTICS 115XT HiQs. Then we get to desks, and when I say Midas XL8s, everybody pauses and asks ‘What do you mean, XL8s?’ And I say, ‘At front of house and monitors I have XL8s.’”

Always throws them for a loop. 

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Follow the Money

 

First Bosch buys Midas, and now Harmon International has agreed to be acquired by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Goldman Sachs for $8 billion dollars. Hey, I’m small time and $1 million dollars seems like a lot of money to me. Therefore, an $8 billion dollar purchase sounds like the type of numbers my friends and I would spew out when we were little kids trying to outdo each other on the playground. “When I grow up,” I’d say, “I’m going to have a gazillion million billion dollars.” 

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