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Ghost In the Machine

The band had just finished a 7:00 p.m. setup and sound check at a really cool club in Texas. It's a large stage with huge P.A. system, monitors, stands, mics, sound guy, etc. Most of the band took off to get a little rest before the gig while the guitar player stayed back to watch their equipment and warm-up.

So picture this: The amps are off. The place is starting to get a few people. He's in the dark back corner of the club strumming away, making no sound. Suddenly, everyone hears very loud guitar tuning over the canned house music .

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Life, Death & Iron Maiden

Concert sound isn't usually a matter of life or death, but leave it to Iron Maiden to be the exception. The iconic metal band's recent "Matter Of Life Or Death" world tour proves that after more than 30 years, they haven't slowed down a tick and still demand a P.A. that permeates sold-out arenas with full-range output, while also upholding the first commandment of metal: Make it loud.

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It's Usually the Little Things That Count

We have trod upon this ground before, but I keep seeing things that make me remember that it is not usually the big expensive whatever that sends a show south. It is usually something small that just got overlooked. Here are a few recent examples.

The first was a bonehead move on my part. I was playing out and trying to get a good audio recording of the gig for demo purposes, and do so without having to ask the house sound guy to change anything he was used to doing or use any unfamiliar gear. A lot of thought and wiring went into building a rack that could feed the house, provide our PM mix (which actually freed up the house guy who had been running mains and two monitor mixes from a sideof- stage position) and feed an Alesis HD24. Got it all done, but failed to really think through the internal routing of the mixer until — of course — I was driving home from the gig. So I ended up with a pretty unusable recording. At least I know how to do it right for next time. I think. Ask me when I get home from that one.

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Parallel Universes

"Sector overlap" is the somewhat clinical term for what happens when technology creates a convergence between areas of expertise. For instance, going back a few decades for a more dramatic instance, what happened when you converged a pilot and a physicist is you got an astronaut.

An area of nascent convergence at the moment is in the domains of live event audio and fixed installation media. The taxonomy would seem to place them on one side of the aisle or the other: live sound moves around a lot and installed sound doesn't. But definitions can be deceiving. In fact, the overlap between the skill sets, both technical and business, in live touring sound and installed sound have more in common now than a decade ago, and in the process have actually diverged from music recording.

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Using Digital Effects Processors

While it is much lower in the procurement priority list, procuring and using digital effects processors is still something that requires a bit of thought. For professionals, choosing the right effects processor is more than the strength of the preset list or the user interface; it is a long-term investment and a gamble that the effects purchased will continue to be popular for many years of touring usage. Take the ubiquitous Yamaha SPX-90 effects processor; while very technically obsolete, it is still found today in many club installs, and the outboard racks of many regional and touring soundcos. Ditto for the Lexicon PCM-81, Roland SDE-1000, TC Electronic 2090 and Yamaha SPX-990.

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Wings of Desire

This month, we go way Off-Broadway to the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., and their co-production with Toneelgroep Amsterdam of Wings of Desire, a play based upon the famous Wim Wenders film about an angel (Damiel) who seeks to become human so that he can spend his life with a beautiful trapeze artist (Marion). The show uses a lot of sound, from an audio montage of the inner thoughts of citizens to an occasionally noisy two-piece group (guitar, bass, vocals), to help recreate the world of the epic film, and trapeze artist Mam Smith elegantly performs with silks to poetic effect.

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The $300 (x40) Gig

[A few months back, we ran an article in this space detailing the infamous "$300 Gig" and what it really costs you to take it. Well, everything is relative, and recently one of our Anklebiters took a gig that, for all intents and purposes (and disregarding the low-five-figure payout), was a $300 Gig. In the end, the client got way more than he paid for, and the soundco had destroyed their relationship with the company that supplied much of the gear, pissed off a bunch of crew members and earned very little money for a full week of work. Let's take a look at what went wrong and what can be learned from it. –ed.]

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The Other Buildings

Generally speaking, when we think of house of worship installs, we envision FOH speakers, monitors, outboard gear, mics and a mixing console. That is obviously a very simplistic vision, but it does cover the basics. Well, a short time ago I discovered the "other buildings." Just about every church, temple, synagogue, etc., has additional multi-use buildings at the same location.

I got a call to give a bid on a portable sound system for the youth house of a church in Glendora, Calif. This building was a former home that the church had purchased and set up for the youth of their congregation. The youth pastor wanted a small system to be set up in the living room area with additional speakers to be installed out in the patio area. He also wanted this system to be portable so that, for various events, it could be set up out in the back yard of the house. However, the main use of this system was to provide programmed music for the youth who visited and volunteered at the house.

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Shows Need Labor, Too

I enjoy the Holiday season as much as the next guy, but quite frankly, the high cost of present-giving has left my bankbook crawling through January, and it's doubtful if it will be off crutches until March or April. Everything is just so damn expensive that, even if I do all my shopping at Target or Best Buy, my bankbook still gets its knees broken. Well, that's life, but fortunately for all of us, the big oil companies got into the Christmas spirit and, in the name of charity, raised the price of oil by only about 25 cents a gallon for the season. Tell you what. When I go visit the relatives during the holidays, it sure gets me in the spirit to top off the tank at "Bah Humbug Oil" before I leave on my journey. I guarantee that the ghosts who visited Ebenezer Scrooge will be making the rounds next year, but that's another story, and in the words of Tiny Tim Crachit, "God bless us. Every one!"

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Monitoring the Big Bang

When The Rolling Stones' "A Bigger Bang" tour came to Chicago recently, we had the opportunity to visit backstage with monitor engineer Mike Adams. It was a cold and windy October evening when Jack Kontney caught up with Adams before the show.

FOH: How did you get started as an engineer?

Mike Adams: I count my career from when I started getting paid on a weekly basis. That was 1981. It was a band called Green Dog, out of Denver, Colorado. As far as getting started, I took the long, stupid, hard road. When I was 16, I just started hanging around, getting myself into nightclubs and finding guys that made it sound really good, and just started trading out my labor for their knowledge. By the time I was 18, I was working all over the Denver area, mixing in clubs. And now here I am.

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Tech Trickle Down

It wasn't long ago that the best technology available was priced beyond the reach of many live sound professionals. A certain amount of price segregation makes sense, of course, but manufacturers across the board came to the realization that a customer base could be doubled, maybe tripled, by offering a series of products at a more attainable price point. The trick is to take proven technology, tweak it slightly to get to a more affordable level and keep the quality high.

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