Doing shows in established venues requires attention to details, but all bets are off when the client wants an event at a “creative” space – whether a downtown street plaza, national park or abandoned missile site. In his July 2024 “FOH-at-Large” column, Baker Lee looks into the logistics of unconventional gigs.
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Folks often talk about redundant console power supplies, but you’re far more likely to need a redundant AC power SOURCE to avoid resetting your console after a power loss or some moron pulling the plug. A console may reboot in a minute or so, but that feels like hours when the sound goes out at a show. For less than $100, an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) can sidestep that situation and give you surge protection too – along with peace of mind.
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Two gate features that are eminently useful but often overlooked or misunderstood are the filters and key inputs. Whether hardware- or software-based, all gates incorporate a gain control device and a detector. The gain control device varies the gain of the audio signal, while the detector is sort of a remote-control signal that opens and closes the gate by telling the gain control device what to do; the detector signal could be the same sound as the one you’re trying to gate, or a completely different signal.
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Across most of the U.S., the legal requirements for providing assistive listening technologies do not apply to religious entities, with the exception of California and Texas, which legally require religious entities to adhere to federal law. That said, are we really so callous that we must be forced by law to help ensure that everyone in the room can hear our presentation clearly? Of course not, and we all know that providing the necessary solution is the right thing to do.
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While subgroups, VCAs and DCAs are just a few of the many tools used to accomplish the mission of a great mix, another piece of essential information I often share with my young engineers is that just because an option is available on a console doesn’t mean one is obliged to use it.
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Once upon a time, live sound was much simpler than it is now. We put mics in front of our vocalists, plugged their instruments into DIs, fed the signal via snake to our mixer, and mixed the signals for our congregation and musicians. Nice, simple, analog signal flow — no crazy wireless or digital signals flowing everywhere over Ethernet cables. It was simple, it was easier… but nowhere near as good as it is today. Yes, we have to deal with digital networks and the increasingly complex world of wireless (which is becoming more complicated all the time), but the benefits are worth every bit of struggle we face.
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Once you’ve made sure that the generator you’ve chosen will meet the needs of your system, there are a few other things to consider. First, it’s important to respect the starting power by not firing up the entire P.A. system or amp rack all at once. And though it should go without saying, here I am, saying it: generators should be used only outside in unenclosed areas, at least 20 feet from any other structures.
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Before diving into the more abstract subjects like algebra and calculus, students should also be offered practical instruction in doing taxes, mortgages, interest rates and a study of credit card fees and management. In the same way that I feel certain applied math is overlooked in schools, I feel instruction in certain touring practicalities gets overlooked. While the study of gain structure, the use of dynamics or the flying of a speaker array should be mandatory knowledge for a young engineer, it should be as equally vital to know how to juggle your marriage or kids in the middle of a six-month world tour.
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Figuring out what sort of generator you’ll need first requires determining how much power your P.A. will consume (don’t confuse this with the audio output of a power amp or powered speaker). A visit to the manual or rear panel of your gear can provide a lot of information, and what you are looking for is “maximum power consumption.” This information can be listed in amps or watts; if you need to convert one to the other, use the formula (above).
Read More »When replacing traditional monitors with IEMs, it can be hard to overcome the institutional and individual resistance to change. If our seasoned musicians and vocalists have adopted the “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” stance, we might timidly present the idea of IEMs, and just dip our big toe in the water — buying a cheap system in case the old-timers decide they hate it. However, if they were already predisposed to hate it, and the system is cheap, it’s not going to work well: The old-timers are REALLY going to hate it and now have a legitimate rationale from which to argue against the new paradigm.
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“Water for Elephants” sound designer Walter Trarbach spoke with FRONT of HOUSE’s Bryan Reesman on the control setup for the complex Broadway production, a mélange of music, dialog in various languages and animal puppets, which loom large in the production and even have their own character arcs in the story.
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As we go into festival season, you may be mixing on a console that’s your second or third preference. It makes sense to tweak your console files to make them as easy to use as possible… Be sure to indicate names for the band members, the date, monitor output routing, and add channels for monitor and FOH talkback, and keep everything up to date as changes happen. High channel counts make navigating a desk cumbersome, so develop a grouping system that makes sense to you and reduces the number of faders you need to run a mix… I typically color code the DCAs, matching the color of the channels to their respective DCA. I find this helpful when I’m looking through multiple fader layers for something in a hurry.
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