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The 5%: Women in Pro Audio

By Nathan Lively

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In this episode of Sound Design Live, I talk with writer and podcaster for SoundGirls and Associate Course Director at Full Sail University, Susan Williams. We discuss sexism in pro audio, remote learning, and constructive criticism.

I ask:

  • The 5%: Steps you can take to balance the audio industry
    • What is the 5%?
    • What’s one step I can take to help?
  • Tell us about the biggest or maybe most painful mistake you’ve made on the job and how you recovered.
susan williams

I don’t think you can try too hard anymore. I think we have to do the harder thing.

Susan Williams

Notes

  1. All music in this episode by Shane Ivers.
  2. Susan’s blog and podcast.
  3. What can I do? Hire women.
  4. Books: Video Production 12th Edition
  5. Podcast: Samantha Potter Church Sound podcast, Roadie Free Radio, Signal to Noise podcast.
  6. Quotes
    1. The main things I see consistently students do [wrong] is to completely ignore the basics. If you can’t record 1 channel properly then you can’t record 50 channels properly.
    2. Just be humble and ask questions.
    3. 5% is lower than female truck drivers or construction workers.
    4. I don’t think you can try too hard anymore. I think we have to do the harder thing.

Transcript

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

Welcome to Sound Design Live, the home of the world’s best online training ing sound system, tuning that you can do at your own pace from anywhere in the world. I’m Nathan Lively, and today I’m joined by writer and podcaster for Sound Girls and Associate Course Director at Full Sail University, Susan Williams. Susan, welcome to Sound Design Live.

Thank you, Nathan. I’m so excited to be here again. Woop woop. I definitely want to talk to you about your career and we’ll get into some topics related to gender sexism and stuff and pro audio. But before I do that, after you get a sound system set up or I don’t know if you’re setting up a lot of sound systems these days, but when you did what is one of the favorite pieces of music you would want to play to kind of get familiar with it?

Uh, I don’t do it so often anymore. But when I used to, I would play something that was going to be similar to what I was going to be mixing. So when I would do like theater, I would go honestly with stuff like music. And I’m not even that huge of a music fan, but they have such this huge presence that I would love playing some of their stuff because it just had a big dynamic range. And it just sounded really dramatic and so I could really like listen to it and then other times I would go with something really delicate just to, like, simple, like not overly produced.

So I had some of these, like Irish folk, like acoustic Irish Philbin’s stuff that I would play that was just really like soft and gentle so I could hear both sides of it, but.

So, Susan, how do you get your first job in audio, like what was your first paying gig?

My first paying gig was actually in high school. I worked at the high school theater. We actually had a legit theater for my high school. It had, well, a full sound system. It had lighting. It even had a two storey rail system for the, you know, to get the scenery and stuff to fly in and out. So it had like a full Idjit theater.

It was actually the only one in our town that I lived in. So we had other aside from the high school theater stuff, we had other people come in and rent out the the auditorium. And so I would work those events. I will tell you that I was mildly scarred by one of the first paying ones that I did. And it was this weird old old person like talent show.

And this was decades ago. But I very, very strongly remember this like very old man doing this like baby sketch. And he was in like a giant like diaper.

Yeah. So weird. So weird. And then you’re like, oh, God, this is the kind of thing I’m going to have to do from now on in. Like, that wasn’t the weirdest thing I’ve ever worked with, but it was the first weird thing.

Wow. Yeah, that’s awesome. But doing all that got me scholarships and stuff for college so it was cool.

Oh yeah. OK, so you were able to say like, hey, I’ve done all I’ve done all this work. Yeah.

I got some scholarships from a theater. It wasn’t in our town but it was nearby. So I got a scholarship for theater for that and then went to college for tech theater and got more scholarships. I was a nerd in high school, so that worked out nice scholarships for nerds, theater nerds.

That’s special. So, Susan, I know a lot of stuff has happened in your career and I don’t want to go through everything, although that would be fun. It would take a long time. Yeah. I was wondering if we could zoom in on one moment that maybe connects your first job in high school with this job you have now, full sale university. It’s you know, your career has taken all these twists and turns. But take us to a moment when you made a big decision and a decision that really affected your course.

And maybe looking back now, you realize it really helped you get more of the work that you really love.

So something that I very distinctly remember that changed my course in a couple of different ways. But I went to in college, we had to have an internship. It was part of our degree requirements in order to graduate. So I got a summer internship because Summer Stock Theater was a huge thing, not so much now for obvious reasons with the state of the world. But I so I moved to California and I did this internship where in California it was in Lake Tahoe.

It was for. Oh, cool. It was really fun, man.

It was beautiful and it was fancy and we were so poor. So it was a paid internship, but it paid like this stipend, which is fine because you were probably the only poor people there.

The only poor people for sure.

Yeah. OK, we we can talk about this more later too. But it was actually really interesting being there because I’m from Florida and I’m from central Florida. So we have a pretty diverse population here. And when I moved to California in that specific area, there were no people of color at all except for some of our cast members. And so that was kind of alarming. I’d never been in a place that was just white people before.

So, yeah, it’s surprising to arrive in some of those places, especially in famous cities that you didn’t know about. And like the Northwest. Yeah. Where you get there and you’re like, oh, well, there’s no black people in Portland, like, what’s the deal now?

Just always in that part of California. OK, yeah. So that was a surprise. What else is a surprise I have that I would love it. And I was I was so excited to do summer stock and be, you know, an audio intern and all of the stuff. But I hated it. I hated all of it. I hated living in an apartment with seven other people. I hated not having my own car. I hated the job in general.

I hated getting yelled at for missing a cue because literally a mouse was living in the rack behind the console and then climbed onto the console mid show. And I just had never had to handle that before. And so, you know, that’s why you take your chips to panic and learn from the thing.

So, like, all kinds of awful things happen. We had bears come out. We had to cancel a show because there was literally a bear in the area. Like I did learn a lot, but I hated it. And so sure for that internship, I was like, all right, well, I’m not doing this anymore, but I still have one semester left. So I. To finish and graduate and I’d been booked on a show, on a musical.

So, like, I was like after this, I’m done because I’m like, well, great. I just wasted four years of my life getting this degree and I hate every second of it. So I did my last show in college, graduated and then took a shitty job at a theme park because it’s Florida. So I took a job as a photographer at a theme park, which is a terrible job. Oh, really? Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

It’s a bad job. Don’t do that. But OK.

But it was not in that field and I was like, OK, we’re done. And then like three months went by of me doing that job that kind of sucked and thinking like, oh great. I’ve completely changed the course of my career. Like what am I going to do now? I literally have a degree in theater and no way to use it or anything. And a couple of months into the New Year, because I graduated in December, so a few months into the New Year, one of my friends is like, hey, I’ve been interning at this local theater in Orlando and they really need someone for sound.

And we went to college together.

And I know you did sound and I was like, oh, OK, OK, I really need a job.

That’s not this. I really need to refocus and, you know, do something. And I missed it. I missed working, but I just hated what I was doing so much before. So I’m like, OK, I’ll meet with the same person there. And then I sent a message to my friend and I’m like, hey, if this works out, like, you know, I’ll make your pie, you know something, because I baking has always been my, like, not depression remedy, but when things are going really poorly, like I’ll bake a lot.

Sure. Self care totally. And then I give them away because you can’t eat all of them. All of them. So she she freaking forwarded that email with my response to the the sound person at the theater and he’s like, well hell, if you’re making pies I’ll hire you. And I was like, oh God, oh no. That’s how you get the job. That’s good.

So I, I accepted and I was his audio tech for as long as he worked at the theater. And then I took over for a little bit after him and then I got back into it and he was so different as a mentor than the other person that I had from my internship that it was so needed. He was he was so gentle. He was really smart. He’s worked at a lot of pretty cool theaters in in the country since then.

And it was just what I needed. I needed that mentor to actually just be nurturing because, you know, if you if you’re not perfect starting out and who is, you know, having someone who’s mean and like telling you how much you suck isn’t going to be helpful for some people. Like, maybe that motivates other people. But it didn’t motivate me. I was just like, well, it I’m done with this whole career because of how awful this is.

And I couldn’t take that, like, rudeness. So my you know, this was my third mentor in my career at this point. And he was at the theater and he was so great. And it kind of revived my interest and my belief in myself that I could do it. That’s such a cool story.

And one of the things that I’m taking away from it is that it’s really hard to separate the conditions that a job is in. And like the people, the relationships with the job itself, especially when you’ve never done it before. And so it totally makes sense that you get thrown into a situation where, like maybe one relationship is bad or all of the relationships are bad and you’re like, oh, the job is terrible.

Yeah. And then it took it took a contrary contrasting situation for you to be like, oh, wait, actually I am good at this and maybe I could like this. And and I think we’ve all had similar situations.

Yeah. I’m really thankful I’ll give him a shout out. I don’t know if he listens to any of this stuff, but it was his name is Marshall Simmons and he was the audio tech at the Orlando Repertory Theater. And he was awesome. He was cool. Thank you, Marshall.

All right. So, Susan, I know you work at Fulfill Your Course Director. You work a lot of students. You see them going through, you know, a lot of the same mistakes that you did and bumping into things and making a mess. So I’m kind of curious if you could pick out maybe one or two trends that you see. What are some of the biggest and most common mistakes you see students making who are new to the world of pro audio?

We get a lot of students like there’s thirty students in my class this month. And so every month we get like, you know, between 20 to 50 students. And it’s been kind of tough seeing what they’re doing now. Like what they’re doing now online is completely different from the mistakes that they were making on campus. So I’m going to focus on campus and hands on mistakes because those are so different. The main things that I see very consistent. Students of all different backgrounds and hopes and dreams of what they want to do is that they completely ignore the basics and they go forward and just want to learn the really cool stuff.

So they’re jumping ahead. And I know it’s it’s really tempting to do that because we have so much amazing and cool technology at our hands. But if you literally can’t record one channel properly, then you can’t record 50 channels properly. Right. You can’t mix more than one channel properly. So that is the biggest thing that I see time and time again of them getting kind of overwhelmed or looking too far into the cool stuff and not getting the basics signal flow, just literally signal flow and then signal to noise ratio and that’s it.

And so if they can’t capture those two things, then they’re not going to do OK at the rest of it. You know what I mean? And then the other huge thing that I see very often, which was the opposite of my problem when I was a student, is arrogance. They they can’t record one channel properly in general. And then they have this huge arrogance about them, like, oh, I’m I’m an artist and I’m I’m a recording engineer.

And I’m like, you just learned how to touch a console today. I showed you this for the first time. You can say that you’re that, but that doesn’t make it true. So there’s this arrogance that is insane. And I had the opposite problem. I had no confidence for, like, the longest time. So, yeah, just be humble and learn the basics.

Yeah, but I’m just thinking, as you’re saying, that is that is that partly because the industry is generally unregulated. And so since we can’t have a piece of paper that says I’m a doctor, then we feel like our license is our confidence. And so we just try to like, pretend. And I put on this face of expert, since there’s no way of proving that I’m an expert.

Yeah, I guess that that would yeah. I wonder if that’s how most people understand it or subconsciously students are like, well no, I guess I got to say it’s me and this is how I do it. Like, I don’t know. That seems like maybe part of the problem.

I think there’s a lot of like fake it till you make it. And I don’t I don’t think that’s always a bad thing because how do you know when you’ve, like, made it? That’s a different metric for every single person. But I think that’s doing themselves a disservice. And those who hire them, because if I expect that you can do something, I say, go, go patch the console. Here’s a paper. Here’s my here’s my iPad sheet.

And they can’t do that. OK, we got to tell me, though, because now you’re wasting both our times because I leave you alone for an hour to do that and now you haven’t done it. And now I come back and I’m like, bro, you just wasted an hour of our time when you could have just said, can you help me with this? And I would have taken the ten minutes to help you. Right. So that level of confidence or just being afraid to admit that they aren’t sure of themselves, you know, those are things like just being humble in general and asking questions.

I don’t know that anyone’s ever been pissed off at you asking a question, being genuine about it. Now, if you ask every five seconds and you question, maybe you weren’t ready for this, but I can also if I know that’s what’s up, then I can adapt and help, you know what I mean? And as an educator, that’s literally my job.

So you have to be real with me, because if you lie, then I’m like, OK, all you can do this and I’m wondering about knowing the basics is there’s some sort of a metric for that, because sometimes I think I know the basics. And then like I just interviewed Jason Romney for the podcast a couple weeks ago and I looked on his YouTube channel and he has a three hour, three part series about the decibel.

And I was like three hours or things, about the dozen or so. So when when do you know do you guys have some sort of handbook that’s like, here’s the basics, here are the things you need to know how to do and here’s how to do it properly.

I guess we do, because every class has its like core learning principles, you know what I mean? Like objectives, core learning objectives. That’s our our jargon for that. So if you meet those metrics, then in theory you have absorbed that information. So if you can do these things for each class. So yeah. I mean, can you can you properly record one channel is your signal to noise ratio OK?

Are there issues? Is it quite enough. Did you do this thing properly. Cool. You can do that thing. Can you design a system, you know, for whatever size venue. Can you do that. And it works. Cool, you can do that, but it’s going to be so different for every individual person because the systems that I designed for a theater are a bit jillion times different than what my colleagues did for. Concerts and bands and live sound, and that’s completely different than broadcast audio and what some of my other friends did for sports, you know what I mean?

So those metrics, there’s no generic one that fits to tell you, you know what the hell you’re doing it there.

It isn’t. And I don’t think any of us are going to know what the hell we’re doing with every single thing, because it’s impossible. It’s so it’s so vastly different for each industry and each thing that you’re doing.

The audio is very specialized for, you know, down to the company that you work with, but also, like, I don’t know, the city that you’re in and the industry that you’re in. And, you know, the words change specifically how things are done gets changed. But but I appreciate what you’re saying. And I feel like I could get a lot out of going to full sale if I do these two things of, you know, focusing on the core objectives and asking for help.

Seriously, like we are underutilized and especially now, like I have every instructor that was on campus now, including our lab specialist. I’ll have open office hours. We have we’re doing workshops on campus now because we can’t have classes on campus and one or two students, if any, are showing up to them. And I get that, you know, there’s safety issues or maybe they’re not in town anymore, but they’re not taking our students in general are not taking advantage of what we’re trying to give them.

We are so accessible more than we ever were because, like, I don’t have to go on campus and maintain my equipment. I don’t have to go on campus and, like, reset lab spaces because we haven’t used them in months, you know what I mean? So, like, I’m sitting here, you can literally call or email me at any time and I’m going to be able to respond, you know, so I. I think that they’re missing a lot of opportunities with having such accessibility to their teachers right now.

Yeah, well, sort of wondering if we were going to get into this. But I’m curious, like from a for profit Institute of Education, I’m wondering what you guys are telling people. Are you telling people or what is the conversation around whether or not it’s a good idea to invest your time and money in an audio career? And the idea that I’m thinking of is that when we first got into this back in, what was it, May or March?

It was March when we closed, uh, camp. OK, so back when we got into this in March, there was a big energy, I thought, from a lot of people, like, cool, I’m going to use this time for self-improvement. And there are a lot of people like, cool, I’m going to do all the webinars. Yep. And I remember several of students in my community were like they were like listing their daily process of all the learning they were doing.

Like on Mondays I do system optimization study and on Tuesdays I practice mixing and all this stuff. And now we’re, you know, five or six months into it.

Where are we that far? I’m losing track of time. It’s been deeper into it and I’ve OK now we’re deeper into it. And I feel like people are losing their steam. There’s more people that I’m talking to now who are like don’t even want to talk about it. They’re like, oh, no, I’m not working, so I can’t help you. And I’m like, well, you could be practicing, but nobody wants to do that. And and so I wonder if you’re seeing that kind of energy and like what what is the conversation right now among your colleagues on this topic of, you know what I guess what the future holds?

Should we should we be optimistic? Should we be like powering through with self improvement in education to be ready for the shows that could pop up tomorrow? I oh, so it’s tricky because I can’t speak for the entire I can’t speak for the entire school because there is a lot of other programs and stuff that they have, like they have cloud networking and they have animation and all this other stuff. So for our department at least, I have felt a little justified in pushing video production to our students because I started to feel like a fraud a little bit like, yeah, live sound.

I spent my career doing that and like films, sound and stuff like that. Now that that industry is temporarily dead, which sucks because I miss going to the movies. I don’t know about you, but oh my God, I missed so many of those things. So I felt like a fraud because, you know, the stuff that I’m teaching and I really care about is temporarily gone. I don’t think it’s forever gone, but I have felt a little bit more justified on the other side where I, you know, teaching video production and how important that has become because we have all all of a sudden, you know, everybody.

So not just teachers, but the church that I work for and sports and I don’t know every company ever is suddenly having to do all of this stuff remotely and video production as individuals. So now you don’t have the camera guy and the audio recordist and these people in your house to get good stuff for you. You figure it out on your own. And so some like live TV shows like, you know, Saturday Night Live is kind of hit or miss for me, and I think it is for everybody.

But they started doing their SNL at home where they sent them like maybe microphones and cameras and stuff, but they were producing their own content literally in their apartments. And I thought that was pretty cool because now these people who are literally just actors are figuring it out. And so I think maybe learning if you’re sick of learning or you’re just done with all of the stuff that you’ve been doing, like system tuning, there is only so much that I can stomach to sit and pay attention to all of these, like really technical things.

So maybe instead of doing that, think about what the future is going to be and what new standards we need to make, because it’s not going to be the same for a while. Have you seen any of the pictures of the concerts? They’re doing the European concerts. And I remember I think it was Germany where they have like the little like six inch or six foot like squares. Yes.

I saw one on Facebook this morning. Yeah, Omar posted that right.

Yeah. So, I mean, is that what things are going to be like? I don’t I don’t think so. They having a lot of Drive-In concerts and stuff like that, I don’t know.

But I think the question you’re posing is really important.

Like what are ways that I could potentially diversify like you video gross. But yeah, that’s where some work is now, you know, with all with all of these online meetings and stuff. Yeah. I would say focus on that’s a really good point.

What you think it could be or figure out, I think brainstorm what you can do differently, because we’re all sick of being at home and we’re all sick of, you know, looking at the same kind of content. Like right now we’re talking of resume, which I use every single day. And I don’t know about you, but this interface is getting really old and it kind of got really fast, you know. So what else can we do?

What other things can we develop that is better than what we’ve been having for the past several months? And I think that energy is better spent, especially if you’ve already gone through all of the educational stuff that you can handle for right now innervate. Yeah, because I’m not smart enough to build apps and software and I have no idea how any of that stuff works. But if you’re one of those people, like freaking innovate, make something cooler for us so that we can use that instead.

So, Susan, at this year’s Lifeson summit, your presentation was called the five percent steps you can take to balance the auto industry. We’ve talked about this in the past, but I want to cover again for for people who haven’t heard it before. And it just feels like an important topic that will continue to be important for the rest of our lives. So just to get into it and kind of remind people, what is the five percent?

The five percent is a percentage that a couple of different organizations, specifically A-S and some girls have decided is kind of the number of how many women are working in the audio industry. So it’s kind of a loose number. It could be as much as like seven or 10 percent. But this is pretty much out of, you know, surveys and stuff. What they figure it out. So that number is disproportionately low, obviously, compared to the number of guys working in the industry.

And so there’s a number of organizations that are researching why and then trying to change that because why? Like, why is it five percent? That’s that’s insane. That’s lower than female truck drivers or like. Women, construction workers, it’s crazy, really. OK, it is, and I have all of the graphs. I did a lot of research on that, like, no way, it’s not lower than that. No, seriously, there are more women truck drivers.

That’s not a traditionally woman career either. You know what I mean? Yeah.

And this is not good for anyone. You know, like I don’t like this being a guy. And, you know, women don’t like this who want to see more women like and, you know, it just I mean, everyone easily, pretty easily agrees that it benefits everyone to have a more diverse, more sort of balanced workplace, you know, where you have a better flow of ideas and just general better community. I don’t know. Do you want.

I feel like I got into a topic that I don’t really know how to talk about that. Well, but I’m just realizing that when I go to work with sometimes when I show up at work or to work on a show and the crew is more diverse in some way, it just feels better, you know.

Yeah. You know, I don’t know. Do you do you know what I mean?

Some people might like working in that kind of echo chamber where they just see a bunch of people who look the same as them and have the same ideas as them. But a lot of us weren’t raised that way. And especially me being from central Florida, like we are more diverse than a lot of people might realize because they only go to the touristy parts like we have a whole like Little Saigon area in downtown Orlando. You can get some really great Vietnamese food, you know, so we have a pretty diverse culture here.

So that’s only beneficial for for the first part of it, culturally, having more than just white men in an area, the food is better, number one. And then I think the standards and the standards for things are better. Like I think that in my experience and in a lot of other women women’s experience that I talk to you guys work harder when there’s a woman there doing a similar job because they almost get this, like, manly urge.

I don’t I don’t know if there’s like a scientific reason, but I feel like I’ve seen it where they get, like, this manly urge, like, oh, if that chick is able to push that console or get that console off the truck by herself, then I would need to show how strong I am. And that’s only good because now you’re working harder because I am working harder. And so that kind of benefits everyone. So it’s almost like using the male ego to for good instead of for just so I enjoy that.

And then it’s also odd if you look at other industries, like how many other industries are there? Just men. It’s not that many. So it’s it’s really weird that this industry specifically is a is a dude fest. I mean, you go to your college and it’s a pretty good mix, right? You even go you go to the library and it’s equal men and women. Right. You go to a store and it’s pretty equal. So it’s really weird for this to be so disproportionately male.

OK, so I’m convinced I want to help. So is there anything that I mean, you talked about entities that are doing research and trying to take action to restore some balance, but is there anything that I can do? Like what’s one step I could take to hiring women?

I mean, going out of your way to find a woman to do a project with you, to hire her, to pay her and to lift her up. Having me on your podcast, having a number of women in the live sound summit, those are all great steps. So you’re already doing those, which is awesome. So from that, like just seeking out women to do jobs that men can do. And so a huge part of this industry is, as in many others, is networking.

Right. So I have gotten most of my jobs, you know, from other people that I knew either recommending me or thinking like, hey, I need this person, let’s call her, or I worked with her before and I know she can do this stuff like that. So we with more exposure and more allies like you and like our friend Omar from AV education. Yeah. Oh my God. From AV educate his own friend. It oh God forgive me.

He works in South Florida and he does a lot of great, really cool video stuff. But by by making those allies, those are what really push us into that network and then we can, as women get more jobs and just be more visible. So that’s that’s it. And just that’s all that you have to do, really. I mean, it’s not like it’s a difficult thing, but the excuse that we hear a lot is that they can’t find women to hire.

And I’m like, bull shit.

OK, well, this is a great Segway into maybe taking a peek behind how lives on some it was produced because the first year it was. All white dudes and several people came to me while it was going on and said, hey, you should try, you know, get some more women and some more diverse people for the next one.

And I was like, sure, sure, sure, I’ll do that. And then the next year, I invited a bunch of women, a bunch like, let’s say six, that I could get referrals for. And none of them can make it, but nobody saw that.

So then the next you guessed all dudes again, no one woman I got daring to come and and then I heard the same thing and I was telling them, well, I invited people, but they weren’t available. And, you know, that’s not what people want to hear. And so the perception is still that there’s no women there. And so then this year, I just had to push a lot harder. And so I think it is more work.

But the big payoff is really just getting new insights and new ideas from people that are outside of your normal networks. And so this year I really pushed and I was like, OK, I’m going to invite I just have to invite a lot more women. And I know 12 doesn’t sound like a lot, but like, you know, I’m sending personal emails to them doing follow ups. Like, a lot of it feels like a lot of work for me to not just reach out to people that I already know.

So and then the funny thing was that then we got into quarantine and then all of a sudden everyone was available. So then I just said yes to everyone and then live Sound Design Live ended up being five days instead of two days.

OK, so that’s sort of behind the scenes. No. One, that it did take more work and pushing outside and like really like following up with people like please, please come, please come to get people that I didn’t just already know.

Yeah. So this year we had three times as many women and I was really happy about that.

Yeah, it takes more work. I’m just doing the default like it’s easy. It’s easy to find a bunch of guys. That’s totally the easy thing. So you put in the effort and it, I think it paid off. I was really excited to see the lineup of women that that you had on there. Good. Yeah. And I heard that from a lot of people. But, you know, the thing always needs to grow. And so the next thing that I thought we might get into is just talking about this really painful incident of one person who was really upset about I don’t know what they’re set up.

I can only tell you what they did. So there was one person who decided to kind of stage a one person war against me and live on summit. And it was really strange for me, just like this, I feel like I’m just kind of a nobody trying to, like, do little interesting audio education things online.

And they were acting like I was this big corporate structure that need to be torn down. So what happened was they emailed me and said you were racist and the event’s racist and you only have white men, which is totally not true.

But I realized that a lot of people on the panel who are not American and not white potentially look white. And so that’s when I started realizing a couple of things. Oh, so then the other important part of the story is that they also emailed everyone else who who was who was a panelist on Lifeson Summit and told them to, you know, abandon the event and that I was a racist and so on. And so I had to then hear from all of the teachers who are teaching.

It lives on summit that they were getting emails from this person and explained to them, you know what, what was my response to that? And so I just wanted to chat with you about this for a few minutes because I felt like if there was anyone that might have something to say about it, it was you and you. You know, we talked about this a little bit before we started recording already. And you immediately pointed out that, you know, yes, we can talk about it, but also recognizing that we’re both too white people talking about this issue.

And so it’s not the same as having even a more diverse group of people to to speak to this issue. But I just wanted to share that, like this thing happened. And this is what’s going on in the world. And too, I think my main two takeaways are, number one, I am really responsible for how the thing is perceived on the outside, as well as what’s going on on the inside. And so I pitched to you this idea that, you know, what, if there were a thousand women or a thousand people of color working behind the scenes, but that’s not what you see on the outside.

And so I sort of need to manage the perception of the thing as well as, you know, pushing again, pushing farther, like, OK, this year I push to get more women. And next year I got a push to get people from other countries more diverse backgrounds and just more diverse panel over it all.

So sorry for the long monologue, but I haven’t really talked about this with anyone except for my wife. So now that I’m done with all of that, I don’t really have a question for you. But. But can you say anything about your experience being a panelist on Lifeson Summit and sort of other events maybe you’ve taken part in and maybe you’ve seen some similar sentiments? Very special that you wanted to talk to me about it. We I didn’t get an email from that person, so I’m really glad because I think I would’ve been pretty pissed off because I saw the effort that you need to diversify.

And there were people from other countries and it wasn’t like just a bunch of white American guys. Not that there’s anything wrong with white American guys. I like white American guys, but I can see how a lot of people, specifically white people, are more hypersensitive about diversity right now because it’s a hot topic right now. And I know that people of color have had this issue their entire life of feeling invisible or left out or whatever. And they’re aware of it, but they’re also sort of used to it, which is awful.

But that’s why right now it’s like a thing. That’s why that person felt the need to, like, reach out and attack you. There’s so many other things that they could have done with their energy, but that’s what they chose to do. Did you know them? I didn’t ask you that before. Did you? Didn’t know this person? No.

I mean, the first thing I did is look up to see if it was a real person because I thought maybe it was just I don’t know, like I think I don’t know what to say, but I get emails every day that are like weird marketing or spam things. So you always got to, like, kind of look out for that. So, yeah, it is a real person. And I just check and I had several back and forth with them because they were obviously really upset and it’s like trying to I was trying to, you know, at the same time be a do good customer service.

Yeah. And like listen and not be too reactive, but then also get some information because I’ve discovered that many times you see the tip of the iceberg from one person and you realize that there’s like loads of other people feeling the same way, but just who aren’t speaking up. And so it’s good to listen to those things come up.

Did you find that with this situation?

So yes. Well, in a way. So let’s see this last year, maybe I got two emails from people saying, hey, you should I would love to see more women. And I and I said, great, thank you. And then this year, I probably got twice as many. So maybe I got four or five emails saying either you should have more women or you should do things differently in some way. And just to make one suggestion to everyone out there, whoever feels the need to reach out to anyone.

And so I’m trying to avoid from making complaints. But this is going to be like my one soapbox moment that I realized as being on the because I complain a lot to other people when I don’t like their product or their event and I’ll let them know. And I realize now being on the receiving end of that, it feels it feels hurtful, but it also doesn’t feel very helpful to have someone just say, you suck in your thing sucks.

Yeah, that’s never a full comment.

And I didn’t realize that until one person emailed me one time and said, I think you should have more. I can’t remember even what it was. I think you should have more women. And here are five women who I think you should interview on the podcast like.

Well, great. What you’re brilliant. Like, yes. Amazing. Like who reaches out and criticizes and then makes a suggestion. So I don’t know why I didn’t realize that that was so different. But that is what when people don’t like something, that’s what they’re doing. So if you really care about something and you’re not just like complaining just to bitch about something and because you’re annoyed, like, you know, make a suggestion that’s so much more helpful.

So that’s what’s going on, right? When you say, yeah, there’s not enough women at your thing and then the people are saying to you, oh, we couldn’t find any like, uh, yeah.

Perfect moment to be like, hey, here are five thousand. Here’s a whole group of sound girls that, you know, sorry. OK, off the soapbox go. No, totally.

Like we all we all love to complain about things when we can’t write. Like it’s my favorite thing to angry tweet at a company because like they didn’t put avocado on my sandwich or whatever.

Sure. Sure.

But in these situations, like you are one person essentially, and you have people that help you, but it’s mostly you who is putting on this huge event. And you have this podcast and it’s just it’s you and you’re doing it because you’re passionate. So to be so harsh and judgmental sucks. And it also tells me that they have never had to. Maybe these people have never had to make something themselves, because then you really start to look inward and you’re like, OK, yes, I do suck.

Great. I you’ve confirmed every fear that I have with my life. But when you actually give that peer feedback of like, OK, this isn’t what I expected from you, I think you can do better. Here are ways that you can do better in the future. That’s a tactic that we use in in our classes on how to give peer feedback. You can either do a happy sandwich. Where you say this is something that’s bothering or you’re really great at this, this is the thing you need to do, but I also think you’re doing this pretty OK, you like those things are so much more effective as because we’re human, you’re human.

You’re not a corporation. You know, just yelling at you isn’t going to be productive because then that’s just hurtful. And I totally feel that we’ve gotten I co-host this and Girls podcast and we’ve gotten emails also of like judging our recordings. And we’ve talked about this before. We we started recording here like I can’t control what other people are doing. I can’t control if someone’s having construction done in their house that day and they didn’t want to reschedule. Like, I can’t really control that.

I can just try to edit that out or not share that podcast. So, I mean, there’s a lot of things that happen behind the scenes that no one sees. So I can tell you what we’ve done with the Sound Girls podcast is made a very conscious effort. So we collectively rewrote the Sandro’s mission statement. We recorded that and have been placing it in the new version into podcasts. We have made a very strong effort to highlight women of color and put those podcasts ahead of other people.

I feel weird about that sometimes because I want I don’t want them to think like we’re doing this just because we feel like we have to. Does that make sense? Um, you know, and just be like, oh, well, they’re trying too hard. I don’t think you can try too hard anymore. I think we have to do the harder thing. I think we have to seek out people of color. And it’s not that hard to find women who do live sound, who are black.

That’s not that hard. It’s maybe hard if you close your eyes and you’re just like, I know like seven guys that do love sound like men, then it’s hard. But if you literally just, like, open your eyes for five seconds, you’re going to see all of these amazing people who are doing such cool things. And they also happen to be black and happen to be women like I mean, there’s there’s so many different people out there.

And so when people are judging you and you look inwardly and you’re like, OK, I can do better, I can because we can all do better, then you just do that. But it’ll never be enough. And we talked about that before. You could have had, like you said, a thousand people of color, of all different genders working behind the scenes and no one would ever know. So you do kind of have to you unfortunately, I guess, advertise it like, no, look where we’re woak over here.

This is really helpful, though. Like, I, I didn’t think about, like, having a mission statement, you know, and like trying to be really public about who you are instead of letting people just make whatever judgments they want to make. And so I’m making the assumption that, hey, I know I’m a good guy. So you must assume that I’m a good guy. Like, don’t want like we don’t have to leave everything up to hoping that people will give us the benefit of the doubt.

You we can try to put our put a sign out or put a put our best foot forward with that. That I think it’s a fact is what’s important to me. It’s expected now. That’s why every website that you go to has a statement about Black Lives Matter or about whatever hot topic is. I’m I’m not saying that Black Lives Matter is only a hot topic because I care a lot about that. I went to the protests here in Orlando and I try really hard to highlight people of color and do what I can because we have this voice like you have a podcast, I co-host a podcast.

We have to use that for highlighting and pushing people forward because they deserve it, you know, because there’s some really cool people and they deserve to be hurt you. But it’s like you can’t assume that people think you’re OK anymore. You can’t you can’t just assume that strangers are even acquaintances are accepting that you’re not a piece of shit.

Awesome. Well, the rest is up.

Susan, I just want to say, like, I, I think people should know the doors are open, you know, like you want to hear feedback from people and I want to hear feedback from people because you and I are both doing things to just try and help people like you’re teaching to try and help students. You’re doing a podcast to try to spread information and push people forward. And I’m doing the same thing. And we’re not just doing that for ourselves.

You know, it’s fun for us to produce. But, you know, we’re doing this to to started Livestrong Summit to see, like, does this help people? And people showed up and they said it helped. So I did it. Yeah. So, yeah, I’m building the thing with you, you know, for making the goddamn effort.

Yeah. So if you want to see a change and you want to see something different, like I’m all for it. And so I think it’s important to say that too, because it’s like people don’t see any. They don’t say anything, they don’t say anything, and then it boils over and they explode and they’re like, I hate you. Susan, what is one book that has been immensely helpful to you?

I have. Oh, man. Hold on. Let me put it up. I have a book that we use in our classes that I love. It is a text book. It is a text book that we found after we wrote the class. And we were like, oh, my God, this is exactly what we just wrote. And it kind of was validating because, you know, then we really go. We do know what we’re talking about in this book kind of confirms it.

OK, so one of my favorite books, and this is a textbook because we talked earlier about me being nerdy. This one is called Video Production Twelfth Edition.

Isn’t that fantastic that I couldn’t remember that production twelfth edition of the topic. OK, super, super difficult, but this one is really, really cool. And we use this for the for one of the classes that I, I helped write. And it goes through disciplines and techniques and this thing goes over cast and crew. What are relationships between the director and a camera operator, whatever the relationships between a floor manager and a producer. And so it goes through all of that.

It goes through scriptwriting, how to do how to make a rundown, how to how to write blocking for cameras. And then it goes into directing video switchers, field audio and lighting and graphics and editing and like. It covers absolutely everything and it covers it in a really cool way that is approachable. It doesn’t read like a really tough textbook and it has a ton of, like, beautiful pictures in it. And the best part is that it’s all in line.

So like, God, when I was in college, you would spend hundreds of dollars on textbooks and now you can get them online for free, which is amazing. But this is my favorite my favorite book, and it’s not written by someone I know. And I know some people that have written some cookbooks, but and I’m not diminishing them. I just have referenced this more than any other book for education purposes in the past three years. Susan, do you listen to a podcast?

I listen to some, but I want to know, like one or two podcasts that you have to listen to every time they come out.

I listen to episodes. I am not like podcast subscriber where I listen to every single one. So I’m kind of bad at that. And to be honest, I listen to a hell of a lot less now that I don’t drive as much so that I’ve gotten out of that routine. Because if I’m not driving, I’m not listening as often. But I have been listening to Samantha Potter’s church sound podcast, that one I’ve been interested in. We interviewed her with some girls, but also working in a church environment, which was super new to me this year.

That helped me because I don’t know if you’ve ever worked with houses of worship. They’re like super weird compared to any other kind of production. But and then the royalty free you. No. Yeah. Roadie for radio and then the Signal-to-noise podcast. So and I don’t listen to every episode of those. I kind of reread them. And then when there’s someone that I know or a topic that grabs me, then I’ll pick that one up. But those are the ones that I, I listen to more than I used to.

OK, Susan, where is the best place for people to follow your work?

I have a blog with sound girls, so you can go to soundgirls.org. And it’s usually they have like a front page scrolling part where they have like the new blogs like posts. And then we also have our podcast, which you can find on literally any of the podcast outlets that you like. You can search for it and we are on all of them.

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

Thank you for having me.

What (wo)men want: How IEM mixes differ by gender

By Nathan Lively

Subscribe on iTunes, SoundCloud, Google Play or Stitcher.

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In this episode of Sound Design Live, I talk with flute tech, sound engineer, and all around badass, Loreen Bohannon. We discuss breaking into pro audio, working with Michael Bolton and Lizzo, and what you should be doing differently in your monitor mixes for men vs women.

I ask:

  • What are some of the biggest mistakes you see people making who are new to monitor mixing?
  • Using all of your Tools: The science and application of male/female hearing in IEM
    • What was your biggest surprise in the research?
    • What ah-ha moment was immediately applicable to your work?
  • Scott Vogel What are the key points male mixers should know when mixing for the female ear and vice versa?
  • Elliott Clarke Pavan mentioned a modified wireless mic system that Loreen put together for Lizzo’s Flute, I’d like to know more about that! And any other “artist bespoke” solutions she’s come up with over the years?

You should have an idea of how the other sex hears.

Loreen Bohannon

Notes

  1. All music in this episode by Alejandro Magaña Martinez.
  2. Loreen on Instagram and TikTok.
  3. Books: The 48 Laws of Power, Sound Reinforcement Handbook, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance
  4. Hardware: Sennheiser SK6212, MKE104
  5. Workbag: qBox, multi-meter, Cab Driver, RAT sender sniffer, clear medical tape, tincture of benzoin, skin tack, generic ears (Ear Sonics, Sennheiser 400/500), me
  6. Men
    1. Age 39: men’s hearing really takes a dive above 4k.
    2. Age 70: threshold of hearing higher by 6dB, above 12kHz is toast.
    3. Frequently I need to boost the high-end for men.
    4. Men can take 40% more background noise before they are distracted than women.
    5. Men are better at localization. Panning seems more important to them.
  7. Women
    1. Our threshold of hearing is 6-8dB lower than a man’s.
    2. We don’t perceive 1-2kHz as well as men.
    3. Estrogen is one of the main auditory processor in the body. That’s one of the main reason men and women retain and loose their hearing differently.
    4. Women process audio faster. It gives us more information initially. We also anticipate the arrival of sound faster.
    5. Avoid Ultimate Ears and JH or put a small shelf on the high end. Avoid Shure.
  8. Quotes
    1. I spent a lot of money that I didn’t have flying places that I probably shouldn’t have to get connections in the business.
    2. It has astounded me that we as people who put speakers in people’s ears don’t understand how humans hear.
    3. I’m 7 years into this business and I still haven’t worked with another woman.
    4. Failure is part of success.
    5. I’m an amazing monitor engineer, but if you put me in front of a FOH console, I’m magic.
    6. Michael Bolton has been doing this for twice as long as I’ve been alive.
    7. One of the biggest problems I see with new in-ear engineers is that they think they know what the artist wants to hear.
    8. After the age of 39 men’s hearing really takes a dive above 4k.
    9. You can’t take it personal. I’ve messed up bigger gigs than this.
    10. You should have an idea of how the other sex hears.
    11. If it hurts your ears it’s definitely hurting theirs.
    12. In nature we never encounter sound above 80dB, except for natural disasters.
    13. The research of women’s hearing only 20 years old.
    14. Every microphone on the market is designed for a man’s voice.
    15. Every single person on that stage has messed up worse than you and if they haven’t they’re newbies too.
    16. Everybody just likes to pretend that we are some enfeeble creature that lords over the sound. We try to establish these unreal personas. I want to be real. We all mess up. You take a lesson from it. You don’t take it personally.
    17. I just want men to hold each other accountable.

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 monitor engineer for Lizzo Michael Bolton, among others, as well as front of house and tour manager for The Plain White T’s and FOH for Rusted Root, among others. Loreen Bohannon.

Thanks for having me, Nathan.

So, Loreen, I definitely want to talk to you about all of this cool research you’ve done into how men and women hear differently and the like. But before I do that, I’d love to know a little bit about what music you like. So after you get a sound system set up, what is maybe one of the first tracks, you might like to play through it to just get familiar with it.

Shake Me Like a Monkey from Dave Matthews Band. One of my favorite songs to play through, to start off with, it’s really random, I’m not a Dave Matthews Band fan, but I love that song. I love the horns. I love a mix of that song. It really gives you an entire spectrum of sound like as soon as you put it through the P.A., which I really appreciate, it’s one of my favorite.

I’m a big stereotypical kind of person. So I love Sade Smooth Operators, one of my favorites somewhere.

No need to, he’s a smooth operator. And then also Sting Mercury Falling is my other one of my favorite songs.

It’s actually my favorite song to hear through Mercury. So I rise from my. And then for like base and padding, I like to use Trombone Shorty. Hurricane season.

So those are kind of some of the ones I run through, I have more like I’m a gypsy woman from Jonathan Tyler, there’s a couple that I like to use. I go I go through moods like I have moods of tuning music.

It depends on where I am. Sure. All right, Larry, take us back to the beginning. How did you get your first job in audio?

Like what was your first paying gig paying gig? Well, I was 16, 17, and I had a production company. My the lady who’s my adoptive mom now was my theater teacher in high school. And in my junior year, she brought in a production company. And I saw these guys and I was like, I want to work with y’all.

And they’re like, OK, yeah. They’re like, OK, you can help us. But like, only if you know how to rap a cable, we’re not going to teach you. And I was like, game on. And so, like, I learned how to do it and I had to help them when they come to our high school and they’re like, well, you should call you should call Richie the owner like and see if he’ll put you on some gigs and load out some stuff because Rock Street Music and Pittston, Pennsylvania, is where I kind of like originated.

I spent the first 10 years, my career with these guys.

And so I literally would just call Richie every week in the store and just be like, hey, you got any gigs to be? Like, No, like, OK, I’ll call back again. The next would be like, Hey, you got any gigs? And then I started like going to the store. Like I would go down to the music store and be like, just walk in. And it was like it was like an hour drive, 40 minutes hour depending on traffic.

And I would literally just go down to that store.

And I didn’t I should preface this with I lived by myself. I was on my own at 16. So, like, I kind of could do this. And so I would just sit it is in a store and look at him and talk to him and be like, you’re going to hire me.

And then eventually, like, I called one day and he was like, oh, my God, Jesus, here’s a load out, go.

And it was like of blackmail this person, but it all worked out, but it was like seventy five bucks. My first paid gig. I mean, I’ve done honestly through my career very little unpaid work. Even if it was a small amount, I’m always usually getting paid. And if I was doing free work, it was definitely for an advancement in my career or something like that. So for me it was just perseverance and harassing people until they were like, God.

OK, well, you have told me that you are an introvert and kind of shy and kind of don’t want to have like this online. You don’t love social media. So so you must have been really motivated at that time to, like, pick up the phone, go to talk to people. Well, you didn’t have a choice.

Like, I came up in a different time. Like, I’m feel like I’m the last portion of the millennials that grew up without, like, the Internet as a child. Like, I didn’t have Facebook till I was in college. So I really didn’t have any of the social media as part of my core person growing up. And I am I’m pretty adverse to it. Like, I don’t like, you know, we talked about it. I don’t like having my personal things online.

I don’t like people knowing personal things about me. I’m a very private person. I do like it that way. But definitely at that time you had the network.

Like, there’s no there’s no question like, oh, the the reason I everything I am and everywhere I am is because I went out and networked.

I would go to conferences like I ended up on Warped Tour because I went to a conference in New York that was the live touring summit or something. And it wasn’t touring people at all. It was all management people. But because I was well spoken and things like that, I was introduced and made lifelong friends there. And that’s how I met Kevin Lyman through a friend, because I lost my voice. There was a woman that I met there who is my friend as she was translating for me the whole weekend.

Oh my God. She was personal friends with Kevin Lyman, who was doing the keynote speech there, and she introduced me. And that’s how I got worked hard because she introduced me to Kevin Lyman. And through Kevin Lyman, I was introduced to Rat Sound and he just gave me a chance. And networking has been the most important part of my career. Like hands down. OK, so.

So that was your first gig and a bunch of stuff has happened to you since then. But, you know, I love to kind of ask people about maybe some point in their career where a pivot was made. And I find that with a lot of people, including myself, there was a big point in your life when you decided to make a change, when you said, OK, I’m going to stop doing this thing and do this other thing, even if it’s just like switching from during front of house to monitors or for a lot of people, it’s like I’m going to move cities or I’m going to stop being a landlord and only be a sound engineer.

So the question is, looking back on your career so far, what’s one of the best decisions you made to get more of the work that you really love?

Well, I actually have a really distinct time period in mind, but I guess I’ll preface that with I’ve been doing this forever and I was in the business in twenty eight when the housing market. And so I then was consecutively a part of the next few years when literally our industry died a very slow death and it was just coming back when Korona like coronavirus, it was really just back full swing from that. But I actually had gone from working like four gigs a week or five gigs a week to like maybe one at that point.

So I actually had to get out of doing sound.

I had never really I think at that time you’d sound just like a career option. Like I knew that I wanted to do this for the rest of my life, but maybe not in the capacity that I thought that I was going to happen. So I actually stepped away from doing this because I really didn’t have a choice at the time. And I was doing radio and waitressing. I was an on air personality for two years on a radio station called One of five The River in Pennsylvania.

And I’m an introvert. Yeah, right. Because well, that’s well, no one no one can see me. It was it was awful. And then I got to tell you, they just threw me on the radio. The first day in the studio, I thought they found me on the side of a stage mixing monitors for a doo wop gig like I swear to God, that’s how I got introduced to these guys. So I thought that when they were hiring me, they were hiring me as a producer, not an online on air personality.

And I got in the studio the first day and the lady that’s on the air, Jessica, she gets up and leaves. She’s like, oh, hey, here. She did like one stop said. And she gets up it goes. And they’re like, you’re going out on the radio.

And I was like, oh, that’s the most hilarious mix up I’ve ever heard.

I only got the talent. I no know you’re the talent. That’s fine. Now you’re the one. And I was awful like the whole time. You can kind of see it when I speak now where I have arms and things like that. Still, imagine me not speaking in front of people and having stage fright and then being thrown on the radio knowing there’s thousands of people listening to me. Oh, the whole first month. God bless those people that listen to me, because I definitely called the station the wrong numbers a couple of times.

Definitely my stops as well.

Like someone has a recording of it somewhere, too.

And I’m just like, oh, God, can you just get rid of it? But I was doing that.

And the owner of the company is an incredible human events. Benedetta, who just got married this last week. But previously we had met we had been friends the entire time. You know, he owned the radio stations. I was in a remote location and we became friends and we became pretty close. We kind of started dating. And one of the things like he very much was someone who never wanted to cross the lines, which I always appreciate and understood and respected from him.

And the radio isn’t what I wanted to be doing anyway. So he said to me, he goes, This isn’t what you want to be doing. Stop take the time and to really figure out what it is you want to do. And he gave me the space to like I had a really rough life. I’ve had a very bad life. And everywhere I am now is purely on the merit of my own fight. And I have no parents or anything like that.

So he’s the first person who gave me the space and the support to truly take a look at myself and see what my dreams were. And it was this. It was touring. It was traveling the world. And that was the pivot point after I took that year and really focused on what I love doing and really like I started. That’s the year I went to the conference. That’s when I got to Warsaw. That’s when I really like I spent a lot of money that I didn’t have flying places that I probably shouldn’t have to try to get connections in the business.

And he’s the person that truly helped me do that and realize that if I’m not doing the thing that I love, then there’s no real reason to like live life because you spend so much time doing the thing that you love. You spend more time at your job. You spend more time doing your job almost than anything else, you know. And my first tour was with Rusted Root. And unfortunately, you know, our relationship couldn’t last through my transition into my life because I changed so much in the time, you know, from starting touring to like the few years after.

Like, I moved to California three years ago, less than three years ago after I came back from my second Warped Tour. So that’s how fast our relationship changed. And that’s not to say that touring isn’t an amazing space because I love what I do. And like he is the most supportive human in the world. As I said, he just got married like he’s a wonderful human and I owe him pretty much that idea. And that whole turnaround of my life came from him and like allowing me to have the space to, like, understand that I love doing this, that I am good at it, that I have, that it is like career.

There are people out there making six figures doing this. And it’s not just like, oh, a gig like this is a career.

This is a job. You can become established, you can become you know, I’m an engineer like this isn’t woo woo. This is like this is like I’m literally manipulating sound. I can build speakers, I can repair circuit boards. Like this is I’m a real engineer.

And that’s also. Been part of my realization the last few years, and the way that I’m speaking out is I think in this industry and why I started my research in the first place, we’re engineers. It is astounded me that we, as people who put speakers in people’s literal ears, don’t understand how humans hear. So that’s kind of like let me, you know, in full circle in that conversation to my research. So it became a point of passion.

One of the things I remember earliest in my career is, you know, I’m seven years into this business and I still haven’t worked with another woman at all. Not once, haven’t even seen one. Not hide nor hair. I’ve heard of them. Yeah, I know. Right.

And then I do the wolf’s den in Connecticut with Cassandra, who we still keep, you know, every now and then we still keep in touch. She’s actually one of the people who inspired this.

My research, because one of the very first conversations we had was like, hey, have you ever realized that, like, dude mixes are like Celmo boom compared to like what I usually do?

Like, have you ever why do they have all that in there? Like what is that? And I was like, hmm, maybe it’s like a difference or something.

So I can tell that you’re about to start getting into the research and like where it came from. And I don’t want to stop you, but I do just want to say a couple of things about about the story you just told. It’s amazing what happened to you all the all the turns that your life took and that from this little piece that you just told, it sounded like you had a friend hold up a mirror to you and then you just saw it and you’re like, OK, I know what I know what I need to do.

And maybe you didn’t know the exact actions, but you were like, OK, I know I need to make a change.

And then you proceeded to take a bunch of risks and it paid off.

I think that’s the I think that’s a truth. And any career like if you’re not taking a risk, like you’re not going to get the reward. And I think that’s that’s a really big business lesson. And like, there’s failures along the way. Like, that’s not to say that things that I did do didn’t result in, like, bad results. Like I have bad moments in my career and stuff like failure is part of success. So, you know, there’s a lot to be said.

Like, you know, I spent before. I mean, I’ve been touring now that I look back like it seems like it’s a lifetime, but I’ve been touring, like, full time professionally for only five years. So it’s kind of like wild to see what I was able to accomplish in that time, you know, from being living in Pennsylvania five years ago, getting my first real big national touring act, being rusted root. So where I am now, you know, in less than five years and even more so than that, you know, I haven’t even been in California for three years yet.

This fall will be three years that I’ve been here realizing that’s the biggest, scariest risk I ever took was, you know, looking at the man that I have been living with me like I got to go. And him going, I know. And then me literally packing up my car and driving across the country with no plan, no apartment, like two weeks later. And it worked out for me. But it’s terrifying.

It’s just so interesting for me that I hope you don’t mind me saying it this way. But for a person who in a way came from nothing like no connections or resources or whatever, you ended up in a business that requires a lot of that. It’s all based on personal referral. If you have certain resources, you can get in places.

If you had money, you could just start you could just buy a bunch of speakers maybe and start a sound company like and here you are, having gone as far as you did.

So I can tell that you were very motivated. And at the same time, it seems like once you started putting the pieces together that like, oh, to make this work, I need to know this person like you just made it happen. And so I’m sure it was you know, it’s frustrating to discover that pro audio and life is not a meritocracy, but once you get over that, you can start taking action and just sort of like use the tools for your own resources.

You were just thinking you were telling me that what you would really like to do is be getting more of this information, especially into the hands of women and sort of like teaching them like this is how the game is played. And so, yes, it sucks. And like now let’s take over something like that was pretty.

You say that in a better way.

I’m not saying much yet. As women and even some men, like depending on how you’re raised, we don’t learn. And I really feel like I’ve had some conversations with other people, um, and young people. One of the lost our son. Our generation is like negotiation and understanding business and how things function. One of the most important books I read to help me understand the rules of the game was the 48 Laws of Power. You’ve probably heard of that book, but it really helped me understand, like put words to the things that I was witnessing, like the plays and power that I was witnessing that I was always very aware of.

I’m a writer. I’m a reader. I’m a. Voracious studier of history. So, like, you know, one of my favorite time periods is like the Tudor period in England, which is all about court intrigue and things like that, and, you know, layers of stuff.

And that’s very much honestly how business is played. Its kupets, it’s layers of intrigue and knowing how to, like, play the game and slip in the right way and like, ask for things, you know, and I, I want to, like, help women and do that because so many people, transgender people of color, women, look at me and go, how did you make it? And like a lot of people don’t actually know my story, that I actually come from literally nothing like I was.

I had no parents. I was emancipated when I was 16. My mom passed away from cancer. My dad was never in the picture, but he passed away from heroin six years later. Like, I literally come from nothing. So like, I want people to know that they can do it. Like, I didn’t go to college, I didn’t have those things, and I still was able to make a career for myself. So that’s definitely where I’m angling my focus now that I’m becoming more of an online presence and people I’m starting to actually respond to everyone being like, how did you do this?

What are you doing? Because before I I want to talk to anyone.

But now I have to say, OK, well, choice maybe on the Internet.

I feel like it’s an important to take a quick moment here, just to point out that you can hire Lorien as a career coach from her website. And I don’t know how long that’s going to be available. And so I urge people to to go and do that, like she learned all this stuff the hard way. And I don’t want to say what the price is, but I looked at the prices really clear in her website. And I tell you that it is significantly cheaper than, for example, hiring me to consult for an hour.

And very few people do that anyway. But I’m just I just want to point out that, like, the price is really good. Lorien has a lot of experience. And so you could be like doing some shortcuts on your career.

OK, promotional ad over. Thank you.

I just think that’s amazing opportunity. OK, let’s get into talking about some technical stuff.

So we were we sort of started already talking about some of this research you’ve done into hearing before we do that, I would love to just talk maybe some general tips about mixing monitors.

And I know you’ve done a lot of different jobs, but you’ve also done a lot of mixing monitors in your monitors. And so I would love to just know from what you’ve seen out there and the mistakes that you’ve made, what do you think are some of the biggest mistakes you see people making who are new to mixing monitors? And I guess would you say that your specialty is kind of in your monitors if that’s like we can focus on that, if that would make the question easier?

I’m not sure I consider myself a sound engineer. So if it is sound, I can make it produce sound like I, I happen like I’m like I’m feel like I’m going to toot my own horn. I’m an amazing monitor engineer, but if you put me in front of a front of House counsel, I’m magic. So, like, you know, I think that’s what makes me that’s what makes me a great monitor engineer is because like my mixes.

I’m trying to make them sound as good as the record does, like I’m trying to make them sound great or not even that one of the biggest mistakes I feel like a lot of engineers make when they first start mixing monitors is assuming they know what the artist wants to hear. And that is why I am so successful, because I really pay attention to my artists. I really try to understand what they’re hearing, why they want to hear it, what they’re hearing.

Like, one of the first questions I like to ask someone that I’m working with when I’m doing like inners for them is like when you’re listening to music. What what what’s the main thing that you’re listening to? Are you listening to the drums or you’re listening to the guitar? You listen to the vocals, and that’s going to tell me what type of frequencies and what type of things they like to hear in their mics.

You know, if they’re a dancer, a lot of times I get people who dance. I’ll be like, you know, they like to hear more drums and bass. You can’t dance to a guitar and a vocal. You’re dancing to the bass in the drums.

So, like for me, not assuming that I know what my people want to hear has been probably my biggest tool and being really communicative with them in what I’m trying to accomplish. Like with Michael Bolton, that was a very big, big thing. He has been doing this for literally about twice as long as I’ve been.

A lot like they’ve got some stage time. Yeah, he’s he’s been around. And I remember one of the first things he said to me was when I ask for something in my samples, in my tracks, like, I know what I’m asking for and that’s what I would like and I know what I’m saying. And I just looked at him and I was like, I’m sorry. Did somebody tell you that you didn’t know what you were hearing? Because that is not my job.

Like, literally, these have been your tracks for longer than I’ve been alive. You know how they go and that. And I think that established like I respected him as an artist and then he respected me as an engineer in my job because I was able to anticipate his needs. Once he explained to me what he was looking for in each song, like at one point Michael said to me goes, I don’t even know if you’re mixing me during the set, which I constantly was mixing him.

He was a very active mixer. Me like he it was the first time I’ve had to do like a real star mix, like lock eye contact with him, the whole set, like we didn’t have another monitor engineer, but kind of what they told me was the band knows you, don’t you look at Michael only if it’s a crisis do they ask for anything from you during the show.

And I had never dealt with that level of and like focus and intense thing with Michael. So that is why does Michael’s mic sound so bad?

He he’s a 70 year old man. And I don’t want to say it sounds bad because. I know. I know.

I’m just taking a leading question to get you into your research. This is one of my most favorite takeaways from your presentation. A live sound summit using all the tools of science and application of male female hearing.

And AM is as how surprised you were at what Michael Bolton’s mic sounded like, what he liked, and how you could barely stand to listen to it.

So. So, yeah, talk about that. Yeah. It was like I’ll have to someday I’m going to pull up a file I like, put it on my own and show people it is all like his vocal four K up like a six dB shelf like on they’re pegging for K and is mix like. And at the time when I first started with Michael I hadn’t compiled, I had been researching but I hadn’t like put all of my research in one place and I had compiled all of my charts and things like that.

When I did I was like, oh my God, it makes so much sense now because he’s he’s almost 70. He’s been in the music business his whole life.

So there’s also hearing loss there, like after the age of thirty nine men hearing really, really above Fourcade takes a dive. Like once you hit thirty nine, probably some of y’all are probably lucky and get to forty your high end, particularly at four K plus dives like is gone by the time a man is seventy. Like I wish I could like hold up a chart here you can like it’s your threshold of hearing is higher by like six dB you like your high end like basically above twelve K toast probably probably at the age of 70 above eight K like not a whole lot present there.

So all of a sudden it made so much sense when I looked at my research.

Why his and for me it was brutal, it was brutal every night.

And also one of the fun facts a lot of people don’t know is Michael Bolton wears one ear, one stereo in year one.

And I I love you ultimate years, but I hate you for making this product. It is literally a stereo set of drivers in one ear. Why does he do that?

Because he’s. School and I like somebody, one of the engineers told them that this was a good idea, so we got used to having one ear open. Oh, no. Oh, good. It was so it was so rough.

So, like, on top of doing that with one ear, I would have to go out to his wedge. And I did this thing where I would I delayed the wedge like three milliseconds or something, and I would put a tracing of his vocal background, vocal and piano in there because it would pair with his ear up here. So it would almost sound like you had a stereo set of headphones in with one ear because I would have the wedge so it would pair.

He never he never realized I was doing it, but like, it really helped him. Sure. And the guys on stage honestly notice, too. So that was nice. But he didn’t like wedgies on stage, but he just can’t hear the high end, like, you just can’t hear it. And that’s true of most men. Like honestly, most men that I mix for.

I frequently find that as a female it’s fine for me, but I need to boost the high end for them and the volume level female hearing, like our threshold of hearing is six to eight dB lower than a man’s. So what is loud enough for a dude is screaming for me.

And that’s one of the things I want people to consider is that that’s also vice versa. Like, so what is just loud enough for you as a man is going to be screaming for a woman? So I feel like that’s just been some of the most important things I’ve taken away from my research, that especially men mixing women and women mixing men. You should have an idea of how the other sex here is so that you can properly address what they’re hearing.

You know, it’s definitely made me effective. Like I feel like I’m a problem solver, monitor engineer now. Like, you know, I get called for Anita Baker and a lot of difficult acts. And I think it’s just because I know how people hear. And one of the things that I take very personally is like, I want to know how I hear. So like I get hearing tests. I’d like to know where my holes are.

Yeah, but I mean, what’s your hearing tests look like? Well, normal actually for women. We have a whole a natural whole. That’s like a a lower. We don’t perceive one or two as well as men. It’s like the flip in our hearing or something. We have a will naturally have a hole there for me. I also have a little bit of a hole at like five hundred, like a little bit of dip and frequency in five hundred.

But I think that in it’s mostly in my left ear, I think that’s more of hearing damage from something probably warped more than anything.

Yeah.

What’s on your chart. Warped Tour. Warped Tour. Well that’s that’s a whole other story of the for my first year out on Warped Tour, we had a we had a beat up system out there, the kora. Do you remember those? No. Yeah, they were this then they’re about three, four, three inches wide. The largest speaker in the P.A. was eight inches.

I had and I had ninety six, eight inch speakers and a flat on my stage. That thing could breeze past one dB without even like thinking because it was meant to be. It throws just naturally as far as a football field without doing anything. And so that’s what they put on a stage for warper, the screamo stage.

I’m sorry, Nathan.

I had hearing I had earplugs in I had 30 twenty dB filters like thirty to dB of of reduction. And it wasn’t enough because they were, we were, they were trying to blow those things up honestly. I mean even if you have that right. So even if I have that much hearing protection and I’m still being bombarded by one hundred plus dB for eight hours a day in front of me, so like I damaged my hearing on WAAPA, like that first year, warped her like hands down.

Something happened. I didn’t come back from it the same. I came back with some tinnitus. And the next year I totally was the front house engineer. I had my filters and gun muffs, like totally was that person that Kepa was. Great if you’re on a football field, but for a metal stage, not the BYB, and then they were they tried to tell me like it got rained on and then all the combe filtering on the right side went away.

We lost the box. So because it was a ray process, all the filtering went away because we had a box out and they wouldn’t listen to me, they would be like, well, it’s on in the computer. I’d be like, dude, you hear can you hear the space in the P.A.? And then one day I was so pissed that I took the sides of the P.A. and I swapped them. And then every single engineer and every single person because they had gotten so used to it being on the right side, every single person came up with what’s wrong with the P.A., what’s going on?

And I was just like.

So so you coming back and having a hearing, hearing loss from work to really kind of changed how I thought about audio and perceiving sound and how we treat our audiences and things like that. Like if my hearing is damaged and I had thirty six to thirty to dB of reduction, like, what about the people that were standing in our audience being hammered by one hundred and twenty dB like. Sure.

That some sort of like audio production golden rule. I don’t know. Yeah. Like if it hurts your ears it’s definitely hurting theirs. Like back it down bro. Like, like it doesn’t need to be that loud. Does it sound good. Yes. Then you don’t need to have it be a gargantuan movement of air every time someone hits the kick drum like you don’t want to like knock down the field. And I get it, people like that EDM in particular.

But like when you’re dealing with live humans, one of the things I am most passionate about is the fact that we as humans and our natural state, we don’t ever encounter amplified sound except for large earth movements. Thunder or, you know, natural natural disasters are pretty much the only time in a human’s natural span that we hear sounds above 70 or 80 dB. So now we’re in environments where we are perpetually, you know, exposing people to a hundred plus dB is regularly.

What is that doing to our hearing? One human ears are not meant to hear at that level. I think that’s why we have a prevalence of hearing loss. We see it.

Sure, it’s not just us plus whatever consumers are doing with their headphones like. Yeah, exactly. And I like, you know, one of the things products that came out that I wanted to come out that I still haven’t seen was dB check from a sense of phonics, which was in your SBL meter, like you would put the inner ear on it and it would measure and it never came to market. I don’t know what happened to it, but I was really looking forward to that product.

OK, well, if anyone knows since then, we’ll put we’ll add it to the notes to this. But yes, let me ask you a couple more questions. So you started getting interested in this research. You started looking into it. I’m curious. Since then, like, what has been one of your one or two of your biggest surprises?

So you learn this stuff about how hearing is different and how your hearing works. Was there anything that was really, like shock to you?

Yeah, I read a really interesting study someone had compiled hearing research regarding children and learning and. One of the most interesting things that I happen to come across is the fact that, like men and women’s attention like is I don’t want to say attention, volume limit before distraction.

Right. Is much different. So like as it goes with the hearing threshold, but like, men can take 40 percent more background noise before they’re distracted than a woman is interesting.

OK, so like, you know, and that also really goes for inners as well in a way. But in real life, what that means is like classrooms today. It’s one of the things I’m also interested in. Classrooms today are very much suited for female learning, quiet, concise, straightforward in front of you back in the day when classrooms are a little more boisterous, a little more noisy and kids can move around, that was more of a male oriented learning.

That was more like men. Boys thrive in those types of classrooms where women and females do not they cannot actually function in a because the background noise is so much for them that they’re distracted. Like for me, I always like it to compare it. Like if you have a girlfriend or whatever and she can be there and you’d be like, what was that sound? And you’ll be like, well, that sound is because she’s like, she can hear you just hear those frequencies more like there’s we’re more sensitive to sound in a way.

So it was really that was kind of shocking for me to understand that how much background noise makes a difference in in retention. And also through my research, I started in the last four years, I think like twenty sixteen. They published the study formally, but they published a study on estrogen and its effect on hearing. And it turns out that estrogen is one of the main auditory processors in the body, really.

And that is one of the main reasons why women retain and lose their hearing much differently than men. That was also a wild discovery and then wandering down that deep scientific path of like how it actually affects our auditory processing, like it actually helps us to initiate the short term memory making process estrogen that’s connected with sound. So that’s also intensely interesting. And that’s still a very new area of study. Like, you know, that, as I said, that journal was only published in twenty sixteen and it hasn’t really caught on yet as popular research.

Like there’s still limited research on it.

There’s so and there’s so many other forms of research that are still lacking. One of the most amazing and shocking things that I found out through my research is that the actual research of female hearing is maybe like 20 years old, like men’s research and hearing goes back 60 plus years. But they really only started researching and understanding that we had different hearing less than 20 years ago, which is why I think I am so passionate about my my research now, because I think that, like every microphone that’s on the market, especially the older ones, are designed for a man’s voice, like the fifty eight.

That’s dude’s voice. Like, I would never use that on a lady I love. Sure. And I could get whatever I wanted out of it. But the right out of the box, the frequency curve on some fifty eight is just not what a female voice needs. And also like opposite of what our ear hears.

Right. So I was thinking, yeah, it’s what, what the voice needs and what a man wants to hear then on the other end. Yeah. Yeah. And a lot of our products are made that way based on a man’s hearing or without taking into consideration how women here as well. And I believe if there is an equilibrium between the two, that we a lot of people would be much more happy with the sounds of things.

You know, if we understood more how we each year like what if you can go into iTunes and, like, turn on a filter, that’s like I’m a lady, I’m a dude. And then it, like curves into what your natural genetic hearing hearing curve is, you know, like that kind of stuff interests me. Like, I think that it would change music for a lot of people and make it more comfortable.

Yeah, just did an interview with the co-founder of Sonar Works Reference for and you might want to talk to them because they’re looking at improving their products. And, you know, it totally makes sense in this conversation that you might have male and female target that you would reference to. Maybe that doesn’t make sense. I’m not an expert on their product, but it just reminded me of that.

Yeah, I mean, there’s a bunch of things I’m sorry. The other part of research that people don’t have a lot of study on hearing is transgendered hearing. One of the places I’m really interested in is understanding how our hearing changes. When you transition, when you start taking hormones, does a male get better hearing as he transitions to becoming a woman? You know, what are the implications then by hormone treatment? You know what I mean? In hearing and estrogen, there’s estrogen and B, how does estrogen A, estrogen is the one you need for hearing estrogen.

B is the one that can make you lose your hearing. Like, how do we you know, how do we deal with all that stuff? How can we improve our lives? Understanding hormone treatment can help hearing loss, you know.

Sure. And going back to the background noise, I remember one of the applications you mentioned is that the way you create a mix for someone might be affected by this knowledge. So you you might need more isolation between instruments that people want in a mix if they’re man versus woman. Can you can you comment on that and some of the mixes you’ve done for different people? Yeah, big one.

A big comparison that I can do is Michael Bolton and Lizzo. Michael Bolton. Love to hear all the background tracks. Like I like to have all the tracks in there. He like to hear the piano the most, but he like to hear all the tracks. And some of the tracks just sounded like noise, like they weren’t specific. That’s just kind of how they were mixed. There was a lot of parts. And you just liked a lot of like.

Volume of sound behind his voice, but Lizzo, now I will say that Lizzo is a classically trained musician like that is not a lie. Like y’all just get to see her tooting around on the flute on stage. But if you catch her backstage, she does some like arias and stuff and you’re like. Yo, like, I didn’t I didn’t know Lizzo, so we were cool through through the first couple of months of touring, but then when we got to the fall tour and they started adding production tracks to the the show, she started to get very upset.

And she did not like the new tracks. She would be like, I only want the album tracks, period. And my ears. I cannot I can’t concentrate with the other tracks in there. And she would literally like if if I were like Ghostman because I felt like something needed to be filled, she’d be like, take him out. She would get distracted by like she would literally like if they came in she would see her on stage be like, yeah.

And she’s still she was still very new of course to this world as well. Like I want, I want people to understand that like the lisel you saw at the end of the year, like where we were.

And this time last year, like I had an SD eleven, I was running front house of monitors from this eleven by myself, like doing all the wireless coordination by myself. I was her first professional sound higher ever. Like she didn’t know how to talk on a talkback mic like that came back came that was months of work with her for me to get her comfortable to like even just turning around to the deejay and telling her so that she could relay the information or something like that took us a long time.

Or when she’s having a problem on stage, she would talk, she would say it right in the mic and we had to have conversations.

And she finally, you know, a moment of victory for me was when she walked off stage, when her pack was having problems, like, thank you. But she, like, she couldn’t take any distraction in there. And she would hear it like if there was a buzz somewhere that happened to start up on the playback to actually be like, I hear something weird. And that was wild and true to his defense.

Like Michael Bolton was also very specific and what he wanted and he could hear and process all of that information. So it’s just a matter of like processing. Women also process audio much faster, like our actual AV are autosomal brain response time is significantly quicker than a man’s. So we actually process audio a little bit faster.

So it gives us more information initially than a man. So we don’t need as much information. So that’s also something that I have also considered as well as men.

Females perceive sound hitting our ear faster than a man does, like the actual arrival of sight. Sound is the same, but because of an evolutionary feature, women were more predated. We actually anticipate the arrival of sound a little bit faster than a man to give us time to decide, fight or flight if we were going to leave or not.

Interesting. OK, yeah. Faster response. Yes, and sound localization. Men are much better that sound localization. So like the actual placement of sounds on a horizontal or vertical plane. So Michael’s the big difference for him was panting like if I pand everything he was cool.

Lizzo she never even noticed if I pand anything like I’m sure she, I’m sure she did, but she never said anything to me and it wasn’t wasn’t important to her. Yeah. Right. And as a female like because she’s a woman I kind of I kind of have more of a closer idea of what she was hearing. So I was able to more curtail her mix to be a cleaner, like a cleaner present vocal, very, very present, but also not overwhelming because she’s very dynamic.

Michael wanted his vocal to be like piercing like. So those are some of the big differences. But also, like, again, he is a 70 year old man and Liz’s, you know, a thirty year old woman. So there are huge differences. Great test case. Yeah.

Well, you’ve mentioned so many things already, so, so many helpful facts, but I want to jump down to this question from Scott, and I don’t know if you’ll have anything new for him or if you just want to summarize a couple of things you said already. But he says, what are the key points male mixer’s should know when mixing for female year and vice versa?

Well, for a male mixing a female ear, I would say understand that her threshold of hearing is six dB lower than yours. So what is an OK level for you will probably be too loud for her. So consider that when setting up your packs and your gain structure. Also understand that background noise is highly distracting for a female. So if you do have a buzz, if you do have a hum or something on stage, she is probably going to perceive it a lot sooner than a male and be distracted by it and that will affect their singing.

Also, be aware that we do not need as much high end. Like if it sounds bright to you, it is definitely way too bright for the female.

And also one of the things I would like people to consider is that in areas that you are using and in ears that you are putting in people’s ears for me, one of and everybody loves them.

But one of my least favorite sounding ears, our ultimate ears and JH, because they have such an abrasive boost in the high end and that that’s for men.

OK, yeah. His interview in ears. Yeah.

If you have a woman who is carrying JH or Ultimate Years, I would say put a small shelf on the high end above five k maybe start with like two dB and I guarantee you she will have a much better time. I mean with most of my artists that have those ears, I literally do a full on like low pass and back it down. So I’m sure they will appreciate if you would shave off some of the high end off the ears before you start sending things.

And actually doing that will probably make your own makes a lot easier in their ears just with basically what you’re doing without having to do make any special changes for them.

Also on the flip side, for like women mixing dudes understand that they need more volume than you.

Yeah, everything’s the same, but in reverse. Yeah. Like you need like if it’s if it’s loud for you, it’s probably like just right for them. If it’s high end for you, good.

That means it’s probably right for them. If it’s a little noisy to you and it’s driving you nuts. But they’re not saying anything, leave it alone. They’re fine with it and they can handle that, that information in the background. And in fact they might need it to properly process what’s going on in their mix.

Cool. Thank you, Scott, for that question. So we can come back to that if there’s anything else that you that you want to share on that research. But I would love to move on and ask you about I ask you to share with us one of the biggest mistakes that you’ve made on the job. Now, we’ve already talked a lot about sort of all these trials that you’ve gone through in your life. And there’s this trauma and we all have these things we’ve gone through in our life.

But I wondered if you would share with us maybe something that happened to you on stage or at work that was especially painful and then maybe how you recovered?

I have to I think I have two stories that stick out in my head. OK, the first one is a major failure on my part. That isn’t necessarily and I think people have heard me talk about the story before, but I guess I’ll go a little more detail here. I was monitor checking back in Pennsylvania for the Montage Pavilion. I think it’s like the Ford Pavilion or something in Scranton now. And our company was doing the PR and the production for a big festival.

It was coming as a huge stage, like it’s a it’s a shed.

And I was the monitor tech and I was doing great, having a great day.

Everything’s going well. And then Andrew McMahon in the wilderness came. And these people I’ve met people from the crew, I love them. But at this time they were not carrying a monitor engineer. They were carrying everybody else, friend, a house, guitar tech. They literally had a chick who stapled glass to the top of the piano for five hours, but they didn’t have a monitor engineer. And they handed me a stick and they said, this is our file.

And I was like, figure that out.

And I was like, and they had like a twenty minute change over on stage maybe. And I mean one, I think the act before them was like a huge act. They were like seventy plus inputs on stage. And so we’re trying to change these guys over and we’re having massive connection and snake issues with their stuff. We don’t I don’t even get like a game check on any of the channels.

They just start the set and I’m in a I’m in a file that I’ve never even seen before. And I what console was it on? It wasn’t a profile. It might have been a disco. I think it was a digital back then. And one of the older. Maybe a seven or something, and I was way less familiar back then anyway. Oh, no, no, it wasn’t. It was a it was a M7. OK, yeah, it was an M seven, I remember.

And he rolls in and Nathan, it was it was just a nightmare. It was the worst. The worst. I mean, my Coachella’s that with Lizzo was terrifying, but it wasn’t because of me. This was the worst that ever because of technically because of me, but because the band’s unpreparedness and not having a monitor engineer for the entire file, like then it’s it is my fault. Like, it does come down on me to the point where, like, it was so bad the guitar tech came over and pushed me out of the way and thought that he can makes it better.

But there was nothing you could do, like there was no time for gain structuring or anything. I’d be like, bro, if you think it’s if you think you’re going to make them more calm just by being there, then go go on with your bad self.

And I kind of like going to the back of the stage and kind of started to cry a little bit, I’m sure. But my boss came up to me, Billy, there’s Richie and Billy Kozu through the owners. And Richie is more of like the club side. Billy does all the large production and Billy has always been very paternal with me, like they’re very much still my family. He came up to me and goes learing like you can’t take it personal.

Like we all have days where we destroy. We’ve all messed up. Like I’ve messed up bigger gigs than this, you know? And he’s the one that taught me that phrase. I’ve messed up bigger gigs than this one because you can’t take it personally. Like, you can’t let this moment derail you for the rest of your career because these people are going to move on and they’re all they’re going to remember is, hey, remember that shitty sound tech in Pennsylvania?

They’re not going to remember. They’re not going to remember specifics. Maybe they’ll remember you, but like, they’re going to move on that cruise, not even going to be the same, like next year. Like, don’t take it personally. And the honest truth is that they’ve all messed up just as badly as you have. They’re just acting like they haven’t like and I was still pretty young then. And that was a really important piece of information.

The other pretty big messed up I made is when I started touring with Rusted Root was my first time on the road. And I feel like a lot of people there. First time when they get on the road, they want to like hang out with the artist and be like the artist and stuff like that. And I definitely not that I was guilty of that, but we were all on the same bus and there was only like two production people and the rest was the band.

And so they would like invite me to hang out and they’d be like, oh, hey, you want to smoke weed and the stuff? And I’d be like, OK, sure, but rock and roll lifestyle do it. Yeah. And it was rusted root.

We were touring with the Wailers like it was just an interesting time and so like yeah, I was doing it. But then I had Larry, who is our tour manager, pulled me aside one day and he’s a pretty gruff dude. He was really a teddy bear, but he was like a scary dude. He pulled me aside one day. It was like, dude, you fucking suck. You can’t do that.

Like, yeah, he he’s like, you’re you’re dumb on weed. Like, you’re dumb. You’re slow. I can see it. You’re not the artist. You can’t hang out with them. You are not that person. And like I was mad and upset about it at the time, but he was right. It’s one of the most important moments of my career, like I was messing up. And the reality is, is I’m not the artist.

I’m a professional. I’m a technician that’s hired to go out there to be a professional. And he was 100 percent right. And while his approach was a little gruff for me for my first tour, he was right. And I needed that lesson. And I definitely have. I’ve taken it into my career. But that was a big mess up. Like I really was not myself, like trying to keep up and thinking that that’s how it was out.

There was not not the reality. And I think as I experienced other tours, I really that was the only tour that I was like that on. And I became the consummate professional that you pretty much see now after that tour, because I understood what I definitely didn’t want to be perceived as a man.

Some big lessons. One of the things you gain with years of experience is knowing when expectations are way out of line. Right. And so looking back on that moment in Scranton now, you can you’re probably like, oh, does their expectations are way out of line. There’s no reason for me to feel like I was not competent and not good enough.

But in that moment, you don’t know that. And you’re like, oh, I’m going to make magic happen here. I’m going to make these people happy. And they you this console and then and you know, and it feels terrible and it’s awful.

And you just like especially when you’re new in the business, like you take it really personally. And I just like I keep telling all the women who talk to me and all the people who talk to me don’t take it personally. The honest truth is that every single person on that stage with you has messed up worse than what you just did, trust me. And if they have it, they’re newbies to like, are you kidding me? I’ve had an entire PPO’s go down a middle of festivals console’s.

I’m at Radio City Music Hall with Lizzo this year and my console is just rebooting on the side of the stage for twenty minutes on our thirty minute change over like are you kidding me?

Like I have their moments in my career where I am like I’m an idiot like and there’s everybody else goes through that. They just. Don’t like to talk about it, everybody just likes to pretend like we’re some like ineffable creature who like lords over the sound and like we try to establish these like almost like unreal personas about ourselves. I want to be real. Like we all messed up. Like, dude, my poor feeling guy for Lizzo came out for our front of house dude, and he was out front.

And then all of a sudden in the set, we just start losing all of the pages at random times. And it turns out that there was a hardware issue on the digicam console out there where like the fater banks were like linked together through the layers. And it was like a literal if you would even touch the fader, it would just like it would just go like right down or straight up.

So, like, that’s all going on like this and there’s nothing that person can do. But if you were a new person, you’d be taking that personally, like, you know, and you just can’t like we’re in a technical world, we’re dealing with a bunch of computers all the time. Like stuff is going to happen. You know, you just got to take it with a grain of salt and take a lesson from it and be like the next time.

I’m not going to do that thing or the next time I’m going to institute this step in my set up thing to make sure I’m checking this thing that so that doesn’t happen again. You know, you take a lesson from it. You don’t take it personally. You learn a lesson like the reason I get hired to do what I do is because my check, my systems of checking before shows and my own personal systems of setting up are so effective that that’s what people hire me for.

Yes, my skills. But it’s really consistency is what people are looking for. Yeah, the immediate response oftentimes is to feel like I’m bad, and if you can either get through that or stop doing that and turn it into how to change or how to make an improvement next time or how to react differently next time, then now you’re growing. And now that experience has made you stronger instead of just, you know, a huge bag of emotional baggage that you’re just carrying around with you all the time.

And I kind of you know, and this will be maybe a little controversial to say, but I also kind of take that into my interactions with men on the road. You know, something that a lot of people ask me about is about being a woman in the business. And I’m a lot more vocal about that now. But part of our world is kind of like living with each other and being around each other all the time. And there are interactions that you do with your friends and stuff like that that you start to do with people on the road.

And I just you know, there’s a lot of conversations happening in our business right now. And I don’t want men to feel like ever they’re being attacked, you know, in this whole in this whole conversation. It’s never been in my point. And I hope that people perceive what I say, you know, merely I just want men to hold each other accountable moving forward in our business for the actions that they that they have on tour regarding women and the people around them and even their treatment of each other.

I believe that after we get done with covid, we’re going to have to come together as an industry again and really support each other. And so I’d very much like the conversation to change on the male and female aspect of being in the business. And not that I want to say that women kind of have to let things slide. That’s not at all what I’m saying. What I’m saying is how men interact with women and how men interact with men is much different scenarios.

And men are Routier and a little bit more noisier and all that things. And while things being said are not appropriate, I don’t want the men’s comfort and culture to go away.

And I wish that people would take things with a little bit of a grain of salt. Like I’m someone who’s able to be on a stage and like a dish and take it like there’s a real big like. There’s a lot of talking shit on stage with people, and as part of the fun, like, I love getting on stage and just like sassing around with everybody on there, you know, it’s one of my favorite parts of the day is totally having those crazy interactions with the dudes on the stage and like, making them kind of be a little shocked every now and then by the things I say.

And I definitely don’t want that culture to go away. So I want us all to be allies and be friends and take things with a grain of salt and not take things so personally sometimes.

Yeah, there’s there’s definitely a spectrum of, you know, experiencing work culture as a garbage fire on one in to, you know, just wearing lab coats and being totally analytical and nerd fun list. I don’t know what a better word is on the other end. Somewhere in the middle is like, yeah, a nice place to work. Yes, exactly. Somewhere in the middle where you can, like, still prank each other, but also have a deep conversation on the tuning of a P.A., you know, are tuning out yesterday in Rotterdam or something like that.

So, yeah.

All right. Let’s see, Elliot, send me a question. He says Pavane mentioned a modified wireless mic system that Lorien put together for Liz’s flute. I’d like to know more about that and any other artist bespoke solutions she’s come up with over the years.

I have a lot I like to McGyver things like I’m I’m a solutions person. Like if you present me with a problem, I’m immediately like, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing. Like, here’s options that you can do to fix it. Or I just look at things from a different perspective.

Often times for Eliseo’s flew, I’m actually a flute player. Like that’s I think also people I’m like I’m a I’m the flute tech as well. So this is like a marriage made in heaven I’ve never met, so. Yeah, well, here’s your first one. She is I didn’t know I didn’t know I was going to end up there either, but someone had to do it because I was not doing it.

I created a system. It was for the BET Awards originally. That’s the first time you’ll see the wireless flute. Brandon Blackwell helped pick out the wireless solution, but me and Steve, the broadcast tie for the better, spent two hours raking it up and trying out different ways to get it all done. We spent, you know, and I perfected it, of course, after the BET awards as we went on. But so we used Sennheiser ÄŒeské sixty to twelve packs, those teeny little wireless packs.

They’re tiny. They’re the only wireless packs that would be able to be on a fluke because of the weight. And then we used an MK one for microphone that I would tape towards the amber. So we’re Lizzo played the flute is called the brochure and I would take the mic and put it on the top side, wrapping around the front of the flute. I would put a little bit of tape. I would put some padding underneath the mic and then angle it.

And then I had a really special way that I would wrap all of the cable and things like that and get it compact onto the flute. So you really couldn’t even see it.

I even had foil tape that I would use to hide the cables. So if I had my work box, I could actually pull it out. But I have like actual like it’s like duct foil tape that I would put over the tape to when we had the TV appearances to hide the. So that’s why people are like, I don’t even see the mic.

I know that was the whole point for all of this with the show notes, because this would be amazing to to see.

Yeah, I think I have a screen capture of the Betti flute on my on my screen here. But yeah. And I actually if I think if we had continued touring this year, I would have worked with Sennheiser to actually make a little proprietary mic. That was the right measurements that I would need for the flute so I wouldn’t have to continue like that. We were having that conversation, but now we’re not doing anything.

So yeah, we really needed it to be safe, like a lot of it.

Brandon really wanted to do. The DBA in it, of course, would have sounded better. But the problem is, is we needed the mike to be mobile, needed the mike to be able to be thrown and tossed and handled and not have something sticking out of it like like a DPA neck. Like we couldn’t have that. So it had to be the Mkhize. So that was that was that was about fifteen minutes to midnight every night. And then I also had to create a proprietary bagging solution for Lizzo because she sweats so much that she would sweat a condom.

Oh wow. Yeah.

I’ve heard about problems like this, mostly with fitness trainers who do like these huge rooms. And for hours at a time they get super, super, super. So. So tell me the solution you came up with.

So of course, you know, Loizos, a big girl, and if you’ve seen her, she’s literally on that stage the entire time. She doesn’t come off, but for like three minutes out of whack maybe. And she is dancing the whole time and in and the pack is in a very tight bodysuit outfit. You know, you all have seen her outfit. So eventually the stylist and I work together and he took measurements of the packs and he sewed pockets on the back for me, which made life better.

But I still needed to protect it.

But originally I would take a condom and then I would have three and a half by five inch Ziploc bags like this that I would drop the pack into and I would cut them and I would cut out a hole for the the antenna and then a hole for the knob. And I would pull it down over it and then tape it on and I would cut out a little bit of it and tape it so that I could get into the pack if I need to.

And then I would literally stab in the headphone jack over like closed closed plastic, like I would stab at it and pulled it out, pull a piece of plastic off the tip and then push back in. So it was completely sealed on the top because it was the top is where all the moisture was getting in. Now, I found out that sure makes proprietary silicone sleeves, but I’m pretty sure they weren’t like fully out or something. I wasn’t aware of them.

I don’t understand why all the shirt people that I encountered and I told them about those weren’t like, oh, hey, we have this proprietary silicone sleeve you can use because I was trying to come up with my own, like solution for that. I still am trying to design my own solution for a more simple because theirs is like it molds to the pack and I want more X, I want more access than that.

So I have a different design in my head, but I’ll eventually work on it. And then for Michael Bolton, the pairing of the wedge with the zipper thing was a proprietary artist’s solution for him, like understanding how the ear works and then understanding that when you have a big gap over here, nothing filling, it’s going to make it harder to hear delaying a wedge and then putting shading in, like if you stood on stage in front of it in the band was going, you wouldn’t even really hear it.

It was just enough that it. Totally paired with his ear and then it sounded like a mix here in the head versus just over here.

So tell me about some things in your work bag. I know you have a lot of things, but are there one or two, maybe unique or interesting items that you could tell us about?

Let’s see things that are always in my work box. I have a lot of things that are always my work box. I’ve spent years putting it together. Absolute necessity is a cue box, like must have a key box. I also have a cable tester. I also have power testers. I’m a huge advocate of like really understanding everything you’re working with all the time. So I test all of my power. I do. You know, I have a multimeter in there.

So this is the whirlwind cue box and you have one of them or two of them one.

And then I have the I don’t know what the big yellow cable tester is. You know, the one I’m talking about, it’s big yellow. It does all the connections on the side. It has like four connections. Yeah, yeah. It’s called the cab taxicab. Something like that. Yeah.

I have one of those. I have the rat center sniffer because that’s super helpful. And festivals to like slam it on a snake when you’re not getting connection and be like well it’s you guys not me.

That’s, that’s my real favorite use for it is you.

Well, the best part about that is when it is when it really is them and you slam it down the thing like they’re usually in their headphones and they’re like they like through the headphones off. And I’ll be like, yeah, that’s what I thought I wanted to you. And then like some random things that I really like, love to have in my work box that people don’t really expect, like I keep medical tape in there, clear medical tape.

So this is this is the thing you only learn if you’ve worked in theater for a while, that medical tape is so good for keeping stuff on skin. Yes.

But even more than that, I also carry around tincture of benzoin which most people haven’t heard of. No, tell us about that.

Tincture benzoin is an all natural compound where I’ve sprayed on the skin. It provides an adhesive that you can’t sweat off. So when you put tape to it, it actually sticks to the tape better. And also you can put tincture of benzoin in water and steam it and it will help prepare vocal cords. Oh, well, that’s an old school theater trick.

They’ve they’ve taken they’ve since taken the adhesion type thing that I talk about and they’ve created skin tech, which is a very similar product. But the original product was tincture benzoin before skin tech. And that’s one of the things I mean, I have a soldering iron, I have boatloads of E tape, I’ve got headphones, I’ve got tons of generics, like I carry around like four to five pairs of generic ears personally most of the time. And you’d be surprised at how often I use them.

Oh well, OK, I will show up who need them but don’t have them or what happens. Yes.

And also I carry around specific generics. I actually carry around generics from a brand called EER Sonic’s. And then I also carry around the Sennheiser, the four hundred series or five hundred series, their new series. Because I find that people that have generic years. I love you. Sure, I hate your ears. A lot of people have those ears and they don’t sound good. And particularly for women, the actual frequencies that are boosted in those ears are not great.

Like they’re like one K to K which are frequencies. We have a hole in their abrasive in the high mids, which we’re sensitive to. I just I always will change our women’s women’s generics with my sures or my or my synthesizers or my ear Sonic’s and ear. Sonic’s is like one of my favorite brands for ears for women. As long as you’re not doing like hard rock and they always have a better day, like sometimes I’ll get when I was with Michael Bolton, when we went to England, we had a crew of background singers that was with us and they all had ears.

And I gave them all my ear, Sonic’s generics. And they were like, oh, my God, I didn’t know. I didn’t know it could sound like this. So they actually all bought your Sonic’s after the tour of Nice. Yeah. I mean, I’m the type of person where I don’t actually get endorsed by any of these brands, but I like like my my presentation of the live sound summit, you know, the science of hearing.

I believe everything is a tool. I believe the ears are a tool like yes, I’m loyal to certain brands and a certain extent, but not really like the guitar player comes up to me and goes, hey, I need ears. I’m probably going to. And it’s a dude. I probably be like, you need to go get some G.H. like, those are perfect for those guys. But if a lady comes up to me and goes, hey, I need to get some ears and she’s a singer, I’m probably not going to offer her the same ears.

But I have listened to all of these brands and all of these different types of ears. And I know how they sound and I know how to utilize them to effect what I need out of a mix for someone. So I think that’s a big tool for people is like just.

Understanding all of that, so I’m a big proponent of trying new things and like introducing people to new things, so I just carry around a lot of just because the has the greatest market share doesn’t mean it’s the best tool, right?

Exactly. And I think we find that I think very much in our business, people get stuck on brand names and like what’s most popular and stuff like that and don’t like to venture in to see the rest of the incredible innovations and tools that have come up, you know, in the 10 years since that single product that they’re still touting has been has come out. There’s been hundreds of advancements in our technology. And, you know, I’m a big proponent of continuing to learn and I like to incorporate that in mixing like or I do a lot of award shows or I do random.

Like I told you, I get called in to like do Anita Baker or one offs or whatever. And people need things. And just having resources and tools is incredible. I guess one of the biggest things in my toolbox is like me, like I can fix anything, I can solder whatever I carry. I can take a circuit board and replace capacitors. I can solder a guitar pedal. I can replace I can record a speaker.

I can, I can. I mean, I was doing that. That’s why I mean, when I was 16, I was working in a warehouse with Rock Street Music. I’ve replaced Pazos, I’ve done diaphragms, I’ve written speakers. I’ve actually cut kown and glued in cone pieces on subs and stuff like that.

Like so I, I believe that’s like my biggest toolbox is like I have this set of skills where I can pretty much fix and do anything. Like I have always been a technician just as much as I’ve been an engineer. And it’s always fascinated me. I believe that the most effective both of us are both. You are just as technical as you are creative.

Lorien, what about books? Is there one book that has been immensely helpful to you mentioned one earlier. Is that the one or was there another? That’s one of them.

There’s a bunch of books. There’s a bunch of other. I read a lot. So The 48 Laws of Power is the book that I was talking about earlier. And for anyone that really wants to understand the rules of the game that is being played with power and things like that, it’s an excellent read. It’s very short. The actual concepts are pretty short. But once you read it, you’re like, Oh, I didn’t know for a sound.

One of the most important books that I ever read was Sound Reinforcement Handbook. I feel like a lot of people say that, but it really started me in understanding the science of sound and like how things work. And, you know, I really was fascinated when I was younger by the science and microphones and how, like microphones and diaphragms, transducers, all that stuff works. So they have a lot of great explanations of the science of sound in there.

And then for like. One of the books that changed my life and how I perceived my career and my success and my skills was a book called Grit The Power of Perseverance by a woman named Angela Duckworth. And that book changed everything. You know, that book talks about how talented people are oftentimes not more successful, oftentimes as people with a little bit less talent that want it more, that are the most successful people. And she also talks about, you know, what we all talk about, like the ten thousand, our role or whatever.

But she goes into a really neat section on flow. When you reach a certain linear time in your career, you no longer consciously think about what you’re doing when you’re doing your job. You’re just doing it. And I very much in about year nine or ten of my career got to that point and didn’t understand, like I would all of a sudden be like mixing and it will have been like ten minutes and I will have gone through and like putting Compressor’s and they’ll be like, I don’t even know what I was doing.

And that’s called the flow state like I am. I’m not learning anymore. I don’t need to second guess what I’m doing. I know what all of the things do. And so now I can flow and my creativity. And that book was really great for those conversations and understanding how we advance in our careers and on our skills and giving ourselves time like ten years. You’re not a master for ten years or ten thousand hours. And it’s very much true.

I feel like it was about year nine where I started to feel like that. So that was a really great book. And I actually, if that book to a lot of people, I send it to him for Christmas, all kinds of stuff. So.

So, Loriene, if people want to listen to all of this research that you talked about a lot, some of that they can do the live sound, some 20, 20 does Sound Design Live dotcom. But if people want to keep up with your work and see what you’re doing now and in the future, where is the best place for people to do that on Instagram?

Probably is my main platform where you can follow me.

I’m a sound lady, 13 on there through 12 already taken, I guess. Yeah, well, I was like 13. It was like I had I had my I had my real name on there for a while and I was like, that’s probably not the best idea. So I changed it to lady. Should I not be using my real name. Right. I just I just didn’t want it to be my username. So I was like, let me take it off of there.

And I was just like, let me just put a placeholder and I just put Sound Lady Thirteen and I just kept it. It might end up changing to my ticktock candle, which is Lady of Sound, but we’ll find out also if you want to follow my little educational things along there on my platforms. But I’m also posted I’m also on Tick Tock at Lady of Sound and I post really fun little short intro to audio. It’s very basic audio knowledge for the average person so it can help them understand what’s going.

And eventually I am going to be doing more talks about my research. So I would say go to my website, learn Bohanon Dotcom and put in your email and then you’ll get notified because I’ll probably be doing events through my website and through my social media sites for it. I would love to do a series on my oh my talks once I’m more formally compile my research because the small part that I had for yours is like like a quarter of all the medical journals that I’ve I have compiled.

So it’s actually more of a project than I anticipated. So that’ll happen there. So I would say you can pretty much I have a unique name. So if you Google Lorien Bohanon on any of the platforms, you’ll find me. There’s not a lot of red headed south ladies, and you can definitely tell on all of my platforms that I’m a sound lady because all of my window, all my pictures of me in front of a console.

So awesome. Well, Loreen Bohannon thank you so much for joining me on Sound Design Live.

Thanks for having me, Nathan.

I’m Here to Make You Sound as Good as Possible

By Nathan Lively

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In this episode of Sound Design Live, I talk with North American technical lead for Void Acoustics, Nathan Short. We discuss setting up sound systems for DJs, an alternative to using compressors out of fear, and paying for sound systems with alcohol.

I ask:

  • What are some of the biggest mistakes you see people making who are new to setting up sound systems for DJs?
  • Steps to Success with Modern DJ Reinforcement
    • No one wants to tell the artist what they can and can’t do. How do I set up a DJ rig so that I can basically let them do whatever they want without destroying the sound system?
    • Why are DJ monitor rigs so big and loud?
    • “When the sound is right and there’s no distortion, people stay for 2 more drinks and after two years you’ve paid for that sound system.”
      • What does “right” mean to you? To customers? What are the most important details I need to get right to help my clients with their end goal (selling alcohol/food, selling tickets)?
  • Tell us about the biggest or maybe most painful mistake you’ve made on the job and how you recovered.
  • From FB
    • Michael Reed: I want to hear how he manages spatial XOVRs of his uncoupled destination sub arrays he puts in bars and clubs.
    • Dave Gammon What’s his favorite cut of meat…… 😂
    • Zac Chia ask him about the time he sliced his leg setting up Dirtybird Campout.

My job is to help my client make more money.

Nathan Short

Notes

  1. All music in this episode by Arulo.
  2. Quotes
    1. It comes back down to basic gain structure.
    2. Tickle the red on the in. Tickle the red on the out. Someone’s going to come up here tonight with a few too many beers in them and play this loud anyway so I might as well do it now and find that reference so I know how loud I can get before the end of the night.
    3. What I tell them is that if we keep most of our knobs here at noon and you can tickle one red on the input and one red on the output and until then, you’ve got it all. That’s where I start to limit.
    4. DJs like a floating dance floor so that your feet don’t hurt at the end of a night of dancing.
    5. They’re not going to know why, but their brains says, “Any time I go there, I have a good time.”
    6. My job is to help my client make more money.

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 a jack of all trades except lighting. You can find him in corporate boardrooms, dirt festivals, touring metal country and hip hop. Technical lead at Void Acoustics. Nathan Short.

Nathan, welcome to Sound Design Live. Hey, good to be here. So, Nathan, I definitely want to talk to you about how to set up a sound system for a DJ without blowing things up, breaking anything, hurting my equipment. But before I do that, I would love to know what kind of stuff you keep you use for reference tracks. So once you get a sound system set up and you want to kind of get familiar with it, what’s what’s maybe one of the first things you play through it.

So as I’m traveling and I travel a lot, I’m constantly looking out for new music, whether it be D.J. or anything else. This comes from years of being in the in the past I DJed in Chicago for probably 10 years, sports bars, nightclubs all over there was how I supplement my income on the weekends around regular job to and installs and other things. I always I always keep a couple of deejay gigs over the weekend because no. One, if you work at a bar for drinks and that’s how we made it through our twenties without spending all of our money on booze, you know, we always kept a couple of our jobs in bars where that was deejaying and stuff.

I’ve always had an extensive large music collection. I mean, even two thousand five, two thousand four when people were still trying to figure out how to share iPods and stuff, you know, and rip music from each other. I always had, you know, nearly a terabyte of music constantly searching for the new cool stuff to play during my gigs and then constantly looking for archives of really cool old stuff, because I not only didn’t, you know, top 40 and another stuff, but I had a unique thing in Chicago because I came from Missouri and up here, everyone was always trying to do top 40, top 40.

And I was like, well, well, that’s fun. I kind of want to bring the kind of party we used to do in Missouri, which was more like a frat party. So even in the early 2000s, we’d be doing hip hop and then rock and roll and then Southern Rock. And I was like, you know, I’d be looking around these bars. And I’m like, well, there’s a lot of people here that obviously went to Iowa and Nebraska or somewhere else.

I just happened to live in Chicago. Now I’m like, I think there’s room for the good old Midwestern college frat party.

And so we’d be throwing down AC DC in the middle of a hip hop set and people would be going wild and then sweet home Alabama, just sing along. And so even in my travels now I keep Folder’s and I, I use Spotify a lot and then that’s downtown. But there’s the apps that you sit there near the bar and I wonder what that is. It sounds, oh, cool. And I’ll throw that in Spotify playlist to review for later.

So if I just get two or three revolving playlists for one is for corporate trade shows, then I have one. That’s more for the EDM nightclub people. I actually have like when I’m in Asia, I do a lot of traveling in Asia. I have a Chinese market because what they prefer is completely unique. Now tell me about that.

Yeah. So I found out when my last trips I was playing stuff that I like and this and that. And they were getting really weirded out because the bass, the bass they felt was too violent. And that was the word I was getting. And what I had to figure out to tailor that the Asian market needs at the clubs over there was that they don’t like the transient explosiveness that happens at like sixty five and eighty five. When there’s high impact, lots of air moving, they want things more a little over compressed and over rounded.

Just sound more like a car audio sub. A little more polite, a little more. So for them you kind of need to over compression around it a little bit. That’s kind of why they prefer maybe the sound of like a dB to, you know, and pass some very round. It’s very this is what you’re getting. This is what we’re always doing. And they like that polite repetitiveness, OK? You do things that scare them too much and they’re like, oh, that’s aggressive.

You’re wired. Well, so we’re kind of had to tailor a little bit to what they wanted, but a little bit, you know what what we do as well as we acoustics and some of the stuff that I love, we do bring a very dynamic bass sound, so to say back to. I always have a number of Spotify playlists where I’m trying things out and I like to surprise people with new songs. So whether it be something from like defective records or dirty word records, those are two labels that if you want to just throw a pen at the dartboard, you know, they have stuff that just sounds so good because it’s mastered.

So I know for a fact where the stuff for Dirty Bastard, the. London, they have a custom set of old, as I know, the gear goes through and every time you listen to it, you’re just like I just got so rich and powerful and it’s so sweet. Yeah. Yeah. So pretty much anything that Claude Van Stroke to Martin Christian Martin they’re putting out, you can throw up as a reference for. So, you know, OK, well, let’s keep going.

So I just want to check, because I’ve heard stories about people basically funding themselves through college with deejay gigs, but does that really work? So you were able to just like basically do a gig, a weekend, and then that was enough money to pay for college in your life and everything, you know?

So my college story is actually a really funny and crazy one.

I want my freshman year and I played soccer in southern Illinois and I went on pretty much a full ride for Division three soccer. And I got a what they called was a temporary music degree, which was really tailored toward the Christian music market. What I found out when I got there is that I do not operate well in a small town of a thousand people, OK? That’s a that’s a dry county. I got into lots of trouble at that school and I eventually got kicked out of the house.

So I went back to Missouri, took some night courses, and then I met a girl who was moving to Chicago and found out they had a great studio program and live program, went up and interviewed there and then made my way to Chicago and went to Columbia College, had some amazing, amazing mentors, you know, some of them. And, you know, like Jack Alexander Sound Design Live, Jim Nutt was an amazing live teacher and went there for a year.

But while before I got there, my student loans had defaulted within one week. And I was like, well, I’ve been no longer working here. This is two thousand one. And they left her her phone open, but no one took over her pay schedule. So they let me go the first semester they let me go saying that without financial aid. And then they made me stop going. But before they made me stop going, one of my friends who worked there, I found out about a teacher’s aide position.

And so I signed up and started working as a teacher’s aide before they knew I was a student. And I did that for the next three years. And so I’d sit in and audit any classes I wanted. I worked for the school, I worked at graduations, and I kind of scammed my way through the rest of my education by working for the school, and they didn’t know I was a student.

That’s amazing. I did what I have to do to get by. And they actually that actually came up about two years ago. I went in to interview. They wanted me to come back and teach. And when I went in there, the new dean was like, you’re 17 hours away from a degree. And my mentor looked at me and he goes, You asshole. And I was like, all right. I was like, I did what I had to do.

Yeah, I never graduated. OK, cool. And he said, Yeah, keep me on track.

So I know your career has taken all these twists and turns. And I’m just wondering if looking back, you could take us to a point in your life when you felt like maybe you took a hard left turn or something really had to change for you. And so I’m wondering if you could tell us about that and what did what did you decide to do? And just to give you a little bit more information, I have found that with most people there’s some point in their lives when they’re like, OK, I’m not going to be a building manager anymore and I’m going to stop doing this all this work and just focus on audio.

And that may not have been what maybe you went the other direction. But can you think of something like that in your life when you made a decision to really do more of the work that you really love?

I actually have a very defining moment that comes out, and this is where I’ll make a tiny statement. Also, I am I’m a very spiritual person. I personally do believe in God and Jesus. I do not believe in the modern church or dogma. And a couple of years ago, I was digging through a thing that right before I moved to Chicago, I had written down some prayers and I had written a note to myself and God while I was searching these things out, I was in a really dark place in my life.

I was not happy. And the note said, God, please help me find a job in a place where I can be as happy as I am when I’m helping friends, car caraveo or running sound for their fans. I don’t know how to do it. And I was like, put that out there and I found this note. And whether you want to call that self reflection or a prayer, I wrote this down while in a time of turmoil and I found it years later.

I was like I at that time I didn’t know because I came from a small town in Missouri that the possibility of a career in audio was even a thing I worked in. I worked in warehouses and then on the side I would help friends do recordings every now and then. I’d help run some further bands on weekends or at a biker rally. That was the extent of I knew like there was also the venue in town. But I thought that was so far beyond me.

That was that was a level to me. Now, looking at it, it’s a road. And I like those guys to be were so. They’re living it now, and they were so in it, I have the chops to do that, I was just a guy who had to hear it and that get in my friend’s car radio or hook up their own stereo. Enough of that. And then looking at that, in hindsight, I was like, wow, I knew what I was looking for.

I didn’t know how to get there. And I didn’t have anyone to tell me how to get there. I had to figure that out. And so that was going to school and then running into just an amazing amount of talent at that that year, the kids that were going through the program. Now, all of those guys now are stage managers for a lot of the big festivals around huge names that I went to school with. And we all banded together and said, well, we’re going to kick all these old fuddy duddies out.

We’re going to keep each other. We’re going to keep pulling each other up. And so every time one of us got a new job, we’d sneak in two or three of our friends and then he’d get up somewhere and he’d take us along. And now we’re talking about stage managers for Lollapalooza, you know, for some of the main stages, people that tour the world with, I mean, major acts. My old roommate is the chance, the rapper’s front house guy.

They tour the world a lot of our guys and went into huge giant corporate. And we’ve always we always banded together in a matter of ten years. We took over a large portion of the industry in Chicago with our own kind of underground mafia.

You know, we’ve brought in people we trusted and we excluded people that we could trust. And it was really we had a really good run for a good number of years. And now I could pick up the phone. And I’ve got I’ve got friends that work for every major company in the world right now that are close friends.

I feel like it’s important that I know you now. Before it was fun, but now it’s for business. So. So what was the decision? So you you discovered this prayer reflection you’d written down at some point and then you decided what? I’m going to move to Chicago and do this? Well, this was this was finding that out years later, OK? So I hadn’t had that search out there. And then Chicago kind of fell into my lap, whether that was an answer for prayer.

But I remember when this girl that I met told me that she was leaving and going to school in Chicago and I was like almost devastated. We had the summer going on and I really did love her. And all of a sudden, for a week everywhere, I turn to the newspaper, Chicago, the TV commercial on the radio, Chicago. And I’m telling you, I heard it five times a day for like two weeks in a row. And I went, OK, OK, I need to go check this out.

The universe the universe is telling me this is this is the thing to do. And in hindsight, it was it was an answer to either that that great search or that or that was definitely written in the stars that I need to be in Chicago. And then I I took the springboard from there and hustled. So, Nathan, you have set up a lot of sound systems in your day and you’ve helped a lot of people set up sound systems.

So I’m curious, what are some of the mistakes you see people making over and over again? Maybe you could share with us one or two of the most common mistakes you see people making who are new to setting up sound systems for DJs?

Yeah, that becomes a whole different thing. Now, back in the day, it used to be underpowered amps and games on the amplifiers that set open music, getting on an amplifier as as volume and volume.

Right now, they use it as what I was doing game structurally the wrong point of game structure where my brain goes. And nowadays it’s less because you see so many more people using powered speakers. So now there’s so much less thought put into it for the amateur. So you have you have two groups going to have the amateur, you’re going to have the mid level and you’re going to have the extreme, the mid-level. Let’s say you’re going to see DJs at your average house or your average media festival.

You know, they’re going to do what they’re going to do with the limitations. But and then on the big side, we’ve talked about this before, people using compressors and limiters wrong at the game stage between the dB. And that’s pretty much the thing I would focus on is it just comes back to the basic game structure and people not understanding that you can set up to help you succeed instead of just leaving him and guessing and doing well. I don’t know where the game is on my knob because you never took the five minutes to go up to his mixer.

You can plug your phone in or a file from a thumb drive, set a high level and go back to your desk upload. Now, if you take the extra five minutes and do this and understand, OK, well, when he turns up there and there, my console is here. Cool. Instead, what you will see a lot of guys doing, like will send me a signal. Where are you going to play? Well, come on then.

That’s like that’s like twenty dB of guesswork right there. And then you’re hoping he doesn’t turn up later. It’s the same as like what we call that market. And this is when if you’ve ever run down for horn bent trumpet players and trombone players are notorious when you say, hey, all right, let’s get those monitors set, let’s get a level set, play you something like where you’re like, that’s nice. But I know as soon as I turn my head, you’re about to blow my brains across the side of the room and you’re like, give me a show level.

I need to show up for you. And they’re like, why weren’t you like, listen, I’m going to give you all the monitors. I get what I need you to blow that thing like you’ve been warmed up for twenty minutes and then maybe they’ll give you a loud note, but you still never that first note. They’re going to come out of the gate. They’re just going to go, well, they’re going to bury that diaphragm into the back of the magnet, you know, so we call that market and we you can’t go up a horn player to do it, but you can walk up to a big.

Put your own speed and plug your phone in, put a thumb drive in profile, turn the game up nice and spicy, as if you would examine to show level to the red on the integral, the red on the window. Yeah, someone’s going to come up here eventually tonight with the too few, many beers in them. And they’re going to play this loud anyway. So I might as well do it now and find that reference so I know how loud I can get before the end of the night.

And so most of times you’ll find people don’t do this and then when they start to get scared, they throw a compressor on it. Oh, I better compress this.

I don’t know what he’s going to do because they have to do it. So that’s how you use a compressor. A wrong is by not setting up the game properly ahead of time and just trying to rely too much on the compressor to save you.

That’s right. When she smashes mushy. OK, I’m safe now. And what have you done? You’ve ruined the dynamics. You’ve made it sound even worse. You know that, because when we know, we know two things are ever going to come in with really amazing files because they’re super pro or they’re going to come in with garbage. So we can’t do something to make it worse. Right. All we can do is try and do things to make it better.

And you’ll see it on like especially when guys would be running hip hop. I’d be in Chicago, I couple to squishy, squishy, squishy. I’m like, why are you killing this? Like, because it sounds like crap. Our friend. Hold on, try this. Instead of using that as this is where it started, I started to get into using progressors as a quick release limiters. I feel like it started with some of those hip hop deejays who would just be absolute pure red.

They just don’t care. They’re there to be loud and do one thing for the embassy and everyone else because they’ve got one job. And that’s to the embassy may find that he doesn’t know. So it’s down to that loyalty thing and they don’t care about you. You don’t get anything else. Track loud. I will speak to my MP. It’s nice to know you, but you are not my boss. This guy up here for my kids. And you have to understand that.

I mean, I see my friends especially with crap out of this. Yeah, we already know his tragic can be weird. He’s got a gun controller. And so you in quick attack, quick, quick release just to catch the big, nasty transient. You know, we’re talking about eight attack, sixteen release and then we’d only have it coming in to our I’m trying to catch three or six dB. That’s anything else. I need to go upstream and put a pad in front of my mind free or line in or I need to put a dye to knock the signal down.

This topic is so important and it’s interesting, I think that both you and Dave Rete discussed some methods at this year’s Lifeson summit for what you can do technically to have a really great relationship with the artist. And so you talk about how you can set up your deejay rig so that basically when the deejay walks up, they’re expecting some sort of limitations from you. So they’re already kind of have an adversarial relationship where they’re like Nathans coming up here. He’s going to tell me to turn it down.

He’s going to tell me all things I can’t do. And so then when you come up and you say, hey, how’s it going? And they say, hey, like, where can I set these knobs? And you’re like, hey, you can turn it all the way up, then it’s like they’re amazed because they’re so used to people telling them all the things they can’t do.

So what I like to do is when I walk up and I say, hey, just to let you know, here’s how it is. And I was like, if we keep most of our jobs here at noon and game and you can take a one read on the input, you can take a one read on the output, and until then, you’ve got it all. That’s where I start to limit. And they go, oh wow, someone’s being honest with me.

I’m like, I’m not going to limit you until it’s there. And that’s just for the system. You’ve got the whole system until then. And I’m like, your monitor. Go ahead and turn it all the way up. That’s all. You you have complete control. If you need more, I’ll try to find it. But you should be surprised. And usually they go, yeah, go ahead. And you know, and it’s you for absolute Armageddon and they usually turn halfway up and oh you’re like, there you go, you know.

So yeah, you just tell them the rules are like, listen, you’ve got it all. But here’s where the limit sets in and I’m here to make you sound as good as possible outside. So if you just take the radical to to we stay there, we’re good. And they’re usually really happy, you know. OK, great.

You get those you get those things that you discover work well with people and then you discover that you can kind of just like repeat them in the right way and like people get it, you know. Yeah.

Yes. So this leads me to the next question from your presentation. It sounds like it was called Steps to Success with modern dB reinforcement. And one of the things you talked about is the question I’ve always had. Why are monitor rigs so big and loud? And the two reasons I remember are actually really straightforward. But yeah. Would you talk about that for a second? Yeah.

So what you’ll find is that is not just to have a performance. They’re not prima donna. These are people who love music, who grew up at the scene, who love the singing and as one of a quorums. We titled that we fool around in your records. These are people who literally want to hug the speakers and to have their experience and teachers come from that world. And so when they play a small club, the small club, you’re in that system, you don’t need it as big of monitors because that base is in the room.

You’re getting pounded from all sides. When it’s a good club, the booth is more near the crowd. So let’s remove ourselves now and go to the bigger stage. You know, remove the person from the crowd. You can’t reach out and touch your crowd. So how do you get that feeling back? So what what’s going to happen in around twenty four thousand five? If we come through with his dB, that’s going to triple 15s and then three or four dB ask what this did?

Is it put a lot of punchy bass on the ground and then it coupled all this massive momentum, high frequency kept them low. So you didn’t have giant stacks, you had everything coming from from low up and him. And because he was such a tall guy and we’re talking he’s six, I believe he always had problems with getting auditors up high enough to get his ears. So if we do the line or a curve from down below, it’s going to hit him no matter what the shortage comes in.

Guess what? It’s going to get the shortage, too. They didn’t have to start reinventing the wheel just for him to come on. Painkillers got less. And then the video and lighting guys realized, oh, look, there’s no fat that’s in the way of my own lighting show. And so this became the de facto standard. And people were like, why do you need all that horsepower? That’s not the way Linera works. Well, the does the gospel of guide is not a traditional itinerate element.

It is it is a web shape in a slot. It does different things that it’s more like a hi fi device in my mind. I mean, people say, oh, they’re your medicine, your kids not going to couple. Well, guess what? This serves a purpose, and it actually sounds good when you doing it. I’m worried about horsepower and the reason these guys want that horsepower, because now you remove them from the crowd and they need to get that feeling back, that close connectivity.

So the smart guys put in their 30 in our reduction hearing protection devices and they crank it and crank it because they want the low bid viscosity to be modulating their chest. They want those cell blows to be blowing their legs around to have the feeling of being in the crowd and being assaulted by the P.A. while they’re removed from their crowd in the P.A. And so it’s all about what we call a body feel. They do it to get their body in the game, to get loosened up, to feel part of the music, and then they put in if they’re smart.

And most of the guys that I work with, our superstar, are very aware that the hearing protection goes in because I don’t need all that power in IMiDs. I want all that power in the low mids lows to shake my body and get my brain that endorphins in the same space as my crowd is. OK, so, Nathan, one of my favorite quotes from your presentation and from the entire life sounds I something I wrote it down and I actually quoted it later during my presentation at the end of the summit.

Is this you said when the sound is right and there’s no distortion, people stay for two more drinks. And after two years, you’ve paid for that sound system. And I just love that you I think you said you came up, you figure this out with someone else, but you just kind of have figured out the dollars to dB average for installing sound systems and what that can do for your business and also connecting it with what your clients or customers want, which is oftentimes sell more alcohol, sell more food, sell more tickets.

And so you’re connecting sound quality with their business success. And so the follow up I wanted to ask you about this idea is what does right mean to you and to your customers? What are the most important details that you feel like you need to get right to help your clients with their end goal, whatever that is, selling alcohol, food, tickets, that kind of stuff? Yeah.

So this came about as hanging out at a super trendy nightclub in Chicago where my friends would work. And one of my friends there, a couple was a bartender and the other friend, she was a cocktail and cocktail server for some of the high dollar bottle service stuff. We’re talking, you know, back in the late mid 20s, these are people who would take home six grand at night. We’re talking about kind of nightclub super high end, super high volume, really great at the time and had a function, one sound system in it, which was supposed to be top of the line.

And what they noticed about this particular venue is there were mains that were pointed right at the bar and there were some behind the bar pointed right at your point of sale. And so you’d be going to try and order a drink. And you’re just absolutely screaming at the bartender to try and get a drink. And then my buddy would complain about. So this thing started slowly sitting. And I’m like, well, you don’t need to put speakers there because that’s where we’re taking in revenue.

He was complaining about his ears and I got him some special ear plugs. I think all the bartenders started wearing the atomistic research because they’re cheap. They go in and they just lower everything in a high five way. And you can actually in a loud, nasty bar, hear people talking easier because it cuts down the extraneous bouncing around noise. And I got them hooked on that. And I started thinking about, you know, I’m like, you know, someday I’m going to be designing the big clubs.

This is not a mistake I’m going to make. I’m not going to point about it at the bar where the money is exchanging, where the commerce is taking place, what they’re not charging at the door for these large nightclubs. They’re making their money on booze. So if I don’t help the bar so oose they’re not going to buy speakers of lights, which is where I make my money or the new fancy DJ gear. This has I have to make the owner money and then the owner will be happy and spend money with me, you know.

So I started looking at the mistakes that were being made and then I started researching. How did the classic discos do it, how did you do for Zanzibar and all these amazing places you heard of in New York? You know, how could we find the old material somehow? This just laid out where they did and did not put delays where they did and did not put Phil speakers or their methods. These are the guys that invented it. And I started looking about how how high power was on the dance floor.

And sometimes they didn’t do any of the ladies at all. You want to dance with the dance floor, you want to talk, you go to the bar. And so I started looking at every aspect of this. And then one of the cool things we got into over at Columbia College, Chicago is as part of the aesthetics of live sound, you know, we get into acoustics and psychoacoustics. There are no courses on that. And while I didn’t get to take the courses, I did buy the book.

And I said and I got my friends took the course and I started studying as much as I could, because as we know, you go into a noisy, loud restaurant. It doesn’t have soundproofing anywhere and you’re trying to talk to someone. It’s a miserable experience. Loud, noisy restaurants are horrible. We want to be calm. I want to have nice with you. I don’t want my voice heard at the end of the night. I’m just trained to listen to you.

The human brain is powerful DSP when we’re in a noisy environment that DSP engages to decipher what the person across from us is saying to get those words across. It’s trying to look at your lips moving and match that up with some sort of algorithm in our head that’s filtering extraneous things out to get communication across. And so I started thinking about why were all these little things with the disco so important? They don’t follow them now. Why do they have little floating dance floors?

And you read an article and it was important to the deejays that the guest dancing on the dance floor that floated and moved so their feet wouldn’t hurt. At the end of the night, you dance on concrete, your feet hurt. I was like, why were they so? Concerned about this because they want people dancing. I was like, OK, so they don’t want their feet hurt, that’s causing pain, that’s causing a negative performance and stuff to be released in our body pain messages.

Cool. So we get that out. Let’s do the same thing with the audio. And if we don’t have harsh mid range and everything, sweet and high fine and everything’s balanced in the right way or people’s brains are going to release stress chemicals. And then I started looking into studies about this. If you’re in a noisy, nasty environment, your brain’s releasing stress chemicals because it’ll work if we eliminate the need for the brain to make that. And you’re sitting there just talking normally, that would be an uncomfortable way.

Your brain is only going to release endorphins from having a good time. If we don’t sell you alcohol and you have more endorphins and then you go dancing, you have more endorphins. What we’re doing is we’re giving you an entire cornucopia of legal high. You are literally floating on cloud nine because we know about Norbert and norepinephrine dopamine and serotonin, and we want those things flooding out. While you’re having a good time, I want it as much as I can keep your brain from engaging high level of thought, any amount of stress or any amount of pain, then what we’re left with is a natural high for everyone.

And what that turns into is people are going to stay longer, they’re going to dance longer, they’re going to feel comfortable, they’re not going to know exactly why, but they’re going you know, every time I go there, I have such a good time. And then their brain associates that have Lova and response with I like going there, I’m happy they’re about happy with this other club. I don’t know why it’s nicer. They have a nicer sound system, something else.

But every time I go here to my favorite place, I’m comfortable. I’m happy. People I’m with have a good time. I leave in my ears. Don’t hurt to. What we’ve done is we’ve given them a complete stress free experience and we noticed that the turnover that started happening is everyone to stay longer, dance longer, are more drinks. And over the course of the year, our clients started making much more money and we would then sit down and talk about this like, hey, we’re not going to point fingers at your point.

So I know you think speakers go over here. Guess what?

They don’t you know, I’m not going to tell you how to run your bar. Don’t tell me how to run myself. I’m going to help you make more money, you know? And so we’d be like we started doing very specific things. No speakers ever pointed at point of sale. If they are, they’re going to be so low and so tailored, they’re nearly invisible. You’re not going to think they’re on the curve is going to be for maximum vocal intelligibility between the person handing over the money and taking the money.

And that’s very important because we need to make our clients money, but we also need to put our best foot forward. And it just so happens, it’s the same thing. My best job is also going to make my client more money. So that’s that is that summed up as concisely as I can.

And so you have some of these specific things, but it sounds like you’re very good at reading the room. And and so it’s hard to generalize because it’s whatever you think the room needs and the client needs to to get the job done and to get the results that they won. It’s not like you have a template that you follow every time. No.

And I’m sure that if I wanted to make some sort of complicated Excel spreadsheet that could be done or as part of some larger SRM, other factors taken in. But it’s really about common sense. We’re not going to put big face by the front door to annoy the neighbors. You know, we’re not going to point fingers at our point of sale. There are there are zones like the bathrooms. The bathrooms don’t need to be blaring.

These are common sense things that you walk into some place and you’re just like, oh, my God, no one stepped in here and like, gone to take a piece of mind and realize six and a half inch finger on maximum overdrive.

Wow. That’s not comfortable. Let’s let’s fix these things. It’s the niceties. It comes back to the aesthetics of the situation. So. Yeah, well, Nathan, you’ve done so many cool things in your career so far, and besides getting kicked out of school, I would love if you would share with us maybe one of the most painful, biggest mistakes that you’ve made on the job in your own mind. And then what after what happened afterwards, how you recovered?

Yeah.

So the I was I was thinking about that because you had asked me to think about that. And I’ve been quite lucky to not have a lot of major, major mistakes in my career. But there is one that really stands out. And I was in Japan and we were launching Incubus in Japan. For Japan is the first time ultra music festival went to Japan as they had started to branch out around the world, and I hope it was in a number of Asian countries and would work its way around the world, even South America back to Miami.

Miami being the kick off every year as one of the world’s largest electronic music festivals. So we go over to do ultra Japan with my incredibly, incredibly awesome Japanese counterparts. These guys are just the absolute, most amazing bunch of guys. They’re footies, they’re personable. They’re they’re like family. So we set up and we’re doing everything all day. And it was a very, very famous club outside of Tokyo with an insane and I’m talking insane amount of loud.

They’ve been designed by Jim Thorpe and each of these Red Cluster’s had to Tadgh fifteens a tad 10 and then it’s had four inch compression driver with a couple of bullets and the crown arms were set in them. And I think there’s something like thirty eight of these in two concentric rings on trust. It goes up and down. And then they had a house very dark. And I think that 10 elements inside of Dask and then a few weird configurations of.

That in-house guys were not super happy that we then come in with our to what looks like little compared to that room stacks of incubus and a little center cluster. So I’ve got my tools. We want to go out 15 or 12 or six and a half and we fire it up and they’re pretty happy. And the guy on stage is like more and more and more. And I’m like, cool, cool, cool. We got a little headroom, little headroom and all of a sudden all the hyman’s are gone.

I’m looking around, we stop to stop and I’m out at front of house and I can already smell, oh, now I knew what had happened. So I run up and the guys are climbing over the speakers and they’re sniffing like, guys, guys, guys, the production people are watching here. Stop, stop. Let’s go have a sidebar. And I look and I said, what happened? What happened? What happened? I noticed the lights dimmed while this would happened.

And at that time, this was before everyone could afford power. Something really serious was was good, but didn’t sound as good yet as a lot of the other stuff over Japan, their voltage runs at about one hundred and five. That’s all they have. And so the guys have gotten custom modified Chinese lab group. It’s made for their rig at the time and they were very, very good. We know a lot of people use those sandwiches and see views now, and they’re incredibly well made at the time.

These are some of the first really very well-made ones with the cost of running about one hundred five bolts. And the guys are like, oh yeah, we have brownouts here all the time now.

And I when it was found out during soundcheck and it cooked every single time made and high frequency device in a brand new customers, I didn’t know that could happen.

That’s terrifying. Yes.

Which is why we soon after this we had moved over to a complete power soft thing simply because of the amount of precise limiting you could do. You know, before it was the Wild, Wild West. Well, what’s your what’s your DP? We had an tbsp, but not everyone wanted that. They wanted that. They wanted this. A lot of my early work with Boyd was simply gaining consistency between different things. So I tell everyone, we’re taking a break.

I go to the house, guys. And I said, and this is this is the point where the Japanese mindset is coming on. I’m getting the looks of death.

I need you to take the sword out, cut yourself up and commit Harry Carry right now, sword.

And I’m being looked at like a piece of trash. And I said, could we please could I send out a matrix left and right into your house for you? That’s great. No, no, no. I’m not asking for your entire ring. We’ll use my subs mids and close up to my twelve. I only want to use your high gifted tonight. We have to have a solution. The show starts in a couple of hours. The guy said, OK, they drag this rack out the front of house, they stick to dB.

That’s one sixty’s on my matrix. The guy cranked it down a little bit hard. They have a guy sit there and he sits there for the next twelve hours. He traded out with one guy. This is my babysitter of shame. So I go back out, I dial in the delay real quick and it turns out it takes six Vidor’s kind of elements to keep up with our incubus. That’s what we like. Yep. Just turn on fixed up timeline and to my to my stack, read up on my bass and then we’ll just use your hands and eyes.

Well, it sounded fantastic, but the show went well. And because I was so ashamed of what had happened, I sat there and I only took like one pee break that whole night. I sat there and next for twelve hours, I think my hand will not leave. This will not have any more problems. This will be a perfect show that other stupid little kids sat next to me and was my babies that look at me every time I got loud, every time his compressor started with dB like, are you going to get this?

I was like, Yeah, I get it. I get it, man.

And I love that I have to work. Hopefully he didn’t speak English. So the two of you couldn’t actually talk. You just had to look at this.

This is pretty much what’s happened. I think they asked me a number of times that night, do you want to take a break? You want to go somewhere you don’t need to stand. You know, you’re just like I said, no, you’re going to make this right. And I have I earned their respect, OK, by standing there for the next twelve hours and just solid on my face. I’m going to take a break. We’ll be right back in five minutes.

I was back in five minutes. I was standing there. I didn’t stop watching the stage. And I just I took my licks. I had to pay for all of that because it was my mistake. And I had gone to one of the owners at the time and he gave me this bill back. And I was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I’m like, we understand retail and factory pricing.

I’m like, I’m asking was a personal one time favor, can I get manufacturer pricing? Things cost because it’s coming out of my own pocket. And then I shipped the stuff to the guys with my apologies. And I said, and so they got an entire new set of different devices were there. And that’s the I did that. Right. That’s an amazing story. Just to give people some context and also just for me to confirm, like you keep mentioning, you mentioned power soft a few times in that story.

And I think the reason is because power soft amps has some very more advanced power tracking on the inside. So when the AQ’s coming in, it can really track and make sure that everything’s OK and protect the. That and the output limiting, so the absolute rock solid voltage limiting on the output of those amplifiers, you know, used to have a lab group in Sydney, and here’s what I’ll say. The reason I moved away from my screen experience is the favorite power.

I installed the first Katende in North America. We got the first one off the boat that was not a demo piece. And I put it in a nightclub probably back in two thousand and five or six. Ten dB was brand new. We didn’t know much about it. We’re like, what do you mean? We need to hook up 30 to 40? It doesn’t care. And my electrician was like, that’s insane. Don’t do that. I’m like this.

I’m telling you, this is the best stuff. And we put it on some old our axes at this club. It just beat the everloving beat him to within an inch of their life. And those drivers blew I put it in at the time of being hundreds live even better and we beat them up with that thing. But because I could dial in that voltage limit, the output of that thing was it’s a whole new world. And what we found out over time is this came from moving manorial boxes for a company you’d have lab group in on the set of these Martin audio subs.

And at the end of the night, the driver doors were just so hot. And then we switched over to power, soft on a few of them. And at the end of the night, the priority was to just be warm and doing some some comparisons back and forth. And part of it was a function of the power off to deliver its transient voltage so quickly. And I started looking at how the old MAPP group and their TV and to me with the fractions of a microsecond, but the TV waveform versus the abs, the precision impulse of the power stuff that we’re talking fractions of a microsecond that over the course of the evening led to twenty or thirty degrees that the boys call long term.

And every time I use power soft, I had just as much bass and what might not have been as warm or as high five. But what we’re actually taking that into is trying to smear. That’s what our brain was quite it’s warm and fuzzy now. It’s theory. And what we’re talking we’re talking. They’re both very good amps. I’m not talking down about any company. It’s about how the driver is held for absolute microseconds at the top and bottom of the platform that’s being reproduced.

Our soft is a little more precise, but people called it cold. Guess what? It had more power. I’m going to go for more power and I’m going to make up for your lack of warmth with something in my pre stage attitude and something else, I’m going to want that power and that voltage delivery. And I’ve seen that this comes back to that. We want to protect our Vojtko from heat keeps the enemy if we can deliver voltage while keeping the long term heat down the arms heat, we’re going to have less glue failure, less component failure, better transducer.

I’m going to lose my soft parts before I lose my coil. That’s what we want.

Yeah, that makes sense to me. Let’s keep the art on the artist side and let’s keep the sound system linear and keep the science on the side and said, yeah, you know, and that’s why we just came down to it.

You know, I would make those choices. I still love Loubriel, but I love the way it sounds. But for me, long term and a sound system, if I want a system that’s a problem, that’s going to be power top for me simply because it’s we have less heat. And I’m going to argue with me somewhere, but I will track it down to personal experience and we microseconds in the way that it produces its waveform versus the absolute almost clinical peak, the peak that the power itself does.

It’s those microseconds that lead to 20 or 50 degrees.

Well, Nathan, I know you’ve got to take out soon because you’ve got a demo there in Houston, Texas, where you’re doing an install. But let’s knock out a couple of these Facebook questions before you go. So Dave Gamon says, what’s his favorite cut of meat? I have a New York strip guy. All right, he says, ask him about the time he sliced his legs, setting up Dirty Bird camps.

Yeah, so this is a good story, being a big, large man who has spent many, many years on his feet doing production. I’m getting to the point where I’ve got a few varicose veins on on my lower cats.

And we were out in the high desert outside of L.A. somewhere to get out. It is night three or something. And it has been absolute crusty, dry there where the legs are all blotchy and skin’s dry and we’re not showering like we should run out. It’s the middle of the night. And I walk past the case and the case had a little snag on the metal that literally catches my varicose veins and just goes so sorry, the tiniest.

I’m telling you, it is the tiniest micro millimeter pinprick you’ve ever seen in your life. But because it’s down near my ankle, this thing shoots blood like four feet and just straight out and everyone’s like screaming, I’ve got my hand over it and I am just hemorrhaging live right there. And they take me away on a thing. They wrap me up and the ladies like what’s already skipped over. Let me look at this. I’m like, don’t touch it.

She touches it and it literally took off. It’s all over her.

And she’s like, I’ve never seen this before. Well, that was funny videos online. This is what happens when you take a varicose veins, wrap it up, but it heals.

Yes, as well, I’m sorry, we have to end on that note now. So, Nathan, where’s the best place for people to follow your work?

As much as I can post on things I do on Facebook and just make sure you’ll find me wrapped up in it.

Yeah, that’s about it. I feel like this wasn’t long enough. Now, this is great.

We got all the main things I wanted to ask you. I got all my questions, my personal questions answered. And that’s all that’s important. Yeah, but no, we’ll have you back and do another one in the future. I should have mentioned if people are interested, like Sound Design Live 2020, dot Sound Design Live dot com is where you can go. If you want to watch Nathan’s entire presentation that he gave, which is really great. But we even ran out of time there.

And you know, there’s just always there’s always more to talk about. So all we can do is like keep getting together and, you know, getting into more conversations.

So thank you.

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.

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