While sitting at a bar, a man noticed a good-looking woman and tried to engage her in a conversation. "Excuse me," he said, "would you sleep with me for a million dollars?"
Not knowing what to make of this, she looked him over, and after a moment or so, answered, "For a million dollars, I would sleep with you."
He thought a moment, and then asked, "Would you sleep with me for $1?"
Read More »It's a New Year and it might be time to rethink what's in your rack. There is something always exciting about cleaning out an old closet, giving away what you don't really need and finding a whole lot of space. The same can be done with that audio rack!
I think you'll see that if you are tired of overprocessing and getting poor results, it might be time to go digital. There are exceptions to every case, and I don't deny that an extra piece of outboard gear at FOH can be handy for the experienced technician. What I am talking about is a paradigm shift in technology and equipment management, not the odd "what if…?" situation.
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How much abuse can a traveling analog FOH console take before it expires? Mary McFadden knows the answer. The sound engineer for the national touring company of the hit musical Chicago dealt with that issue recently after spending two years on the road with a faltering analog board sandwiched within digital gear.
The Tony Award-winning Chicago is already a challenging show with its concertstyle production where the bandstand with full band onstage, also the centerpiece of the scenic design, is a substitute for the traditional pit orchestra. A little over a year ago, McFadden and Chicago's sound system designer, Scott Lehrer, decided to remove a badly limping analog FOH console for Yamaha's digital PM5D desk. The touring show's production package was a more modest adaptation of a system designed for the 1,587-seat Schubert Theater in Manhattan. At the start of the national tour in May 2003, a Yamaha DM2000 sidecar was substituted into the system to replace an analog board, and it was joined to a smaller mainframe analog desk, to shrink the mix-position footprint in the smaller venue. But within two years, the analog desk began to develop problems that eventually required its retirement.
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While doing FOH at an outdoor gig in Victoria, B.C., with a fair-sized (six boxes/side + 6dual 18) EAW rig next to city hall, the local city representative and his trusty Realistic SPL meter came up BEFORE we turned on the mains and told us to keep it down–the local bylaws say that they have a 90dB limit. The stage sound at FOH was around 90 to 95dB. The local system tech didn't turn on the system for the first band, and we were the second of three bands in the lineup. Well, I hadn't seen the city guy in an hour, and figured I could bluff and delay us through a 30-minute set, and mix with adequate volume. This, however, was not the issue. Halfway through the first song, the subs go down. No comms to stage, so I run to the deck and get the system dude to click the breaker back on. Bear in mind that I was peaking at about -6 on the output of the crossover. Went back to FOH and was there for a minute before the subs went down again. As I ran back to the stage, the high/mids went down. The stage guy said I was pushing it too hard, but my mix was so conservative that there was NO WAY I was close to the red lights. The monitors seemed to be relatively stable, and the band I was working for had been accustomed to no monitors, so I cranked the vox in the wedges and pointed them towards the crowd. The owner of the rig finally showed up and crawled under the deck, played with the distro and all was good. The last twothirds of the set went off without a hitch, at about 105dB at FOH. But during the second-to-last song, the city guy reappears and gives his meter a good, hard look, and glares at me. I held my SPL, and nothing came of it. Had he asked me to turn it down, I may have inserted the meter in him. By the way, I found out later that a construction worker next door had plugged an electric jackhammer into our power distro.
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When I telephoned Gary Nellis on Dec. 19 for an interview, he certainly sounded calm. Talk about the eye of a storm.
Nellis, who headed up the electronic install at the brand-spanking-new South Coast Casino in Henderson, Nev., a city that hugs the southeastern rim of Las Vegas, didn't actually answer the cell phone; someone on his crew answered for him as he discussed business on his other cell phone. Momentarily, he switched over, and with mind-boggling calmness, talked to me about the task of getting a big electronic install done under pressure.
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For the fourth consecutive year, B&R Communications chose Orlando, Fla.-based LMG, Inc. to provide the audio and video for PartyLite's National Sales Conference. As audio services manager for LMG, and this being an audio trade publication, I will focus on those particular aspects that went into this challenging endeavor.
Challenges
When speaking of this show, the phrase about "pounds of unmentionables in a too-small bag" comes to mind. In previous years, this event was held in a football-size indoor stadium. For 2005, the show moved to Washington, D.C. and a basketball-size arena was chosen, offering a lack of space for the backstage areas. Prior to 2005, the stage was set up around the 50-yard line, leaving an extra 50 yards for the setup of audio, video, lighting and scenic. With the stage end on the court of a basketball arena, we were left with little to no space.
Read More »It's one of those nights. It is 4:15 a.m. and I can't sleep. You know how it is: I'm tired, but my mind is racing and I can't fall asleep. So, what the hell? It's a perfect time to write this month's missive.
It will be early to mid-January by the time you read this, but I am writing it a few days before Christmas. As we begin 2006 with this issue, I find myself looking back on the past year. Most of us do that and, like most of you, some years bring a sense of opportunity lost and others of accomplishment, some of sorrow and some of great joy. As I look back over the last 12 months, I am struck with a profound sense of gratitude. It has been a year of growth, both personally and professionally, and a year of many changes.
Read More »When the Beatles played Shea Stadium in New York in 1965, the music P.A. consisted of a half-dozen Shure Vocal Master systems–two columns of 6- and 8-inch speakers fueled by a combination mixer/power amplifier. Thankfully, the miles of Hi-Z cabling running around the stage didn't honk back much telemetry from the then-relatively small number of satellites floating around in orbit.
Looking back, it's almost comical that an event of that historical magnitude had such a puny P.A. system, but that's what you had at the time. The Vocal Master was the apotheosis of what someone could buy off the shelf in terms of a public address system in those days. But there are a couple of trends that make what was the state of the art at that time worth remembering.
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Every soundco has cables, endless numbers of them. From snakes to mic patches to speaker cords to AC power distribution. And like most newbies, you all start with the usual whatever-is-handy approach to transporting them–old roadcases, milk crates, suitcases, steamer trunks, plastic totes, etc. This article describes the art of cable keeping, and how the big soundcos do it.
Sometimes we just don't learn, but typically, plenty of clues are dropped by those witnessing your load-in ritual. Sayings like, "How many trips are you gonna make?" or "Hey, it's getting cold in here. Wanna hurry up?" What those less-than-polite comments should be telling you is that you are not very efficient in getting your gear from the gig rig into the venue.
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One man. One stage. One microphone. One ambitious actor performing an entire trilogy of famous sci-fi films with dozens of characters. Charles Ross deserves props for taking George Lucas' famous first triad of intergalactic adventures and condensing them into an hour-long solo performance that is equally a loving homage and hysterical parody of this beloved film franchise. Ross plays all the parts, uses no props and imitates as many sound effects as he can, even simulating an X-Wing crashing into the Death Star. In other words, he's like a kid imitating his favorite movie, zooming and rolling around his bedroom, except he's in front of a much bigger audience. It's a show that can be punishing on his body, voice and microphone setup.
Read More »Jamie Rio: Since the very first edition of Anklebiters, I have attempted to answer your questions and share my real-life, seat-of-my-pants experience of the sound biz with all of you. And with the help of some very capable fellow sound techs and anklebiters, I think I have done a good job of it. Well, after seven years of working my own small niche company, I am graduating to the next level. That means I have grown from a local guy to a more regional organization. This will be my last installment of Anklebiters and I would like to share some of my experiences of taking "the next step."
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Consider it the equivalent of hazing before getting into the fraternity of Front of House engineers–you're working with an opening band, and as you step up to mix a show, the main act's muckety-muck reaches over and turns down the entire P.A.
Welcome to the big time. Everything you'd hoped for, huh?
That situation has played itself out over decades of FOH history and new engineers accepted it both as a right of passage and brutal reality. The good news, according to Seether FOH mixer Howard Worthen, is that those days may be passing. "I've gotten the shaft pretty hard as far as them cutting me on volume and stuff. You don't see that a lot any more, and I think that comes from guys like me who started in the '80s going through that whole scenario," he says. "I know my point of view is that I've been through that and I would never do that to another person.
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