Dear Google...

Another round up of quick answers to search phrases that ended up on this blog:

compressor setting for stage theater

I like a light touch on the body mics, especially for good performers. You want the natural dynamics of the performance to come through. Which means, unfortunately, there's no decent substitute for a skilled hand riding the faders. Compressor settings won't help you with the actors who speak most of their dialog softly but scream one line, and they won't get you through the kill zone of romantic duets (in which each person is singing far too close to the other's mic, leading to huge excursions in sound level and a horrible flanging effect as the two signals combine out of phase).

My default starter setting for the musical is 1.7:1  For children's theater, I start at 2:1 or perhaps 2.5:1 For hand-helds, especially when used by choreographers, I default to 4:1 with a huge bass roll-off and an extremely fast attack (choreographers tend to eat the mic as they start screaming at the dancers).

On the LS9, my default attack is 50 and release 200.

how to make a mic belt

For some reason everyone lands on the first post I wrote, not the more detailed one with better pictures.

kids should wear mics in plays

I don't think so. Unfortunately, there seems to be no way around it in the current clime. People want to put extremely young actors without vocal training on stage, and playwrights are making musicals that have heavy underscores and choppy, "pop" phraseology. And the audiences want to hear everything. So we mic them. Which is additional time, expense, and discomfort to the young actors involved, and furthermore tends to become thought of as a panacea; as if once you get those mics on, all those elements of poor arrangement and writing and lack of vocal training magically don't matter any more. The discussion changes from "Is there some way we can slow this song down?" to "Why can't we make the mic louder?"

qlab powerbook g4

I'm about to do it again. I've run QLab (version 1) on as low as a Powerbook G3; my old Wallstreet powerbooks, in fact, did several shows. In my experience, the white G3 Powerbook is about the lower limit for decent performance. A good G4 -- titanium or aluminium Powerbook -- will run most shows, up to 6 layers of simultaneous stereophonic sound.

Higher versions of QLab, I can't say, but I believe the limiting factor is going to be the minimum OS version that it will run under. I think there needs to be either continued availability of QLab 1 for applications where it is fully appropriate and the larger, heavier, more expensive versions are not, or someone needs to write a new one.

sound design for stage

Yes, there's a few entries here. Some posts are collected on their own link page.

create body handles poser

There's more detail in the "How to rig a Poser Prop" set of posts, but here it goes in simple form; Children Affect Their Parents. If you add a child to a body part, by manipulating that child you will manipulate everything within the influence zone of the corresponding parent part.

For me the simplest way to do it is not in the Setup Room or even within Poser itself, but in text. Within the CR2, if you add just two short entries, Poser will figure out and add all the rest of the part the next time you load the figure. So make two short edits in text, load the figure, adjust the influence zones, and save the new figure.

Here's where to look; right at the top, where the geometry is specified for each actor; 

actor hip:3

{

storageOffset 0 0 0

geomHandlerGeom 13 hip

}

And at the bottom of the cr2, (just above the materials) where the hierarchy is specified:

addChild abdomen:3

hip:3

adafruit perma-proto mint tin

Yes indeed. A wonderful little board -- the entire perma-proto set is a work of genius -- and not only that, Adafruit will sell you the tin, too!