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Audio Analyzers: Pink Noise vs Sine Sweep

By Nathan Lively

Why do some audio analyzers default to pink noise and others to a sine sweep?

They are different acquisition methods, but they’ll both get you there.

Real-time

  • 2 channel input
  • Measure in real time with any source material
  • Common among live sound engineers

Non-real-time

  • 1 channel input
  • Measure off line with a pre-determined source
  • Measure THD
  • Get very high SNR
  • Characterize decay (T60, C10)
  • Common among acousticians, manufacturers, mobile electronics technicians

You don’t want to feed a real-time measurement with a sine sweep because the real-time analyzer wants a broad-band source, which makes the sine sweep look like mostly nothing. It’s like putting unleaded in a diesel engine.

Transcription

The transcription was automatically generated. Please let me know if you find any errors.

This year, I’ve been getting a lot of questions about why some audio analyzers use pink noise and why some use sine sweeps, and it started around the time that acoustics came out with their M1 P1 platform. And so I think that was kind of what people are looking at is like, hey, wait, we’re used to kind of hearing pink noise when we use things like smart. Why is now the acoustic system using this sweep?

Should I be using a sweep? What’s going on here? And I can go directly to them and maybe I’ll try to make another video later where I talk to Vic or Scott or someone from acoustics and just chat with them about why they made that decision. But I thought it’d be fun to talk to you about just make a short video about just some general places where we see the show up so that people can just including myself, can have a better idea of like maybe why and why some people prefer it and why some platforms prefer it.

So this is the first question. Why does some audio analyzers use pink noise? Isn’t some use a sign sweep?

Yeah, and that’s really the great place to start. And I think, you know, what we’re really talking about here is not which signal should I use?

But what we’re talking about under the hood is what mathematical method is this analyzer using to get the data right. And that’s something that as an end user we don’t care about. We don’t want to get under the hood and know what math it’s using, but that we’re talking about two different types of math that will give us the same answers. So one type of analyzer is designed so that it can use any signal that we want, and that’ll be the dual channel fee.

So it’s source, independent. Right. And then the other type of math works by using a very specific, mathematically predetermined signal.

So a sweep would be a good example of that.

So there they’re just different acquisition methods. And I think as we’re going to see as we go on here today, you know, they’re both going to get you there.

They’re both going to give you that answer.

If you’re just trying to say, hey, you know, I want to see the magnitude and phase of of this loudspeaker, whatever they can both produce that they just use different mathematical methods under the hood to produce that information. Got it.

OK, so would it be fair to call these should we break it down? Is it real time and not in real time or is it real time? And I are mode. What do you think is the better way to distinguish that?

Well, so the real time measurement that is the source independent one. And it’s happening. It’s happening in real time. Like you said, I can be tweaking a delay or it can be tweaked and I’m going to see those results to show up the measurements continuously running. And that’s the one that can use anything that we want for for a source material. Yeah, non real time would, I guess, be a good catchall term for something like a sweep where you say, OK, run it and it goes and then the computer goes and kind of thinks about it.

And then it brings you your answer. Right. And then if you want to tweak that IQ or something, you’ve got to go run that measurement process again. So it’s it’s not happening in real time. In Smart specifically, we call our non real time mode impulse response mode because we’re gathering the impulse response system. But as you know, once we have the impulse response, we can transform that and get get the frequency response. And either way.

So so that’s our name for it. But yeah, I mean, we’re fundamentally distinguishing between measurement that’s happening continuously in real time and a measurement that’s happening once and then it’s sort of a one shot thing. Yeah.

And just to give you an overview of, you know, there are a lot of these audio analyzers like Smart that I think can do both modes. But just to give an overview of some where we where we’re used to seeing them, they are things like when it comes to the real time mode, we’re used to thinking of things like Smart sat live and now we have open sound meter. That is there’s probably some that I’m missing. But then when it comes to the non real time, I immediately think of like RW for our capture, wave, capture or wave tool.

I can’t remember the name. Is there any that I’m missing that you think are common? Oh, I mean, there’s tons of them.

I think another common real time dual channel platform would be Sistan that people are familiar with. There’s a ton of sweat measurement platforms out there. Generally, it’s it’s a sweep or some other period since signal versus the real time dual channel platform. So in terms of the mechanics, the whole point of the real time dual channel platform, like in Smart, like you’re setting up to inputs the measurement in the reference. So we’re just saying, all right, let’s how do these compare?

We can continuously run that comparison.

Whereas when you’re doing something like Remix Wizard, you don’t have the necessity to do that reference channel that loop back. Right. It’s just the computer is going to produce that signal. It’s going to come out and then it’s just going to record it comes back and you could record that sweep to us CD and play it in a different building and record it.

Just bring it back and. So you have are you inputting one signal or are you inputting a pair of signals? Right. And so that’s the fundamental difference here, is that when the dual channel real time, that the whole point of that reference signal is where we don’t need any particular predetermined signal to do this, just give us a copy of it versus the suite measurements that that that sweep is very particularly created by the computer. And so when it comes back in the computer, you can compare that suite to what it knows that it generated and that’s how it produces the measurement data.

Cool.

And you and rest on Acoustics recently published a great video that I believe is called Pink Noise versus Sweep. Or is that was the title of that one?

Yeah, I think well, it was kind of had a double title, right, because it’s exactly what we’re talking about. A lot of people say I think it’s called like in parentheses or in quotes. It says pink is sweet and then it says real time versus real time versus impulse response. Right.

So people people should watch that one for sure. And I just want that one yesterday. And it’s the same topic. And you do some great demos in there. But I know you have another demo. So before we dive into this demo that you’re going to show us, let’s just talk about some common places where we see these two things show up. So starting with real time mode, a lot of people, especially those of you like you and me and the people watching this video, we are used to seeing most commonly this real time mode using things like smart when we are doing temporary installs, a lot of concert, sound theater, that kind of thing.

Do you think that’s right? And where else do we see real time mode show up?

Yeah, I would I think it’s a fair statement to say that the majority of people doing live sound system optimization work are probably using a real time tool. And I think the reasons for that are obvious. The fact that it happens in real time and the fact that we can use any test signal, we want those to have some real obvious benefits in a production environment. Obviously, a lot of this is about how quickly we can move. And so there are some real benefits there.

Now, you can obviously do this type of work with this measurement platform. I know I have a couple of good friends who used Rumiko. Was it for a long period of time to do this work? And there’s nothing wrong with that. And I want to stress that, that this is all about you using the tool that you’re comfortable with it give you the results that you need. But given the choice, typically I’m trying to move as quick as as quickly as I can.

I’m going to go for a real time measurement platform for for a lot of this type of work where it’s, hey, we want to just measure the response to this sound system so we can put a couple filters in or I need to dial in some delay times or stuff like that. I just want to continue measuring during the show.

Like, you never stop you potentially. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, obviously you can’t do sweeps during a show. Right. So so there are there are times when the circumstances in which we’re trying to work are going to dictate a certain workflow, and that would certainly be one of them. Now, if we want to talk about the sweat measurement platforms or what we’ll just call non real time measurement platforms, the really big benefit there is that the analyzer is able to sort of cut through a lot of the sources of noise that come into our measurements.

So we have a couple of different sources of noise in our measurements. Want to just acoustic noise or at the back or my furnace is running right now.

So that would show up my bird screaming in the next room, all of that stuff. Right.

So so that is something that we deal with both in real time and on real time measurements with averaging the more average that pushes that noise down. But there are other sources of noise and sometimes we want to deal with those in our measurement.

So one source of noise comes from the way that the analyzer has to sort of chop up. When we’re talking about real time measurement, we can use anything that we want. It could be music, whatever. We’ve got to feed the analyzer specifically sized chunks of that signal in order for it to do its thing. And so do the process that is involved in that can contribute some noise. So that’s when you get into a period matched stuff where we’re using a signal that’s the same length as the analysers time window.

So it’s smart. That’s pseudo random noise, which we can we can demo or the sweep. The sweep is going to be you set this wavelength in the analyzer. So that eliminates that source of noise and it can bring down the noise, floor the measurement. And then then finally you have non-linearity of the system. Loudspeakers have harmonic distortion. Right. And so when we have all the other sources of noise in our measurement that’s so down low that we don’t really care about it.

But when you’ve stripped back all the other layers, if you’re doing acoustics work right, this is really where the sweet measurement really comes into play, is if it’s your job to do acoustic treatment for a venue. And you really need to characterize that. Talk about the 60, right, I want to measure 60 dB of clean, reverberant decay, I need a really good signal to noise ratio in my measurement. So now we are stripping back those layers of noise and using you know, you’re talking about I’m going to use a really long sweep.

I’m going to do eight averages. So you’re talking about a 30 second acquisition time? Maybe, but you can get down 60, 70 dB into that reverberant and you can get really accurate characterizations of the reverberant qualities of the space. If you’re a contractor, that might be something that you really need to know. So so that is a situation where I’m willing to spend an extra 30 seconds to get this data and get really, really, really good clean measurement data way down on the noise floor.

And that’s that’s a situation where I definitely go to impulse response mode and smart.

And I’m going to I’m going to spend that extra time and I’m going to get these really clean impulse responses. So like you said, it all comes down to what what are we trying to do when we pull it analyser out? And this is something that I know you’ve talked a lot about in your videos. Right. What is the question we’re trying to answer here? What are we seeking to learn? And so if if it’s I just want to enter the system real quick and put some filters in or whatever.

I don’t need 70 dB of signal to noise ratio because that stuff lives up up at the top. And I’m going to get my answer quickly. And that’s great. And if I’m talking to a client about how much acoustic treatment should we order, I want I want to see that.

I want to know what’s going on. 40, 50, 60, dB down. So so that’s kind of different. Different tools for different jobs.

I remember a couple more jobs that we mentioned the last time you and I talked as well. You talked about a manufacturing lab and I was like, oh yeah, they have these specific conditions they would want to know in real time zone could really benefit them. And they want to see harmonic distortion and they’re looking like really close that drivers and they want to get really deep. And so that’s a common one, right?

Yeah, a lot of people I have some friends that work in loudspeaker design and that type of thing, and they’re typically working in way, way more controlled conditions than than we typically. What did it get? Right. So they’re in probably anechoic chamber or really, well, acoustically treated environment. And they are also measuring for a much higher level of of resolution, I’ll say, than than we typically would, because we know that in a venue we move our mic over a foot and we’re going to see a different answer.

Right.

When you’re designing a loudspeaker, they really need to see sub dB resolution on a lot of this stuff. And so so, yeah, they’re going to use typically a sweet measurement in a lab and they don’t care about the acquisition time. They’re not at a show. They don’t have a soundtrack coming up. Right. So so they can take longer acquisition time measurements. And the benefit of the sweet measurement is, like you said, because we’re only putting one frequency at a time through the system, we can keep track of what’s coming out and so we can spot that distortion and we can actually separate it out with a sweet measurement.

So if you’ve worked with Rikyu, is there there’s there’s an ability in there to show harmonic distortion over frequency and each each harmonic, whereas in a real time measurement, the distortion is just part of the tonal response of the system. If you’ve looked at I know you’ve done a little work with showing your viewers the noise test and we see what happens when you get distortion in there. The coherence starts to come down. Right. But in a sweet measurement, we can actually separate that distortion out.

And instead of saying it’s part of the tonality of the measurement, it’s part of the tonality at the system, we can actually split that out of the way. And the benefit there to go back to the acoustics work is if you’re trying to measure the acoustics of a space and you accidentally drive the loud speaker into distortion when you’re measuring the space, it’s separated.

It’s OK. So the ability to separate out distortion is maybe something we may or may not want in a real time situation. But it’s definitely something that’s really important in a controlled condition. If we’re studying distortion, I do work with the rental company here in town and after a month of shows, I’ll take all the boxes and I’ll sweep them and I’ll compare those measurements from what they were a month ago. And that’s a really, really great way to spot a blown driver or another problem with a box that needs to be repaired, stuff that you might not hear with just listening to music or listening to pink noise at a restaurant.

It’s like a health checkup. Exactly.

And so so, again, it’s all about that. We have different ways of taking these measurements, depending on what question we’re trying to answer. One thing I was going to add is that last month I did a training for a bunch of mobile electronics technicians, people who are installing high end systems in cars and trucks, and we decided to use Rumiko Wizzard partly because that’s what they were already using and they were familiar with it. But it turned out to be super useful because they don’t have their client standing next to them, waiting for them to get done in a few seconds like they’re working by themselves in the shop.

And if they needed to if the deadline was tomorrow, they could work all night if they needed to. But my point is that it was really useful to be able to take a measurement and then do a lot of things with it offline and has some great abilities to do, like filter modeling and things like that. And it was great to see that on screen before you take action. And we also mentioned being able to do these offline measurements. So it might be difficult in something like a vehicle to like get your impulse and get your signal generator into the input of that thing.

And so you could just burn a CD. If the car is a CD player with the signal that you need, play it back and record it and do your work that way as well.

Yeah, exactly. So for all of the reasons in a in a busy production environment, why a real time measurement is really great. There are some situations where it just is more complicated to do that, like you said. So if you have a friend who works for else. So how do you measure a smart speaker? Right. That’s all controlled control over wi fi and Bluetooth and stuff. You can’t really get an input into there in real time.

So that’s a perfect example of a situation where you’re like, no, I have this prerecorded test signal. I’m going to just play it back through this thing, pull it back to the analyzer and do what I need to do. And so, yeah, sometimes a non real time measurement is is really helpful. Cool.

So can we take a look at your demo and then we’ll talk about how screwed things up?

Yeah, absolutely, man. All right, let me I’m going to share my my screen here. Can we see this?

I see it. Great. All right. So so this is familiar hopefully to a lot of your viewers. We’re just we’re here and smart. We’re in the default transfer function view. I will point out I am using the version eight point five beta. This beta is public. So if you have a smart version IT license, you can go download this right now. And version eight point five stable will be out in a couple of months. And there’s a reason I’ve chosen this to show you this demo on me because we’ve completely overhauled impulse response mode and it’s really significant and it allows me to look at multiple impulse responses at a time, much like we can in real time mode.

So that’s really, really useful for for this demo in particular. We’re going to be comparing stuff. Right. So I’ll start off.

I’ve got a there’s a loudspeaker and a microphone over here in the corner of my office. And I will just start off by just gathering. I’m going to run the real time measurement for a second. Just take the transfer function here. So apologies for the for the noise. And what do I need, my speaker went to sleep on me. All right, now that it’s woken up, OK, so there’s my transfer function measurement. I’m just going to save this.

Great. So, you know, as you see, as soon as I turn it on, as soon as the system comes up, it starts doing its thing right. And so it’s just going to kind of continue on. I am going to activate the setting that we have, which is to stop the generator once I capture the measurement just so we don’t have to listen to the noise. Oh, cool stuff.

Right in the new feature. So. All right.

So we’re going to flip over to impulse response mode. And the way you do that in Smart as either press the ickey on your keyboard or you just have this little impulse button down here.

And you’ll notice that now this looks a lot more like real time mode than it used to, right? I have my data bar and all that stuff, so this is pretty cool. And I’m going to delete some old data so we can have our fresh new folder notice over here on the right.

Same transfer function. Engine looks exactly the same. I got my two single monitors, I got my delayed time, all that stuff. So that’s the same deal. So the three parameters we’re going to look at here are changing the 50 size. Using a longer field, give us a better signal to noise ratio, adding some averages and both of these things, if you’re familiar with Mickey Wizard, these are both parameters that you can control.

You can say, I want to use a longer sweep and I want to use more averages of that sweep. And then the third parameter we’ll look at is what happens when we change the signal type. So let’s start off with the default settings. We’re going to use the same random pink noise that we had before. So this could be music, could be whatever you want it right. It’s still a dual channel measurement. We’re going to use the 16 KFT and no averages.

And I’m just going to fire this thing up and let it go.

So let’s say that is a random 16 zero averages, right? So this is this is a basic it’s a really notice to talk about a third of a second to come through. So that’s three point forty one milliseconds.

So let’s see if we can lower the noise floor here. Let’s try to get a bigger dynamic range. Right. So one thing we can do is use marriage. So let’s go to let’s go to eight averages.

All right. And we go. So now you can see that it’s lowered that that noise floor by a good, what, 12 dB or so. So that’s pretty good. That’s pretty cool. So let’s now go to a different type of signal. So what we’ve been using up to this point is just random pink noise. Like I said, it could be music, could be whatever you wanted.

If we use pseudo random pink noise, what that does is it’s going to match the length of the pink noise signal. It’s going to be repeating signal now. And you can actually hear it repeating. It sounds like like an old Atari game or something. And it’s going to automatically match to the size of the fee they’re using. So when I hit this button that’s going to drop out, that processing that I was talking about, it’s called a Daito and it basically spoonfeed the analyzer, the correct chunk, so to speak.

But if the signal that we’re generating is already the right size, we don’t have to do that. And that eliminates the source of noise in the measurement.

So before you hit play, I just wanted to I think I’m noticing like this is kind of the classic thing you might think of, like popping a balloon and just recording it in a room right until now.

Yeah. So so we’re doing a dual channel version of that. Right. But yes, you can absolutely. If I if I hit this record button here that turns this into a single channel, direct air. So yeah. Then I could hit play pop the balloon or clap and I’m going to see that it’s a very similar thing. Obviously there are some advantages to the dual channel approach and that we can see the popping and clapping is really tough, right.

Because it’s so short, you’re not putting a lot of energy into that room.

So something like a sweep or pink noise test signal, since we can excite the system for a longer period of time, you don’t have to be so loud in the space. It’s easier to get a good level on your measurement and get above that noise floor. Whereas for for a pop or a clap, if you’re playing that through a you know, you’re probably going to have to push that system right to its limits just to get to get enough energy.

So so there are some benefits in doing this, not as a direct impulse. And of course, we are creating the same result. Right. We’re still creating that impulse response here. We’re just doing it with the dual channel method. Does that make sense? Yeah. Thank you. Cool. All right.

So let’s do the same thing. The only thing we set this time is instead of using random pick noise, we’re going to use the super pink noise and I click the drop our data window and that’s going to sink the pink noise signal length to the size of the fees. I’m going to fire that up.

Nobody can hear it over the zoom audio, but it sounds a little bit different. So that’s that’s a pretty big improvement, right? So pseudo random, let’s call it 16 averages. So what we can see is the noise floor is pretty drastically lowered, right, by a good 18 dB or so. And now we can see that the reverberant decay of the room is starting to be exposed.

That’s cool. Remind me, why do we want to lower the noise floor? I think maybe we covered this at the beginning, but at this point I’ve forgotten.

Well, we may we may or may not want to. Right. So if we’re in, we’re going to finish up by comparing this the frequency responses of these to the real time measurement. And we’ll see that they’re going to be pretty much the same. So, again, if you’re just measuring because you want to kupa, you don’t need to bother with lowering the noise floor because that stuff happens way up on the top. You know, our world was the top 10 dB when we’re we’re not doing stuff that’s 70 dB down.

But if we’re acousticians and we want to characterize the reverberance of a space this up here, if I’m hitting the noise floor only only 30 dB down, that doesn’t give me a whole lot to go on. Right. Whereas if I can push that noise floor down, I’m exposing more of the reverberant qualities of the space and I can do that more accurately. So for an example, I can click the T 60 button and I can you know, you see these markers come into play and they don’t really land quite like they’re supposed to.

We’re generating all these acoustic metrics if we’re for an integrator or we’re trying to study the space itself. And what you can see is as we lower that noise floor, you’re going to see these metrics get more accurate and that marker placement will improve. So so the software just can get a cleaner data set to calculate those types of things, basically. Thank you. Yeah, absolutely. So let’s nuts. Let’s now go to a longer fee. OK, so let’s go up to 60 for KFT.

So that’s a little over a second long at forty eight K sample rate. And so we’re talking about one point three seconds it averages. So now we’re talking about nine or 10 seconds to get to get a measurement, but you’re going to see it’s going to lower that, that noise floor even further. All right, so this looks way different than the other ones, right, so it’s longer. Like we said, you can see that it extends this is this the axis down here?

The X axis is in milliseconds. So we can see over here one point three, four K. It’s not a frequency. That’s that’s a time. Right. So we’re over a second long compared to these guys, which are about a third of a second long. But you can also see that, again, that noise floor is significantly lower than it has been.

So we’ve got even more of that reverberant decay exposed. So I’m going to save this. This was a sixty four K at fifty and we did eight averages. And so in in smaller version eight point four, you could do this work, but you can only look at one trace at a time. And so that’s why I’m using eight point five for this demo, is that it’s obviously a little easier to see this stuff when you can overlay them. All right.

So now let’s go for the sweep. Right. Let’s let’s go for for the big guns in the sweep has that additional ability. So we’ve done averaging. We’ve lowered the acoustic noise. We’ve kind of dealt with that. Then we used a period match noise and that allows us to get the data window out of the picture and that that brought the noise down more. And so when we’re this far down, we’re talking about, you know, you can see where we’re below 70 dB down now, pretty far down now.

We can start talking about. But what about the distortion products of the loudspeaker? And so when we go to the sweet measurement, instead of those being mixed into the noise of the measurement, it’s going to separate them out. And so we’re going to see that. So I’m going to pick a little bit of a longer time record because that works a little bit well, better with a sweet measurement. We’re going to select Pink Sweep as our material here.

And notice I’ve got a setting. One thing I’m going to do is turn this down just a little bit because we don’t need it to be as loud the the signal gen level and smart. This is actually a good thing to remember. This is a peak level. So we’re using pink noise simply as a crass factor, about 12 dB.

So the average the arms level is going to be you below the value in this box when we go to a sine wave sine wave as a crass factor of three dB. So that’s going to sound a lot louder even though the level setting looks the same.

Right. And so it’s just it’s I’m going to just pull it back a little bit.

So the box that I’ve checked here is triggered by impulse response. And so when we get into sweep’s, it’s really important that the sweep lines up with the data window of the analyzer or the time record of the analyzer. Excuse me. So we want that the analysers time record to start. And then we wanted to hear the sweep and then we want to leave enough at the end that the reverb in the room can ring out. And then we want to stop listening and then we want to process that.

And so manually synchronizing that, you can really get into some trouble with getting goofy results because you had timing problems. So that setting when I do this, it’s automatically going to trigger the suite for me when I hit play, which is really cool. I don’t have to worry about trying to sync it up. Right. So we can do a three second sweep, two point seven seconds, and I’ve chosen eight averages. So we’re going to watch this thing go for a good thirty seconds, but you’re going to see the additional benefit of doing that.

OK, and know what, let’s let’s not go crazy. Let’s go to four averages here just because people’s time is valuable these days. All right, let’s let’s hit it. Let’s see what it does. Maurice. There we have it, so we’ve lowered that noise floor even further. And so now we’ve got I mean, I’m at I’m at negative dB here, so we’ve really exceeded our original measurement.

The pink the pink one here, it was minus 30 or so, minus thirty three.

So we’ve gotten pretty much a good forty five or fifty additional dB of dynamic range out of this measurement. So I’m going to save this one to make for averages. And it’s a little bit it’s not super easy to see, but if you have a lot of food in your system, these peaks that you’re seeing here at the end. They’re not super clear on this measurement, but those are the separated out impulse responses of the additional distortion products. So you get an IRR for your fundamental, which was the sweet tone that we hear, and then you get a separate IRP for your second harmonic.

And it is it’s pretty neat.

Now, again, on a super good linear loudspeaker, this doesn’t really get you all that much because you don’t have that much distortion in your measurement to begin with.

But if it’s a if it’s a speaker that’s working really hard toward it, toward the limits of what it can do, you have high distortion in there. This can get you like we see we gained an extra 60 or so by doing this. And so now I can come in and I can hit my 60 button. You see, now those markers really fall along the deck where they need to. And I can come in here and I can look at if I’m going acoustician.

All this stuff means it tells me a lot about the energy arrival’s in the space and reflections and the tonality of the reverb and all that stuff.

And so there’s a lot of stuff that that when you and I walk into a space and we’ve got to mix to show we’re just like MAPP, you know, we this doesn’t really do anything for us because we can’t do anything about it. We’ve got to deal with it. We’ve got the best we can do is not hit the walls with our speakers. Right.

But if your job is to work on how sound decays in a space, if that is your living, this stuff is really important to you. Right. So so we’ve really been able to do a good job of characterizing that stuff. Now, I am going to go to two pane view here and you’ve got linnear.

You can actually do some really cool stuff here. We can we can actually render a spectrograph of this stuff and you can look at histograms so you can see 60 in octave bands or third octave bands. And there’s all kinds of cool stuff you can do in this mode. But I’m going to go to frequency. And so we’re we’re seeing basically the magnitude response of that data. And I’m going to apply a little smoothing just to get rid of the of the grass here.

OK, so what we can see is the Pinki, which was really, really short. He had a pretty lousy signal to noise ratio.

You’ll definitely see some wacky stuff happening in the low frequencies down here where my speaker is not putting out a ton of energy.

It’s a little speaker. So so the signal noise ratio down there is not great and we see that. But if you look at the overall trend here, these are all telling us pretty much the same story.

You can see that if our goal is I want to know the frequency response to this loud speaker, we pretty much got that. And what I’ll do is if you just sort of take note, hold this image in your mind and I’ll send you a graphic of this so you can kind of do a side by side in the video. If you want to make it easier for people to see.

I’m going to go back to real time mode. And I’m going to pull that measurement back up, and you see, again, if I put the same smoothing on, we have the same story, right?

There was a different. OK, so it’s a different vertical scale in our mode. But, you know, what you can see is this measurement happened instantly and gave us the same answer. Now, how do we know there’s noise, that there’s not noise in this matter? Well, that’s what the coherent trace does.

So you can see down here where we have the wacky behavior in in the the impulse or field measurements, we have low coherence. And that’s telling us the same thing. Hey, you know, there’s some some funky stuff going on here with your data. There’s noise. We’re not it’s not super high quality data. So, you know, I think we return to the first thing that you said, which is what am I trying to learn if I just need to measure system so I can IQ it?

I have no problem using a real time measurement for that, because it’s given me the answer that I need and I don’t have to wait. And like you said, I can tweak my IQ in real time or whatever, and I can just watch that. And I don’t have to go through that process again where I go take a bunch of sweeps.

So so, you know, going back to to this stuff, if if your interest is characterizing the decay of a of an environment, then yeah. Then it then it definitely makes sense to get into these specialty types of impulse response measurements or we can use specific signals and we can really dig down into that noise floor.

And that’s a real benefit, you know. But, you know, they’re there. I wouldn’t say that there’s one type of measurement that’s inherently superior. I think that they’re they’re different tools that are most effective at answering different types of questions.

Awesome, yeah, that’s that’s a lot more clear to me now after seeing that demo. Thanks, Michael. Yeah, absolutely, man. He did ever tell you about the time that I borrowed my friend Mark’s diesel Volkswagen Beetle? No, I would love to hear the story, though.

It’s actually pretty sad, but I do things like this in my life all the time. So this is back when I was living in Texas for a little bit after I’d moved back from living in Slovakia. I didn’t have a car and I was living with my parents for a little bit. And so I needed to go somewhere. I think it was actually I had a gig and I borrowed my friend Mark’s car. And then I was driving back home and I was like, Oh, I’ll do the nice friend thing and I’ll fill it up with gas.

And I did. And then I got back home and then I was driving it back to his house from my house. And then it stopped in my driveway and it wouldn’t turn back on. I was doing all the things that he taught me, like, you turn the key and you wait for it to the light. Come on. And then you started up and I could not figure it out. And I sat there for a long time. And I think it took me like 30 minutes before I was like back at the gas station.

It says all over the car, diesel, diesel, diesel, diesel. I just never you know, I don’t drive a diesel. So I of course, I pulled up and fill it up with I’m going to guess. So if you ever wonder how much it cost to fix that mistake and it cost one hundred fifty dollars to get the tank drained and to then put diesel gas in there again. So recently I posted a video where I was demoing using ping sweep with the transfer function and I posted it.

I was like, cool, this will be helpful. And then Christine just called me from National because they said, hey, you can’t do that. And I was like, What do you mean you can’t do that? Look, you can do this. You just go to a transfer function and you set the signal and he’s like, but you shouldn’t do that because that’s not what it once. And I was like, what do you mean? So so, Michael, why can’t I why shouldn’t I use the pink sweep when I’m just trying to do a transfer function?

Right.

So in real time mode, you know, there’s a reason that we use pink noise even though our measurement system is independent. Like, you know, we always say, yeah, you can use the feed from the soundboard, you can use music that you like. The reason that we tend to use pink noise anyway is that pink noise has all the frequencies at once. And so the measurement is acquired really quickly. So you can you can take that real time transfer function measurement with your favorite song, if you like.

You’re just going to be waiting a little longer for those little gaps to fill in. Right.

So if you think about the fact that when we’ve got holes in our spectrum, you know, we’ve got to wait for the analyzer to be fed some information at that frequency before it can show us the result.

And so when you use a a sweep, you’re talking about a signal that only has one frequency in it at a given time.

So all of the analysers bins, except for one hour waiting around going, well, I didn’t get anything yet. Right. And then when you combine that with a modern dual channel analyzer, has the multi time window or something similar where those time records up at the top end of that frequency response, they’re really, really quick. So they may just not get anything entirely.

So if you go into again, I don’t recommend that you do this, but if you go into your transfer function options and you choose something other than multi time window, you choose a 60 50.

So we’re generating that whole frequency range from one foot size.

Then you will see some data populate there with with the pink sweep. Now, it’s still it’s still not a great way to acquire the measurement because, you know, you’re talking about we have we’re going to run run more averages if we want to stabilize our measurement. You’re still feeding in a signal that is mostly empty and so for all the reasons that the MAPP that the impulse response measurements really like that right there, they’re waiting. They’re going to get the whole thing and then they’re going to go and process it and give you the result we’re trying to do in real time.

We’re trying to go as fast as we can. And so when you’re feeding in a signal that is mostly nothing, it’s obviously not the best way to do that. So much like you have the diesel car, you just put the wrong type of gas in it. Right. So we’re talking about two different types of measurement engines here. And you just you know, they can’t drink each other’s fuel. It’s the same thing. But as we saw, you know, they’re both going to get you where you need to go.

If you just want to know the frequency response rate, it’s just about feeding the mass what it’s expecting. And likewise, if you go into Roomi, Q Ezzard and you feed it some pink noise, that’s not going to work too well either. Right. So it’s all about the analyzer being fed, what it’s designed to, to process.

Yeah, that’s a really good point because in Rumiko as if you’re playing the signal that’s designed to reject all of that other noise and then I guess the same thing in Smart you, it knows what signal to expect. That’s why we have the loop back. Yeah. So, so this is all making more sense to me. Michael, thank you for, for coming on to talk to me about pink noise versus science. Is there anything just kind of on this or what do you want to say to kind of wrap up?

I know there’s like a take.

We talked about a lot of things here, but what’s kind of the take away that you want people to have might take away would be that you should use the measurement platform and measurement approach that that works best for you.

I think things like this where you gain an understanding of why these people choose to use this method and why these people choose this method. You know, I’m not I can’t speak for any manufacturer in why they chose to go one way or the other. But when you know what these measurements can do, then you can decide, well, OK, for the stuff that I’m doing, I think this this is going to be a good choice for me. As we’ve seen, they’re both going to get you there.

It’s all about at the end of the day, we want to just get our answer. We’re going to do a good job. We want to get a call back. Right. We want to we want to keep our gig. So I would encourage people to choose a tool that they’re comfortable with and that they understand and that they can get good results with. And as long as you’re doing that, I think that’s the way to go.

Gradient vs Delta Subwoofer Array

By Nathan Lively

How does a 6-element inverted gradient stack compare with an equally sized delta subwoofer array?

I interviewed the creator of the Delta Array recently and he mentioned how similar it is to the gradient. I decided to see for myself.

Coverage Shape

Forward Aspect Ratio

For a short demo of FAR please see One Simple Tool to Find the Right Size Speaker for Any Space.

FAR = depth / width
deltaFAR = 26 / (13*2) = 1
gradientFAR = 26.15 / 23 = 1.14

30 / deltaFAR = 30
30 / gradientFAR = 26.38

Have you tried the Delta Array in the field? What were your results? Let me know in the comments.

Right Now Is the Best Time to Build

By Nathan Lively

Subscribe on iTunes, SoundCloud, Google Play or Stitcher.

Support Sound Design Live on Patreon.

In this episode of Sound Design Live, I talk with the founder of AV educate, Omar Colom. We discuss getting gigs, losing gigs, and networking.

I ask:

  • What are some of the biggest mistakes you see people making who are new to event production?
  • 10 Rules to be a Successful AV Technician
    • “No one notices if you are 30m early, but just get there 10m late and you stand out as being late. Stand out for being a great technician, not for being late.”
      • How can you stand out and be successful in a job where success is defined by basically being invisible. So if we only get noticed for mistakes, what is the motivation for high performance? Can I have a successful career if I’m a mediocre tech, but show up early and wear the right clothes?
    • “The opposite of networking is not working.”
      • What are some simple things I can do on a regular basis, either from home or on a show, that will help me build relationships without feeling gross?
  • Tell us about the biggest or maybe most painful mistake you’ve made on the job and how you recovered.
  • From FB
    • Lou Kohley: What does he see happening in the future? With everyone looking for work and a glut of experienced folks also competing for a limited number of jobs, how can you stand out in the crowd?
  • What is a Cafezito and what did it try to kill me in Ft. Lauderdale?
omar colom

Right now is the best time to build whatever it is you’re doing.

Omar Colom

Notes

  1. All music in this episode by Steve Combs.
  2. AV Tech Talks
  3. Hardware: Atem Switcher, PCDI Box, DAC 70, Rode Podcaster, wrenches, screwdrivers, silver sharpie, SM58, espresso machine,
  4. Software: vMix
  5. Books: The Five Love Languages, The Backstage Handbook
  6. Quotes
    1. The first year I did nothing but pipe and drape and screens.
    2. Do not white glove anything. Do not let your ego get in the way.
    1. I’m a big guy on unknown unknowns. I’m smart enough to know I don’t know a lot of stuff.
    2. Don’t chase the money.
    3. Keep yourself relevant by using social media to promote your brand.
    4. I have a badass resume. No one’s going to read that.
    5. Usually what happens is that I book out my whole year before it even starts.
    6. Right now is the best time to build whatever it is you’re doing. If you have to get a job right now just to make ends meet, great, do that. Still dedicate 2-3 hours to building your brand.

Transcript

This transcript was automatically generated. Please let me know if you discover any errors.

I’m Nathan Lively, and today I’m joined by the founder of AV Educate, Omar Colom.

Omar, welcome to Sound Design Live.

Nathan, thanks for having me here, man. I love it.

So, Omar, definitely want to talk to you about getting gigs, I don’t know, losing gigs, networking. But before we do that, I’d love to know after you get a system set up for the first time.

So I guess in your case would often be a video system playback system.

What’s one of the first pieces of music or some kind of audio you like to play to make sure that everything’s working and just functioning correctly?

Such a hard question for me. So fun fact. I am not huge on music. I do like Electric Swing, which is a weird category. I know, but that’s it’s something I like one of my more kind of go to things on shows. That is a swing box.

I feel like it’s a little bit above jazz and a little bit below swinging, the people kind of like, let me play it out and don’t complain about it too much. OK, sure. I don’t have a broad palette of music choices, to be honest. I’m very narrow and it’s good to get along with your colleagues. Yes.

So, Omar, how do you get your first job in live event production? Like what was your first paying gig?

First paying gig. Right. Was the media stage. So, you know, the untold story of myself is that my father owns a Navy company in South Florida. And I, I kind of grew up in the industry. My uncle is a lighting designer. My brother’s in cinematography. My dad owns a Navy company. So I was kind of going this route regardless. But in high school, I did theater and I did production. All right. I’m sorry.

Theater and broadcast all four years is like my always my electives with those those electives. And then I joined the military for a while when I got out and was like, hey, are you coming into the business? What’s going on? I was like, yeah, I’m coming back.

And you come into the business, but you got as far as far north as Miami. Yeah, pretty much. Pretty much. But yeah, it’s kind of like that’s my into the industry. And I would, I would say, yeah, my first paying gig was again, but I will say I started off so I did six years with them for of freelance and became like an engineer in person. I am now. I started off and this is my father’s doing mostly he’s he’s, he’s a you know, you’ve got to you’ve got to earn your your your, your stripes kind of got guy.

So it was the first about the first year almost. I did nothing but pipe and drape and screens. OK.

Oh wow. Oh wow. Everyone’s favorite. So I was in the warehouse all I mean I did show size. I was setting loading trucks, unloading trucks, building stuff out. I still to this day but he would not let me leave that apartment. I had to manage at all and I got really good at it. And then as I was doing that, I was being cross-trained because it’s where I want to go. I because in between video and helping out like run the warehouse.

So I learned a lot of audio, lot lighting. Some are very competent, a tool to be to. But my passion was video. And then after about that year marked OK, you’ve you’ve earned your right to now do more video stuff and kind of go to that department. So then I was for another year in charge of this Froufrou and Senik department, whatever, but also like assisting in the video. And then after a few years and I got to be, you know, just video and then they brought somebody else in to do that.

I was like, oh, thank God. But then it was so. So the irony to that is that then the other guys have taken over and I would get mad that he wasn’t doing these are the standards that I would do them at. So I was like I was still inserting myself that drive. Yeah, exactly. There’s a way fast way to do this. What are you doing, man? He’s like, not as how I do it.

No, no, it’s not it.

You know what? It’s not my department anymore, man. Do how you want, how you want.

So I’m curious, does your father still hire you when we’re not in quarantine? Are you one of his freelancers? Guess.

Is that too far away? I don’t know. I would say I at my dad maybe once or twice a year, my dad and me are great together as father and son. My father raised me, by the way, in the teenage years. My parents divorced when we were young and we get along but and work. I call him a slave driver. He’s OK. You know, it’s like he’s on me like this. A family. These are not it’s hard.

I mean, it’s like. Yeah, you know, I give them, you know, because of the military getting the respect. Yes, sir. No, sir. I call them Oscar and call my father in public. But when we were together, you can see the tension that people like you. Who is this kid? Oh, that’s so like we try to not work together too much, but yeah, when he can and he needs it, I’ll jump in there.

And there has been calls I like, hey, we need a guy like oh yeah, I’ll be there. Don’t worry. OK, cool.

So I’ma all the stuff has happened to you, all these different jobs and living different places and relationships and the military. I’m curious if you could take us to maybe one point in your life when you felt like there was a big turn. I find that with a lot of people that I talk to, sometimes there’s many points like this. But there’s usually one point in your life. You decide, OK, I’m going to make a change or something happens to you.

Maybe someone else makes the decision. So I’m curious, looking back on your career so far, what do you think is one of the best decisions you made to get more of the work that you really love?

I don’t know, man. It’s a tricky one. You know, there’s a lot of those points in my life where I was. You know, I have that rule, not a rule, I kind of a thing where if you hear the same thing with three different people who don’t know each other, there is factuality to that comment. Right. So, like, if someone says something to you, whether it’s not the exact same verbiage, but it’s the same, actually.

And most of it is the same verbiage where like, you know, people say something to you, but it’s like through separate circles that you run into to say the same thing about you. There’s probably some validity to it. And you should you should recognize it and kind of make some adjustments. So I had a bunch of those in my life. I would say the biggest one as far as the Abe side was changing the mentality of of knowledge.

Right. So like what to do they be educators that came out of the necessity where I couldn’t find. A centralized location for all of it and everybody’s kind of sporadically working in their own silos and doing their own things, but again, if you don’t know somebody that knows that person, you know, there’s no brand ambassador for the for the community. Right. No one’s saying like, hey, by the way, if you want to learn audio and you want to learn some cool stuff, go Nathan Lively.

You want to learn some guerilla stuff, go to Alex Amphoras last name. But it’s the. Yes. Yes. It’s a tough one. Yeah. I was like, I don’t want to try it, but yeah, it’s like there’s these options that are out there. Right. There’s also the one for churches. There’s also video for churches, the subcommunities. A conference goes on every year. Like there’s all these plethora of knowledge out there. Right.

But there’s no one sharing that to say who to go to where and you got to find it out stumbled out on your own. Obviously, if you’re an established author like you, are you still on a book? Hey. Oh, and now oh, by the way, there’s a Web page and there’s an outlet like, oh, there’s all this other stuff you can do. Right. So that’s it adds to the value of what that book is.

But again, you have to search for that stuff and hunted down. And I was doing that for years and then I was talking to people constantly but was talking to Stagehand’s. And I always loved I was loved because of my father, primarily the mentality of do not do not like love anything and do not let your ego get in the way stuff. So I still to this day do search and work at stage and rates with close acquaintance of mine.

Like I know, I know the owners above the mark and I know the guys who run. It’s like these are friends of mine and they’ll call me once in a while like, hey, can you do this favor for me? I got to know more about it. And it’s good. It’s also good to connect with the people that I grew up in the industry with. And I kept hearing constantly, I want to learn this. I want to learn that.

I want to move into this business. I move to another position and I would just tell them, oh, there’s all the stuff. And then it kind of dawned on me like, hey, how do we learn more? Because you always know where to go. I was like, well, because I’ve been I researched, Tony, like, it’s all I do. It’s my passion. It’s learning and evolving myself, you know, so well.

One day I was competing with somebody and we were trying to disseminate information and kind of learn from each other. And it didn’t work out very well. It was very one sided. I got upset about it and a friend of mine said, hey, why don’t you just do your own thing? And then I like and again, this is like within the same maybe a few weeks of it, I had I had left the blue as the operations manager there with the team I was with.

I had left that position because of the whole buyout between seven. And I was I was doing training for the four of you at the time. I was fortunate enough that I I built enough reputation and skill set to say, hey, Omarosa stuff, let’s do a monthly newsletter and we’ll do the training part of it. So I was making these power points for the company, and when I left, I had two guys within it, literally like a two week period hit me up, say, hey, how come you have done any more PowerPoint?

And I’d only posted them on LinkedIn. Click I’m like that. Then these are super old. And I was like, man, I didn’t realize you guys even read it because it went on the newsletter, like whoever saw it, saw it or whatever. And then that was kind of like the like the last little straw. Like, you know what, I got to do something for that for my for my friends and family and everybody that I’ve been talking to, like just expand on it and then try to bring other people into it.

And I and I have been on the last almost three years now. I’ve been able to grow it and bring bring other industry insiders. I mean, Kevin ring from evolve that they post on any post there. And I’ve done a lot of their classes, you know, and I know projects a protected class. I know cameras. I still took a camera class. I know recording. I took like the fact that it’s there and I can learn something that, you know, I’m a big guy on unknown unknowns.

I don’t know what I don’t know yet. I’m smart enough to know that I don’t know a lot of stuff and knows any class I’ve gone to. And I’ve met Eli talked me into Seijas. I did what he did. His classes, like I always learn something from him and like, honestly, like, yes, there’s a lot of things that I like. But there’s like that one tidbit I like and that one tidbit is the one I’m going to show it somewhere and shit hits the fan and it’s like, oh, I know it’s you.

I got you. And I do. My thing is because I learned it from that class, because you had that one little piece of information that I didn’t have before. Sure. You’re looking for an opportunity to be a problem solver, be the hero. Yes.

Yes, I like that verbiage. I’m wearing my shirts.

The hero here for the day. Tech hero tech your. Oh, that’s tech hero. That’s really cool, Omar. So so, Avi Educate kind of started out just as almost like an index or a library of where do I get these resources. And now it’s become a resource in itself. So how do you see it? You see it as a place where like people go to learn how to become AV technicians. Yeah.

So it’s a double edged sword for me because I run into a few problems with that model and I don’t know if what is a good term, but I’m still evolving it with the community. Right. I love when people contribute to the community. I love that because I’m also learning as well from it. And a lot of things that people post, I dive in there, I click on that link, I go down the rabbit hole for four thirty to forty minutes and I learn what I can from that little link.

Some of it sometimes ends up being just like a promo thing and that really educational. And I’m miss the person. Explain to me the value of this or I’ll take it down, because it doesn’t really fit what we’re doing, but for the most part, guys share content. Alex, there’s a lot of good stuff. You sure? Good stuff, Kevin. Good stuff. And I’ll dive in there for a little bit and look at it up to the point that I can obviously orders on my forte.

So I learn I learn what I can, but I will say something I’ve seen from you guys. I’ve been saying like, hey, I know how I get this conversation now.

You know, even when that one class, of course, I signed up for with you with this unknown sound vision or sound you’re doing, the accuser, I don’t remember which one it was.

It was one of the things it was it was like a year ago. But I in and you me talk for a bleep second. You’re like, oh shit. Almost here. And then you by the way, I’m teach in class, but I was in a car with somebody and they were diving into those subjects and I was like, oh, I know what you’re talking about. You know, like visually I knew what he was talking about, which is really cool.

But it’s the double edged sword. Sorry, is that on the one side? I, I think as an engineer, a lot of the top ones yourself, myself, anybody who’s doing classes, you always need to be learning to get better. The negative side to the way the average kid does it right now or that I feel is happening is that guys feel like they can go in there, read a couple of articles, systems, YouTube videos, and then like, let me just use my let’s say minus started write, for example.

I can go watch a ton of because of that and zoom, I can I can download the manual from maybe educate. I can I can do some pass and learn some things about you and hear from you guys and other guys but. My biggest thing always is like knowing what a leader does and when to use that fader, knowing what the EU does and when to use the EU properly. Those are two different things. So when you learn right, by going to school, by learning, by doing the online site, and when you gain from the experience and unfortunate for life, you need both you know, you need.

And school teaches you a lot of things, a lot of theory, a lot of theoretical. They give you some practice, which is good, because then you get a tactile feel to things, but it doesn’t teach you, you know, as a video engineer, when I’m switching cameras, knowing when to take that, when the one who’s speaking on what who’s doing what camera to take, like knowing those moments is from experience. That’s not because someone said, hey, make sure your cameras look.

No, but there’s multiple things going on. You know, I’m looking at here’s an example and I’ve done this. And if you guys watch the GoPro class, I’ve done right. I we did a walkthrough with Scott on the call with me. We did a walk through like in a life scenario. And I told you, OK, is what I’m looking for. I’m looking for the colors in the image. I’m looking for the I’m looking for the for camera example.

I’ll be looking for the focus, making sure my camera guys are in focus, make sure the image is clear, make sure the white balance is clear. And I’m constantly reevaluating my head, you know, looking at the shading of it. Is is it too dark? Is it too bright? Is a shirt washed out? Is the background blurred out on my crushing the blacks? These are things I’m actively thinking about while I’m taking that shot or before I take that shot.

So I got someone in the queue ready to go to the next shot. These are all things I think about before I hit the next next shot. And these are things that I’ve gained from experience because I know from experience, hey, that guy’s not really a camera to do Iraq, but was one I’m take your shot Carawan. He kelman’s live camera three X, Y, Z like it just builds on each other and you’re constantly checking these monitors.

And the more cameras you have, the more things you have. And hopefully the max I’ve done by myself, a six, but I had a good team with me. I had a severe guy shooting, thank God, because that would have been murder to my brain. But but again, that’s experience. Like, I can teach you how to shoot. I can shoot. You have a remote controller, doesn’t RSVP does. Right. Between the iris controls and the Crescenta of blacks and the colors and color balancing, I can teach you those things.

But knowing when to do that and what settings to do for what scenarios, because the thing with live is we constantly change the lighting, the background, the colors, the up lights, you know, am I doing energy lights in the back and I’m doing Fresno’s in the front. Like, that’s two different color temperatures now. So now how do we how do I get the lighting guy to make sure, hey, what are your what is your blue in the background?

What does that color temperature versus what you’re doing in the front, which it is finals. And then what are the projectors doing so that my image still is clear when I balanced the projectors or what about with the cameras. So I just a lot of variables you got to think, you think of and you don’t get that in a class. You can get the knowledge for those things in bits and pieces and then utilize them live. But again, knowing when to utilize that knowledge is, is the experience part that you need to get and unfortunately can offer that all the time.

We try to clone does a really cool one with projection, for example, where he brings you to a live set and you build on a live actual production and you built cameras, you set them up and you get arms. Are you able projectors, you set the projectors and you get to fine tune those things. I’ve done as class as well. So we became friends. We we talk still behind the scenes and everything, but those classes are great.

But they’re also limited because now you’ve learned this one way to do it for this scenario, but at least you’ve gained knowledge and experience in the real world. But you keep building that. And again, that’s the really big idea that you gain the knowledge you need to be ready for that moment when it comes essentially, but then gain the experience to know when to do those things is another key that I think in the life side is very, very important that you just can’t get anywhere else other than the way we do it, essentially.

Right? I mean.

Yeah, yeah. And I want to ask you more about this experience, but I also want to jump back to something you mentioned earlier, which is I’m realizing now that one way that our paths are the same is that it sounds like you and I both had a kind of a life changing event when the avy company that we were working for was bought out by PSV, which probably has happened to a lot of people. And then it sort of changed your life.

And for me, it meant I went back to working freelance and it sounded like it did the same thing for you.

Yeah. So maybe just goes around the world changing lives. Well, they’re doing it. They’re doing a big downsize right now.

Right. So who I was talking to. But he was saying that, yeah, they’re going to downsize big time. So like now there’s a market available, not a market, but now there’s an opportunity for some of these companies to come back, a boutique wave for these hotels now, which is cool. But then again, it’s like they’re going to let you kind of build your thing and then they’re going to buy you out.

Yeah. Yeah. But they’re globally now. I mean, and I don’t dislike the SUV, right. They they have a model that works and they’re massive and they’re growing it maybe be a monopoly. I’m just to throw it out there. But they’re growing it and they’re doing it the legal ways. But yeah, I mean, I’ve done some suffered because of you. I have friends and I have some very close friends that are higher ups and PSV who I talked to so frequently.

They do some cool stuff, man, and they have some good stuff that their show are actually pretty, pretty dope.

Yeah, I didn’t want to start like hating on them, I think. I’m sure they’re all fine too. I just thought it was interesting that that happened to you in the same way it happened to me that they. They bought the companies that we were working for and then that basically, however, it changed our lives. So you went into freelance? I went into freelance. I don’t know.

It’s so interesting. So a lot of people that I’ve met who I find to be really talented in the industry who are within PCV and they were savvy for a while. There was a company prior to this. Oh, my God. Given the name right now. A lot of people that I highly respected industry came from this one company, and they got bought out by PCV years ago, a long time ago, but that that owner got older and he decided, OK, I’m done with this industry, sold it out.

He offered tons of training in house, offered tons of opportunities for people to move up within the ladder. I think he did it very well. I can’t remember the name. Now, it’s going to bother me the rest of this time anyway. So it’ll come to you. Yeah, hopefully. But there was there’s a lot of people I’ve met who start out with these guys. And the same thing, they they they got bought out. They left their friends for a little bit, came back.

The the interesting thing from that is that there is a few people who I won’t mention because they I think they’re they’re hesitant of it, but that I’ve actually wanted to help many that are actually employees of PSV who won’t because of that fact. And I, I don’t understand the full. The full. I guess the reasoning behind that myself, because like you and me, it’s like, why hold yourself back over something that, you know, you’re like, you know what it was for me?

Honestly, it was that when that buyout happened, I didn’t feel so I knew the owner sub and you and your family, we communicated. I helped out a lot of stuff, the office and stuff. I had a relationship with him following the great guy. I just think he was know, tired of the constant, which I don’t blame coming from, you know, and my father and seeing what he sees in the back end of our company.

People are you know, people show that one face and then behind the curtains is another face and a lot of times when you’re the owner of something, you get to see the behind the behind the current face. And it’s not always the best. There are some very talented people in the industry who are super talented, super well-respected, but behind the curtains, they can be a little bit of an asshole.

OK, I’m just gonna throw that out there if you guys are running because everybody’s got their show face. Yeah, it was at the show face.

Right. Let’s go back to talking about some of these things that you learned through experience. So it’s interesting that you’ve kind of grown up doing avy you you know how things work behind the scenes because of your dad owning the TV company and now you’re running a TV educate as well as, like, you know, working on production still.

So I’m curious. I know there’s there’s lots in your presentation that Livestrong Summit was about this very topic, but I wondered if maybe you could just pick out like one or two some of the biggest mistakes you see people making who are new to event production. Oh, yeah.

So the money the biggest mistake is money. Don’t chase it. And I think that’s pretty big on that live event summit. I have a lot of people, so a lot of guys. What they are doing right is they they get in the street and they see this. I could be making X amount of dollars and they will they will cancel a show for another show because they’re going to pay them more for maybe the same time frame. I’m a big proponent of don’t do that, because in this industry we are small.

We are primarily word of mouth. You know, I haven’t paid for a single dollar for maybe educate over myself to promote who I am. Everything I’ve done is through word of mouth. I met you through word of mouth or actually I met you through ourselves. We connected, but it wasn’t like, hey, I know, right?

You know, we connected. So personal referral, person referral. So when you when you accept the gift from somebody, they’re trusting in your ability to do that. Right. When it comes to the labor, yes. You’re a cog in a big wheel. But that labor right. Is going to use you more if they can rely on you, if they call you to book you on to show this to the weeks in advance and you call them a week before, say, hey, I can’t do this once in a blue moon.

I understand it happens. Things things come up, my family comes up. Opportunities. It’s it’s not just the money, but it’s the show that going to be like, I’m gonna be on this Microsoft show. All right.

I’m surprised that you’ve seen this happen. Enough that it really stands out to you is one of the biggest problems, because I feel like I’ve only ever seen this happen once on a show that I was working on. And the projectionist quit a week before or two weeks before. And he basically became blacklisted. And we were all talking about it like, yeah, we’re not going to contract this guy with this guy anymore. That was still when I was working for an AV company and I was like, well, I’m never going to do that.

And that was the only time I’ve ever seen that. So apparently you’ve seen this happen a lot more than me.

Yeah, so on the more so, yeah. So I guess I’ll go in a little details about right. In your scenario. Yeah. I don’t see very often where guys are specialized in something. I don’t see them calling out or changing schedules because they, they’ve learned it. But the stagehand guys who I sometimes have to deal with, including when I was again with CBS, happened to lots of us. We would call guys ahead of time. We actually got we got superefficient what we were doing there, the company that’s kind of run our own our own property.

We had brought in a girl who did a great job for us just to do labor. And it was constantly like, hey, I call X, Y, Z person. They agree to this. And now yesterday they told me they can’t do it because they don’t have a better paying gig. When we do, I go, he disagreed.

So I put it at the bottom of list. That was like for instance, if it was someone I knew I worked with a lot and I was just like a one off thing, I’ll call and let him know, like, hey, man, you can be doing that. But but if you’re not. Yeah, I see a lot on my side, but mainly with stagehand and guys.

OK, so more for generalists and not get you are hired first.

OK, got to correct generalist the more specialized guys. Not so much. Usually one of your specialties, it’s for something in particular. So that’s a little bit different. But a lot of the journals I just stayed in level guys that I try to bring up that technician level side. A lot of those guys, I see it happening a lot and I feel like then I’m getting stuck in that repetitive cycle because they keep canceling and say, OK, well, and then those are the guys that are constant calling you for work because they can’t get work because like.

Yeah, but when I call you, you don’t always follow through, you know. So it’s a tough thing for me. Does that’s the biggest one. That’s the biggest mistake I see as a person of your word, I guess. Yeah, a lot of people listening now are like, hey, I’m a sound engineer. Why these guys keep talking about video? What the hell is going on? OK, well, we are going to not talk about audio today, but we are going to be talking more about kind of this idea of of building your career.

And in this can be maybe kind of a weird thing to talk about right now during a time when people are working. But it’s still so important. And when we do get back to working and being busy and, you know, there’s plenty of companies out there that are that are doing live streaming and broadcast stuff right now. So it’s not that people aren’t working, it’s just that things are really slow right now.

And so I still think this topic of how to be a successful AV technician and basically grow your career is really important because there’s no there’s no resource out there for this. Everyone just kind of has to figure it out on their own by making mistakes. And then eventually Omar calls you and he says, hey, man, you can’t be doing that anymore. So so your presentation, Live Sound Summit this year was called Ten Rules to be a successful AV Technician, or that was one of the subtitles.

And so I just wanted to dive into a couple of them that that sort of caught my eye. So at one point you said no one notices if you are 30 minutes early, but just get there 10 minutes late and you stand out as being late, stand out for being a great technician, not for being late. So I think this is a great quote to sort of jump into this topic of growth in our industry.

So at some point, everyone who works in this industry has this realization where, oh, it’s really hard to be remarkable and stand out in a job where basically success is defined by being invisible. Right. Because if I do a good job, then no one knows that there’s any problems with the sound and the sound just happens. And people think that it’s just magic sound and they go home and they don’t even know that there is such a thing as a sound engineer or a sound system.

So if we only get noticed for mistakes showing up like microphone feedback, audio dropouts, whatever, what is the motivation for me to become, you know, high performing and to grow and get better and to to work harder? How can I?

I guess what I’m wondering is, is it possible to have a successful career if I’m a mediocre tech, but I just, like, show up early and wear the right clothes? Yeah.

So, you know, I mean, yes, unfortunately, because here’s here’s another thing, too. I know some super talented, like genius level engineers that they charge a hefty amount and they get paid for here and there. Right. And it’s great, but they don’t always get cold because they’re not the best to hang around with. So like the other, do this again with their reputation building is that if you’re going to be on the road alive, you can be running with a crew or being called a lot.

You’ve also got to be a personable person. Like if you’re going to be the guy that’s always grumpy and talking shit and like the and this guy is always an asshole or he’s, you know, he’s cursing all day long or he’s he’s being rude to the clients or he’s always spewing paranoia stuff. You may not get as many calls, but if you’re the guy every time word comes out, we have a good time. He’s a hard worker, he’s hustling.

He always helps out. When he pitches in, he’s always there. You’re going to get more calls because you’re just good to hang around with. That’s the only thing in this industry that guys understand. We build these these niches. It’s clicks to the point where I have people that I call to say, hey, I can’t do this. I got you. Don’t worry. I’ll call one of my one of my company that I know will provide either my level of service or better than me and help that same client out because I’m not worried about the money side of this.

I’m not worried about any more about having that person out because they know, hey, I can’t do it. He’s got to give me the right person who’s going to super form to love I want or that I need. But if you just a you know, an asshole guy that shows up late and doesn’t do his job and you smell like crap and you you don’t look presentable when you’ve got to just say, well, I’m going to keep calling you, I need hands.

Yeah. When I need 80 hands, you’re on the list because I need hands. But when I need, like a small strike team or a small handful of guys, I’m going to call the guys that did I know we’re going to represent me well for recommending you because it’s still the thing about this whole industry. It’s still relationship based, like that whole nonsense about, you know, it’s just business that’s out the door now, at least not in this industry.

It’s about relationships. And if you are working for somebody, whether it’s a labor company, your friend or a company directly, if you don’t present yourself well in all aspects, not just in the technical side to their client, to the people that are around you, to the client’s client, to your own client, why am you calling you one and two, especially if I’m going on the road with you? I don’t want to hire someone who’s going to be boring or pain in my ass or going to cause problems on your side.

I don’t want to be seven days. I don’t be in a plane and I’ll tell and in the boardroom with you for seven days straight. If I got to be like, oh, I’m with this, OK, what do you know? I want to be like, yo, hey, man, good to see you. Let’s get some breakfast for a little bit. Let’s go. Let’s do some work. You know, I want to be able to have fun with you and back you up and any now we Mr.

Cute. But you didn’t give him the stuff on time. You just came up to him right now, not. Oh, he missed a cue off. I don’t know, man. That guy, I don’t know. But if we’re friends and we’re sociable, right. It’s like, well, hold on. Just there’s some backstory. And I didn’t just miss something. Something happened, you know, if I don’t like you. Yeah. I don’t know.

You just missed it. But but that guy, you know, it changes the conversation, change the way you work with people. So I think having that cohesiveness of team a team player, team hard worker and just being a person, it’s good to be around. And the people talk about in a good way builds that reputation you have and helps you move forward in your career. The other thing, too, is, again, like what you’re doing, what I’m doing, like learn what you can so that when those problems arise or yeah, rise, you have the you have the knowledge to fix it and then you become the go to guy.

Hey, I need to go on, on my show such unity because every time I have a problem in these breakouts, that guy real quick saw my problems and the client always gives me go and do that guy you had on here who saved us on so many occasions not. Oh yeah, you gave me this one guy in the break out. We had so many problems in them. He didn’t even help us. Like, he just my job is is the console.

I don’t I don’t know what’s going on with that. That’s not my problem. If you’re that guy, I don’t want to your story as you’re talking, I’m realizing like a part of this, is that a lot of people, including the client, don’t really understand the technical side of what we do. But it’s really clear to them the personal or relationship side of what we do, which is a big part of our job. And so that’s really the part that that stands out.

And so you can’t really be a successful tech and be a dick.

And here’s the thing for the point, and I’m glad you said it that way, too, because unfortunately, fortunately so. But here’s the crazy part. You’re right. And this is coming from from Nathan Lively. Right? You said it in a beautiful way. You strong us work together. Great as an audio engineer and you tell me if I’m wrong. You guys are always front a house right next to the client. Yeah. So even more pressure for you to be the go to guy for me because you’re going to be sitting with my client.

The entire event video. Guys, we’re in the back. We can be a little bit grumpy because no one’s really hanging out with us. Right. But audio, you’re right. It’s like it’s like they call right on the client. You’re the engineer. I got to talk to you. Twenty seven. If you’re an asshole, I’m going to definitely let my. Hey, that guy you hired. No, he was great, but I don’t like him.

He was an asshole to me the entire time. Like, you have the extra pressure of you are in the client literally next to them, the almost entire show and maybe not directly. You might be like two rows down, but you’re still closer. They know who you are. They know your face. They know your voice. Right. You’re that guy. And if I hire you and you go out there and you don’t perform well and the client gives me some bad report, I can’t I can’t bring you back.

And not because you’re not talented. You could be the best in the world. You can be literally an award winning audio engineer. The client isn’t like you. The guys like you, unfortunately. And like you’re saying, they don’t care about the skill sets. They don’t have any that they want to have some of that. It doesn’t cost feedback and they gets their cues done at the right time. That’s it. And they want to have someone to talk to you.

And it’s nice to socialize with them. And it’s, you know, it’s a copasetic environment. That’s it.

So tomorrow, another one of the quotes that really stood out for me from your presentation is this one The opposite of networking is not working.

So what are some simple things that I can do on a regular basis, either from home or on a show that will help me build relationships without feeling gross? And I’m especially asking this question for myself 10 years ago or myself 15 or 20 years ago when I was starting out in initially thinking that networking meant send my resume to a few people and then at that didn’t work out, then obviously the world was against me and I was a victim. So I know there’s some things that you talked about in your presentation, so I was wondering if you could share some of those with us.

Yeah.

So, you know, the one thing I have said repeatedly here is be it be the hard worker and be the go to guy. You don’t have to exactly send out that resume. There are ways to do that proactively. Right, to just help you continue to stay in people’s minds, to be active, right at the viability reports, the invoicing, sending a proper invoice and your probability reports that your clients know when you’re available, when you’re not.

That does, too. Theater helps you stay relevant in their minds and also in your schedule. But.

Well, can we get into that for a second? I know you want to go on from there, but that was one of the things I was hoping you would get into and a little bit more detail, because the way that you a lot of people don’t know about this and be the way that you do it is really nice and easy for people to understand.

So talk about how you do your availability, how you format it, how often you send it, what is it, that kind of stuff.

Yeah. So I don’t have an exact formula. Right. This is kind of my my technique I guess. Right. So I have an Excel sheet that I created. It has a whole year listed on there. And in that whole year every cell is like the month and it’s all blank at the top and then all the days right below it. And that that space gives you gives you that kind of the eyes to separate between just a bunch of numbers on top each other.

Right. So it’s like space numbers, space numbers every month as a term of days. Right. Thirty one days of twenty, twenty eight days. And then I just used to call those red means I’m booked agreements pending. And then at the end within five days, in the month I send it out to an email chain I have individually. Right. I have a notes page that has all the emails from my client, my main clients to hire me and I’ll send them that out.

And then the first five days of the month, or give or take five days of the month. I will. I will. Just to follow up just fine. When you I send the report to you every day to me, if it’s someone who’s pending right now, that’s hey, are those spending days confirmed or not? If someone has they say these are confirmed, I’ll say, hey, by the way, I have somebody else who has confirmed these dates.

If that is not confirmed yet, you know, should I take those dates or not? And most clients would tell me, hey, you got something for anybody, go and take it. So that works out, too, because then it eliminates that I’m trying to take other work. It’s not that to say, hey, they have confirmed yet you’re trying to manage your calendar.

And then the other thing, too, is I will mark days and there for myself, like, oh, those days. But it’s personal days, you know, Hallmark doesn’t say I can’t work that day. So then and then it becomes, you know, a way to not be intrusive about it and not be on them about it because and if they don’t respond, they don’t respond. It’s not a big deal. You know, we’ll talk later about it.

They make comes. They have. By the way, do you still have these dates? I remembered about it. You know, you’re just on their minds, but you’re not you know, you’re planting that seed to grow, but you’re not you’re not calling them last minute for something like I’ve heard from you all in half a year now you’re calling me like, who are you? At least that way? Right. It’s not passive, but it’s also not aggressively doing this.

But you’re but you’re being active on your end to secure yourself work. And the other two is clients start to see that, oh, I’m just getting booked more and more and more, and it’s going to look more and more. Let me get in and some dates because obviously he’s a sought after engineer. You must be good at what he does, you know?

Well, one of the things that we talked about I’m remembering now during last UN summit is that what you don’t understand, at least what I didn’t I should just speak personally. What I didn’t understand for probably the first five years of work is that the way personal referral works and the way hiring gets done is not like every time there’s a show, the production manager or the PTD or whatever, they don’t just look through their entire Rolodex of all people and say, like, who’s going to be the best position for this?

And then, like, narrow it. They don’t they don’t do that. They they think of, like, the last person that they talk to, it pops into their head, oh, I just talked to Omar. I’ll give him a call. And like, that’s how that works. And so just with so many people, it’s not a meritocracy, you know? And once you realize that and sort of accept it, then you kind of can can start looking to do these little things like you’re doing to try to tilt the scales a little bit in your favor, or as I’ve heard other people say, grow your luck surface area.

So that so. So I’m sorry. Go ahead. I just wanted to point that out that that is a lot of what’s happening is that you’re sort of reminding people you are alive and available and still work, correct?

Yeah, I know. And it’s interesting just to jump on that as well, you know, and again, again, I’m going to toot my own horn here. I think I have a bad ass resume, right. I have six years of military service, a combat veteran. I’m a father. I have. Two degrees, I have numerous awards, I literally get a vacation at least once a year for the industry, said numerous award to dozens of cases for their side.

I have a dozen other certifications for other things. While I was in the military, I earned a bunch certifications, have a plethora of awards. I’ve been in GQ magazine. I’ve been in numerous articles right now for like tons of things I can add to that resume that make me look and stand out nose and look at that. You know, I have what’s called a Lifebook, and I wish I would have I would have had it here if we had time.

Maybe some of the time I’ll pull it out. But it’s a Lifebook.

So Life book is all your achievements and accomplishments in a book that I just think I just really think, OK, all my certifications, my degrees, my certificate, all of it, my my Social Security, my birth certificate, my whole life is in there. It’s on paper.

So if I want to do identity theft of you, I got to go get that. Yeah, pretty much that. That’s how I know you could. It’s why that’s why I say if you want to string out, it’s in a safe. It’s all right. So each page in front of the camera go ahead.

But the book, it’s literally this thick and I and I read the job interviews to say, hey, do you have any questions about my resume? I can back it up with, like, physical stuff. Never, never in my entire career I’m thirty years old, has been like, yeah, let me go through it. Nope. Yeah.

So the books really for me to be like, oh my ego stroke man, no one cares. But now you’re saying I get referred by a highly skilled engineer or I get referred by you or I get for by anybody like you know what, he must be good because he was recommended by this guy who I know is already good, you know. And and then the other thing, too, is and this is the hard part of this, too, because, again, it’s a double edged sword.

You are literally, literally just on the last show you did. So if you did the last show, that was great. In that context. Mine is oh, actually, that was great. And the next was great. You do that one bad show, if it’s one out of like, I don’t know, twenty four, you might be good. If it’s one I like three. You might want to give a discount on your own invoice, but you fucked up a little brother and if it wasn’t your fault at one hundred percent the client was on your side then you’re good.

But again that’s how they judge you. Oh I never had a problem. I think I have one client who had me look at my month because I was just clients, always loved and always got good feedback. I always did my job. I’m such a well-rounded video engineer. I could go to any position. I may not be the best at that position, but hey, this guy is not Tantlinger. He’s not con ed. I’m a throw you in there.

No worries. I got you.

You know, I had a student tell me once that the best way to build your career is to basically do a lot of learning and make a lot of mistakes and one city and then move and build your career like a blank slate. And I was like, oh, that kind of makes sense because, yeah, it’s true. Like, if you kind of make a mistake or you leave a negative reputation in one place, like you might not get called and it might be hard for you to ever get called at that place again, no matter how good you get in other places.

And, you know, we’ve all had that experience where we get called to work for a company for the first time and we make some small mistake. But because that was the first time and they don’t know who we are or anything about, it’s like we don’t get called in because they have other people they can call that that that hasn’t happened with them with. So it’s just good to remember that there’s always more opportunities. And I’m not saying that that everyone should do that and move on basically, just like using that story to highlight this, to basically prove what you’re saying, you know, that that like, it doesn’t always work out and that’s how people are judging you is like the thing that you did last.

Yeah, well, so let’s finish up this, um, your details of how you do the availability reports. You’ve got this Excel sheet you’re sending out to people. You’re doing a quick follow up and any other details about how you execute on that. And I’m also curious, like, you know, what results you’re seeing from that. Do you see it working? Well, yeah.

So, I mean, obviously not right now, but usually what has happened is I got my whole year and I broke up my whole year before the year even started. That’s that’s how that works out. So what I ended up doing and this I started this four years ago, I started doing it and about three years ago. And I really like heavily focused on it. And it’s been the number one thing in my career that it’s helped me. To be honest.

I did a little stint with a buddy of mine. I was kind of like dancing with him. And I did like three months where they can put out the rest of three months to all my clients. And then I like the beginning of the year. I raised my rates and said, oh, by the way, I’m raising my rates. Here’s a new rate sheet. You guys agree to this Senate report and then like them forward. I just I’ve always had my whole year booked out and usually ends up happening is, you know, key events in my life because I have I have a daughter.

Obviously, you saw key events in my life. I’ll book out. So it also looks like I’m busy already because I always have like her birthday on her birthday when I was married, my anniversary, I had like four days booked out just for those scenarios that I could be home with them. So I really look like, oh, shit, he’s got dates for next year. Like, let me get him in there before someone else takes up those dates and then times you.

You also get paid like I have a pending show, possible pencil dinner for me. So then those pencil thin ones look really good to kiss and say, OK, he’s got these pending stuff, people are talking about you. And then I guess the multiplier to that is now you send that out to the same client, negotiate a settlement for these days. Cool. You still available for me until you had a conversation saying, hey, I got another one that might be happening.

You confirmed or not. So it also multiplies every year after that because then they start seeing more and more biz’s get more, shut it out and then uses it, because then you can give yourself a base idea of what you be making for the year. Right. Like if I do X-Men Days this year at this rate, but I don’t actually make an X amount this month, you kind of schedule your stuff around that helps in planning. How are you planning on your end to a little bit?

Yeah, it’s so it’s great. The I guess the downside, which is again, you worked on your contracts for that, is when you do have that kind of scheduled lifestyle, I guess you could say having a fallback for when something canceled on you last minute and being able to recover something from that. And most clients still get a percentage of that pain if they cancel on me. And then I just take a medication, stay home or I make some phone calls and I do some labor stuff.

But, you know, the availability part, I’m not sure. I don’t know if I created that idea. And I’ve got it. I got it for somebody else actually on Facebook. But he didn’t you know, he didn’t show me the Excel sheet, so I created my own version of it, dB million things. I’m not sure how you it directly, but it was something I found online. And a guy said, yeah, he kind of gave like a synopsis of what he does with it.

And then I just did my own twist to it with my own version. My version has like a logo in it for myself and my contact information at the bottom just in case anything. And I will tell you what ends up happening is between those ten day period that you’re sending in and following up, you will get calls for dates once you start doing it, give it a good six months. Focus on for six months. Right. Just to get it out there.

If and here’s here’s the other thing, too. I see right now, honestly, is the best time to build whatever it is you’re doing, whether you want to, say Navy or not, if you’ve got to get a job part time or full time right now just to make ends meet. Great. Do that still dedicate two or three hours to building your brand as a person so that when we do get busy and send out your stuff, not to your clients anyways, pugilists, think of who you’re talking to.

Think of who your clients are, whose contacts you have to give your friends that are close by. Maybe you’ll get your work to send those out and get feedback on it when other times are a little bit of messing up between how that works out. Figure out a system that works for you, get yourself organized. I will drive. That’s massive. I myself, because of maybe educate and the solution that I own, maybe educate, but I help manage the coalition.

I have a agile CRM now our CRM, but I use agile but is a CRM and I’m using that to manage my business more effectively because I was doing everything Google Drive, which is great. And then I learned a better way. And now I’m doing that and I have the time to focus on it and do it correctly. And not just kind of like when I get to it, I get to it and I’m like now starting to build two different platforms up.

You know, I took a time to learn a little bit more about cookbook’s I use from my building stuff. I learned a lot more interesting things that I can utilize now moving forward, including not just my invoicing side in my building side or my bookkeeping and the invoicing, but also on the proposal side for stuff. So I’ve learned a lot of little tricks now that I can utilize for when we get busy. Again, I’m not here, like, how do I do this?

And we figure this out real quick. No, because I’ve taken the time now to do it. If you’re going to start a business and you have some some cash flow, you know, if you’re getting unemployment and I don’t know about your state, but like my state in Florida, an LLC costs like one hundred and fifty bucks online boom EIC go to the IRS dot com. I’m sorry. Get your estienne go to the IRS. It’s free.

Look at the banks. Look at what banks want to do. Business with Boonen. I have a business now. You have a steady source of income. So learning about how to do that business stuff, it’s not very hard. This is the time to do it where you’re not going to be doubled down between having to work full time, having to get gigs, having to get money into our stuff and kind of dedicate your time to learning this process to your to what you need for your situation and what you think you’re going to have an interest comes back for me.

I’ve been using this as a great opportunity to build. You know, I’ve I want to double, but I’ve grown up to get a lot and I’ve been doing a lot more stuff with it and collaborating a lot more people and just talk and just start calling people. You know, it’s not hard to make the phone call your friends who used to work with just check up on them to have conversations. The other doing. You’d be surprised. Some people I’ve talked to you like, oh, I, I started talking with Zazie.

Obviously now we’re starting a business and we’re going to do our work together. There’s people that need people to to work with them. And I think this is the time to do it. We’re we’re all in the same we’re all kind of in the same boat right now. Right. Unless you already had tons of money, we’re on the same boat. We’re all struggling together and people are collaborating together and forming relationships and they’re building on. And when we get back, those are going to grow into something more and they’re going to be beneficial.

So, you know, a lot of audio guys, I don’t know if you just anybody a lot of the guys in the audio, they have partnerships with other guys. So they share in the expenses and the profits of things and they’ve all been set up. You might want to do that for you and maybe some of the labor companies now with the whole California law and stuff coming out, they’re changing the way they do things. Right. They’re making you want to you don’t have to do insurance, get insurance.

You just get twenty nine, get ten, and you get more money. You make less because they’re covered you in insurance. Maybe you want to partner with somebody so that your insurance is lower, so that you’re splitting the cost of that insurance. So you both have to you both to make money and you both are working together and now you’re. Are cut in half. What you got for your buddies that you trust, they’re going to work together, you guys, to build together, and then as you guys buy gear together, you can kind of outsource together.

Like this is the time to do that with your friends and figure out who you can trust, who can rely on these partnerships with or not. But if you’re not if you’re just sitting there doing nothing, I mean, you’re not benefiting yourself. You’re not going to improve when you get back. The point is, is that you can take the time now to get ready for when we do come back into it. And yeah, listen, I’m I I’m hustling.

I’m working literally 10 to 10, which I’m sure Nathan’s crazy schedule as well, to just continue to give back to community and grow that community. But I can I make pennies for anything I do in the abstract that pennies the podcast makes the podcast make sure nothing right now because. No, it’s podcasting, but I make pennies off of those things. But those pennies, I didn’t take out money for the longest time. And now our last month, I cast them all out and it wasn’t a huge chunk, but it was enough to get me to the next month.

And I’ve been taking subjects here and they’re doing other things to make ends meet all the time. So I’m still hustling to do things I am lucky or lucky and unlucky. I am lucky that at this point in the scenario, I have lost everything. I’m living in my father’s other house. The only I have left this ability is my phone in my car, everything else. The house, the house that I had it, it’s all gone. So I’m unlucky that I have that happen to me, but I’m also lucky that I am at the bottom now.

So my bills are very little. So it doesn’t take much for me to to to survive. And what I’m paying here is that utilities, which is not a lot, it’s not cheap, but I need to I need to hustle to make ends meet here. So I’m very fortunate with that. Again, lucky, unlucky at the same time. Right.

And I don’t think a lot of people are just sitting at home doing nothing, but I definitely feel like a lot of us are trying to figure out what we can be doing, like we want to be in action. And so I love that you’re just like sharing some ideas of what you’ve been doing and what you’ve been seeing other people do. That’s really helpful. Yeah.

I mean, so we’ve been get guys motivated to start even getting guys motivated with the tech stocks, which I started out of a collaboration between Chris and Ed. We started doing what’s called a B tech stocks and guys are sharing information with the community. They’re literally sharing. We’ve shared jobs. We share the meetings we’ve shared. So I think what we should do. So we have things coming up right. Like balloons coming up right now. We have a networking one on one coming up right now.

A couple of things coming up that are down the road. Watch out wrestling class. We’re trying to get a V mixed class right now, but these are actually guys, a community that are essentially promoting themselves. Right, because I’m giving them a platform and say, hey, if your skill set and we just did the last one we just did was to lapse with Orrie. We did a very cool interview, labs. So if you’re not a guy used to labs as a whole to our segment on that, we open Jigme for Q&A.

Those are those guys are networking, right? They’re showing the community, hey, uncompetitiveness, if you know somebody hit me up or if one of my clients now my clients but one of the you there’s a lot of PMS on. There is a lot of clients on there. Maybe they saw evidence say, oh, you know what I mean. Good guy, always information down, let me hit him up, because when I get some work, I’m going to call that guy because he knows how to use that program.

And I use that. I get calls for a lot of that stuff. And now he’s got this plethora of things. So he’s he’s keeping his skill sets sharp. He’s keeping his his name out there, essentially, and he’s grown himself. And anybody can do this. Use use use the platform to promote yourselves if you want to. I’m all about it.

So, OK, so if you’re listening right now and you want to hear the rest of the ten rules for being successful AV technician and you want to see Omar go into detail about how he uses this availability report and you want to get it, actually his copy is template of that. You can do that over it live Sound Design Live. Twenty twenty dB Sound Design Live Dotcom. That’s where all of the replays are from the Live Sound Summit. So Omar, I know you have this Lifebook of all these amazing things that you’ve done and it’s super thick, but just like everyone else, I’m sure there are times when things have not gone so well.

So I wondered if you would share one of those with us. So what’s one of the biggest or maybe most painful mistakes you’ve made on the job? And how did you recover?

Oh, man. So in November, I recently yeah. Recently I lost my family and I don’t know if that’s the right way to say it, but my partner was separated because I was I was working so much. I was the daughter of a company in Orlando. I was living in Miami. I had the house, I had the cars. I had tons of money in the bank. I provided everything except for myself. She, I guess, was fed up with it and was trying to communicate in a way that she thought would resonate with me.

And I misinterpreted that because I wasn’t around enough to receive that. After the separation, we had to kind of get deep talk about everything, like what was going on, you know, a lot of a lot. It was my fault. So I don’t blame her for anything. I don’t blame what’s going on. She raised my daughter a lot by herself, so she felt like a single mother a lot. I wasn’t around. I was around 100.

So financially, I gave her everything. Even a separation, I gave her everything in the separation but my time and even when I was home again, it’s why I is a passion. When I was home, I was working on an education. So it’s like you are here, but you weren’t really here because you’re a focus. And I was like, right. Which which she admitted. It’s something I love about you. You have a drive that I don’t see anybody because you’re constantly moving forward.

You’re constantly working on something. You’re constantly reading a book as learning how like a routine. On the morning I read, I get like five, six in the morning every day with a book deal, work out and I get to work and I can do this all day. This is my this is honestly is my comfort zone. But I wasn’t present as a father. I wasn’t present as a partner. And I lost it. And it was a big lesson for me in life because I was told that a lot with a lot of engineers and other people’s minds is good, like mine gets it.

She knows I’m hustling for us like I she’s covered no matter what. And she was, you know, I mean, anything you think about that you need in a family, I was paying for it, you know, whatever you needed. Here’s the car I gave her, like Gharty to do whatever you want. I’ll cover all of it. And she was working. She was a teacher, so she had her own money. But I wasn’t there.

And it took a toll. And it was we were together for six years, took a toll on her. She just couldn’t do any more. She she just didn’t see me slowing down. She tried to be more supportive of it. She tried to be more understanding of everything and is like the more she she felt, the more she’s appointment of an enemy, the more I worked harder, which is true. I did. I felt like her way of communicating with me, saying, hey, I, I, I support you.

What are you doing? I keep doing it. So I worked harder. I traveled more, I made more money. But she was trying to say like, I’m supporting you so that you come home more to us and spend time with us. And it was kind of organisation. She, she, she left me and she’s with somebody else who gives you that time. You know, he works nine to five, gets off work, you know, spend the day with her, which is fantastic is what she wants, but she loves her.

If you guys ever read the book or the five love languages, I highly recommend it. I read a long time ago, and I didn’t I didn’t apply I didn’t apply correctly myself because I didn’t I missed her because I wasn’t there. I just I wasn’t there to get it correctly. This time is great with my daughter. Talk with her was great. Calling is great. First time is great. But it wasn’t enough because you’re not physically there presently.

And it’s one of the things that I’ve I’m I’m working on now with the girl that I’m with now. She is. Similar to me, she’s a workaholic, you could say, but she also understands spending time with my daughter, spend time with her, so I have a cut off like at eight o’clock, like what’s going on at eight o’clock at it and she’ll come in and harass me. So I have my one day on Mondays when I do the talks that she lets me stay on a little bit longer.

But at nine o’clock she’s like, I’m going to get in a camera and be nice about it, but that you’re going to get off.

And it works is like the girls are here. I got to go, guys. I’m really, really sorry, but has been working now. You know, after a few months, I’ve gotten more used to it. And I, I kind of like a like I get off and do dinner and spend time. I could watch a movie, sit with her and enjoy the time that I have with her because, you know, for five years I just I was around, I wasn’t around.

And it was definitely a hard thing in my life to to accept, especially because I think the the nail to the coffin was my when my dad was like I told you and I was like, what?

Like, No, man, I thought I was doing it better, you know, like, oh, I’m second, I’m not saying I’m third generation right now. I thought I was doing better. And he’s like, you made the same mistakes I made with your mother.

And I was like, and they’re like, OK, I had to just accept it, right? Like, yes, you’re right. I did. You’re right. I got it. Like, still like I’m your father. I’m still I still know, you know, I was like, oh, fine. You’re right. You’re right. OK, you got it. That’s hard. You know, it was hard, but it’s also like, you know.

All right. So now moving forward, I need to manage that better. And I try to manage my time as best I can, you know, which is again, why did the agile thing now the CRM to help, like, schedule myself? Because I was doing other notes and calendars and it works out pretty well. The way you do it is awesome. By the way, with the emailing and all that stuff, I should totally up my game, but I’m I’m a long way away from that.

But yeah, the I guess that’s my biggest thing. And yeah, that’s a huge wake up call, just like all this thing, all the stuff that you thought you were doing it for and then it got all taken away and you’re like, oh wow. So and it’s all my own thing, right.

Like, you know how women hear this, but it’s a total men mentality. Like I felt like I had to be the provider because I was the man. And really we were both providing and and again, I was never like, oh, I’m going to pay for everything. No, I just did it like I just I didn’t even say anything. I’m I’m Latin. I just did it because I was that’s the mentality. I got to give it to my family.

I can provide for them. I got to work to make this money because they need it. And it was like, no, man. I had a partner. She was working. We both had income. I didn’t have to work so hard. That’s why she was working. And it’s funny. It’s funny because in hindsight, right, when we first had my daughter, I told her not to work. I don’t know more about it to stop working.

I’ll pay for it. That’s like everything she went back to because she wanted to work. And I said, great, go back to work. Yeah, we can totally use the extra money. Right. We’ll use your money for savings and for playtime. Well, just for whatever you guys want to do. And then it was like, man, she she went back to work. She said making money. We we put in savings. We used it to cover some bills when we were short for any reason.

We had a guest house that we were managing that we were making money off of like it was it was a sweet deal. But again, I wasn’t around. And when things came up with that house, it was like, oh, we’ll just throw money at it and I’ll have someone go out there instead of me. And instead of being like, I’ll try to get you to come home and like, take time to work on the guest house so that you could be here and I’ll take them.

Yeah, I didn’t see it that way, so.

Wow. All right, man, such a good story. Thank you for sharing that with us. Let’s let’s move into talking a little bit more about the future. Lou Sinton, this question luckly from Seattle, he kind of wants you to look into a crystal ball. So I don’t know if you I don’t know if you have anything to say about this, but you’ve been talking to a lot of people. You probably have a better kind of sense of where things are going than some of us.

So he says what is happening in the future with everyone looking for work and a glut of experienced folks also competing for a limited number of jobs, how can you stand out in the crowd?

Yeah, so I’ll look into the crystal ball and you’re not like the answers. So if you weren’t getting hired a lot before, I mean, it’s the truth if you’re going to have a lot before you have work right now, if you were a station, it wasn’t even called all the time. You’re trying to get those right now. The companies that either furloughed or let their employees go, they’re going to call those people first back first they’re going to give to their people first.

So if you’re a full time with the company, you might be getting those calls already to do stuff to come back in. If you were not full time and you were a freelancer like the rest of us and you weren’t a go to person, you’re going to be on right now. So hustle, hustle, hustle and find some work, but keep yourself relevant and use social media to your advantage to say, hey, I’m still doing stuff. I have got I’ve been doing volunteer training classes.

I’ve been doing. If you guys watch anything with OPV at Orlando or anything with I heart radio, I did a whole almost three months of streaming content of concerts. Every band that they were doing to TV channel we did behind the scenes twitch channel of like actual, which is really cool man. So we did. And I’m sorry I got you for a second. We did a really cool thing where I got CALM’s, I got approval from the company to do push comes into a live feed party line of everybody, including the most of your.

The camera’s view and you able to go to the Twitter feed and and get as we were live playing live to Facebook and YouTube, you can go to Twitter and see behind the scenes and what we were doing.

And that’s so cool. Yeah. And an all volunteer to watch this. Yeah. I had to send you the links after this, but yeah. But I just want to let people know that I’ll put links in the show notes for this podcast.

So as we were going live with the bands, we were also going live on Twitter to show that behind the scenes of what we were doing and how we were switching cameras and how we were calling queues and lighting and audio and all these different things, and it was very cool. And it’s all volunteer. And it’s how I got guys to get hands on cameras, hands on with the Switzers, hands on with some of the audio gear. Hands on with the hard hands on the lightning, hands on with streaming.

We had a streaming room that we can show guys some things that James Van Zandt and Christopher Brown do. It was a very cool experience. We did it. We just wrapped it up. Fourth of July actually was like the last kind of big show we did. And now that is still going on in Orlando between me, Jason Scott and a couple other guys with the team. And we’re bringing bands up there and guys getting paid now, not a huge amount, but they’re going to do something because they volunteer their time.

So there are things you could be doing within your communities to to continue to get back and can you do stuff and also to work. So so that’s so that’s that’s one side of things, right. I think you should keep yourself relevant on social media by doing stuff to get back to the community so that you become a name, you know, like, for example, I’ll give a prime example right now. Ryan Wade, super talented lighting guy lighting guys are having the hardest time right now because everything is going virtual.

He went back to his old career flooring and he’s killing it on florins, killing it. Oh, OK. Yeah, it’s killing it. And here’s the thing. He’s getting these flowing jobs. He’s doing installations. He’s contacting openly on social media for free. That doesn’t know him. OK, if you need work, hit me up. I need bodies. And these are guys that are pretty talented engineers maybe who knows what he’s paying them, but they’re getting something out of it.

And he went out of his realm to do something from his past to do flowing again, which he does an awesome job on the floor, made beautiful, by the way. But he’s a light engineer and he’s a super talented engineer. I mean, he’s one of the best in Atlanta, has a great reputation. He’s giving back by being an educator when he can. He’s giving back by providing work because he’s like, hey, I have these jobs and I’m securing come work for me.

There’s other guys doing similar stuff in New York. There’s a guy in New York who is a video engineer, was doing very well, was also doing installation work right now by himself. He’s giving back to community by offering, hey, I have a gig. Who wants to come on it with me? I got on a gig through a collaboration for an extension in North Carolina for seven days, made a nice chunk of change there. The guy paid me quickly as well because it’s like I know you guys are hurting.

You are quicker than thirty days. I was I wasn’t expecting it, but thank you. I appreciate it. And I have I’m living off that little chance for now. I have a couple of the ones I’m working on right now. But again, I’m calling people and making those phone calls. And if you’re not doing that, I just did a post today, yesterday about a vertical concerts. Yes, it is full of our comments. As of this morning, I reached out to promoters, bands, hotels, people that I sort of know are in that realm.

Say, hey, is there anything we can do to make it happen? And I got a bunch of like, yeah, we do X, Y, Z. OK, here’s my message for this year. And I think we have a couple of hotels that might be interested in it other than the insurance side, which is another way to figure out. And I have guys who are commenting on that feed right now saying I literally said if you were on the show, what would you do or something along those lines?

And they’re saying, I would do these positions like, OK, if I get the show them, I put you in that position. I mean, those of it. So, like, I’m I’m also trying to get back, you know, you’re doing your thing to get better community. Everybody’s, I think, needs to be just sort of connecting again. And that’s why I’m saying that this building. Right. Just connect with your your friends and your family.

See what’s going on. My my parents were separated. My mother’s husband now his name is Johnny. He does not associate he’s like a contractor for for a building and he does repairs an area. I’m not sure what the right verbiage of that is, but he repairs buildings. He’s called me for a couple times. A handy national guide for today. Tell me some piping. Yeah, I’m there. Whatever you need, man, because I need the money.

Right. I’m going to say no to it at all. Sure. I don’t do that. Like, no, he he knows my he knows I’m I’m not competent in it, but he’s like I just need extra hand to pay, don’t worry about it, make a day’s pay and you know, it’s, it’s a little bit of money to go towards something. And again, that’s because I told my mom, yeah, this is what’s going on.

You know, I’m struggling. Don’t worry, Johnny McPherson out and help me out. This my dad as well, who owns a company, they had some Jimmy stuff come up there. They saw that I’d be doing like streaming. They had me come in and talk to him. Sit down. We don’t talk about it. Then a couple possibles come in. They pay me for my consulting fee, which they didn’t have to write, but they did.

And I had some money from that. And again, but this is me calling and contacting, reaching out and doing stuff. So if you’re out there trying to find out what to do, just call your call your phone call and call your phone.

Yeah, yeah. Look at your phone right now. I just got and here’s the thing to like, I’ve also been doing this by contacting people. Those people haven’t talked in a long time that I’ve reconnected with. And one of those connections, a buddy of mine who used to do a B doesn’t do an. More he actually is doing that, he’s in a medical building and they had to do a project and he mentioned, hey, I do a V, I have a buddy, so does it.

We can I can help you figure out some crazy stuff. And we’re actually working on a quote right now to do an installation for his building for ITVS. That’s not hurt at all. Now my wheelhouse. But I also know I’m not incompetent to it. So that’s just make a phone call reconnecting with the guy. He said, oh, by the way, I have this. It just popped up. I understand. I was like, yeah, let’s make it work.

And that was literally like a phone call that I just had to check in and see what’s going on. And then the other the other talking to that side, too, is this when I contacted they aren’t doing anything or that I had really no no commonality with anymore. And I we spoke for a little bit and it was kind of it and I just moved it from my phone, you know, if they call me back or whatever I say and I changed my phone out or whatever the case may be, if you hear this.

Sorry, I do.

But I’ve been taking numbers on my phone because I have a lot of numbers and some of them and there’s some numbers that I hit up and they’re like, I don’t remember you. And it’s like, why were you there? Sorry about that.

I’ve that’s a lot of conversations. But this is awesome. So you’re actually going through your entire desk?

Yes. And I plan to do my emails, too. I’ve been deleting emails, getting rid of junk. I’m going to contacts and see and and you’ll be surprised. I’ve been sending out emails now say crazy, but pretty frequently I get a lot of invalid or no longer active stuff anymore. And I just take that out of my inbox and take that out of my my contact list. Just. Yeah, yeah. I just got down to this.

All right, Omar, what is it cafecito and why do they try to kill me in Fort Lauderdale. So cafecito or auricular is like, oh, I think so. I cracked it and stayed. Downton’s didn’t stay down here for so long.

You had it already. It is coffee. It comes in a little it looks like a Styrofoam shot glass and it comes like this. And what it is, is it’s sugar and black coffee. But I’m talking about like so, you know, so the way you make it here is an espresso machine. You put the sugar in the body, but the coffee on top of that, I mean, you pack it, you forcefully pack it in there.

Sugar, coffee, sugar coffee, pack my backpack, make a super, super tight and you shove that in the espresso machine and it pours out. It struggles come out of there and it’s just a super concentrated sugar and black coffee mixture. So it’s not like just bitter sweet, but it’s hard core and it’s a little short. And what’s funny, too, is that it comes in a shot glass and then they give you other, smaller, smaller cups to pour it into, to give to like with people.

But if you live down here, you just drink the whole thing because you’re not affected anymore. But then what happens is like Nathan notices it. When you don’t have that, you get a regular cup of coffee and you’re like, this isn’t enough money. I need the capacity and I need I need a real coffee. Omar, what’s in your work bag like, I know a lot of things, but is there like one or two unique pieces that you could tell us about?

So I looked out all right. Again, you can see both ways I looked at didn’t look out. I own the first versions of the items, so I have an hard time switching my work box. I have a streamer, the original one with the face plate, which cost me about a thousand three hundred or a thousand four hundred. Now you can buy the whole package on a little controller like this being from out there in a box. That’s one of my favorite toys that are in there and anything right now I have a oh, so we call them dB boxes.

I just come about right. I’ve heard them call it. I don’t there’s probably a lot of people who are listening who don’t know what that is. So what is that?

So I have FM radio, a USB to Xolair box for the computers. So in Miami or in South Florida, we call them Picardie boxes, which may not be there tomorrow. But what we call them and what it does all is instead of going out of the the headphone jack to the little box to control the volume, this is an actual amplifier that gives you a cleaner signal with more channels to use it. If you’re doing that, obviously, if you are dontae person or don’t it guy, you can do all that you’ve got to do.

Networking is better quality, but when you’re not, that’s what I have. I have, I have two of those, I have two dosimeters in there. I plan to buy two, DACC, 70s as like my ultimate podium go to seventy. So that’s seven is a box that does HDMI and SDI and it is an updown cross-company. So I can go either direction. And the decimeter doesn’t do that. The decimeter does HDMI and doesn’t do Vijayan.

So it doesn’t say anything to me is the difference is, is that the deck 70s they come these very robust like, like little aluminum cases and it’s dB switch. And what it does is it allows you so that doesn’t really kind of do the same thing.

You have to procrastinator’s like plastic. Right? That’s why you’re saying, oh, well, it’s it’s metal on the outside. It’s they’re similar. It’s similar. The veejays, the key the key ones are incorporating a lot of the medical stuff we do is very still it’s the one missing link. But if I was doing the box and you can really go analog to digital very well, this one does a box very well. What it does do has this little switch.

So you can you can change that. You can embed audio into the skyline, you can do better audio, which the decimals will allow you to pass it through and see eyeline or HDMI alone. The Dec. seven will also do it, but it will steam better. And it also does and also does it between analog to digital, the difference. So it’ll take an analog to digital or vice versa. And everything it does with a switching side of it is that it’ll decimate as well.

It’ll all force you so as an edit. Right. So I can go, what’s up with B.J.? But it’ll take whatever the signal is in and it’ll set me up whatever I want. And what’s cool is it it sends out a it sends out and not a blast signal, but it sends out a signal constantly like a dosimeters. So so here’s here’s the trick, right. If you have a decimeter deck 70 and you have a podium going to a projector or to a monitor, you set this guy up at the podium, decimeter dark, seventy, whatever you want with a decimeter, you have to program it to take either or input HDMI or start right with a dash 70.

I tell it to do Vijay. And each time I leave those calls out there, then the presenter plugs into that. Or actually you can do the missing link as well. Plugs into that requires it and it sends it out the line. The difference, though, is with those boxes like audio, right. They give you the box or PC converter box, whatever. That’s that line is always active.

Once you plug in is active as all the channels open and video, but ends up happening is like projectors and monitors. They have to save power. They all turn off. That’ll send a signal to the monitor, to the projector. So now you can leave all that stuff on. It’ll show a black screen unless you program it. It doesn’t mean you can program like a logo thing on it, I think. Let me. That’s it. But the mission that you could program a logo on the missing link and you can send a source to that, but it’ll send out a signal the entire time.

So now what happens is that when it comes in, they plug into it every season. Ed takes it in and sends it back out to your on your monitor and then boom the signals up there. You didn’t do anything. You just left it in the room on Ready to Go, which allows you to not not have the projector turn on off. So that’s what the assistant dexterity is like. That extra we have to go analog to digital and just that extra little tool to have in your box, just like with audio.

Right. You always have like an analog version and a digital version of something. I also have multiple laptops. I have to so I now have three I have three MacBook pros too. Yeah. So I have two fifteen inch MAPP opposed to fifteen and one MacBook Pro twenty I guess twenty nineteen now. But the newer ones with the, with the taskbar which is what I’m on right now, and then I have one PC that I use for like E to Spider Vision and NovaStar is on the side and I’m going to actually buy another PC or trying to because of all this, trying to buy another PC to do VMAX on which I had the program.

And then I found that out of fact because I’m doing due diligence. It was only PCP. So I was like, OK, I’m going let this program sit here for a little bit. I also ironically, I bought disguise as well. Which is what’s that so disguises is a of a program which comes in an annoying tiny little that cute little thing.

Yeah. So I need the key for this, but disguised as a media server and you can buy the software and you can program everything and then put on a computer and send it out, or you can buy the hardware side, which is way more expensive, but it’s PC. So I got to I got to get that piece in. And I have two programs that there were programs that are affordable, that now it’s like I need the. Wow.

You have all the toys. I know. I try to be I try to raise my value. Right. So that’s that’s the other thing I’ll add if you you know, and money’s tight right now, but there’s there’s other ways to raise your value. But having a a backpack, for starters, would just generic tools, you know, see ranched suppliers, some Alan Keyes fire extinguisher, I don’t know.

Well, maybe, I guess you’d say anything. Could be a smoke machine. Right, right. Yeah.

Just having, like, a backpack with tools in general, if your station is something you should you should have with you all types, right. Oh, Sharpies. You should have charges up the wazoo. You should also have I just did a video on this. You should also have a gray Sharpie and a black Sharpie in your back, the gray so you have before. So. Oh, thank you for asking. You know, typically we have black, right.

Because what we want to do is want to leave our cables and we want to leave our our consoles. Right. So we we do the white tape and write our notes on it. But Belge, you know, whatever we’re doing. However, if the client didn’t provide white tape and you don’t have white tape, but you always have black tape, you take that black tape, you rip it in half and it’s the same length. And now you write with a gray Sharpie on the black tape and you can still see what you wrote and still get the same effect except the obstacles.

Nice. So do the same thing. But with silver. Yeah. So this is sort of way you said Greg. I’m sorry. Well Silver. Great. I mean they’re close enough so. Great, great. Gray and black or silver or whatever. Yeah. So silver by silver is by at least like a handful of those for yourself and then by the black. Just have a bunch of black ones. It’s usually, usually white. So you can label the cables, you can play with your console, you can label whatever you connected to your texture, power a bunch of shit.

You want to leave everything so that you know, so you know what’s going on. Have a bunch of those in my backpack and then I have some generic tools. I bought some specific like lighting stuff because I had like I had that little multitool lighting thing for the C clamps. I have one of those which is super hard to get. I found out after I bought it. I think that’s oh I have a Rovi podcast there, which is what I’m using right now over here, but I have a bunch of myself that I have like three thousand fifty eights as like those are workhorses.

You’d be surprised sometimes that comes in handy for like random Ryoji stuff. Like I kind of like, you know, but just having I think little things that then you talk about multiple have tons of adapters for Macs, tons of adapters remarks. Just having those little extra little knick knacks in your, in your person I think raises your value as an engineer, as a technician because the client also remembers you for that like, oh man, this guy is always ready to go.

I have a guy who used to stay AMA in Miami who used to own a jewelry company, and he is a surgeon. He comes in with a with a full three tier Workbox. Nice full a tool like literally the guy’s got tools himself and people and he checks all his stuff. Is there anything, you know, like the court on it so that, yeah, they’re definitely mine, you know, but that guy gets on shows and I see him a lot because he has those tools.

I also see camera guys, right. If you’re a camera guy out there, I don’t know if I see camera guys believe or not. And these are guys that I know that I call almost any names, but I call them more because they come in express espresso machine and then I they’re back in case doesn’t have any tools.

It just has an espresso machine in it. And it’s like they bring that to all the job sites. Right. But I don’t you guys come with like your own and at the downplay you guys come with like you see like if you really agent you guys to your carpets, you’re like lava lamps or salt lamps. You’re a little like little thing tables to like put all your stuff on the lamp for yourself, like you guys make your home at every site.

So. Oh, I don’t know. I’m not exaggerating. One of my good friends, Zach Larson, has a carpet, has it. He has a coffin. Actually, he he brings with him. He’s he shifts it and it’s got a carpet, a chair. They put together a salt lamp, a light and something else. I know this is something that he oh. And then I suppose machine but a hot plate with a little like the Spanish coffee, you know, you put them together and the pressure comes up and over my nose.

And I’m sure people listen to right now like, oh yeah, I know, I know.

I have a friend that does it. Yeah. If you’re a one I think you have to. Right. You want to be comfortable. You want to be in your zone. Sure.

I remember just a couple of questions to wrap up, so I know you know all of these resources, but I want to ask you to pick one. So what is one book that has been immensely helpful to you? So the one book man and the one book, I think that was the most helpful. For me, was the the the backstage and I got to with this, I don’t get the name wrong. So it was it’s a book and it’s super old.

It’s called. Yeah. So the the backstage handbook. You guys ever heard of this book? So the backstage handbook is, I don’t know, is massive, but what it is and which is called the illustrative guide, is that it is a booklet that literally just it’s like a sketch or a visualization of all the tools that you use in corporate and theater. And it gives a description of those tools. So it’s like this is a stretch, but it looks like this is a a monkey wrench.

If it looks like this is a flathead. This is a screwdriver. This is a a C clamp. And then like multiple versions of C clamps and what they’re actually called is a power section. So at six thirty twenty six I’m sorry. Six oh six thirty. Twenty six twenty. I need that. So it has, it has all these little visual illustrations and I’ll definitely send you a photo of it because it’s little my favorite book ever. I probably use that book for a good few years to learn about the industry because I kept seeing these tools.

I was like, oh, what is that. What does that one what is this hammer like? David Hammers had different purposes and it gives you different formulas for different like Donaire. So like Ohm’s Law and some of the funds for that, you know, keep your stuff for hammers in different regions using and then like it also. I mean, it breaks it down to say, hey, if you use the rubber mallet, right. It’s used for this.

If you use the hammer, it’s used for this. It’s like specifically tells you what these tools are used for and gives you a visual of it. So that the book is I hate to say this, say it’s a kids book on steroids for adults because it’s really all images with a description underneath it and what it’s for. And it is within those chapters, there’s breakdowns of like, OK, oh, for the State Department, right. For example, there’s, you know, like like Muslim.

Right. That that material, it breaks down the materials and what it’s used for. Then you have drape. Right, which is a type of fabric, what that fabric is used for. So there’s a whole section on fabrics and different materials and like what you use them for, like so the skin fabric, there’s a muzzle fabric. There’s a bunch of things that I look at. But the one I know the most because it’s what I use projection.

And then there is also some screens in there and how to build strength, not because I had to build them, but screen materials. So there’s all these little knickknacks in that book that I think is super, super helpful. You don’t get anywhere else. And I and I just I wanted a plethora of books. Yeah. And it’s it’s highly recommended. It’s been around for years. I’m looking at right now on Amazon, just one for twenty dollars right now.

Definitely worth the buy.

Where is the best place for people to follow your work?

AV educate honestly. Instagram, Facebook, Twitter. But not so much on Twitter too as an overload. Instagram, Facebook. Right now, the biggest kind of platforms I’m on. You can contact me on there easily. I am the guy who messages you back.

Well, Omar, thank you so much for joining me on Sound Design Live.

Thank you so much for having me and I appreciate it. This is awesome.

Gain Before Feedback Is Independent of the Level of the Talker

By Nathan Lively

Subscribe on iTunes, SoundCloud, Google Play or Stitcher.

Support Sound Design Live on Patreon.

In this episode of Sound Design Live, I talk with professor of design and production at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, Jason Romney. We discuss theatrical sound design, fighting microphone feedback and the Smurf inside your compressor.

I ask:

  • What are some of the biggest mistakes you see people making who are new to theatrical sound design?
  • Potential Acoustical Gain: Why EQ is not the answer to feedback.
    • “The tools people use first to combat feedback are really the tools they should use last.”
      • What tools are they using first?
      • What tools should they use instead?
    • “That graphic EQ is no where near as surgical as you imagine it to be.”
      • How surgical is it?
    • “Gain before feedback is independent of the level of the talker.”
      • What?! That’s crazy. You’re saying that it doesn’t matter if I whisper or scream, it won’t change the potential acoustic gain of the system?
    • “Microphones do not exhibit the same directivity at every frequency.”
      • How does this affect gain before feedback?
  • Tell us about the biggest or maybe most painful mistakes you’ve made on the job and how you recovered.
  • FB
    • Anthony Murano: What separates UNC from other Theater and Design Production programs in the country. What do they do differently that sets them apart.
    • Kyriakos Papadopoulos: What is his favorite digital console in terms of advanced cue and macro commands programming for musicals.
    • Yohai Zilber: Ask him about the Secret Smurf Army Inside our DAW’s ( he will understand… )

Using an EQ to notch out feedback is like trying to cure the Flu with Tylenol.

Jason Romney

Notes

  1. All music in this episode by jplenio.
  2. Jason’s YouTube channel
  3. Someone to Watch Over Me acapella
  4. Potential Acoustical Gain: Why EQ is not the answer to feedback from Live Sound Summit.
  5. Maximizing Gain Before Feedback flash demo
  6. Hardware: AKG C414, Meyer Sound D-Mitri
  7. Books: Digital Sound & Music: Concepts, Applications, and Science, Sound Design in the Theatre
  8. Quotes
    1. I want to present my work in a way that allows others to think and feel and react however they want to. I don’t necessarily want everyone in the room to have the same reaction.
    2. I spend my time watching the audience. I watch the people and see when they react.
    3. One of the things people are going to pay you for is your taste.
    4. Kids are the best audience because they are a completely honest audience.
    5. I made a decision early in my career that my career was not going to be my social life.
    6. It’s really well executed, but I have no idea what you think about this play.
    7. The best thing you can do is be proud of that experience that is behind you now, forget that it ever happened, and start over. The biggest problem is that you rely too much on your previous knowledge.
    8. Using a tool that is unfamiliar to you; it forces you to think about how it works and how sound works.
    9. I’m a firm believer in paperwork. If you draw it out on paper, you’ll find a lot of these problems really quickly.
    10. I don’t understand why graphic EQs still exist.
    11. Using an EQ to notch out feedback is like trying to cure the Flu with Tylenol.
    12. Feedback happens when the sound from the talker or instrument hits the microphone at the same level as the sound from the loudspeaker.
    13. You’ve got to get that level differential larger. That’s a geometry problem.
    14. That one little slider that you re using to remove a sine wave is actually manipulating 1-1.5 octaves. That’s a lot!
    15. Gain before feedback is a fixed amount independent of the source.
    16. Microphones are the same as loudspeakers. You just wire it backwards.
    17. In order to control [low frequencies] you need really big stuff. In order to control 100Hz you need something that is 10ft big.
    18. You can’t rely on microphone directly to solve feedback problems, which is why low frequencies are always the ones to feedback first.
    19. We want our students to never feel like they have to turn down a job.
    20. Our students; we force them to do everything.
    21. Students will only remember, best case scenario, 10% of what you say in a class.
    22. I like to imagine that there is a little Smurf inside the compressor. A compressor is just an automatic volume knob. Just imagine that there’s a little Smurf with a hand on a fader.

Transcript

This transcript was automatically generated. Please let me know if you discover any errors.

So, Jason, I definitely want to talk to you about theatrical sound design and finding microphone feedback.

But before we do that, what is one of your favorite tracks to listen to after you maybe get into a new space and get the sound system set up?

You know, I spend most of my time in my own work outside of teaching, doing primarily musical theater and my main focus, usually when when trying to figure out a system for musical theater is delivering the voice. And so I find playing really complex tracks can sort of distract from the stuff that I’m really trying to figure out. And so years ago, I kind of started this ongoing process with my graduate students of recording. Vocalists singing musical theater stuff a cappella in close to an anechoic environment as you possibly can, using various live mikes at different parts of the head and a little I actually have a earthworks mic we use for it.

We started by doing that in a film soundstage here on campus of the arts. And actually, just this last December, we did kind of phase three of this thing where we actually got into a real anechoic chamber at North Carolina State University and did a bunch of these recordings.

So I have a whole slew of anechoic recordings of vocalists singing a cappella into actual musical theater mikes, and that’s what I play. So when I think I’ve got the system tuned on, it’s what I think it’s going to be. That’s what I put on. And I can hear a voice coming out of the system in a way that it will sound like what it should sound when we really do the show. And that way I’m not worried about things or trying to get distracted by things that don’t matter for what we’re trying to do know.

I don’t have to worry about how the subwoofers are interacting with the voice because I’m never gonna put the voice. So, so. So that’s what I play. That’s my I’ve got my own track, basically, but that’s that I do the one I use the most as an opera singer actually. But she’s singing someone to watch over me. And it’s it’s one of my favorite ones and I know it really well. Now I play it all the time.

Siegel says that love is blind. Still, we’re often told she can usually find. So I’m gonna see a certain man I’ve had in mind looking everywhere. Haven’t found him yet. He’s the big affair. I cannot forget. Oh, my. As you’re talking, I’m just realizing just published this interview with Alex Wannna from Audio Test Kitchen, and he has all of these recordings that he did of different instruments in anechoic chambers because then that’s what he used to, then play them back and basically rerecord them through different mics so he could get all these tests for his database.

And I should ask him about that, too, because it would be cool to have some of those, although those aren’t really those are recorded with, like, really nice studio microphones.

And we probably four live sound want things that we’re actually going to be using in the field, but would still be cool to have some of those recordings because those would be totally clean and reflection free as well.

And you could put those back to the system and see what those sound like.

Yeah, because I mean, the idea that well, the original idea that got this started was, you know, of course, everyone likes to play tracks through the system. That’s what you got. You don’t have the performers there yet. But I’ve always worried about bringing in recordings and then listening to them to the system where those recordings sort of have their own acoustic signature that they’re bringing with them. That then gets coupled with the acoustic signature of the room I’m in.

And sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between what is in the recording and what is happening in my system and in my room. And so trying as much as I can to kind of strip out all of that bias from the recording so I can focus on what I’m doing as opposed to what somebody else did in a recording studio. It helps a lot, I found, because then I can experiment with reverb. Right? If I if if it’s already dry, I can start playing around with my reverb programs and things like that and know pretty quickly if I’ve got what I need.

I think everyone has that first experience when they start out and audio and you do some recording in a small room, like most people start out in a bedroom and then you do some mixing in there as well. And things sound pretty bad. And you discover that sort of the problems of your room that you recorded in or then exacerbated when you listen to it again. And I hear that all the time in this tiny little office that I have with doing the podcast.

And it never sounds very good. And then later, I just learned that later I listen to it on headphones and I’m like, oh, it’s actually fine. It’s just all these problems where I’m hearing them on top of each other stacked, right?

Yeah. OK, so Jason, we’ll get back to talking about some technical audio stuff. But before we do that, let’s talk a little bit about your career journey. So how did you how did you get your first job in audio?

So I the first job I would say that in audio was when I was in high school. A friend of my father’s, a work colleague of my father’s, owned a kind of a side business as a sort of like a deejay business where you would send out somebody like somebody young with a sound system at the time, a big several sort of cases of CDs and jewel cases. Right. And need to go out and you provide music for a party or a wedding, whatever it was, high school prom or something like that.

And I growing up, I was always the kid that was taking everything apart around the house. And I studied music and played the piano and all these things, and it was right up my alley. And so anyway, my father arranged an introduction with this guy and he hired me on to start deejaying for him. So that’s when I learned sound systems. I learned how to put a system together because we had to like, you know, take it somewhere, unload it and put it all together.

I learned that was when I learned what power amplifiers really were. I was like, why is this?

What is this big, heavy thing that I keep having to like all year and nothing works without it?

I don’t really understand what this thing does. So that’s that was my first real job and where I was getting paid to do something with sound. And I think it really started the wheels turning for my interest and ultimately become a sound designer because I was obviously I was interested in the equipment side of it was like that was kind of fun. I could make really loud sounds and all of that. And that was cool and with lots of buttons and knobs and stuff like that.

But as I kind of the first few gigs that I did, of course, I was sort of shadowing somebody and this guy that I’ve been doing it for a few years, he sort of took me under his wing and showed me the ropes. And we did a few gigs together and he started showing some really interesting stuff.

He said, OK, look, I’m going to he would sort of point to like some people over on the wall that weren’t that weren’t out moving or talking, they might says, I’m going to get them off the wall and he would do these things right.

And or he would sort of play certain types of tracks in a certain order that he had kind of learned that he could slowly coax somebody into the party. Right. And I was fascinated by that. Or I thought, whoa, like, you just totally manipulated those people. That was fascinating to me, like, I love that I just couldn’t get enough of that, and I think that the part where I really started thinking about what it means to be a sound designer who’s not who’s designing the content and telling a story, I was like, oh, I can actually say something.

I can use the things that I create, the music that I that I create or choose or play or the sound, the sounds that I create or choose or play to really communicate something and affect people in what I now believe is a somewhat unethical way. I prefer not to manipulate people anymore. I prefer to let people react. However, they would like to react. But at the time, you know, I learned really quickly that I could manipulate people.

This is so interesting because it can be so hard as a sound engineer sometimes to get feedback and know if we’re doing a good job or a bad job. And what does that mean, like in the in the short term or the long term and how do we get hired again and be successful in our career?

So you’re a comedian and people are laughing and you’re like, it’s working, I’m doing it and you’re a deejay and people are dancing. You’re like, OK, things are going well. I’ll probably get hired again.

But as a sound engineer and it’s a little bit harder to tell if things are working, obviously if you come back and if people are coming back and complaining like, hey, I can’t understand anyone and I’m sitting over here or it’s too loud, people kids are covering up their ears or something.

That’s how we used to tell in the circus that it was too loud.

But you’ve just done another variable in there, which is, you know, I want this to be working, but also I don’t want to be manipulating people. So I don’t know.

We didn’t discuss this beforehand. But what do you tell your students about?

How do you know if if you’re doing a good job as a sound engineer, like what is the feedback loop so that you put something, you do your work and then how do you like make changes and make improvements now and now?

I will also say that there are a lot of people who disagree with me about this, a lot of Sound Design Live who disagree with me about this. But my my feeling is that I think it’s fine to say whatever I want, whatever I think and feel about the piece through my work. But I also want to present my work in a way that allows others to think and feel and react however they want to. And I don’t I don’t necessarily want everyone in the room having the same reaction.

I don’t want everyone in the room crying. And I know I know a lot of sound designers who that’s what they want, right? It’s like I want to make everybody in the room cry or want to make everybody in the room laugh. That’s not my goal. I’m interested in everybody having a natural response based on their life experience and what influences them and all of that. So the way that I know and what I tell my students is, you know, in theater, hopefully you get some previews where you get to try this thing out on an audience while you still have time to make changes and tweak it.

And I love that period of time. When you think you’ve got something, you bring in a small audience, you do it for them. And I spend my time watching the audience because I know the show backwards and forwards. I mean, I can add every minute of it so I don’t watch it. I watch the people, I watch the audience. I see when they react. And when I start seeing everyone react the same way, I think, am I imposing something here?

Like, am I doing something that’s making them feel like they have to react that way? And if I am, I want to fix that. Right. I want to make sure that I can. I’m not imposing that that maybe maybe everyone’s having a natural response and there just happens to be the same. And that’s fine. I just want to make sure that I’m not the one doing that. But when I see a person over here laugh and a person over here sort of get uncomfortable and a person over there scream or something like, you know, those are dramatic examples, but that’s when I’m really that’s when I get excited.

I think, OK, great, we’re doing something real now. People are reacting based on their own life experience and their own biases and their own whatever. That’s what’s. So that’s what I look for is those previews. If you don’t get the previews, gosh, that’s hard because you just don’t know. Right. You’re you’re in the show, you’re doing rehearsals. And the jokes stopped being funny like two weeks ago. And no one knows for sure.

It’s really hard to know.

Will this work? And then what is your definition for work? And your definition now is yes. Sometimes I want everyone kind of reacting the same and we’re having a community experience. But in general, I want people to kind of be reacting in their own unique personal way that has to do with their life experience. And so there might be a cue for thunder in there. And then you put in thunder and everybody’s like, it’s really loud. Everyone sort of shocked.

And I’m putting thunder in here because I know you have a recording. You have you have many recordings of thunder that are about on your database.

You know, then you might also try like what if there’s an obvious cue for thunder? And I put in the sound of a chicken and then like a few people are confused, but then a few people laugh and a few people are discussing or whatever, and then everybody’s kind of having a personal experience for whatever their relationship is with like chicken and surprises and whatever else is going on on stage.

Yeah, well, I mean, for example, for a lot of people, the sound of crickets is very relaxing and soothing. It’s, you know, it reminds them of nighttime and going to bed and all of that kind of stuff. For me, it’s very unnerving because as a child, I would be my mother would put me on time out in the laundry room that was next to the kitchen, our house. And my sister and I called it the cricket room because this room, there was crickets in it.

And when we would go and sit in this room and she’d shut the door, we’d sit in this room, it sounds way more abusive than it actually was.

But, you know, it was it was a bad kid. We get it. It was just a time out, you know.

But we’re sitting there and we’re hearing these crickets chirp in this room and there’s little kids. You know, you start your imagination starts going wild and you start seeing the coathangers come alive.

And so to this day, you know, the sound of crickets does not relax me the way that it does with other people.

And so whenever I have a director says, oh, we should put some crickets here to sort of like calm down the mood and everything. And I’m like, OK, let’s try.

It’s not gonna work. And so I think that you can’t control that stuff, right? You can’t you can’t control the way people are going to react. And I know a lot of people who try to control the way people react. And it is possible to some extent. But I just think that’s the easy way out. I think the the much harder way is to just do something that’s true and honest and and open and let people have that whatever that natural response is and whatever their natural response is, is fine.

Sure.

So I guess the non manipulative, honest way to do it is just to do whatever you think works for you.

And I’ve had this discussion with other colleagues about why some people are good mixers. And there’s this idea that that sounds true to me, which is that you will be a successful mixer if you’re hearing is somehow similar to other people. So there’s a large enough group of other people that hear your results that agree with you. So if you just make something for yourself and it sounds and you’re not trying to be manipulative and you just make it sound good for you and other people agree with you, then that seems to be one of the attributes of a good mixer’s.

They seem to have like a a taste that is right down the middle with some category of people. Yeah, and I do talk about that with my students a lot. I say, look, ultimately, one of the things that people are going to pay you for is your taste.

I mean, hopefully one of the reasons people bring me back is they like the way my show’s sound. And there are times when my style is not right for a particular show. And I either have to evolve my style for that particular project or I find somebody else to take the gig. But yeah, I think you’re absolutely right that I try not to overthink what the audience is thinking and feeling. I try to just be honest, tell the story and then be completely OK with however they react.

I do a lot of theater for young audiences and kids are the best audience because they are a completely honest audience. Open book. Yeah. And you can tell, you know, exactly when you’ve lost them, exactly how they’re feeling about any moment.

And when I first started, it took me a while because there were times when we were trying to be really serious and have this dramatic moment. And then a kid would like shout out from the crowd is like, hey, that’s not whatever, you know, that’s not right. You shouldn’t do that or whatever. And at first I was getting really like somebody tell this kid to stop yelling out there.

And then I realized, you know, actually that is exactly what that kid should do, because whatever is happening in the scene is exciting that that kid and and that kid is reacting to what’s being what he’s being presented with in a really great way. So by all means, call out, you know, tell us that you can see the wires, tell us that you don’t like what’s going on. Tell us that you think that’s funny. And all of those reactions are fine and they’re great.

And that’s what we want is engaged, is to engage people, give somebody an opportunity to experience something that excites them in some way.

All right, Jason, so a lot of things have happened in your life, but I was wondering if you could maybe take us to one event. Can you think of something that’s happened in your career that that you feel like was a turning point? So what’s one of the best decisions you feel like you made to get more of the work that you really love?

You know, I think that I’ve made I couldn’t think of a single one decision, but I can think of a couple of things that have helped me an awful lot. One is that I I made a decision pretty early in my career that my career was not going to be my social life. And I think working in theater or any form of entertainment, I mean, the hours are long. You tend to be working when everyone else isn’t working and vice versa.

And I saw so many people around me where, you know, their work and their and their social life were basically the same thing. And I just decided, I’m not going to do that.

I don’t have to be friends with the people that I work with. And I absolutely want to do good work.

I want to get along with these people. I want them to appreciate and like working with me. But I don’t need to go out to the bar with them after the show. I don’t need to hang out with them when we’re not working. I don’t need to go golfing with them. I don’t. And that has helped me immensely because it allows me to make decisions about the work that I do without having to worry about how that’s going to impact my friendship with the people around me.

I can instead just focus on what do I have to do to do the best work that I can do in a way that is the most collaborative and the most supportive of everything that’s happening there. So that’s sort of a deal I made with myself, is that I’m going to have I need a social life, but my social life is not going to have anything to do with my work. And that has helped me so much. I see a lot of people who struggle a lot because they’re having a really hard time balancing that thing.

Right. Their friend, their best friends are the people that are sitting next to at work. And, you know, that makes you have to make some hard decisions sometimes when you’re doing work. And that is hard for a lot of people.

So that’s that’s one I think the other real another big turning point for me, that it was sort of like an aha moment for me as a as a sound designer was when I first started graduate school, I designed my first show as a graduate student. It was The Crucible by Arthur Miller. And I did what I thought was a fine job with the show and the David Smith, who I had come to study with. He came and watched one of the final dress rehearsals, and he and I sat in the back of the theater with him that night and.

To kind of get his thoughts, and he gave me a couple of notes here and there about some of the cues and stuff, and he says, I think generally, though, I’ve got this is my main note, he said. I just watched this whole show and having watched this last three hours, I, I know I feel like I know what the director thinks about this this play.

I can look at the set and I think I know what the what the set designer thinks about this play. I’m looking at the costumes, and I think I know what the costume designer thinks about this play, and I listen to your sound and you’ve created a lot of really great stuff.

It’s appropriate. It it fits. It’s really well executed and well mixed.

And we’ll edit it. It sounds really great in everything, but I have no idea what you think about this play.

Wow. And that was like a moment where it was just like mind blown and like, oh, wait a minute, what do I think about this play? And because I and he went on to just sort of say, look, yes, I mean, as a sound designer, your job is to tell the story, serve the director and their agenda and collaborate with other people everything.

But ultimately, your name goes on the poster right next to the director and the other designers and and the producers like you’re not even the actors get their name on the poster most of the time.

It’s like you get top billing on this thing, which means you had a voice in creating what this thing is. And if you don’t use that voice or something, then what’s the point?

You know, why are you here if you’re just here to just push the buttons, pull the sound effects, throw the dog bark off stage left, ring the doorbell and get your paycheck and go home, then why is your name on the poster?

It was a big moment for me where I was like, Oh, I am also an artist. Right.

I am a storyteller, I’m not yes, I’m an engineer and a technician and a musician and a designer and all these things, but I am also a storyteller and I am also an artist and I have a voice.

And that was a big turning point for me where I just, I mean, reframed the entire approach that I took to everything I did after that. And so that that is really, really informed to me over the years. Yeah.

And a good example of this is a show that I just did a couple of years ago. I got to do Matilda the Musical at the Children’s Theater of Charlotte and Children’s Theatre.

Charlotte was sort of one of the first two or three professional theatre companies to get the rights to actually do it after the after the Broadway the. And so there wasn’t a lot to go on. I mean, we eventually, after a show has been done a lot regionally, you sort of get a lot of there’s a lot of good research you can do that. You can talk to a lot of other people who have worked on it. I really didn’t have that luxury because there hadn’t been a lot of other people to work on this thing.

And so I read it. I listen to the music and all of this. And the thing that really stood out to me was there’s these two songs in this play I want to call it, once called Loud and once called Quiet. And the song called Loud is sung by Matilda’s mother. And she talks all about how it doesn’t really matter what you think of what you say or how smart you are or whatever, as long as you’re the loudest voice in the room, people have to pay attention to you and it doesn’t meant the substance doesn’t matter.

And this is her whole song. And and then in Act two, Matilda, if you’re familiar, the show has this moment where she sings the song Quiet, where the other kids at school are sort of being confronted by the headmistress and Matilda sort of it has this moment where kind of time stops. Right. And then she goes into the song called Quiet, and she sings a song about how much she’s in these moments in her life where she feels like everything is just being piled on her and she’s getting overwhelmed and buried.

She kind of retreats into herself and finds this sort of like stillness and quiet inside of her own mind and her own body. And that brings her peace and strength and all that. And she comes out of that song. Singing the song with everyone around her frozen in place. And she when she comes out of this song about how she finds power and strength in the quiet moments of life and the quiet, reflective moments of life, that’s when she turns around and discovers that she has telekinetic power.

And and I just thought, oh, that’s just amazing as a Sound Design Live was just like, yes, yes. And I the thing is that and I tell my students this all the time, says, listen, our job is to make stuff louder. We actually don’t have any technology to make things quieter. Every piece of technology that that has been invented, percentage in ears, is designed to make stuff louder. You don’t have anything that can make something quieter.

And so everything we do is just about making something louder. And so if you’ve got a problem, that something is too loud. You don’t have a knob for that right now, it could be that you have made it too loud and therefore you can make it less too loud. Right. But if it’s already too loud all by itself, you can’t do anything about that. And but I realized I have to figure out how to get quiet. Because that was so important to me, right, I mean, that part of the story was so important to me and I said, if that song is not actually quiet, then we will lose the meaning of this moment.

And so I put I play all my cards on this because I said, what do I have to do to get that song quiet? Yeah. How do you do it? Ironically, I opened the pit. What it.

What does that mean. It seems like it would make it louder if I know.

So this was the problem is I figured out the wait because normally at this performance space they cover the pit and we make up the orchestra and we play everything out of the speakers, the monitors and everything. And you would think that that would control the atmosphere of the of the orchestra? It does not, because the second you cover it, that means nobody can hear it.

The audience can’t hear it. The actors can’t hear it, you can’t hear it.

And so you start having to put this sound out of all kinds of sound systems. Right. And it’s coming out of 20 loud speakers on the stage and 50 speakers out of the house. It’s everywhere. You can’t get rid of it. And so even to do something quiet, it has to be coming from everywhere. And I said, that’s the way that’s how I’m going to do it, if I can get them to open the pit. Then I can push my front files back or.

I won’t have all this monitor bleed, I won’t have have to worry so much about putting all the sounds of the speakers. So then when we get to that moment, I can just tell the orchestra to play it quietly.

And if they can play it quietly, then the actor can sing it quietly and then we can mix it quietly and we can write.

And so I had to I played all my cards, all of my political capital.

I couldn’t get them to open. They really had to you really had to do a lot to talk them into this because it didn’t make any sense to do this.

It didn’t make any sense. The thing I was telling was like, we need to open the pit so that we can get the show quieter.

That doesn’t make any sense. I know it doesn’t make any sense, but listen, I’m the expert.

I’m telling you, you’ve got to do it because it did work. It worked. It was amazing. Amazing, right?

I mean, we got to that moment and everyone, like, turned to me and went, oh, you look like.

Yes, I know. And and it was just it was great.

And in the previews when we did it, like the audience got quiet, you know, even even kids got quiet. What is going on? And everyone’s whispering.

And it was great. It was so brilliant. And I would never have thought of that. I mean, that was that was ultimately a technical challenge that we had to overcome. But it would never have been something we would have even considered if I hadn’t decided that I had something that I felt and believed about this story that I wanted to make sure got communicated. And so that’s that’s a really extreme example of this thing where we had to do something really big but actually cost a lot of money so to do.

But it was really that came from me as as the Sound Design Live who wanted to make this point about about this song, about finding power and peace and quiet, that you don’t have to scream. You don’t have to be loud all the time. You know, I just found it so powerful.

So I think that has really informed a lot of the work that I do. That’s so great, so I just want to sum up again to say, like, I’m not here to make the doorbell ring and the dog to bark off stage left, I’m here to share this idea or I’m here to share like this transformational moment in this work.

Yeah.

So, Jason, you’ve been teaching for a while, and so you meet a lot of people who are doing things for the first time. And I thought this would be a perfect opportunity for you to talk about some of the the themes you see of people doing things for the first time. And so I use the word mistakes here, but really, it’s just like people doing things for the first time and they think, oh, this is the way you do it.

And that’s ends up not getting the result that they want. So what are some of the biggest mistakes you see people making who are new to theatrical Sound Design Live?

So I give my students the speech every year when they when all of my incoming students in the speech and I say, hey, look, you know, you have had a lot of experience in your life so far that have led you to this moment. Right. That got you to the point where you’re ready to really focus and learn this thing. And that’s great. And you should be proud of that experience and those things you had. But what you need to realize is that a lot of what you think, you know.

Is wrong and or is incomplete or is based on assumptions that you haven’t proved or is based on information you were given by someone who who also did not know what they didn’t know. And I said the best thing you can do is just be proud of that experience that is behind you now. And then we’re going to forget that it ever happened, that we’re going to start over, because the biggest mistake I see my students make is when they rely too much on their previous knowledge.

Because what happens is when when you get yourself into a rough situation on a on a show and everyone’s something’s not working. Everyone’s looking at you, the director shouting at you, and no one gets to work until you can solve this problem. The natural reaction is to just retreat into some sort of process that is comfortable to you, like you find these ways to get through the day.

And, you know, because when you didn’t know what you were doing, when you had no clue and you were starting, you just sort of like discovered these things by accident, like, oh, here’s a way that I can get people to stop shouting at me.

And it wasn’t necessarily the right solution, but it got you out of a mess once. And therefore, it’s like, OK, that’s that’s my go to now. That’s my solution.

And so I, I see my students do that a lot where they’ll they’ll come there for whatever reason.

They’re terrified of me. I don’t know why, but eventually they’ll pluck up the courage to actually call me for help and I’ll come over and see where they are on their show and I’ll say what’s going on?

And we’re having this problem and this and this and that and all these things. And I’ll start looking around and I’ll look at what the system that’s in there and look at what they’ve set up on the board and everything. And in invariably every one of those times I look at it and say. That’s not what I told you to do. That is not the way I taught you to do that. This is not what was drawn in your paperwork. How about we do the thing that was in your paperwork, do the thing that I taught you to do, and then let’s see what happens.

And what had happened is they had retreated into some previous knowledge and ignored the new knowledge because the previous knowledge was comfortable to them. And I think that’s the biggest mistake I see people starting out with, is that you sort of stumble into these quick fixes of things before you really understand what’s going on.

And then you miss forever in the future the opportunity to learn a better way.

So it’s it’s hard it’s really hard to sort of unlearn things, but it’s critical. And hopefully you you have a mentor, somebody that can help you do that. If you don’t, it’s it’s almost impossible to challenge your own paradigms. But I think it’s the biggest mistake I see new people make. And so how do you how do you break out of that? I did an interview with the creator of the Sound Bullett last year, and he sort of talked about forcing yourself to to practice methodical troubleshooting when normally you just want to jump to one thing because you think, oh, I think it’s over here when and then you waste a bunch of time because you’re not being methodical.

And so if you practice forcing yourself to actually go from point A to B to C in the signal chain, then you get better really at figuring that stuff out logically and faster later on. Then if you just sort of like gas and then you end up chasing your own tail. So what is your guidance then to your students to, like, unlearn this stuff or force yourself into better, better habits and better more creative processes? Well, the first thing I do is I.

I exercise really tight control over the tools that they use. Right.

I mean, we’re in a fortunate situation in our program where we’ve got a pretty, pretty good equipment inventory and students will, if left to their own devices, they’ll just use the same thing every time because they know how to use it. It’s comfortable to use the same console in every show, whether it’s the right console for the job or not. And so one of the things that I work really hard to do is I force them to not use the thing that they know.

You know, you’ve you’ve used that Yamaha M7, s.L on every show you’ve ever done in your life today. You’re going to use the Digicom. Well, I don’t know how to use the DiCicco. Well, you’ll know by the end of today.

So that’s one thing, as I sort of is sort of force yourself into using tools that are unfamiliar to you, because when you’re using a tool that is unfamiliar to you, it forces you to think about how it works and how sound works.

And you have to read the manual. You have to ask questions from other people. And so I find that’s the quickest way to overcome your own previous knowledge biases and things to force yourself to use a tool you’re not familiar with. The other thing is I am a firm believer in paperwork. My students do a ridiculous amount of paperwork and they always say it’s like no one does this.

This paperwork out in the real world. I’m like, yeah, and this isn’t the real world, this is school.

And and I say, the problem is I can’t look into your head to find out if you’ve thought about all the things you need to think about, show your work. The only way I know how to figure out if you’ve thought about everything is to get you to write it all down. And so, like, I make them do these ridiculous patch plots where they make a spreadsheet that shows every single connector in the entire system connected one to another. And they say this takes us forever.

I know. But if you do this now, then you’re definitely going to know how that sound system goes together and you’re going to realize before you get into the gig that you need an hour to quarter inch adapter or such and such a turnaround or something like you’re going to find that out now as opposed to five minutes before you have to make sound come out of the system.

So that’s another thing that I find really helps, is to take the time to sit down and do paperwork, draw it out. What am I trying to do? If you can draw it out on paper, you’ll find a lot of these problems really quickly and you’ll realize, oh, gosh, there’s a better way to do that.

So that those are the two things I find a lot. Force yourself to do something new, do paperwork.

Nice. All right, Jason.

Well, let’s go back to talking about tools that you’re not comfortable with and like breaking out of your patterns and your biases. So at this year’s Live Sound Summit, you gave a presentation called Potential Acoustic Gain. Why IQ is Not the Answer to Feedback. So one of the first things you say in that presentation is that the tools people use first to combat feedback are really the tools they should use the last. So first of all, what are the tools people are using first to combat feedback mostly?

Q I see so many folks.

I mean, I honestly don’t understand why graphics still exist to me in the world now.

I understand, but it’s stupid, right? And it’s because people buy them.

But, you know, that’s it is people use this graphic to combat feedback. And I get why it’s and if you don’t really understand why feedback happens, then, yeah, it makes sense to sort of like whip out an HQ and fix this because you’re realizing there’s this problem, right? There’s this frequency in my sound system that is running amuck. And now I have this tool here that allows me to remove a frequency. So if I have frequency that’s misbehaving, I can just get rid of it.

Right. It’s reasonable. The problem is that you’re treating a symptom there, you’re not actually treating the problem. And so, like using any cute and not sharp feedback, it’s sort of like trying to cure the flu with Tylenol.

It’s like, OK, that might make you feel a little bit better. Your sore throat will go away, your fever might go down, but you still have the flu.

Sure. This is interesting because what they teach you in sales and marketing is that people buy vitamins and they buy aspirin. They don’t buy cures as much. Yeah, exactly.

And so that’s why the graphic here still exists, because people buy them. It looks like a solution that gets them through the night and that’s fine. The problem is that, you know, you can do a lot of harm to a lot of things that are important to you by immediately jumping over that gravity cue to solve that problem.

And this goes back to what we were talking about earlier, is that you get into a challenging situation. There’s feedback. It’s a scary thing. It’s something that pisses everybody off. It’s a sure thing to make you not get hired again.

And so you want to go to so you end up falling back on whatever your previous experience was, your preconceived notions. OK, so we’ve talked about this tool. This is what people are jumping to first. So what tools should they be using instead if it’s not EKU?

Well, I think to understand that, you have to first understand what is causing feedback and what feedback happens when the sound from the talker or the instrument or the whatever that’s making the sound when that hits the microphone at the same level as the sound from the loudspeaker, that is amplified when those two things hit the microphone at the same level. That’s when feedback happens, because when you have two identical sounds that are arrive at the same place, at the same level, but slightly out of time, then we know that creates some calm filtering.

But the other thing that will happen is that there will be some number of frequencies where that difference in time corresponds with a certain period or wavelength for a given frequency. Therefore, those frequencies are coming together perfectly in level and at some zero degree phase relationship. And whenever that happens, it gets louder. Right, 60 boost foom for that frequency. And so now that frequency comes out of that loud speaker again, six dB louder hits the mic, six to be louder again.

Boom, boom, boom, boom. It loops, loops, loops, and it gets louder and louder and louder, which is why feedback gets louder the longer you let it go.

And so that’s what’s actually happening, is that you have sound coming out of the loudspeakers that’s making it back into the mic at the same level as the sound of the thing that the mic is pointed at. So if you really want to solve that problem, you’ve got to get that level differential larger. And that’s a geometry problem that is not an EU problem solving, that is geometry, it’s the reason that you have that problem is because things are in a physical relationship in the room that is causing the sound from the loudspeakers to hit the microphone at the same level as the sound from the talker or the instrument or whatever.

And if you understand that, then you’ll understand that, oh, well, I could make the sound from the loudspeaker quieter the microphone if I could get the loudspeaker farther away from the microphone. Right before I could make that, I could make those two things different, if I could get the microphone closer to the thing that’s making the sound, then that thing would be louder there. But the the level from the loudspeaker would not have changed. And so now there’s some differential there.

So there’s various things that you can do to create that differential. It’s not that you can’t have any sound from the speaker hitting the mic. It’s that you need a significant difference in level between the natural sound and the amplified sound hitting the mic. And if you can do that, you won’t have feedback.

So let’s just take an aside here related to level and time arrival. So is this why don’t we take a step back? So I studied studio sound and I remember one of the things we learned in Studio Sound since we had a tiny bit about live sound is just like some tips and tricks. One of the first things I heard is that if you add some delay to a signal, you can reduce the feedback or try inverting the polarity. And so from what I’m hearing you say now, it sounds like maybe that won’t actually help, because if I add delay, the signal’s still arriving at the same level.

And so what’s going to happen is that I won’t eliminate the feedback. It’ll just change to a different frequency.

So, yeah, if you invert the polarity. Yeah, that frequency that was feeding back won’t anymore. But now an octave above that will.

And it’s likewise if you change the delay, that’s that just means that now there’s a different frequency that’s going to lock into some zero degree phase relationship because of its wavelength period. So it might solve your problem for that specific moment. But I guarantee you 10, 15 seconds later, you push the fader and some other frequency locks in and feedback guarantee. So then coming back to the question, you were saying that IQ is not the first tool you should be reaching for when you have dealing with microphone feedback and instead the tools you should be reaching for are placement, aim and activity of your your receivers and transducers, your speakers and your microphones set the case, right?

Well, and I think the the reason that people are reaching for the cue is because they didn’t do that work ahead of time, that if the system’s already up, everything’s in place.

You’re doing the show and it’s feeding back. At that point, you don’t have a lot of options, but feedback can be predicted. There is math that lets you predict this. You can plug in the system configuration and the distances and everything into a mathematical equation, and it will tell you exactly how much gain you’ll be able to get before it feeds back. And now there’s a lot of variables that are being considered and all that math. And so, you know, it’s give or take a few dB, but you can get pretty good idea of whether you’ve got a problem or not.

And so if you can figure that out ahead of time, then, yes, then it’s easy to move the loudspeaker if you haven’t already hung it.

Right.

But if you’ve already hung it up in the air and you’ve already checked this show and there’s already the mikes already in place and everything, and the show is going now and you and that’s now the time you’ve started worrying about feedback. Yeah. Your only option is going to be to reach for that too. And then you obliterate your finely tuned frequency in phase response.

So to illustrate this, you have these really great flash demos on one of your sites that people can play with.

And and just to describe it to them, you have a few different variables that you can change. You can change like the talkers distance to the microphone. You can change the speaker placement. You can change the what’s the other thing you can change well, so you can you can move the listener around.

You move the talker around, you move the microphone around and move the loudspeaker. Right. And then you can also also play with the activity of the microphone. And then you see the result is very, very cool.

You see, like how much what is the potential gain of the system? So I don’t know. It doesn’t really do great justice to it for us to I don’t know, describe that too much more right now. But it just so eye opening to be able to see that. So if people want to play with that again, I’ll put a link to that in this in this podcast. But during your presentation of on it, it was just so cool to see you just in real time, being able to change these factors and see how the potential gain would change in the system.

Yeah, and I have to I have to admit that I did not create that that flash demo that was created by a colleague of mine. I published a book I wrote a book with two other people, Jennifer Berg, who is a computer scientist at Wake Forest University, and Eric Schwartz, who at the time was a graduate student of mine. And Eric is one of the smartest people I know. And I kind of hired him. We had a research grant write this thing and and I hired him on the grant to kind of help us out.

And he learned programming as part of that. And I had been talking about that. I mean, I had this idea for a long time. I was like, you know, like if there’s these mathematical equations you can read in the books that tell you, well, you plug the Senate, you can get your game feedback, but it’s kind of cumbersome math and it takes a little while. You want to change your variable, you have to go back and write it all again.

And I was talking to Eric one day and I just said it’d be really cool if we could somehow, like, just plug that MAPP into CAD or something and be able to move the speaker and move the mike or something and have it recalculate the results. And he’s like that in Flash. And I said, well, let’s try it. And so he did he put it together and he made and it was great. So we put it into the book and it got to the point where Eric had contributed so many of those kind of just amazing tools to the book that we eventually had to credit him as a co-author because, like, we can’t in good conscience take credit for all this work that he did, you know?

So I think that the I will take credit for the idea, but I did not make that Eric. That was absolutely his work. But and it is really, really useful as a teaching tool and a learning tool just to kind of really understand what can I do to combat feedback doesn’t involve obliterating my frequency response lithographic to.

Well, let’s talk a little bit more about that in your presentation, so I just picked out some moments that were surprising for me and that I thought would be fun to talk about. So you say the graphic IQ is nowhere near as surgical as you imagined it to be. And this is such an interesting moment for everyone.

The picture that you have in your head of what you think a graphic IQ does, what you think it does is pretty different than the first time you actually measure one and you see the results. You’re like, oh, wait, so how surgical is it?

What is a graphic IQ really doing?

Yeah, I mean, of course the answer is it depends. But if it’s a third octave graphic, which is probably the one you see the most you’ve got, I mean, the great thing about a graphic here, the reason people like it is that you can look at it and get some idea of what’s happening with rings.

Your response, right. You’ve got your low frequencies over here, your differences over here, and you move around.

And that’s great that that one slider that has that one frequency on it. But you’ve got a slider that says one kilohertz and you can move that up or down. And if it’s in the middle, it’s it’s not changing at that frequency. If you put it up, it makes louder, but it makes quieter. And the screen printing on that fader has a single frequency. But in reality, that’s that little slider. That fader is manipulating a lot of frequencies.

It’s called a third octave graphic Kikue, because that slider represents a third octave filter. And what that means is that it’s a third octave filter because it’s a third of an octave between the six dB down points of the filter. So you’ve got a peak and that’s where that’s the frequency that is labeled on screen printing. And then you measure the distance between the frequencies on either side of that that are 60 below that. And that’s the defined range of the filter.

OK, the prop. So first of all, you’re not just knocking out one frequency, you’re not out a whole range of frequencies and a third of an octave then. But that’s just between a sixty down point. You also have a whole lot of other frequencies that are also being manipulated beyond that sixty down point. So that one little slider that you are using to remove a sine wave is actually manipulating. An octave, octave and a half worth of frequencies to some extent.

That’s a lot.

And to sort of help people visualize this, I find it helpful to sort of imagine keys on a keyboard if you’re familiar with what a piano looks like and you can sort of like reach across an octave, which is 12 keys with like one hand, as if you imagine a third of those. That’s already four keys. And now you’re saying it’s even larger than that. So now you start to get a sense of what the size of this is, if you think about keys on the keyboard, right?

Absolutely.

It’s way it does way more damage response than you imagine it does. You are taking out a big chunk of your frequency spectrum in order to remove a sine wave.

OK, all right. We killed it. We kill it. So the moment in your presentation that is sort of like mind melting for a lot of people live on the event is when you said gain before feedback is independent of the level of the talker.

And everyone’s like, what? That’s crazy. You’re saying it doesn’t matter if I whisper or scream, it won’t change the potential acoustic gain of the system, is that correct?

That’s correct. And the math, there’s this out.

If if this was if we had video here, I could do the math and show you. But basically you can run the math in a way that considers how loud the person is talking. And then you can run the math in a way that completely excludes that information and you get the same result as far as your acoustical game goes.

So that tells us that it doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter how loud they talk, your game is the same. And what we mean by that is that, know, we define acoustical gain or game of feedback as the difference perceived by the listener in the audience between when the sound system is turned off and when the sound system is turned on. So if we decide not to show up for work and they try to do the show anyway and the sound system never gets turned on, presumably the audience will hear something.

Right? There’s people on that stage doing stuff and they’re singing or playing instruments and those things are making sound. And that sound will get out to the audience somewhat. They’ll hear something. Hopefully, if you’ve done your job well, you might show up to work that day, turn on the sound system and they hear more. Right. So the difference between what they would hear without the sound system and what they hear with the sound system, then that’s your game.

That’s what you gain by putting a sound system into the room. And that game is fixed, right. The amount of gain you can get before the system feeds back, unless you change some very big system like that, that is a fixed amount that is independent of how loud the sources. So if the source is if you’re game for feedback is 20 dB. That’s not bad. It’s not awesome, but it’s you can get through the night with only 20 dB a game, that just means that if they’re talking really quietly, you can make the audience hear something 20 dB louder than them whispering.

If they are screaming, you can you are able to let the audience hear something 20 dB louder than them screaming, but them changing how loud they are doesn’t change the fact that you can only add 20 dB to that scenario. So your gain is independent of the level of the talker or the instrument or whatever it is.

But what is true is that in some cases in small rooms, if the source is naturally louder, you might need less gain in order for the audience to be able to hear it and understand it. But in a really big room where there’s if your listener is three hundred, four hundred feet away. You know, it doesn’t make me talking really that it really doesn’t matter, they’re not going to hear and understand anything. It’s all on you anyway.

So so that’s where the misconception is, is is that, oh, well, you know, if they get loud to talk louder, wouldn’t be back.

And it’s like, no, it’s not a problem if that’s what’s happening. You’re basically using the acoustics of the space to solve a problem with your sound system. And that doesn’t actually change anything about your game for feedback. OK, one last thing about this, you said microphones did not exhibit the same dire activity at every frequency. So I’m thinking, OK, microphones have this polar pattern and we think of cardio super cardio. OK, I understand that.

But you’re saying that that’s not the same over frequency. So tell me a little bit more about that and then how does that affect my game before feedback?

OK, so the first thing I understand is microphones are the same thing as loud speakers. They’re just a dynamic microphone is just a small, loud speaker. It just it just wired it backwards, just using it backwards. So it’s the same thing. And we know that loud speakers are not directional in the same way for every frequency. Hopefully, you know that if you don’t, you should know that just because the spec sheet of the loudspeaker says that this is a 40 degree vertical does not mean that it’s 40 degrees for every single frequency.

And that is not a laser beam. Right there is. It doesn’t mean you don’t have any sound passed 40 degrees. You still have lots of sound pass 40 degrees.

It’s just at 60 quieter at the 40 degree angle and that 40 degrees at some arbitrarily chosen number by the manufacturer that they put on the back seat. It’s like some sort of average of some range of frequencies that they cared about. But if you really look at what it does and look at the color parts, look at these parts and you’ll see, OK, it’s vastly different from frequency frequency. Microphones are no different. Microphones are different directives per frequency.

And there’s a lot of reasons why there’s some science behind that that we don’t have a lot of time to get into. But it has to do with the size and diameter driver, the way that it’s vented and things like that. So, yes, you could get a cardio in microphone and that will exhibit a certain activity on average. But that’s going to change for for from frequency to frequency. Now, particularly, it becomes problematic at the low frequencies because it’s we know it’s really hard to control low frequencies.

Low frequencies tend to be omnidirectional because in order to control them, you need really big stuff. You know, if you want to control one hundred hertz, you need something that is ten feet big. You need you need either the back to the future driver that is a ten foot diameter driver or this is another reason why we like winery’s is because you can make a lot of speakers act like one really tall one and then you can control one hundred hertz.

But a microphone, the biggest diaphragm on, on and on, even a large diaphragm microphone is about an inch, inch and a half or something, not ten feet.

It’s not going to be not even close. Right. There’s no way that it’s going to be able to control that low frequency.

And so you can yes, you can use microphone type activity to your advantage and gain before feedback. If you can get the the area of the microphone where it is less sensitive pointed towards the loudspeaker than OK. Yes, that’s now the sound for the loudspeaker is going to be hitting the mic and that mic is going to be less responsive to that sound at that angle. But that really helps you mostly at high frequencies. You get down to the low frequencies.

The lowering is these are still largely omnidirectional, even for that cardio microphone. So you still have to figure out what to do about that. You can’t just rely on microphone or activity to solve your feedback problems either, which is why the low frequencies are always the ones the feedback burst.

So I think in a lot of times in practice are on stage. We don’t see this happen immediately. It seems like it’s the high frequencies that feedback first, but that’s because we’ve already taken actions to make sure that it’s not the low frequency. So we have high best filters on our microphones. We have high test filters on our stage monitors. And so we might sort of lose touch with the fact that those would be feeding back if we didn’t have that in place already.

Absolutely.

OK, Jason, tell us about the biggest or maybe most painful mistake that you’ve made on the job and what happened afterwards.

I, I can’t think of a specific thing that I do remember early in my career.

I was doing summer stock opera and was put into this position of being the in-house Sound Design Live for this opera company and barely knew what I was doing.

I mean, I was still halfway through my undergraduate college training. I hardly knew anything. But for whatever reason, I mean, it was summer stock. They so happens they bring in college students who work for cheap and they give them responsibilities that I’m ready for.

And I was no exception. I was not ready for it. And they gave me this budget and they solve these problems and do sound. And, you know, I remember a couple of scenarios that those couple of summers where I did that, where I had somehow got into my head, that if I only had this certain fancy thing, whatever it was, then I would be able to solve. Problem. OK, I had heard about cool microphones.

There was this we were doing Carmen and the maestro wanted the six chorus people off stage singing at the end to sound like a few thousand people in the stadium. And I thought, oh, well, if I got a good microphone and maybe some reverb or something in the mixer, I could make that happen. And I made the I made the company rent a C for 14 for what to them was a good amount of money.

And because I thought, oh, that’s a nice microphone, that should sound good. And and then I can do this reverb effect and it’ll be fine and understand what I was talking about. And I’ll never forget the first time I tried to do it, it just sounded awful.

I mean, it was awful for a million reasons. It was awful. But of course, now I know that that’s not possible. Like, you can’t even do that thing. Like you can’t make five people sound like a thousand people live. You can’t do that.

Especially not if if all those if the five voices are coming into one might like it. Just like you can’t do it. It doesn’t work. So now I know that.

But I didn’t know it then.

And I remember the first time we tried to do it, the maestro sort of turned around to me. Are you kidding me?

Oh, no, that’s painful. Yeah, that’s good. And I was like, but of course I was really offended by that because I hadn’t really even on my own. I haven’t I hadn’t come to the realization myself that I had screwed this up yet. I still was attached to my idea. I thought I was doing something right. And it took me a while to realize that I was doing nothing but harm. And so there was that and a couple of situations like that where I read something in an article or something and heard about some cool little Whiz-Bang box.

And if I could get that, then I could solve this problem. And I realized that I didn’t actually notice talking about it. And I made somebody spend a lot of money and didn’t solve the problem. And I lost a lot of credibility because of that. And that is a lesson that I take to heart. And I always I tell my students this all the time. I said never, ever, ever tell somebody to spend money on something unless you know for sure that they will hear every dollar that they spend.

It’s got to be justified.

Can’t visit while you tell them they have to spend a thousand dollars to buy you this fancy box. They had better here a thousand dollars worth of better sound because of it, or you will lose all of your credibility.

Wow. So what’s the end of that story that I might go back? Did you figure out solve the problem? Did you get fired? Well, what happened? I get fired. I mean, listen, they were it’s not like there was anybody else that would do the job.

You know, it was a summer stock opera company in the middle of nowhere. The you know, we fooled around with it a little bit more and played a little bit and ultimately just kind of had to punt it. OK, it’s never going to sound like a thousand people. The best thing we can do is just make it sound a little bit farther away. We can add a little reverb to it. And that was about it. And it would never we just it would never sound like what we know nowadays.

What I would do, of course, is I would just record it right. I would record it.

I would double it. I would get a whole bunch of people to saying I would mix it all up. I would make it sound like thousands of people would click, track it and play it out as a recording. But those were concepts I didn’t even know existed.

All right, Jason, I’ve got some questions from Facebook. Anthony Miranda says, What separates you and see from other theater and design production programs in the country? What do they do differently that sets them apart?

You know, I think I mean, I can speak for the sound design program that I run.

And in saying that, there are a few, a handful of schools that I think are trying to to teach sound design at the same level that we’re trying to do. And I think they all have a slightly different approach. And I think the thing that sets us apart is David Smith and I decided a long time ago that we wanted our students to have jobs. Basically the mission statement of our institution, the North Carolina school, the arts is what used to be called and it’s called the University of North Carolina School of the Arts.

But it’s been around for 50 years. It’s the first public performing arts conservatory in the country.

And the mission statement of the institution says we exist to prepare people for professional careers in the arts.

So if we’re going to all this trouble to train these people, send them out, and then they’re not having professional careers in the arts, we’re failing at our mission. And so the thing that we decided early on is we want our students. We want to deliver on that for one. And we looked at what is the typical kind of career path if there is a typical career path or anybody working in Lebanon. And everyone sort of has their own little path they carve out, but the first handful of years, it’s like you’re trying to figure out what that is, you’re trying to figure out what your groove is and what the thing is that you do and you end up having to just kind of take every gig that comes to you.

Right. I mean, if you’re if you have to turn stuff down because you don’t know how to do it or whatever, then you’re going to have a much harder time those first few years, because to just kind of pay the bills, you got to take everything until eventually you start figuring out what you’re really good at and what people will continue to hire you to do. And then you kind of get your your area that you the thing that you do and your special secret sauce and then you get your your career out of that.

But at first you have to take everything.

And we we saw in some cases students coming out of some of the other programs that that study that had put a lot of their energy into training students for a particular part of the industry, a particular skill set within that which meant that the students coming out of there, that was the thing they felt comfortable doing. They sort of had to turn down jobs that weren’t that. And I decided and David, I decided that we didn’t want that for our students.

So we made a conscious decision for our curriculum that we want our students to never feel like they have to turn down a job. And so in order to do that, we’re going to train them as broadly as we possibly can within this area of specialization of Sound Design Live, which means I want if they get offered a job to mix amusical, I want them to feel like they can take that job if they get offered a job to compose music for a play.

I want them to feel like they can take that job if they get offered a job to coordinate RF frequencies for.

First of all, I want them to feel like they can take that job. So I want to train them as broadly as I can within that. Now, that sounds great. And maybe people are listening, hearing it like, well, like, why doesn’t everybody do that? And there’s a reason everybody doesn’t do that because we have to give stuff up in order to do that. And what we have to give up was depth.

So if all I cared about was teaching you how to be a really great music composer for theater shows, then and if I wanted you to be the best of that in the world, then I would have to not teach you a whole lot about mixing shows and coordinating R.F. and tuning sound systems. And I would instead spend that time teaching you more about composing music. And so in order for us to deliver on this sort of broad based curriculum, we had to give up at some depth.

So some of our competitors have the ability to take their students deeper into some subjects than we have the luxury of being able to do, because we’ve made the conscious decision to diversify our curriculum. So our students, we force them to just do everything right. They our students will come out of our program having mix to show, having designed a sound system, having recorded sound effects, composed music, laid table, all of it like they do, all of it.

They could if they had to do the whole show themselves. Now, maybe not as maybe there are parts of that that wouldn’t be as good as somebody else could do for that little slice of it. But they can deliver the whole package at some level of competency. I think that’s what sets our program apart is, is that broad based training.

Kiriakou says what is his favorite digital console in terms of advanced? Q and macro commands programming for Musicales? So I years ago got my hands on a military system from which, if you know the history of that product, it used to be called LCAC, there’s this company I started it that was sort of like matrix panning kind of stuff and evolved over the years and into what it is now. And it’s it’s we’re kind of getting the vibe that maybe Myers seems to be maybe losing their interest and continuing developing that.

We’ll see. I haven’t seen the software update for a good while now, so I don’t know what they’ll what their intentions are for that product.

But what is amazing about it, it’s it’s amazing and terrible, all because, you know, both LCS and then when Meyer bought out the company and took it over, they they had the same attitude about it, is that basically they always say yes. Right.

So do one thing anywhere. Yeah.

I mean I mean, they’re trying to put these systems on big shows. I mean, these are the systems that all the big Cirque shows we’re using for a lot of years. I think they’re starting to transition out of them a little bit, but a lot of big theme park shows are doing it. Jonathan Deane’s, he was involved in the early stages of LCAC and he still uses them on his shows, on Broadway and things. And so you’ve got these big clients that are paying a lot of money and do these big shows.

And when they ask you, hey, can it do this, you’re going to say yes, right.

And so they always just say, yes, sure we can it that we can do anything you want, which is great, but also terrifying because anybody who’s ever developed any kind of tool or product knows that eventually you have to start saying no to people or the thing just get so bloated that you can’t use it doesn’t make any sense to the world and the military and the system is basically that. I mean, there’s only a handful of people in the world.

That thing makes any sense to it all. And it’s I’m one of them, apparently, like, it just made so much sense to me when I looked at him like I could do anything I want.

I could literally do anything I want.

And which means it basically does absolutely nothing. When you turn it on, it does nothing. It doesn’t even know it’s a mixer. When you turn it on, it just thinks it’s a stack of Linux computers and you have to literally tell it every single thing that you want it to do. But it always says yes. So I love it. I love it. I use it. Any chance I can get.

Yohei Zilber, what some people may know from Sound, Jim, and on your YouTube channel, which we should talk about a little bit more, let’s take an aside real quick. So, Jason, Romney has this amazing YouTube channel. I don’t know how I discovered it, but Jason, you put so many of your lessons on there and they are multiple hours long. And so if you can’t make it to Jason’s class and enroll in his school, there’s so many lessons on there about fundamentals, like just learning the decimal.

You have like this many hours, like three part series about the decimal. You have this multiple multipart series about learning to use ese for doing designs and then AutoCAD and like all this other stuff. So not really a question about that. Just want people to know that if they go to YouTube and search for Jason Romney, basically have hours and hours of audio and Sound Design Live content to learn it.

Yeah. And, you know, a lot of people sort of like really kind of look at me funny. A lot of my colleagues look at me like, really, you’re putting all of your classes on YouTube. And the reason behind that is that I read a paper years ago when I first started teaching was it was a it was a research study about sort of like how students retain information that they give in a classroom. And it was the most depressing thing I’d ever read as a teacher because it basically said the students will only remember best case scenario, 10 percent of what you say to them in class.

And one of the occupational hazards of being a professor is you sort of become enamored with the sound of your own voice and you start thinking about every word that comes out of your mouth is the most important thing that has ever been other.

And so that was devastating to me because it was like I never say anything in a class that I don’t want them to something.

So it was like this was devastating to me. And so I immediately began trying to figure out a way to fix that problem, like I have to, that this cannot stand I cannot allow this. And one of the ways the solutions I came up with was, OK, if they only remember 10 percent of what they hear in a session with me, if I can give them the opportunity to listen to it more than once, then maybe the second time they’d remember a different 10 percent and the third time they’d remember it different 10 percent, or they remember the piece that they need today.

But then maybe a year from now they need another piece. So I first I started just like recording them just with a was audio recording. I did a podcast and I would put it out on a little local Web page for my students that they could just get and look after. So when I realized that they didn’t remember something, but they have this faint memory that I said something about that at one point they can go back and listen to it and get it again, and then they don’t have to call me and then feel embarrassed.

They don’t remember it. And then slowly that evolved into doing videos and all of that. And I used to be really worried about I used to password protected and all of my students could only get to it so other people couldn’t. And then I finally got to this point realized, what am I protecting here? Like, what is what is it that I am so worried about people getting a hold of? What’s the worst thing that could happen if someone that is not one of my students gets a hold of this?

Oh, I know what it is. Ask me, what is the worst thing that can happen if it’s your own fear about about someone seeing about doing something wrong.

Right, exactly. It’s like maybe somebody think I’m wrong. But you know what? I don’t think I’m wrong. Actually, I’ve been doing this for a while now, and if I am wrong, that’s fine.

But this is the only way to learn it. I mean, I’m sorry I keep interrupting you on all these subjects, but like, this is why I write stuff and it’s terrifying. Every time I publish this podcast, I publish a video. I published an article.

And it may seem like I’m kind of confident sometimes now because I’ve been doing it for a little while. But but that’s why at the end of every one of my videos, I say, hey, if you see me doing something wrong, like let me know or if you knew, a better way to do is let me know. Like this is my learning because I’m just, you know, as engineers were so often just working by ourselves. And so you need some way to, like, speed up that learning feedback loop.

OK, sorry, continue.

So I had to get over that. It was sort of like, look, why am I so afraid of this? I mean, people are literally paying thousands of dollars to come and hear me say these things in a room with them. Why would people not want to hear these things out online? And maybe if they don’t agree with, that’s fine. I’m not doing it for them. I’m doing it for my own students. I have nothing to lose by putting this out there into the world.

The best thing that happens is maybe people discover these videos and they learn something about sound. And is that the worst thing in the world? No, absolutely not. And does that mean they won’t come study with me? No, it means they would be more likely to study with me. It’s not like I’m giving the house away. They’ll watch these videos and they’ll like them and they’ll want to come in all my program. So anyway, long story short, I record pretty much every class I ever do.

I put it on YouTube, but know that I’m not doing it for you. I’m doing it for my students. And I just put a copy of it on YouTube and you can watch it if you like it. If you don’t think that the microphone quality was good enough or that the camera angle was good enough for you, it’s I don’t I’m not going to respond to those comments because I don’t care. That’s not why I’m doing it. I’m not trying to make money off these videos.

So you take what you can get. But I think the information is good and it’s free.

So, OK, so you Zilber says, ask him about the secret Smurf ami inside of our doors.

He’ll understand.

Yeah. So this goes back so high is one of the people behind him. And we started we’ve moved our training class over to Jim a couple of years ago with my sound like programming, which is spontaneous. It’s a great tool.

And there’s but there’s also it’s a really great community of sound people who sort of like talk and exchange ideas and stuff like that. And I responded to a thread on there. This was now almost a year ago, Santorum had just released a new training game for compression. And there was a lot of people that were starting to play this game and they suddenly realized they didn’t understand compression. They were like trying to guess what the ratio is of the compression.

They had to guess what the attack was. And they start realizing, oh, wait, I don’t actually know what these things are. And so somebody started somebody posted threads like, I don’t understand this. Like, can someone explain to me what these things mean? And there were a lot of things, comments who were making a lot of which didn’t make any sense. And I had years ago had to figure out a solution to how to explain this, because I have to explain it to my students.

The compression is is a really abstract concept that is really difficult to wrap your head around. And David Smith and I who who teach together, kind of between the two of us, it came up with this way of talking about it where and this is ultimately what I shared on Sound Design Live kind of.

So excited, as is said, I like to imagine that there is a little Smurf inside the box, inside the compressor, and what in order to understand a compressor, you have to first understand the compressor is just an automatic volume knob. That’s all it is, is a compressor just rides the theater for you saw does so if you’ve got a sound that you’re constantly riding the fader up and down, up and down to control the level, you can let a compressor do that work for you.

And so to understand how the compressor works, just imagine there’s a little Smurf inside the box and the Smurf has got the hand on a fader and the Smurf is listening to the sound. And when the sound gets too loud, the Smurf turns it down and when sound gets too quiet, turns it back up. And and that’s when we’ll just do that forever inside that box. And then you can sort of take it on to sort of say, OK, well, the threshold is how you tell the Smurf when something’s too loud.

So you say if anything ever gets louder than this, turn it down. That’s your threshold. And then the ratio is all about, well, how much do you turn it down? So so once the Smurf realizes it’s too loud, if you’re ratio’s two to one, then the Smurfs will say, I’m going to turn it down by half as much as it went above the threshold. And then attack and release is all about how quickly it does it.

So it’s it’s just sort of an example that I use to explain compression to my students. But it’s a way it’s a way of understanding it that seems to really click with people like, oh, it’s just an automatic volume knob. And yeah, I can just imagine there’s this little Smurf inside the box that’s just sort of providing the fader for me. And then you can sort of say, oh, well, you can just imagine that every little piece of equipment is a little Smurf that’s doing something for you.

Like a gate is just a Smurf inside a box that’s automating a mute button for you and muting something on MAPP.

And you can sort of keep going. A dynamic queue is just several Smurfs inside of a box that are operating graphically for you. And so that’s that’s the thing. And I had me kind of write that up in a little blog post or sound that they put out. And it’s funny because I’ve been using this example with my students for years. And then one day I was over in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, at one of the many sort of souvenir trinket shops there.

And I, I found this shelf in the shop that had little Smurf figure. And please tell me that put one inside of a compressor.

No, but all the different Smurfs that we’re doing different things. They’re what I kid you not. I found a Smurf that was wearing headphones, holding a boom.

He’s doing the thing. And I was like, oh, there is he’s real. You know, I just I thought I made him up, but he’s real. There is actually a real sound person, Smurf, and I bought it and took it home. And I sits on my desk at work right now that it seems like see, it’s real.

They’re really smart. So I have a picture of that in the blog post first.

All right. Just a few short questions here to wrap us up. So what is one book that has been immensely helpful to.

OK, so this is going to sound really awful, but it is the book that I wrote back, to be sure, and I say that because when I started out teaching, I was just generally dissatisfied with a lot of the books that were out there.

In fact, there was a time when I would actually sharpey out things and some of the books that my students would buy was I mostly agree with this book, but there are a couple of pages in this book that you should not redacted because the information is wrong or really misleading or something. And after that went on at long enough, I just like, man, this is silly. And so I got I told you earlier, I partnered with a computer scientist from Wake Forest University and we wrote this book.

And basically I was trying to write a book that that I agreed with and mostly for my own purposes, I would never cared if anyone ever read it at all.

We got we received grant funding to write it. And I still have yet to make enough money selling print copies of the book to actually buy a copy of the book myself. I just have made of money. But it is it has been incredibly helpful to me because as a teacher, I was able to create all the things I needed. It was like, here’s the thing that I’ve been struggling to teach in a class. Let me now I’m going to sit down and actually figure out how to do it.

And I’ve got really smart people around. We’ve got a computer scientists and a really smart graduate student who can do anything. And and we’re going to really figure it out like Gambo for feedback.

Right. Here’s a concept I’ve struggled to teach. Let’s figure out a really great way of doing it. And I had a couple of really smart people and we would create a very clear and simple way of teaching this concept. And we put it in the book and we had the demos and now it’s like, OK, great, now it’s easy to teach. So. So, yes, my own book.

I know that. That being said, I think the the the first kind of book that really resonated with me a lot when I was first studying Sound Design Live was John Breakwaters book, which is got this really generic title, something like Sound Design Live or something like that. And John was retired by the time I got around to looking at it and he had to like send me he had to print out a copy of the book and send it to me because I found out that it existed and it was out of print and everything.

But what was so fascinating to me about it is that he covered everything like it was it was the stuff we were talking about before about this broad based training. It wasn’t just a book about the creative and artistic side of Sound Design Live. It wasn’t just a technical manual. It was sort of like everything took you through a whole process from what is a sound wave to you. How do you put together a sound system to like how do you analyze a script to what is a sound cue and how does it make sense in the context of a story?

And I really, really like that book. If you can ever get a hold of it. It doesn’t say it’s been out of print for years and years and years, but it’s lovely and quite, quite good.

Where’s the best place for people to follow your work? Probably the best place would be the YouTube page. I do have a website where I post kind of interesting projects that I’ve done here and there, but and you can look at that. But I think the thing that people are most interested in is the YouTube page, where I just put recordings of all the classes I teach.

All right, Jason. Well, thank you so much for joining me on Sound Design Live. Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

Rog and Nathan’s 5-hour Show about End-fire vs Gradient Arrays

By Nathan Lively

Subscribe on iTunes, SoundCloud, Google Play or Stitcher.

Support Sound Design Live on Patreon.

In this episode of Sound Design Live, I talk with the the creative director at Void Acoustics, Rog Mogale. We discuss building an R&D lab in China, 200 mph motorcycles to Tibet, and gradient vs end-fire subwoofer arrays.

I ask:

  • What are some of the biggest mistakes you see people making who are new to Void speakers?
  • FB
    • Kyriakos Papadopoulos 
      • Where can we find the second part of his subwoofer arraying guide?
      • And what are his thoughts on gradient configurations?  I’d like to know his subwoofer system design approach regarding the use of gradient configuration. Reasons to use, trade offs like Impact and headroom reduction, band pass behavior. And if he has a preference on gradient or end fire or a mix of them!
    • Stuball Scramble How do the aesthetics of his cabinet designs affect the acoustic designs? Does an acoustic design goal come first on a given project, or an aesthetic one, and what compliments and conflicts arise?
    • Gui Wise can you make him talk about his SuperScooper Mogale 18″?? The Idea and history behind this for this design, his thoughts about it in quite briefly!
    • Nathan Short Ask him about running his racing motorcycles at 200+ mph on the unused superhighways in the edges of Tibet near China a long time ago.
Rog Mogale

If I can’t get everyone dancing, I’ll never mix again.

Rog Mogale

Notes

  1. All music in this episode by Harper’s Jar.
  2. A Practical Guide to Bass Arrays, Arcline: Design Considerations and Practical Implications, System Planning For Dance Venues
  3. Speaker Plans
  4. Quotes
    1. I’m the only person who’s hearing actually gets better every single year.
    2. You are doing the artist a disservice if you don’t understanding what they’re doing.
    3. Music can change people. It put’s you in a place where you are able to learn and change.
    4. If you don’t know why you’re doing this and who you’re serving, just get out. Don’t do it.
    5. If the audience isn’t that big, I like to toe the line arrays in to avoid using so much fill.
    6. I’d like to see more systems distributed. Nothing should ever face back towards the DJ.
    7. I’ve tried to unlearn everything I’ve known.
    8. I’m not a lover of end-fire.
    9. I’m a gradient lover. Give me lots of bins. If you haven’t got enough bins you can do a space. Just make sure you are in 1/4 wavelength center to center and the highest frequency is 80 or 90Hz.
    10. I consider myself as an artist that has a good founding in acoustics and physics.
    11. There’s a small mod for the Super Scooper that not many people know about. If you block off the two top left and right chambers, it works better.
    12. A well modded eminence scoop with double bracing is king.
    13. That thing can rip your life apart. It can change you.
    14. It should almost be a law that you shouldn’t work in this industry unless you can play a musical instrument and have some theory in music.
    15. If I can’t get everyone dancing on the dance floor and including in the toilets, and you can check, I’ll never mix again.

Transcript

This transcript was automatically generated. Please let me know if you discover any errors.

I’m Nathan Lively, and today I’m joined by the creative director at Void Acoustics, Rog Mogale. Rog, welcome to Sound Design Live.

Good morning, Nathan, and welcome to Rog and Nathan’s show about end fire vs. gradient arrays. And we’re only going to talk five hours.

Yes. So we’re going to talk for five hours about environ versus gradient.

But before we do that, Rog, tell me about some of your favorite, maybe one of your favorite test tracks, like after you get a sound system set up, what’s one of the first things you’ll want to listen to to to kind of get a sense of it that?

Well, that really depends, because what are you playing? Who you playing to? Are you doing demos to people? So which scenario are you referring to? Because I can think of about eight different things where I would set a system up to play to people. Sure.

Let’s let’s think of a scenario. So let’s say you’re doing a Medium-Sized Club install and this is just for you. You’re there alone, right?

OK, yeah. I would play, obviously the style and genre that the club is going to play. You know, if it’s an all out dance club or techno club, then I play something that’s obviously going to reflect what will be played and nothing too good. You know, I quite like some of those kind of tracks were really screaming the vocal kind of leads and, you know, you wouldn’t normally play, but it’s what’s going to be played.

So you have to allow for that and set up accordingly. It’s very, very different. If I’m doing if I’ve just set the system up and the nightclub owner and all the staff turn up for the first time, then, yeah, I’m pulling out nice recordings and yeah, hopefully getting them all in tears, which I’ve done a couple of times. That’s good business.

Yeah. So that’s interesting. So do you do a little bit of part of your research as to kind of find out what music they’ll be playing, they’re what they’re expecting to hear. And that way when you do that first demo, you have something that that you know that they’re familiar with. Yeah, of course. Yeah.

With everything in life, you do your homework, you never, ever get caught off guard. So I need to know who who’s going in now, you know, what kind of night support and what kind of styles and. Yeah, yeah, I’ll do my homework and that’s the way you go forward with it. Is that a curiosity?

Do you ever notice do you notice any trends in the music? Like is there one artist or one track that, you know, everyone is going to be happy with or.

No, it was always going to come up when you ask people what they’re playing difficult and in a club world? Not really. I mean, I see it on forums commented that the rude sandstorm is often one that’s kind of people you know, you put up a post and go, what what would be the first track you play on that? And you often get that. It’s a fairly typical. I’ve never played it, to be honest. OK, yeah, so that’s the thing, no go, that’s actually really cool to hear that, you know, people’s tastes are fairly eclectic or like changing often enough that there’s not one thing you just always play.

Yeah, it’s not like in a demo for a live system where, you know, certain tracks and Hotel California and all the other boring stuff is going to be expected, which I won’t do, you know, come on, show me how great if you are by just playing the same track as everyone else.

OK, so yeah, I know that everyone’s a reference and we all want to hear something we think we know. But now there’s there’s other options.

So how did you get your first job in audio. Like what was one of your first paying gigs.

So do you want the short answer here, which is kind of like two minutes, or do you want the life history until that point?

I don’t want the whole life history. I’m sort of curious, like that moment when you were young or whenever it happened and audio was interesting. But then also you got money for it. Like, I feel like that’s that’s a special time. Like the first time you actually pay money for your first record, you know, that’s like you’re really taking agency of a thing.

So, yeah. So I’m kind of interested in that that moment in your life, what happened there and how did it turn into a job for the first time? I’m not sure I’ve even been ever paid for anything yet.

It’s OK, know, I mean, obviously it was always in me music.

I mean, it’s not something you choose. I’m against people that, you know, choose to being something it chooses you. It’s. Yeah, you just got to be there for it. And if you’re open enough and it will come and it will find you and it will use you and it will give you a good time and all the tools you need to do it.

So yeah. So first got into a very young age.

I didn’t hear very well as a kid at school. I was the kid at the front of the class with the big headphones and the things swung around my neck. So really I kind of always wanted to make everything louder, I suppose.

Sure, sure. Glorified from that.

Really. So yeah, hearing got better after about 10 or 11 and I kind of could start to speak a bit then as well, which was handy.

And actually my hearing gets better every year. I have it tested every year and I’m the only person that’s hearing actually gets better every single year my age. There should be nothing over like ten K and there’s just loads.

So you’re going to live forever.

Yeah, well my is well it’s just been like a purple kind of cushion in a class somewhere. So yeah. The first time I really kind of did it for real I suppose was I did like being at school in the late seventies just before I left school. And then in the last year of that I was doing a bit of sound as well. The guy who did send a sixth form a left. So I was doing the kind of sound and the lighting for the stage in the school.

I was and it wasn’t wasn’t a very big place.

And yeah, it just kind of felt right. Making noise felt better than kind of illuminating things anyway, you know, it just felt good. So I left school and I got a job on a building site doing civil engineering and I started going to university for to learn civil engineering did that for two years.

And yeah, I really just knew that wasn’t wasn’t my path. It was just, you know, you get that got is systemic out there. And if there is and I don’t do it or find it, I’m I don’t regret this. And I got to that point. And when I get to that point, I just walk away. So I just walked away from it and I didn’t look back. It wasn’t what I’m used for.

So so. Yeah, but in the evenings and weekends, I was kind of doing a few kind of discos. A friend of mine had like a really bad disco and I thought, yeah, I’m going to build some speakers. And just because I wanted to and I could and I just thought, yeah, be a cool thing to do. So I think it was some of the ones from the early feygin catalog, maybe the 115, you know, W bin and the Y Ben and things like this.

And although actually even even in the early 80s, in my last year at school, I was in woodwork building speakers as well at that early. Yeah, I really wanted to I mean, two years old, my mother got pictures of me, you know, with like cardboard boxes of first drawn on them.

OK, it’s a string. It is even like free Amazon amplifiers. It’s getting that technical even like two, three years old.

So. Any evenings was doing this disco with my friend and yeah, it just was good, and then some kind of bands, friends of mine said, wow, yeah, yeah, yeah, we’ve got a gig coming up, like a pub or small club. Would you like to do the sound? And I’m like, Yeah, why not? So I started doing that. I got a small mixer, 12 channel mix and multicore some mix and stands and yeah that’s that was I supposed.

Yes, that was mid mid eighties and that was the first paid thing I did really. The discos and the live work with, with the system I built.

Sure. So that was your first, like sort of commercial opportunity. I’ll make speakers for my friend who’s building this disco or this manager.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Actually I would it wasn’t his I supplied it to him. It, it was.

Yeah I you had a rental company from 1985 onwards. It was called Sound Facilities and.

Yeah. So that’s just it kind of took off a bit and after about two or three years stop doing the discos. Just, just didn’t, just wasn’t really into I was really kind of into the live things and doing a small few festival stages outside and doing lots of kind of Pumbaa work and no nightclubs at this time. And yeah, it just took off.

And then I did a couple of bands that were kind of break in at the time and that was useful because, you know, a lot of, you know, and a lot of music industry people would turn up at concerts and gigs.

And you’re using your systems. Yes. Yeah. By then I actually designed my, my, my. The first time frame for city system there is blue with yellow writing. There’s some pictures of I can send you pictures of speech on the web.

Sure. Yeah. I kind of started to I suppose, get noticed.

Yes. Guys not doing too bad and mix. So a couple of companies in Bristol and which actually remember the name of it all. My memory is really bad. Said Would you like to come and do a bit of freelance mixing, you know, for some bigger shows than that? And I said, yeah, I’d kind of love to. So I went over and kind of took took a while, you know, some days and afternoons to learn the desks and all the board and stuff like that, because it was quite, quite a step up from what I was using.

And yeah. Really got into it and went and did did loads and loads of shows then then then did some work in London. This must have been from about eighty seven, eighty, eighty nine around that time I was in London and yeah it just took off then I was just getting work from, you know, loads of big bands and loads of big artists and then went over to the States and did some bits in the early nineties.

Yeah. I’ve just been really lucky. I’ve worked with many, many people in the industry, but I’ve worked with people that I really respected.

I’ve never you know, you do people are this justice if you don’t like or don’t understand what they’re about. I have one of the biggest, biggest artist in 87. His management rang me up. He was American guy.

I can’t say I work. I say.

But he, you know, top two, three performers ever that that big it wasn’t Michael Jackson, but it was under that, but not it was close in scale of things. And he he just rings up. It was all telephones in those days, no mobiles. And my ceramic thing with the van Dila. I’ve heard of it. Yeah. Yeah. Picked out. You picked it up and he’s.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We’ve had some of your work and you come highly recommended. We’ve got a UK tour and starting off at Wembley or somewhere and would you, would you like to do the house for this. And I said well to be honest I just don’t really like the artist. I called him by now. I know. I just don’t really like him. I just don’t I just don’t do it. And sorry, put the phone down.

But because, you know, he deserved and everyone deserves to have the best they can.

And, you know, it really needed someone that wanted that gig so badly that would have died for it. And just then the ultimate mix and it would have just been work for me. And sure, it’s not enough.

It’s a disservice to the artist. So so I’ve turned down lots of work where I could have done it would have been an easy gig. But it’s I’m not connecting with I’m not doing them justice. So, yeah, I work that well and everything.

No, it’s great that he’s there. I mean, we like to sometimes get a little arrogant and think that we’re the best at everything and really we’re only the, you know, good at a small number of things. And we should really focus on those things. And those include, you know, working on the music that we really love. We’re not going to be the best at working on music that we don’t care for.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I see a lot of it and especially recently creep in the industry. And it’s where, you know, people have really forgotten why we do stand and why we do lifesize and. We do clubs or whatever, and we do it for people’s enjoyment and we do it to make a difference. I say the music can change people. You don’t listen to an album become a different person. You don’t go to a concert and become a different person.

But what it does do is it puts you in a place where you’re able to learn and change. So it indirectly does change you. And I’m all for that. I’m just here to use what I’ve been given to give people a good time and just turn them on and make it as best enjoyable experience as I can. And, you know, that’s the reason people work as medics or paramedics or doctors or firemen. You know, they’re there for the people.

But occasionally in the industry, you just see people who are doing it for them. They’re walking around. They’re kind of it’s all ego. And it’s just like just just get out right now and just stop doing that. It’s just not right. If you don’t know why you’re doing this and who wear here and who we are serving, just don’t get why it’s such a big injustice. So I see that creeping in a bit where it’s know this superstar MCS, engineers and things, you know, and it’s like, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, don’t go that way.

So speaking of who you’re serving, why do you think you ended up here talking to me today and working as a civil engineer? Is it just because you hated it so much that you were kind of looking for anything else?

Or was there a moment where you were like, OK, I need to make a decision for whether or not I’m going to be happy for the rest of my life or whatever? Can you think of how did that how did that turn out? When was that moment? Yeah, that yeah.

And it was well it was it was the, you know, being two years in the unit doing the civil engineering kind of degree and being out on the building sites. It was the second winter that hit me hard. It really did.

And it never felt right. It just didn’t feel like the thing. It was the thing kind of I wanted to do, but it wasn’t the thing I should have been done and it really was.

And so, yeah, after two years, I’d just had enough. And I was like I say, in the evenings doing systems and doing a few live events and discos and things, and that made more difference.

I could really see what how that could affect people and the difference and the change that could bring. So it was just one day a lesson, as I said that before I came to that regrette point, you know, if I on going to regret so I might. Bristo accent comes out every now and again.

It took me years to try and hide it, but it just does come out occasionally. Yeah. SAT in the classroom and. Yeah. Am I going to regret not just sitting here for the rest of my life and just been on building sites and you know, I mean where there’s this other side that I can do and I just so want to do it, but I don’t really know how. But so I just walked out, I walked halfway through the lesson and I just quit my job and I said, I just have to have to make this, you know, I have to make something out of audio and I have to make a name and I have to give with it and change things.

So that that’s that was the point. The real point. It was just really walking out of a lecture and just just no more of this. No, it’s not. I suppose I was lucky. I had a feeling it wasn’t right. You know, you are told the way to go if you’re open and receptive. And it just took, you know, for me to get that out of my life, which would probably 18 or 19 to actually say no more.

No, this is not right. I’ve got to do something else. So I did. And yeah, I’m lucky I did. It’s been brilliant, however.

Right. So I want to know, what are some of the biggest or most common mistakes you see people making who are new to avoid speakers, and I’m really just using the word void because, you know, that’s what you’re associated with now. But you’ve been working on systems and helping people with systems for a long time. And so you get a lot of support calls. You’re helping people with their designs. You’re going to see their installations and saying, oh, you did this, this and this.

And this could be a better way to do that. So I’m I’m just curious if there are any trends that you’ve seen over your years of working on systems that you that people just consistently do or like the kind of questions that you that you get all the time?

OK, so I can split that into, obviously, because we do talking products as well into touring and into life. Obviously, you have to have to be careful here not to upset everyone or that everyone.

I don’t care, to be honest. It’s it’s a really, really good crew of people that use our products. We’re not as careful as some some other companies that really vet who uses their product and literally tells them what time to get up and what toilet roll to use. We just don’t sit on people that that much because, you know, if you haven’t got that much trust or someone don’t use them, you know, there’s got to be able to get out there and just do a good job.

And luckily, you know, we have that. So I don’t really see many mistakes. And if there are that be pulled up by other people, we have two or three forums for power users. And, you know, people put up what they’ve been working on and people just, you know, come up with suggestions and things like one thing life wise I see often done and I can’t say it’s wrong, but I would do it differently is OK.

So if you’ve got a very, very wide audience outside festival, this isn’t really practical.

But if the audience isn’t that big, I quite like to toe the line or raising quite a bit to avoid using so much fail. I see people use hell of a lot of fill on top of the front from base tax, you know, side Phil’s pointing at the audience. It’s just too too many sources from, you know, arriving at different times for me. I like to keep things really simple.

If you can just do two hangs, a one in the middle, you know, and then if that means you’ve got to have a bit of extra help and, you know, then do that. So that’s that’s one thing that that a lot of people kind of like I say, you don’t get it wrong because if you’ve got a really wide audience, then I understand you’ve got to hang flat going outwards to cover it also with clubs.

Yeah, this is quite a controversial one. I mean, I massively trust the people who who who do are clubs and write them off and help set them up. Know from Germany, Nathan Shaw and the US and many others around the world, tokie Japan. So, you know, I really trust them. And I’m in such a lucky position because I don’t need to go out anymore and write clubs off or check things or set things up. You know, they have as good an air as I do and that’s probably better in some cases.

So yeah, I can totally trust them. I’d like to see more systems done distributed. I, I’m not a lover of four stacks when when you have especially mid tops, nothing should ever, ever face back to the dB. It’s the same as doing an outside festival, getting all the delay stacks and turn them towards the stage. You would not do that, but it’s done in clubs and yeah, I hate it.

I really do. I like running mid tops.

You find the zero point, you know, the front of the stage and you run everything, you delay everything back, you calculate it first and then you find tune by just just for the feeling really. And I find it really it gives the deejay a lot easier job and it really kind of brings everyone closer to the front and it brings everyone the same experience because they’re all kind of here and the same thing from from the same point.

So it’s interesting. You have a point of focus and some sort of a sonic image instead of it just coming from all around you.

Yes. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, I know that’s done.

And there are some very famous ones that people have done quite recently, but they were very long flops. So the real rare delays and if they’re told in enough, you know, they’re probably not going to be heard at the front of of, you know, at the front of the club. But other than that, if it’s a square club, I just wanted to I really just advise everyone to go stupid and all the clubs. I’ve actually done myself like shock.

Thirty nine in Bangkok. We’ve done distributed systems. And to me it just makes the whole place just party about. More and a bit more united, it just really brings everyone together, I guess, tell me what you mean by that, because to me, just distributed just means more speakers. But in this case, we were talking about how they’re aimed. And so you’re using more speakers to to fill the space. But instead of them being around the room kind of pointed in towards some center point, they’re still all using the stage or the dB as their sonic image and then pointed away from that.

Yeah, totally.

This is exactly the same as you do in a live concert with Stacks. It’s just that you’re doing this in a room and you’re just delaying as you as you go back. Normally, you wouldn’t need to do this if you can get a big enough array along the, you know, under or in or around the deejay console, then, you know, the set will go all the way. So you really just fill in the middle top as it goes back.

That’s that’s what you’re doing.

But, yeah, I don’t know why people more people don’t do it, because it’s really just. Yeah, I really like being in clubs.

It gives a focal point, you know, if not if you’ve got kind of sand behind you into the side of you, you’re a bit where’s it coming from?

You know, so well, you’ve done all these great projects, have these beautiful speakers. And I thought maybe to sort of give a more well rounded story about you in the short time that we have together, you could talk about maybe one of the biggest and most painful mistakes that you’ve made on the job and how you recovered. Oh, yeah.

I don’t I don’t personally tend to make many mistakes. I know. That’s like, wow. But, you know, I go and prepared and I do my homework on everything because the performer, the deejay, the artist who is the band, whoever’s going to be on that stage, you know, it’s their moment and they’ve put everything into it. So I’m not going to leave anything unturned. So I’m going to do everything in my power to make my bet right.

And I don’t want to lose face. So normally not many problems. One big problem I had that was out of my control and this didn’t go well was I was doing a culture clash in London, I think must have been about twenty thousand people. Twenty two thousand people. We had Floyd Klein twelve, which is we no longer make that product has been superseded by our Klein and we did the Sanjak. And I thought this is probably a bit underpowered.

We had probably fourteen or sixteen aside and an additional hangs from the balconies. And I thought it’s probably a bit underpowered, but we’re quite aware of it. It’s enough, it’ll be OK. And we are below to perform all the same checks. You know, had nine vocal mikes, Ramses on the opening act. So this is quite a difficult, you know, shape to mix anyway. So what I find out later is that the amps for the mid tops haven’t been linked there, only one on one channel.

So you’ve got the top cap, then the second, the third one down, then the fifth one down. Every other cap wasn’t wasn’t working.

And then someone because I wouldn’t normally go and check that. You just normally assume that that’s been done and that’s that’s how it is.

So the system came on and it must have been about plus twenty five dB from about 250 hertz up and everything, just fed back at like one hundred fifty two hundred.

And when does that happen at me during the show it came back on. Well no this was the first number because I was now you know, I’d done all the RTA and done everything on the system with half the work. And I now had a full system, all the cabs working the first that comes on. And that’s just it’s just I haven’t just mixed up the whole thing in seconds with nine emcees and another. Yeah.

So, yeah, that was and it was televised.

Yes. I was just looking at me and go and what the hell’s going on.

And I’m like I’m just dying. I really. Well how did you come back. What. You just remix it. You just grabbed some controls and sucked, you know, put some bypasses on you just get on with it. And luckily after the first number, it was it was almost back to where it was. But again, that was out of my control. So it’s but that was a difficult one. Yeah. Yeah.

Some of my competitors were stood next to me as well because they had some of the bands to me. I really lost face that day.

What was there was another bit to it as well.

But we know that was pretty much it kind of how you recovered. Like I’m also curious, like what happened afterwards. Like did you.

Did you. Obviously, you didn’t lose all your work and never worked again like you had conversations and there were probably producers or even promoters who are like, what happened? And then what did you say to them?

Well, they just had the technical and yeah, it just went wrong. And I’m really sorry, you know, and. Yeah, yeah. But as you can tell, you know, from from four or five minutes in, everything was fine. So it was just, just, you know, and the show went really well. Everyone loved it. And I got back to the next one.

OK. So it was.

Yeah it was. Yeah. But there’s a few. Yeah. YouTube videos of it and you can see how bad it is.

All right. Well I have a handful of questions here that were sent in from Facebook and some of them are pretty broad in general. So we can kind of see how well we can do with them. So. So we’ll give it a shot. So Kyriakos knows that I never pronounce his name right. Sorry about that. Where can we find the second part of his subwoofer, Irangate more?

Well, as you probably read or probably this morning before you got up, you didn’t have much time, Nathan. I did. The first base array, the practical guide to base raising phase in an eight. And at the time, there really wasn’t anything kind of like it. There was nothing that showed you, you know, how the response is going to look.

So, you know, also, we we had some big shows coming up as well, which is why the the the area the I think it’s 50 meters by 25 or something or 30 meters is actually the area of the concert hall we had booked. So I just did lots of simulations just to see what was actually going to work the best at some concerts that I knew we had coming up. And so but then I just for a while I’ll just share this, because there’s nothing there’s nothing like this.

There’s nothing out there. So it was early.

Some of the some of the bits got taken up quite seriously.

The Martin Audio MLA system from 2009 onwards for about five or six years, used the Delta, Delta Arae, the I, the I outlined in The Practical Guide and the Tuesday at Glastonbury every year.

And it worked well.

It did work well.

It’s it’s so I’m I’m a fan of more gradient. Definitely. I know that’s a question for sure.

Yes, that’s cool. And and I that was definitely one of my texts that I read it a long time ago when I didn’t understand any of it. But I do remember the Delta and I was like, oh, this is interesting. So for people who don’t know and haven’t read the guide from thousand eight, would you mind just describing the Delta array and and and what you feel like it’s practiced best practical purposes.

OK, so it’s quite a lot like what you would call now like inverted CSA. So it’s to Cabinet’s forward. So how you’re doing and you stand him up, right.

You do, you do two forward, one back to forward one back. And the rare one obviously is fais adjusted and has a delay. So it’s very much like but with the Delta Arae you actually physically move the bass, been the rearward facing bass cabinet, you actually physically move it.

So this is different than an inverted gradient stack that people might be familiar with.

Actually, what you’re doing is you’re creating a bigger surface area and so you’ve got a bit more directionality. That’s actually what it’s doing.

So, yeah, but it kind of if you’ve got a long enough array, it kind of works just having it flat. There is not much point and staggering.

You know, the redwood facing. What does it do.

It just puts more at the front and gets rid of any lobes. If you if you’re doing a left and right stack, obviously you can have a massive power power rally in the middle, which, you know, 500 people really got off on and everyone else is kind of where’s the bass? So it gets rid of that on stage.

Levels are going to be a lot quieter, you know, so for low end. So, yeah, it’s why not. And also it couples cabinet actually makes more use of what you have. You haven’t got things fighting each other or you know, everything is working as one. So you’ve got a game now which is always worth having. But to the original question, where is part two? Part two never really happened because it was going to be about horns and things like that.

And then I looked into it and it’s just so complex, you know, like, you know, to MAPP horns. It’s so easy. To just have a reflex, it’s so predictable, it’s you know, you can get the fun of it, you just know what’s what it’s going to do. But homes are just really quite unpredictable. And especially in multiples, things start changing with larger homes. And so it’s very, very difficult to predict.

And I really kind of gave up.

But what did happen is part two came out well, it wasn’t part two. It was a kind of side kick off from it. In 2010, I wrote System Tips for dance venues, which I think is also on the Net and the PDF that went into more elaborate, more elaborate Khalaji and false tax systems to stack either side of the dance floor circular with a circular D.J.. So of all the subs facing outwards, which actually proved to be the best.

So yeah, that that was it.

But it didn’t go into homes, but it did elaborate on on the joy of part one. So part two is. Yeah, the system tips for dance venues.

Cool. So Quercus also wants you to talk about gradient configurations. And I tried to get him to be a little bit more specific about exactly what he wants to know. And I said, well, what do you want to know about it and what specific questions? And he said, I’d like to know his suboffices design approach regarding the use of Khadir configuration reasons to use trade offs like impact and head room reduction, bad past behavior, and if he has a preference on gradient, in fire or a mix of them.

So we don’t really have time to do like a whole like three hour course and answering all these questions, which I’m sure you have a lot of insight into. So how can we how can we talk about this question? What do you think Cariocas wants to know from you about gradient arrays?

I really have to start off by saying that really you’re talking to the wrong guy about it, because I’ve over the years, I’ve I’ve become more like a kind of jazz musician where I’ve kind of tried to unlearn everything I’ve known because there’s so constrictive. And, you know, they set you in a very, very defined way. And I’ve kind of tried to go more free form because all my work has become design as the companies become bigger. We have, you know, support staff and we have staff to do, you know, help with installs, layouts and festival system planning.

We have this. So I don’t really get to do that anymore. So I used to, but that was probably 10 years ago, so that I’ve not really been in the field. And yeah, I go to concerts, I mix things, but I don’t really plan the systems and I certainly don’t sit there for weeks on end just just running simulations anymore. If I’ve got the time to do that, I should be designing because you can get a lot of people to say a computer and do predictions, you know, but you can get very, very few people to do what I do.

And so that’s another thing I’ve realised my time is valuable and you just capitalize on what you’re good at. You just don’t sit there running simulations or analysis, because are the people that can do that actually quite like it? I don’t particularly like it. I really like designing stuff. And so that’s that’s where I’m at. I’m not a lover of fire. It’s I.

Space, I don’t know, we don’t get to do, you know, massive, massive stadiums and so we don’t you know, we can be doing three or four stages at Notting Hill Carnival, which has two million people over the weekend. But because there’s so many systems, it’s quite small and there’s just not room for fire.

There really just isn’t not enough real estate. No, no. I’ve looked into it and I’ve looked at people have had problems of blobbing and it doesn’t look the cleanest kind of at the front. And I’m really just a lover of just, you know, bins as wide as the audience everyone’s in. You know, if you need it a bit wider, you can start to put delays on the ends. Yep. Reverse, you know, in a gradient fashion or a CSA and invert so that you you get, you know, on stage noise levels.

And that works for me. That really, really works. And I don’t really think you can take that any further. Some of the void rental partners have been doing, like what they call Delta arrays now, which are kind of big, huge Vee’s. And to me, it doesn’t really matter because you can really make the frequencies for so long. You know, you can make any MAPP of cabinets in any kind of shape, some somewhere and go that direction.

So but I just yeah, I’m a great lover and just give me lots of beans. And if you haven’t got enough then you can space. You can you can, you can do a space. Just just make sure you know you’re on quarter wavelengths into the center and yeah. The highest frequency you say your 90 hertz and yeah. That, that for me works. Yeah.

I want to move on but I feel like for people there are probably people who are listening who may have not heard this rule before of the limit of spacing quarter wavelength. So could you just explain that a little bit? What is the highest frequency operating range I should be looking at to calculate this? And then how do I do that?

OK, I mean, ideally and this this also applies for when you’re designing a line or a cabinet, you’re trying for obviously a center to center spacing of quarter wavelength.

But that, especially with H.F., is just very, very difficult to get.

And I’m some mid-range as well. So, you know, a half a half wavelength is in my ear, still sounds OK. And actually lower frequencies of wavelengths are still OK. I don’t mind a wavelength if push comes to shove. I you know, so you’re talking quite a distance then from if you take 100000 below one hundred and ten below, you know, you can you don’t you need to you fill everything up along the whole front. So yeah.

I’m not too much of a stickler on this quarter wavelength. It’s, it helps but it’s, it’s impractical.

OK, so you’re saying people should do whatever they need to to get the line length that they need for the coverage that they need. Yes.

Yeah, well, like going over one wavelength spacing and that’s not edge to edge. That is actually drive a center of drive at the center of drive. But ACTC, that’s not as your cabinet build this thing. I put the cabinets two minutes apart. But no, that’s so it’s a bit closer than we think, but well, depending on cabinet, if it’s a home then you assume, you know, and the full frontal, you know, area is the radiation area of the home that you can assume that it is to the edge, OK?

So there was a time in my life when I was living in Portugal and I was working at the National Theatre and my predecessor or a guy, a colleague who used to work for the National Theatre before I got there, eventually left and became a distributor for void acoustics in Portugal in the Lisbon area. And that was my first introduction to them. So he really liked them. And I think he he told us about them when he came by the theater one day to help us, like, install some new antenna cables or something like that.

And he may have given us some marketing materials, but I remember the first time seeing those and it really dawned on me that my entire life I sort of understood that people wish that speakers could be invisible and that’s why they’re sort of black.

And then they ended up they end up getting put into all sort of weird places because people don’t want to see them, at least in terms of most things that aren’t just concert, whereas just focused on the audio, but you still have to see the performers. So so it was it was eye opening for me to see this brand where they seem to go the opposite direction and they seem to say, hey, we’re not going to make our speakers invisible, we’re going to do the opposite.

We’re going to make them visible. They’re going to be so beautiful that you’re going to want to see them and you’re going to want to put them where everyone can see them. Now, they’re like part of the show. And I’m just saying all this story as a preamble to stubbles question, which is how do the aesthetics of his cabinet designs affect the acoustic designs? Does an acoustic design goal come first on a given project or an aesthetic one? And what components in conflicts arise?

OK, so, yeah, you’ve just highlighted why, you know, I went with things that weren’t just black boxes because it was quite evident in the late 90s when I first set up the successor to Void Acoustics, which we called big mouth speaker systems. And I was lucky to get some some work in the Caribbean, in Antigua and also around around England as well. And that was sort of a series called Static. It was all kind of wooden and it was bare wood and very, very difficult to make.

So, yeah, it just became really apparent the even lighting in clubs were looking kind of nice and artistic and kind of had some kind of sculpture. But then clubs were just spending millions on décor and it was just plush and it was looking really, really good. And then there was just really horrible black. Conover’s always in the corner, like trying to be hidden because it didn’t look good or it didn’t couldn’t make a statement. It should just be hidden.

So I thought, well, yeah, this just make something that looks nice and beautiful. And so, I mean, I don’t consider myself as a speaker designer. I consider myself as an artist who just as a really good finding in acoustics and physics, I’m you know, I come at it that way. We have far more to do with, like, how a top car manufacturer, you know, comes up with molds and, you know, for cars and things like that than we do traditional speaker companies.

You know, it’s so easy to get to the question.

There’s there’s two ways to do this. There’s either I come up with something just wacky, like in my head, and I have to then make it make a sound. Or the second way is I get a brief and.

There’s a second part to the brief MAPP, and that is the you want something to work so correctly that there is only one form it can actually take to do that. So that was Incubus. That was there was no brief. The brief was make everything couple, you know, and make everything completely.

One in that cabinet and that made top section make the twelve’s the French compression drive is the one or just some or become one or be within half wavelength and just, you know, and then have a bit of control over that with power shading and things like that. So that the form of that came because that to me was physically the only way all those transducers and horns could actually be mounted and set to accomplish that.

So that so Incubus wasn’t oh, let me come up with something that looks really, really groovy and then just try and make a sign that that was more like our motion. Our motion was just let me make something really, really nice. And now I’ve got to kind of worry about getting a good sound from it. But because it is or comical, Holmes is quite an easy thing to achieve. Try motion was another one that was. Yeah. You know, I just want to make a speaker that looks like that.

So so you draw it first, then you start running the simulations and then adjust things. And so but try emotion was difficult that, that, that.

Yeah. To get it to get a good sound out of that was very, very difficult. That’s, that’s not an easy thing to do. But actually it turned out because the, the horns were triangle the had a symmetrical vertical dispersion. So there’s less actually going at the top from the bottom. So you get less in shlubs, you get less cieling reflexion. So actually it kind of I didn’t actually even think about that at the time, but that was like a side effect.

That’s very useful. So, yeah, two ways. You know, the other thing is I get a brief and it’s OK. The Cabinet has to be this weight this size because it has to go in a truck. It has to have this I put this frequency response and things like that. And so then you really are. Yeah. You’re working to a spec. You’re working to a brief. A brief. And I can do that. I don’t mind doing that, but I do just like making weird shapes, make a good sound that there’s something about that.

But it’s not. I mean you could literally give me a piece of glass and it can make it can make a sound. I can make anything make a sound.

It’s not the problem.

Guillaume’s says. Can you make him talk about his super scooper Mogale 18 inch? And I said, what do you want him to say about it? And he said, the idea in history behind it.

And I said, OK, well, that’s going back to my old DIY days.

OK, when is that from?

So that was this was one of the earlier models that you that you designed and built. Yeah. Yeah. Are you aware of my speaker plans history. Oh, my God. Oh, you haven’t learned to speak of plans, just like the greatest forum in the whole universe. Oh, OK.

Well, no, it’s a DIY community and I started it in 2003, I think.

OK, so just just after I started avoid acoustics, which are.

Yeah, that’s a conflict of interest. But on one hand you come of trying to sell speakers for quite a bit of money and say that the best say this is proprietary information.

Yeah, yeah.

But I mean, a lot of that was the thing, you know, I helped and I still help out. You know, if people ask me questions, I’m now for it. I’m not like most designers that just hide it. Everything to them is a secret because, you know, you’re arming other people. And I really don’t kind of mind. It’s we you know, we’re all in this together.

So speak of plans. Yeah. Like I say, it’s the best kind of forum ever. So 2003 that started and yeah. That was yeah.

It was good.

And it still is good really, because it has people who come on and you know, you’re really encouraged to come up with your own designs and use base box pro or when, when, when ESD or nonresponse, things like that and just come up with your own thing.

You know, we really, really against copying and people coming on and kind of what and plans the things it’s like now just work out for yourself, for yourself. So I’m glad the forum is kept that and still is still keeps going that way. So yeah, I will talk about the super scoop. I’m not avoiding it.

So I started the forum because it really is a UK kind of answer to the US stuff that was going on. And that was pro sound news, was it. I think the forum there or live. Yeah.

Somewhere might have even been called Pro and live. Back then there was another one. There was the high efficiency speaker forum and it was just people like me and Bill.

What is this, the one that I like? I had Bill for Fritz IEMs. I don’t know.

I’m sorry, but crap memory. I remember Tom Dowling was on it as well, and there were a few when Barnham and there was, you know, Freddy and Jake, there was quite a few of us. And yeah, we kind of really started that whole DIY movement. This was this was 98, 99. We were on these forums. You know, a lot of it was on kind of old tripod kind of forum sites and just really, really Windows 95.

I think my machine was Batman, but it kind of worked.

And we started talking and yeah, we it was brilliant.

So I really wanted to they were all us sites and I really wanted to kind of the same thing, but but more kind of UK based and more European based. So that’s why I started Speaker plans and then it just.

I actually the more famous one with the 1850 hon, and I’m sure I did that before I started with acoustics, and I think Super Scooper is while the super scooper came out before voit acoustics as well. So they would have been about to phase in 2001. Yeah, I just wanted to do some designs that people could use for like free parties and just just for fun, really, and make a bit of a difference.

It was nothing really too serious. Yeah. I just that’s why I did it. It’s yeah.

It’s kind of in a way come back to bite me because yeah, I am in direct conflict, you know, it’s a conflict of interest trying to sell speakers and also having plans out there that stop people from buying.

But but to be honest, the people that are going to DIY built by and build are never going to buy. So you’ve not really lost a customer. And I think what I have done is I do get quite a bit of respect by people saying, wow, you know, you’re one of the only designers that will actually talk to people and actually will help and come back with a reply. And I think, you know, that that puts me in a bit of a stand on other people, really, because I do that to be a super scooper was just for dub and reggae.

Sound systems are used 1850 Mach one driver. And yeah, you need quite a few of them because it was it was a hyperbolic flare. So you need quite a few to build up quite a bit MAPP really. And yeah.

Well then we released a driver void release, a driver called the VAT 1000, which actually worked really, really well in it. And I had designed the super scoop before the driver came out. So I didn’t that was a pure fluke that we came out of a driver that just seemed to be the one that worked the best.

Eneko But but yeah. So there’s a mod. There’s a small mod you can do that not many people know about or anyone, and that is with some drivers. And you’re going to have to send this because, you know, I’m out of the loop with DIY, to be honest, bezoar 20 years ago now. So I don’t really know that there’s people that are still doing DIY every day and they’re in a much better position to advise what’s good people come to you and go, what’s the best DIY thing?

I might just go to a forum because you know that they really are aware of what’s happening and right at the forefront of it all.

And I’m not because I’m concentrating on the commercial side. So I forgot what I was going with that one.

But now the mind is completely different from other modes.

Yeah, the mods and the rockers and everything else.

So yeah, the front chamber is a bit too big. It’s a bit too big.

If you can put two bits of angled woods would at the if you can from the front the cabinet, you take the driver at the top, you need to block off in the rear chamber behind the driver. If you block off the two top left and right chambers, then it actually it works better with certain drivers to have a lot smaller front chamber. So, yeah, that one about a year after I designed it, but I never kind of put the mods, but I think a few people had worked it out well.

But yeah, it’s OK.

I really wanted something there. And also it was kind of slightly ego kind of thing as well. It’s nice to have a Ben that you’ve designed, you know, a lot of, you know, DIY and design sound systems and sound systems are, you know, around the world. And it’s just nice. The well one that they’re doing and given so much with the performance isn’t to just on an egotistical side. It’s just really nice to be part of that.

And, you know, if they’re going to build some, I just don’t think some crap, really. So I just just decided to put something out there, just kind of stop at least some real rubbish being built. But I really did want to compete with the Éminence design. There’s a single eighteen éminence, and if you do a few monsta that by putting in corner deflectors, it actually, I have to say still is better than the super scooper, the super super probably slightly under it, but yeah, a well molded eminent scoop of double racing is is can go on.

I don’t love that Gloria. I wanted to but I don’t.

OK, so Nathan Short says ask him about running his racing motorcycles at two hundred plus miles per hour and the new superhighways and the edges of Tibet near China a long time ago. Apparently, you ride motorcycles and you took one out to some superhighways.

And what’s the story here about such a Nathan thing, isn’t it, to kind of glorify that?

Not just brilliant. Yeah, yeah. Actually, I was just going to a shop on a fifty sixty moped, you know, get a packet of facts and turn grandma spooky superhighways, you know, so.

Yes, I think it’s quite well known that I really, really love and dB motorcycles, I have a car, but it really is just to get to the shops when I can’t carry some kind of backpack. It’s yeah, I’ve only got four motorcycles at the moment. Certainly as quite, quite bad. Yeah. One of them’s a beast. It’s twelve ninety. Well three hundred and one skateboard v twin that weighs under 200 kilos. So that’s, that’s the same power to say how excited I am.

Not because that’s the same power to weight is like two Ferraris or two.

That’s nine hundred and six. What are you doing with that thing. A lot need.

Yeah. It’s got traction control. Speed is done. Yep. Just going for rides. I just love it. It’s just that thing can just rip your life apart. Yeah. I can change you. It’s good. So I love bikes. Yeah. The other thing you probably don’t know is that I moved from the UK to mainland China in 2002. Just after it opened, I started doing the R&D in England and I just could see this was just going nowhere because, you know, you go and see people.

Can you can you make this work? Can you make this better word? And you just get that kind of beard scratching. You don’t know what’s going to cost. Like, well, to know if I can fit under. And it just it was just so bloody hard work and everyone was just giving me such a hard time.

And I really like to work quick and just just just jump on it and just get something out quick because you’re in the moment. Same with writing music as well. Yeah. You know, two year long album writing is just not good. It doesn’t work. So I was, you know, and I’d had enough of England. I really had I just knew every day where I was going to go, who was going to see what I was going to say, where I was going to eat.

You know, I’m a firm believer in, you know, is if if you don’t wake up every day and you don’t get a kind of wow.

You know, you look you look at something, you just you got to have a wow every day and at least two, three times, you’ve got to be shocked. You’ve got to really have a wall.

You know, if you tell and England for me, we’re starting to get like that, just just get away straightaway. Just move. It’s not it’s not your place. And it’s took me all my all my life to find my place and where I feel at home. And that is Gran Canaria. It’s it’s it’s it’s the people that make anywhere.

And they’re just brilliant. They we have manners here. If you go across the street anywhere in my town, all the cars will stop for you anyway.

Well, we still have MAPP. It’s, you know, that’s different. So, yeah. So I was looking for to get out of England because it really just didn’t like it. I needed that change. So I went to a trade show to do some soul searching for some component just to see, you know, bar handles or just what was in China. There wasn’t really very, very much back in the early 2000s. And I went to a trade show in Shanghai for fourteen days and I ended up staying for 14 years.

So it was quite a yeah, it is quite aware of one because I went back and seen some factories and they just just just get on with it.

Everyone just get some of it. And if you just want something done quickly, you just just chuck a few more people in it and everyone’s so eager to learn where they were then they’re not so much know they just ever want to learn and you just chuck people in and you could get stuff done. So I was really impressed and I was just, you know, going back and forth to England more and more like the first year and then to Faizan in late 2002, I think I thought, well, I’m kind of in China more than I’m in England, so I’m just going to stay here.

I’m just going to just live here. So I rented an apartment and just outside Gangel in quite a rural area, actually, and I thought stuff MAPP. So I’m going to build Nandy lab. So I did. I rented a place, built some soundproof rooms and got some nice kind of kit in there and, you know, things like that for testing.

And I had some offices and I got got a couple of guys and made a small area where we could do kind of mock ups of based Benzino prototypes. So would work. And we had fibreglass with a guy who could do molds and would knock us up some fibreglass. So, you know, I did so much from 2004 till 2010. I designed, well, everything for void and that was over thirty five series and probably six or seven products within each series.

So I don’t think ever been done in history. That’s I could literally have something I. The door three days you could work, that sounds like you were focused and you had this whole team who were really focused with you as well. Yeah, that’s how life works.

Yeah. You just get a team of everyone around you that you need and you just, you know, you get everyone really on one. They’ve got to be up for it, though. And the people were never really wanting to learn. And I just did so much so quick. And yeah, it wasn’t the easiest country to live in.

It wasn’t, you know, it was.

And then I couldn’t wait to get out and really. Really. OK. But yeah, it was cool in terms of getting work done.

It was the best. But then in terms of living, you’re like, OK, it’s time for another another thing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, things happen with the presidency change as well. And the whole place really changed as well. And so it became quite difficult for a foreigner actually to be there. And so that was hence the move. And I think twenty fourteen or twenty fifteen when I moved back. So ripe the motorbike and Tibet thing. So I would say after about two or three years have been in China, I would spend the winters just a second job and village because it was it was quite warm.

You know, you could have twenty six, twenty seven degrees on Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve and things like this. I don’t know what that is in real Fahrenheit, but.

Yeah, yeah. So what happened was I would spend the, I would spend the, the cold winters in gungho and the summers, I would go to Tibet and I didn’t have the full R&D lab. I was in Gangel, but I did have like a kind of apartment and a little kind of almost like a design studio where I could go in and do a bit of cad and kind of just come up with concepts and come up with ideas to take back to the lab.

So I used to spend quite a lot of time on the China Tibet border. And yeah, I had bikes in both locations. I had what the motorcycles was the most I had at one point.

Well, and yeah, they were just kind of roads with no one on them and some of them were kind of private and toll roads in that.

And it was just, you know, there’s still not many people on the roads, you know, in central western China, you know, a car is still quite a luxury item.

So, yeah, I had this expec Kawasaki’s at 10. Ah. And good for about one hundred and ninety five horsepower I think. And it didn’t have any restriction because Japanese bikes have a and restriction which is about one hundred and eighty six miles an hour. They’ve got like a gentlemen’s agreement that goes over that even though they didn’t have that. So I, I’m not sure it was 200. I read just over two hundred on the speed of two, three times on the high speed runs.

But I think the GPS was reading about one hundred and ninety seven. I was doing so. Yeah, it’s enough. Yeah. It’s quite a strange experience.

You know, there are a few kind of cars about it’s quite strange because it’s, it’s like you’re in a car park just kind of slowly maneuvering around vehicles.

It’s really that park is quite strange. Yeah. Actually feels quite safe.

There’s no kind of buffeting or wind noise because you’re right behind the fairing and you really feel quite confident and safe.

It doesn’t you think, oh my God, Chindamo now. But now it’s all right.

Yeah, it’s amazing. Yeah. Yeah. So that was the Tibetan and the China thing. So big part of my life, you know, a massive part of my life. I spent almost half my life in Asia. Then I moved to Malaysia after China and I was always going to move the R&D lab there, but I only really lasted four or five years.

And that are not the easiest person, not the easiest place to to live in really, or after the rose tinted glasses come off and you see what it’s really about. So, yeah, I was I was looking for somewhere else and and someone suggested, well, how about Cyprus or Greece? Because I just can’t do anywhere cold. It’s just, you know, the least temperature I’ve seen here. And just a just under two years of being here is 19 degrees in the winter, which is sixty six degrees Fahrenheit.

Yeah, that’s the coldest. Sixty six is the coldest it can ever get here. So and I think the most the world’s third most stable climate. So it never goes over like twenty seven or twenty now.

So and just for people who were wondering about your earlier comment. Twenty seven is eighty degrees Fahrenheit.

Yeah. Yeah.

So it’s sixty six to eighty all the rain every seven or eight months and only for fifteen minutes. So you know that kind of you know, suits me fine that, that, that kind of living. It’s good.

But what I’ve actually done by being here is I found where I fit in and I think the most important thing in life is to find where you fit in. It might not be the place where you look like you come from or even sound like, but it’s just where you fit in and and every. It comes together. Since I’m here, everyone has come together on more creative. I write more music, I design more speakers, it’s just got easier.

It’s just where I should be. And it took me my whole life to find that. But, yeah, it’s important to fit in, I think.

Right. I’m guessing you don’t listen to any podcasts. I don’t I’m not going to ask you. I’m not a TV watcher. You know, it’s it’s not called a program for nothing. It really isn’t.

So I don’t watch much TV. I yeah. I just just try and learn the things. I listen to a lot of music, you know, I haven’t a really, really good hyphy with electrostatic and valve amps is really important because it’s a reference. And the stuff I do in the studio, it’s it’s it should almost be a law that you can’t or shouldn’t work in this industry at any level unless really you can play music in musical instruments and have some theory and music, because you really should understand.

Yeah, I know a lot of people don’t and they do a good job. I understand. But I can always tell the engineer that has a musical background that they’re you know, it’s it’s a weird one. When I mix a band life, all I’m I mix for the crowd. I don’t mix for me. And that happens in nightclubs. You know as well people who set up nightclubs, a lot of them get it right, you know, and a lot of the people that work, you know, avoid systems as well.

Luckily to say, get this right. And they actually tune the system for the audience and for the space and for the time to be had. A lot of people just go and do it for them, what they think is right and it’s not enough.

Who are you to say what what’s right?

It’s so when I used to mix bands, I used to get a lot of work because I used to I used to go to, you know, people that run, you know, the venues and and the tunnels, the tour managers and promoters.

And I would say, look, you know, I will get especially is like a funk band or something like that. I remember doing Asimov quite a few times and Gil Scott Heron and people like that. And it was just just brilliant, brilliant shows. And I would say if I can’t get everyone dancing on the dance floor and including in the toilets and you can check and I’ll never mix again, I will never mix again.

And luckily I’m still good. But I mix. I mix for the audience. I mix for the time, for the feeling.

That’s what I why I do it and well I mix for I’m really not I’m not worried if the high hats are enough. Fourteen K in the scheme of things it’s really not important. It’s the whole vibe. It’s just bringing that audience up. It just gets better and you know, you just connect with it and you just yeah. That’s what you mix for and you do it more from your heart and from your ears. So yeah. So I’m, I like to see people that do that.

And that’s normally people with more of a musical background.

Yeah. Whereas where is the best place for people to follow your work. OK, yeah that’s me.

So I guess they’re going to call you up.

Yeah. No, if it’s my personal life then yeah.

You can check out Roger, Google, Facebook and most of the the posts are public actually. So you can if not on Facebook, you can kind of see what I’m about. But that’s just that’s kind of more the studio stuff I get into. I don’t really post design and stuff and I don’t really post anything about upcoming designs because I really don’t want anyone to know. We don’t want it to upset, you know, sells a few current products.

So we keep things back.

And also the Void Acoustics Facebook page as well on the Instagram page has, if you want, keep up on void and you know, where will the new installs are happening?

And you know what where we’re at. And what we’re doing obviously is a bit quiet on the festival season. But I have to say, there’s a few installs going about this. There’s some still going on. And as a company, we’re kind of doing all right. It’s it’s OK. Obviously, it’s it’s done, but it’s it’s OK.

So, yeah, because, yeah, I’ve seen the companies that have a installer contracting division have continued on because those projects started years ago.

Yeah. Yeah. It is also just being able to adapt as well. So we’re doing we’re seeing you know, obviously we do smaller stuff for kind of bars and lounges that actually kind of work in living rooms.

So we’re starting to do kind of quite a few high end lives, but they just won’t kind of club party systems because they can’t go home. They want to party at home. So that makes a lot of sense.

So you just gotta think, you know. Yeah, it’s just yeah, it’s there’s an opportunity out there and everything that’s kind of bad if, you know, to work and you and you can see it and you know and.

You can use it. So this has not been so bad for us. I mean, yeah, I do feel for the people that are, you know, the tech crews that are all laid up in the system, sitting in warehouses, you know, because there’s no festivals. That’s that’s obviously not good. But and obviously, the nightclub industry is going to be quite decimated. This is going to be the last thing they want is lots of sweaty people in a dark room.

So we’re going to have a while to go. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, Rog Mogale, thank you so much for joining me on Sound Design Live.

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