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If Poor Speaker Choice and Placement Were a Crime, We’d All Go to Jail

By Nathan Lively

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Support Sound Design Live on Patreon.

In this episode of Sound Design Live I talk with principle teacher at Synergetic Audio Concepts and a co-author of Sound System Engineering, Pat Brown. We discuss the motivation of mistakes, finding clients through retail work, investing in high quality tools, practicing at home, and the biggest mistakes in sound system design and optimization.

I ask:

  • What was the first record you ever bought with your own money?
  • How did you get your first job in audio?
  • 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?
  • What are some of the biggest mistakes you see people making who are new to sound system design?
  • If you could wave a magic wand and make it so, what is one concept that you wish all sound system designers understood better?
  • Tell us about the biggest or maybe most painful mistake you’ve made on the job and how you recovered.
  • What software do you us in your seminars?
  • What’s in your work bag?
  • What is one book that has been immensely helpful to you?

If the FCC prosecuted sound system designers for poor array design, like you would for a for RF antenna design, they’d be putting us in jail for how we spew energy into rooms.

Pat Brown

Notes

  1. All music in this podcast by Nataly.
  2. Course 50: How Sound Systems Work
  3. Software: GratisVolver, CATT-Acoustic, ReflPhinder, SketchUp, FIR Capture
  4. Books: Handbook for Sound Engineers, Sound Systems: Design and Optimization
  5. Workbag: impedance meter, polarity tester
  6. Quotes
    1. I had just screwed up a system really bad. I wanted to know what I did wrong and was glad to find out I had done everything wrong.
    2. The key is to do it enough times to where you don’t have to think about the steps each time.
    3. Everyone should have to do retail for a while.
    4. The music store makes a great front end for a contracting business.
    5. I get that call all the time: OK Pat, I’m out in the room, I’m got my mic up, I’ve got my USB card hooked up. Now what? And I always say, “Pack it all back up. Go home. Lock yourself in your living room. Get a couple of little sound speakers and learn how to drive the thing.”
    6. If the FCC prosecuted sound system designers for poor array design, like you would for a for RF antenna design, they’d be putting us in jail for how we spew energy into rooms.
    7. You have to minimize the excitation of the room because you are creating your own interference if you are not thinking about that.
    8. I’ve never been impressed by market share. Just because something is the most popular thing out there for doing something; that’s never been a good enough reason for me to use it.
    9. The thing about acoustic modeling programs is that you can be way off. It’s always necessary, if possible, as a sanity check, to compare it to measured data in the room.

Why Touring Sound Engineers Are Getting Paid Less

By Nathan Lively

sound-design-live-touring-sound-engineers-getting-paid-less-dave-swallow-erasure-featured

Subscribe on iTunes, SoundCloud, Google Play or Stitcher.

Support Sound Design Live on Patreon.

In this episode of Sound Design Live, I speak with touring FOH sound engineer, author, and fashion entrepreneur, Dave Swallow, during his stop in Minneapolis on tour with Erasure. We discuss using timecode to trigger scenes on a Venue Profile console, starting a clothing line, why touring sound engineers are working more, but getting paid less, and what to do about it. I ask:

      • How did you get the job touring with Erasure?
      • How do you use the wireless Lake controller to tune the sound system?
      • What are some ways you used plugins to recreate specific sounds from the album?
      • What did you want to start a clothing brand?
      • Why should I care about the speed of sound?

sound-design-live-touring-foh-sound-engineer-job-dave-swallowOur wages haven’t gone up in 10-15 year in some cases and there are less shows. When you think about the future of the industry, there is a big question mark.

Notes

  1. All music in this episode by Meathook and Butler Boyz.
  2. Dave’s clothing line – Audio Architect Apparel
  3. Software: Waves H-Delay, True Verb, C6 Multi-band Compressor
  4. Hardware: Venue Profile, D&B B2, FunktionOne 221, D&B Y system
  5. Books: Live Audio
  6.  Quotes
    1. What [triggering the scenes with timecode] has allowed me to do is focus on sonically how they are sitting in the room. This is especially important when you are stuck mixing at the back of the room.
    2. The problem with putting big reverbs into big rooms, is they are twice as big. One of the things that is quite helpful is using the pre-delay. Getting it up to somewhere between 70-100ms, you give the vocal time to form the words and then you have the extension.
    3. One of the biggest problems with theatres in the US is that they lack bottom end.
    4. My self and my contemporaries are probably the first generation of touring sound engineers that have had to think about having another career. [When you set out on this path] you just think, “Let’s have fun!” But there comes that point when you think, actually, I don’t want to be 60 and living by myself in a rented flat somewhere in north London.
    5. To earn a decent living you need to be out of the house [on tour] for the whole year, to pay for the house that you’re not living in.
    6. You’re losing out to gigs because there is someone younger and cheaper than you are. Experience doesn’t seem to count for as much as it used to because it’s all budget controlled.
    7. When my son was born I only worked six months and we weren’t struggling for cash. These days, if I only work six months, we’ll have a bit of a problem.

sound-design-live-touring-sound-engineers-getting-paid-less-dave-swallow-erasure-stage sound-design-live-touring-sound-engineers-getting-paid-less-dave-swallow-erasure-mixing sound-design-live-touring-sound-engineers-getting-paid-less-dave-swallow-erasure-bus

 

 

Dan Dugan and the Birth of the Automatic Microphone Mixer

By Nathan Lively

sound-design-live-dan-dugan-automatic-microphone-mixer-featured

Subscribe on iTunes, SoundCloud, Google Play or Stitcher.

Support Sound Design Live on Patreon.

In this episode of Sound Design Live, I speak with the inventor of the automatic microphone mixer and CEO at Dan Dugan Sound Design, Dan Dugan. We discuss the origin of the automatic microphone mixer, implementation and best practices, and his favorite locations for soundscape recording. I ask:

  • What are some of the biggest mistakes you see people making who are new to using the automatic microphone mixer?
  • Tell me about your field recording rig.
  • What has been your favorite location to record so far?
  • What is one book that has been immensely helpful to you?
  • What podcast do you love?
  • Facebook
    • Bashir
      • 1- I have heard of people saying that it’s applied to music… Why? How?
      • 2- speaking technically, would like an explanation of how it works, not how it’s applied, but of how it works technically… Like what it really does to the the sound that I am applying it to
    • Lou
      • Ask Mr. Dugan about non Dugan branded auto mixers. Im sure he isn’t happy about them but does he feel Dugan branded stuff is better.

sound-design-live-dan-dugan-automatic-microphone-mixer-headshotGating doesn’t work. I spent about 6 years figuring out a better gating system and discovered the magical system called gain sharing.

Notes

  1. All field recordings used in this episode by Dan Dugan.
  2. Dan’s field recording rig:
    1. Heavy (50lb): Sennheiser MKH4020, Sound Devices 788T, Lowpro bag, MP1 batteries
    2. Light: (4) Talinga, Zoom H2 (modified)
  3. Sound System Engineering, Lang Elliott’s Listening Earth podcast
  4. Public domain patents for the Dugan Automixer

sound-design-live-dan-dugan-automatic-microphone-mixer-interview

Why is Dan Dugan looking at my website?

sound-design-live-dan-dugan-automatic-microphone-mixer-cake

Download the DiGiCo Session Setup Checklist

By Nathan Lively

sound-design-live-download-digico-session-setup-checklist

sound-design-live-download-digico-session-setup-checklistAre you sick of reading the users manual every time you need to set up an SD5?

Me, too!

Good news. Last night I got Aleš real drunk and got him to spill the beans about setting up a session from scratch. There was a lot of gibberish in there, but I was able to edit it down into something comprehensible.

Let me know if this helps.

Download the Checklist Now

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

By Nathan Lively

sound-design-live-how-to-update-snapshots-digico-sd5-middle-show-featured

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.

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