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How to Update Snapshots on the SD5 in the Middle of a Show

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UPDATE: This article appears in The Ultimate Guide to Creative Mixing on the Digico SD5.

In this video I describe how I used snapshots to automate my mix on the Digico SD5 as head of sound for the Out Of This Word tour for the Ringling Bros. Circus. In it, I walk you step-by-step through how I implemented snapshot creation, global scope, recall scope, update selected, auto update, cross fades, add to group, relative groups, update group, recall times, and midi list for Qlab control.

One of the most important things you need to know how to do on the SD5 related to snapshots is how to update a snapshot in the middle of the show. There are many times, especially while building and refining a new show, when you’ll need to make a small edit. You need to continue mixing the show, though, so you don’t have time to create a new snapshot and type in a name for it or scroll back up to the correct shapshot and take care that you are updating the right elements.

The SD5 makes this very easy, but it’s also dangerous! Here’s my process:

  1. Fire snapshot
  2. Press auto update.
  3. Rest your finger next to the button. This is critical!
  4. Change the necessary elements of the snapshot.
  5. Press auto update.

The key here is not to move your finger away until you have disengaged auto-update. Why? Because every change you make while it is engaged will get written into the snapshot. So if you forget, which I did only once, and keeping firing snapshots and mixing the show, you will record all of those changes.

What if I need to go back and change one thing in every snapshot?

This happened to me more than once: You change a microphone position or another way affect the gain staging and all of a sudden 127 snapshots are wrong. Normally, you would have to go through and adjust these one-by-one or find a workaround, but the Update Group feature solves this pretty easily.

  1. Add all affected snapshots to a group. There cannot be a break in between them on the list.
  2. Enable Relative Groups.
  3. Recall any snapshot from the group, which includes the element you want to change.
  4. Make the change.
  5. Click Update Group. It will take a second if you have a lot of snapshots.
  6. Remove all snapshots from the group.

The most time-consuming process here is adding the snapshots to the group. You might think: Why don’t I just leave all of my snapshots in a group so that I can update them at any time? Well, you could do that, but then you put yourself in a dangerous position if you accidentally hit the Update Group button. The undo button does not fix this!

How to use Recall Time to mix your show for you.

In Out Of This World, the first three acts were executed with the same timing every night. There were some fader movements that needed to happen at specific times so I automating them using Recall Time. As long as I fired the first snapshot at the right time, the mix would be in sync with the show. And if for some reason that didn’t work out, I would simply skip the timed snapshots and mix it manually.

The main benefit here was that I could convert the energy from my pre-show jitters into useful work, like double checking plugin settings and refreshing my memory of upcoming cues and changes. Another less import benefit was that I could fire the snapshot to take us into intermission and immediately run to the bathroom since I had the next set to fire by Recall Time. This is important when you need to beat an arena full of 20,000 people who are also rushing for the bathroom.

110 Questions about Sound System Tuning – Pt. 3

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I just completed the fourth presentation of a live webinar training on sound system tuning. The webinars went well, but there just wasn’t enough time to answer all of the question that the 535 attendees sent in. But I don’t want to leave those people out in the cold so I have gathered all of the questions and I am going to answer all of here on the podcast.

I have organized them into sections, so today we are going to continue to part 3 and talk about how to design our sound system for maximum results.

#13 Godswill: What are the factors to consider before designing a sound system?

Godswill, I love that you’re asking this question because there’s a big difference between people who do their work in a purely reactive manner and just wait for people to ask them for things or something to break or something to go wrong before they take action. I was a mostly reactive sound engineer for a long time because I got burned out at the place I was working so I just got lazy and bored. And it was only after working with other sound engineers who were a lot more successful and happier in their work that I noticed how proactive they were with their service. The more you can anticipate the needs of your client and your show, the more time you’ll save and the more taken care of your client will feel.

The answer to this question could take us all day. My suggestion to you is that you sit down and right down all of the factors that you have determined to be most important in the success of a show and its sound system in the past. Turn that into a checklist and use it before every event that you work on.

Probably some of the most important questions to start with are:

  • What is the program material?
  • What is the size and location of the audience?
  • What resources do we have in terms of speakers and power?

#14 Megan: What is the best DIY acoustic treatment for a room?

Hey Megan, so I have worked in two music venues that are small shoe boxes and that were really difficult to work in. Then, due to someone’s suggestion, they covered their ceiling and back wall with absorption panels that just screwed right into the wall and it made a huge difference. I reached out to them to find out exactly what the material was called, but I haven’t heard back. But my guess is that if you reach out to your local building supply store and told them what you were working on they would be able to guide you better than I can.

Obviously this is a permanent solution. It would be great if we could fill a room with temporary free standing movable panels, but you would need a whole lot of them to make a difference in a typical event space. So what most people do is start by trying to control the loudest things on the stage, the drums and amps. So you might try a drum shield or guitar amp isolation box.

#15 Andrey: How to deal with room modes in small rooms?

Similar to the last question, your first line of attack is acoustical. Can we change the architecture of the room? Can we put absorption on the walls? If not, what can we do with speaker positioning? Come up with a bunch of tests to try. Are you using multiple mains? Trying turning one off. Move it around. Use your audio analyzer to record everything you do to help make a decision.

#16 Martin: How do you maintain a clear and cohesive balanced sound throughout a venue?

Martin, you do that by adhering to the principles of minimum variance that we talked about in part 1. Do what you can so that the level and frequency response are as consistent as possible and that the sonic image matches what the eyes see. Who knows, maybe it has nothing to do with you? Maybe, at the end of the day, the noisy HVAC system is the biggest barrier to clear sound, so what can you do to improve that?

#17 David: How to determine where to place speakers in your space and how many speakers to use to get even coverage?

So David, I think one thing you can do is start looking at everything in terms of doubling of distance. Since we know that every doubling of distance cuts our sound level in half, we can look around our room, find which parts of the audience are more than double the distance to a speaker compared the nearest seat to that speaker, and know that we’ll probably need another speaker to start its coverage there.

Another idea that can help you is to start thinking about your speaker’s coverage in terms of length and width. For example, if your main speaker has a horizontal coverage of 100º and is 10ft from the front row, then you can calculate that its coverage of that front row will extend for 16ft. This is something that we discuss in Pro Audio Workshop: Seeing Sound, but you also just open up Bob McCarthy’s book and search for the sections on forward aspect ratio and lateral aspect ratio.

#18 Fernando: How do I choose the right speaker for the space?

So Fernando, in terms of coverage, on a basic level, you should choose narrow coverage loudspeakers for narrow shapes and wide coverage loudspeakers to fill wide shapes. And half the time, that’s the best we can do with a limited inventory. But if you can pick any speaker, then divide the depth by the width of the coverage area, including the speaker. That number is the forward aspect ratio, which you can convert to a coverage angle.

In terms of power, it depends on the program material and you really have to experience it to know if it’s right, but having too much is never a problem.

#19 Jennifer: How to determine how many speakers you may need to fill (x) amount of space?

So Jennifer, of course this depends on what kinds of speakers, what kind of array you are going to deploy, and the idiosyncrasies of the space itself, but let’s take the simple example of a single room covered by a point source array. Since we know that a single speaker can only cover a maximum range ratio of 1:2, then we estimate that a range ratio of 1:2-1:3 will require at least 2 elements in our coupled point source array. And a range ratio of 1:3-:14 will require at least 3 elements, etc. So range ratio can help you quickly estimate how many speakers you will need to fill a space.

#20 Micah: When to use an array versus standard speakers flown?

So Micah, I think the question you’re asking here is when to sub-divide and we need to do that any time we have a distance ratio of more than 1:2, our angular coverage does not match the space, or if we need more power.

#21 Rob: What is the weakest link in most small music venues? Amps, Speakers, poor tuning, Etc?

The weakest link in most small music venues is the architecture. It’s the acoustics. It’s the reflections turning out carefully crafted mix into mush. And as I mentioned earlier, I have worked at two music venues that put up a bunch of absorption, which helped, but this isn’t going to help you on the event that you’re working on today.

So if I had to pick the next most common weakest link in small music venues, it would be speaker position and aim. Since we are in these small reflective rooms it’s very important to position and aim for more control. One of the most common things I see is long narrow rooms with LR mains, which are playing half into the wall because people just default to stereo in most situations when what might work better is a mono main and a relay speaker further down the room. Another thing I have seen a lot is asymmetrical rooms with symmetrical sound systems. You probably know what I’m talking about because you’ve been in a long narrow room that has a bar sticking out of one side, so the speaker on that side is only good for a few feet until it hits the bar, yet we’re playing both speakers as though they are both covering the entire room.

#22 Rune: How to set up endfire sub system?

Here’s what you need:

  • 3 or more subs
  • Processing channel for each.

Position them in a line, all facing the direction that you want their sound to sum. Then, with your measurement microphone in the front, measure each sub solo, phase aligning it with the sub in the rear. Because what you want is for them to all arrive in time in the front. A couple of verification notes: make sure you are not adding more than 3ms of delay to the speaker closest to the rear, 6ms to the second closest, and so on. If you are, you need to go back and reduce the spacing in between them. Lastly, you’ll want to verify that, with all of them on, summation is maximized in the front.

#23 R: How to maintain frequency and volume/all coverage with budget audio system?

The three things that come to mind when I think about working with cheaper speaker models are:

  1. The don’t sound the same when you drive them at low level and high level. So I try to get them distributed well so that I don’t need to drive them any harder than necessary.
  2. The don’t have a very smooth axial response. And what I mean by that is when I stand on-axis with the speaker and then move left or right, it doesn’t just get quieter, the frequency response changes. So I have to keep that in mind during placement, maybe trying to keep the audience within the smoothest coverage area.
  3. I’ll probably need to spend more time on EQ on a cheaper speaker to tame its response anamolies.

110 Questions about Sound System Tuning – Pt. 2

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Welcome to sound design live. I’m Nathan Lively, and I just completed the fourth presentation of a live webinar training on sound system tuning. The webinars went well, but there just wasn’t enough time to answer all of the question that the 535 attendees sent in. But I don’t want to leave those people out in the cold so I have gathered all of the questions and I am going to answer all of here on the podcast.

I have organized them into sections, so today we are going to continue to part 2 and talk about how to prepare for sound system tuning so that we can be more efficient.

#6 Dennis: How to save time in tuning a system? Joel: With limited quiet time (usually shared scheduling with lighting focus or scenic artist), how do you triage tuning?

You see what I did there, Dennis? I answered your question with Joe’s question.

So what’s triage? Triage is the assignment of degrees of urgency to wounds or illnesses to decide the order of treatment of a large number of patients or casualties. And it’s a great word to describe our work because in the rooms that we work in, the sound system, our patient, is suffering from many wounds. Some of them life threatening, some of them not. Live sound is a war zone and we have to figure out which of our patient’s wounds to heal first, to keep it alive.

And of course, we have a limited amount of time, because the show will start whether we have healed all of the wound or not. So the way you save time in sound system tuning is by picking the biggest problems and attacking those first. And I don’t know what those are going to be in your room, but they most often lie with speaker position and aim.

#7 Michael: What are ways to make tuning more efficient or faster in a limited timeframe?

My best time saving tip is to plan your microphone positions ahead of time. So if you can get the venue and system layout the night before, go through and mark all of your microphone positions with names OnAxA, XAB, VTopB, etc., and include what you want to do in each position, set level, delay, EQ, etc. If I don’t do this preparation step, it is almost guaranteed that I will take the right measurement in the wrong position, or vice versa, and have to go back and do it again, or worse, I won’t realize it until the show has started.

Another idea, if you have the resources, is to use multiple microphones. That will speed things up. Personally, I’m saving my money to get a multiple wireless microphone measurement rig. I got turned on to the Line6 XD-V75 and TX-3 microphone from Mel labs by one of my students, which seem like a good combo.

One other idea for you, Michael, if you can do some of the verification steps like polarity check ahead of time, at the shop, that will save you time.

#8 Jonathan: What’s the biggest bang for buck in terms of tuning with limited amount of time.

This is really hard to answer because, as I mentioned in question seven, I can’t do triage on a hypothetical patient without knowing anything about it. But I do want to give you some place to start.

  • If I only had 60 seconds: I would verify that all of the speakers were working and sound was arriving at the correct outputs.
  • If I had 5 Minutes: I would put up my measurement mic at FOH, play pink noise, and at least get a visual image of what I’m hearing in the room. It might not be enough time to make any adjustments, but at least I can start planning for what I can do during the show.
  • If I had 15 Minutes: I would set level and EQ for my main speakers or arrays. They cover the largest portion of the audience, so they win by majority. Then if I had time, I would phase align the subs to the mains.
  • If I had 30 Minutes: I would start matching my subsystems to the main system in terms of delay, EQ, and level to try to bring the whole thing together. With every next step I am looking at my sound system tuning roadmap and thinking, “Ok, what’s the next most important step I can take here to improve this situation for the best show possible?”

And of course, these are under ideal conditions where the system is already operational and I can just start optimizing. But half the time some technical problem will pop up and have to be taken care of because, if the system doesn’t play, none of this stuff matters.

#9 Lou: How do I get consistent results on any sound system?

So Lou, I have a special deal for you. Just put a crisp $100 bill in an envelope and send it to Nathan Lively, Minneapolis, MN, and I guarantee that you will get consistent results from this day forward.

Just kidding Lou. Of course, when you get really good at using all of the tools you have available to you, your ears, eyes, audio analyzer, etc., you can better predict the most important factors that will influence consistency. I wish I could tell you that if you match tonight’s frequency response with last night’s frequency response that it will sound exactly the same, but that would be a lie. There are other factors like room reflections that may actually require you to use a different target frequency response to achieve consistent results.

The only way I know to guarantee consistent results is to give everyone headphones and make sure all of your instruments go direct.

But there is hope. I think that if you not only train yourself to correlate what you see on the audio analyzer with what you hear in the room, but are also diligent about taking notes every day on what you learn and then reviewing those notes on a regular basis, your results will continue to improve and become more and more consistent.

#10. Carol: I’m seeking to increase confidence when dealing with unfamiliar systems in unfamiliar venues.

Carol, I have to admit to you that I still get nervous before every gig. There’s a little voice in my head that say, “You’re an imposter. You have no idea what you’re doing.” So the downside is that there is some stress related to each event i work on, but the upside is that that red flag motivates me to prepare better. So I find out as much as I can about the equipment, room, and production I’ll be working on ahead of time. I actually have a needs assessment checklist that I go through to make sure I haven’t forgotten anything.

And of course, this might not work out. It is fairly common that I either won’t be able to find out anything, or all of the information I got will turn out to be wrong or changed at the last minute. But I still feel more confident, knowing I did everything I could to prepare myself. And I know this all may sound kind of obvious, but I can’t tell you the number of times that I have arrived on site and been the only one who has bothered to look up the coverage angle and power rating for the speakers we are using.

#11 Seun: Is there a difference between tuning line Array and non line Array speakers?

So Seun, there’s nothing special about speakers being in a line or not, but I’m guessing that you are asking about working with constant beam width versus proportional beam width speakers, the modern line array element. And the main difference that comes to mind is that with proportional beam width speakers in a coupled array, you create the shape you want with the splay angles between elements, but that really only affects the high end. The low end doesn’t really care if you adjust the splay angles. It simply plays out out of the mid point of the array. Tapering the amplitude won’t help you like it will with constant beam width speakers. The only way to get around that is with all-pass filters to help you slightly steer the low end up, which is beyond me. I’m still trying to master the basics.

#12 Kyle: What are the first parameters to sacrifice in un-ideal conditions? Should I ignore Phasing? Time Delay?

So Kyle, you’ve got it right…but exactly backwards. The first parameters you should look at are polarity, level, and time. So if we have to sacrifice someone, I say we sacrifice EQ.

110 Questions about Sound System Tuning – Pt. 1

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Welcome to sound design live. I’m Nathan Lively, and I just completed the fourth presentation of a live webinar training on sound system tuning. The webinars went well, but there just wasn’t enough time to answer all of the question that the 535 attendees sent in. But I don’t want to leave those people out in the cold so I have gathered all of the questions and I am going to answer all of here on the podcast.

I have organized them into sections, so today we are going to talk about the Why of sound system tuning. Because whether your event is a small corporate event or a large-scale theatrical production, why tune a system at all?

#1 Siva: Why tune the sound system?

The 3 main reasons that people want to optimize their sound systems are:

  1. Consistency: sound system tuning is the best way to bring more confidence and consistency to your work so that the mix you hear at FOH is the same mix that every single audience member hears, not just today at this location, but every day in every location. The more you can be sure that the mix that’s coming out of your console is being faithfully delivered to the entire audience, the better you can focus on creating an amazing show. You don’t have to worry about running around every few minutes to check on different areas, you can be completely present to the event that is unfolding in front of you.
  2. Demand: Get more freelance gigs: The best way to grow your career as an audio engineer is to be so good they can’t ignore you. And the best way to be so good they can’t ignore you is by optimizing your sound system to produce consistent results night after night. When you can produce consistent results, you are going to be the one getting more personal referrals and generating more demand for your services. But you don’t have take my word for it. Take a look at this quote from TEC award winner and FOH mixer for Pink Floyd, Buford Jones: In live sound, consistency is what it’s all about.  Managers and artists are looking for someone that can go from venue to venue and reproduce a predictable sound. Not an easy task especially when you’re not carrying your own production.  Management and artists would like to ‘trust’ the sound to you. And that leads to the third reason, which I know we don’t talk about that often, but resonates in the Sound Design Live community…
  3. Fun: I’m talking about enjoying our work. None of us got into this business because we wanted to be rich and famous or deal with invisible unending technical problems all day. We got here because we are passionate about great art and we love the thrill of the show. I don’t want to be running around solving problems and trying to figure out why the mix sounds terrible in the front rows during the show, I want to be in the moment, completely present to what’s happening on stage, creating art, having an impact on people’s lives.   These are the main goals that people talk to me about when they talk about why sound system tuning is important to them. *And they’re great goals. And the best part is that the market is wide open for people who are looking to create real value for their clients and their audience. The live event industry is growing every day and there is a real demand for good audio.

#2 Kyra: What is sound system tuning? Is it only used in live sound?

The term is kind of funny because we are not piano tuners, but it has become the colloquial short hand for sound system optimization. And sound system optimization is just another way to say, maximizing our results, despite inherent limitation.

So how do we define a maximized result? For a long time I thought this meant a flat frequency response. A few years into my career, I was working on theatre and concert sound in Portugal and got one of those handheld RTAs from Phonic. It was so cool. I could take a bunch of different measurements in a room, randomly, average them together, and invert the result to set a graphic EQ, and supposedly return the system’s frequency response to flat.

I kept trying this method on and off for a while, not getting great results. Luckily, I was turned on to the work of Bob McCarthy and his principles of minimum variance. It’s these principles that give us guidelines for what is a maximized result. Those guidelines are minimum level, spectral, and sonic image variance.

That means it shouldn’t be super loud in the front and barely audible in the back. It should be as close to the same level as possible. It shouldn’t be super bright in front and dark and dull in the back. It should be as close to the same as possible. And if an actor is far upstage right, he shouldn’t sound like he’s coming from downstage left, he should sound like he’s come from upstage right. So the goal of sound system tuning isn’t flat sound or good sound, but same sound. And to answer your last question: Is it only used in live sound? No, it’s used everywhere where speakers are used to transmit waveforms to eardrums.

#3 Malcolm: Will I be able to master the art of Sound system tuning?!

Malcolm, the truth is, sound system tuning is potentially a never ending task, and the amount you can learn as well. There are some processes that produce a pass or fail result that can be learned in a few minutes and then there are other more complex processes that can take years to learn to do well. But just the fact that you attended the webinar and you care about this stuff puts you ahead of most sound engineers out there today.

#4. Hal: Is sound system tuning without software really possible? Or, are you only shooting for good enough?

Here’s how I think about it: If a doctor were trapped in an elevator with a pregnant woman who is about to give birth, he wouldn’t want to perform that operation without his tools, but he would do whatever it took to get the job done. So, I wouldn’t want to go to work without my audio analyzer, but if I ended up in a situation where I didn’t have it, I would still do whatever it took to get the job done.

#5. Volker: Is linear sound really good sound?

So Volker, I have some questions for you? Wouldn’t it be great if we could have the same sound in every seat, out to the broadcast truck, and into the overflow rooms that we are hearing at our mix position?
Wouldn’t it be great if we could get the same response from system to system and room to room so that if we are on tour, we can start with the same mix settings we had the night before?

Isn’t it more fun to mix a show if we’re not fighting the system and room and worrying about what the balcony is hearing?
Wouldn’t your clients love it if you could deliver consistent results?

So is linear sound good sound? No. Linear just means that you get the same thing out of it, as you put into it. So if you put garbage into it, you’ll get garbage out of it. And if you put milk and honey into it, you’ll get Rick Astley out of it.

 

Mauricio Ramirez: Trust your ears, not just the audio analyzer

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In this episode of the Sound Design Live podcast I talk to Mauricio Ramirez, senior seminar instructor at Meyer Sound. We discuss some of the biggest mistakes he sees made by people who are new to sound system tuning. We also cover:

  • Most popular test tracks.
  • Which country has the most audio engineers who smoke?
  • How did you get your first job in audio?
  • What is the best choice you made to get more of the work that you love? (Hint: It rhymes with dedication.)
  • Why parents shouldn’t teach their kids that they are special and why it’s good to be normal.

mauricio-ramirez-trust-ears-not-audio-analyzer-headshotPeople want to see a beautiful graphic, but what people forget is that we are working with sound. We are not video guys or lighting guys. We are sound guys.

Show notes:

  1. All music in this episode by jACE the Caveat.
  2. Books: Don Davis Audio Encyclopedia, Yamaha Sound Reinforcement Handbook, Modern Recording Techniques
  3. Software: Smaart, SATlive, Systune
  4. The most common sound system tuning mistakes you might be making:
    1. You have an older, cracked version of Smaart without all of the latest features. Buy a license and update.
    2. You are using smoothing. Turn it off (use 1/48 or 1/24 octave smoothing).
    3. You are trying to equalize comb filtering. Move the microphone 1m away. Don’t make decisions based on a single microphone position.
    4. You don’t have enough practice. Watch Jiro Dreams of Sushi.
    5. You trust what you see on the graphic more than what you hear. Trust your ears.
  5. Jiro Dreams of Sushi: “Nowadays, parents tell their children, ‘You can return if it doesn’t work out.’ When parents say stupid things like that, the kids turn out to be failures.”
  6. Wrecking Crew
  7.  Quotes
    1. The big problem is that people smooth the graphic of the analyzer to ⅓. That is the biggest mistake. Smooth is easier to read, but what you are reading is a lie!
    2. Only correct what is common to all measurements.
    3. You need to compare the graphic of the analyzer with something that will be played during the concert. Some people only test the sound system with pink noise and then the graphic looks beautiful and they say, “It’s ready!”
    4. Start to learn what part of the information you can see that you can trust and what part you can see that you can not trust.
    5. Concerts in an anechoic chamber would be horrible because our ears are expecting reflections.
    6. Forget about what you see on the screen. We are sound guys, not video guys.
    7. If you are special, maybe only only special people will enjoy your mixing. But if you are an average guy, 90% of the population will enjoy it.
    8. It’s not important that you are working for famous artists. If people are calling you, you’re doing your job correctly.
    9. I normally prepare two snapshots. One before and one after the EQ. Then play music or speech and change the snapshots. Most people prefer the sound without the filters. So do I.
    10. Listen first. If your brain tells you it’s good, don’t do anything.
    11. If your delay error is less than 20ms, you might not hear an echo, but you’ll have comb filtering.

mauricio-ramirez-trust-ears-not-audio-analyzer-seminar

mauricio-ramirez-trust-ears-not-audio-analyzer-band

Ramirez’s band, Opción Cero, 1997