Skip to content

Articles

From Studio To Stage

Jeffrey "Raz" Rasmussen has heard all the Doobie Brothers records a million times in the dozen years he's been FOH mixer for Michael McDonald, the band's leading crooner. But he doesn't need them to recreate the dense and exuberantly sophisticated sound of those records when McDonald plays in concert.

"If you miss even a little trick, people will come up and tell you about it," says Raz. "Those records are everywhere–on the radio, in elevators. The fans know exactly how they sound. And that's what you have to do on stage–get those sounds and those moves down."

Read More »

Live Mixing Times Three

It's 12:35 p.m. when I walk into Engine studios in Chicago. In 25 minutes The M's will be playing live for a small audience here, but their performance is going to reach a lot more ears. KEXP, the radio station from Seattle which is sponsoring this concert (and 10 others over the course of three days), will be broadcasting this performance live over the airwaves in Seattle as well as streaming it live in multiple formats over the internet and cell phones, keeping that stream available on their website for two weeks, possibly podcasting the performance, burning it to CD for later playback on the air and archiving it for possible inclusion on a live CD at a later date. That's a lot to think about for FOH engineer Scott Colburn, but he seems cool as he walks around the 11-piece band in his socks, swapping XLR cables on the lead vocalist's mic and checking the DI boxes on the string section (two violins and a cello — yes, it's a rock band). Of course, this calm might come from the fact that everything that can go wrong, already has. This morning, just after install, the ISDN line that fed the broadcast back to Seattle failed.

Read More »

Last Mag Standing

Can it actually be? Four years have passed since the first time I filled this space. Back in October of 2002 the industry was still reeling from the aftershocks of 9/11, and the consolidation that has been a part of everyday life lately was just beginning. The last thing anyone wanted (especially in the manufacturing community) was another magazine.

And yet…

So let's take a look at what has changed in the past four years. The upper end of the

Read More »

Mixing In Margaritaville

The call came on a Monday–not the best time to get my attention. One of the PR folks for AKG was pitching a story on Jimmy Buffett. Jimmy has been a Sound Image client for 31 years, and I like the Sound Image guys, but what was really new about a Jimmy Buffett show?

"Well," said the voice on the other end of the line, "He has these lav mics sewn into his shirts."

Read More »

Regional Slants

All of us have mixed sound for track acts, right? If that isn't a broad enough question, how about: have you, at some point, played canned music through a system? This is an important question because the majority of us have some particular music we use to listen to the tonal quality of our rigs, or our clients rig, once we are set up. For the most part we have at least one CD player on hand for just such a task. You may even have a Teac CD/cassette machine. They sold a lot of those back in the day. But before I take us for a stroll down memory lane, let me get to the subject of my piece this month.

Read More »

Bleeding Edge

Way back in the late 1950s an engineer named Jack Kilby working at Texas Instruments developed the first integrated circuit (IC) or "chip." Kilby's IC consisted of a single transistor plus a few semiconductors, all on a small wafer of germanium (interestingly, engineer Robert Noyce simultaneously developed an IC using silicon at Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation). A few years later (round about the time a new band called The Beatles ruled the charts with songs like "I Wanna Hold Your Hand") Gordon Moore (one of the co-founders of Intel) predicted that–due to rapid advancements in manufacturing technology–the number of devices that could be engineered onto a chip would double roughly every 24 months. In the '80s Moore's statement became bastardized, and began referring to the idea that the number of transistors on a chip could be doubled every 18 months. Fast forward to the late-'80s/early-'90s and the personal computing industry adopted to the PC world what has become known as "Moore's Law": processing power doubles roughly every 18 months while the cost of this processing power remains relatively stable.

Read More »

Moving Around Just Keeps Getting Harder

Recent stories in the New York Times and on wire services such as Reuters underscore a small but significant collateral problem stemming specifically from the alleged terrorist plot to blow up airline flights originating in the U.K. in August, as well as from the larger issue of security aloft. Several symphony orchestras and other musical performance groups have had to cancel individual dates and even entire tours in the wake of the U.K. plot reports as British airport authorities and security agencies denied passengers any carry-ons, including their instruments or music-related technologies such as laptops.

Read More »

It's the Laws

Okay, time to get up on the soapbox again. It's probably my three quarters electrical engineering circuit analysis education, but why can't most newbie sound people figure out how much power, voltage and current is going into each of their speakers? I mean Ohm's Law and Watt's Law have been around since before Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, Edison sockets (for the light bulbs) and Edison receptacles (for plugging things into). So I guess it is time we had a refresher course on the basic electrical formulas, and those of you who know this stuff can guess the famous dead physicist's names that make up the laws.

Read More »

Doctoring Up Your Rentals

Dear Fellow Anklebiters,

I rent out my digital console to regional sound companies once in a while. I rent out EFX processors as well. What is the proper protocol for a console that is to be rented out? Should it be cleaned of all saved scenes? Will the engineer who ultimately uses this console just need to load his/her own libraries? Should the EFX processor have any custom programs on it or should it be factory clean?

Read More »

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.

Read More »

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.

Read More »

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."

Read More »