Addendum

Some more thoughts about the subject of my last post.

First -- of course, the situation was my fault. I could have made a site visit. I could have made sure I had contact numbers in case I had trouble getting in. I could have arrived earlier -- then there was at least a small chance I would have bumped into the people who went in and didn't leave an obvious way to follow.

But this is near the end of a tough run, I'm running on fumes and I wasn't mentally or physically up for thinking outside of the routine we've followed for every other performance. Or in a position financially or time-wise to make that site visit. I was barely able to drag myself out of bed and get there at all, in fact.

So to it. When you hit a situation like this; due to whatever circumstance you have to get a show up without the resources you really need (usually time, but also often enough gear), here's what you need to do:

Don't Panic. It's fine to go to flanking speed. It's fine to get tense and terse. But don't hurry to the point where you start plugging in the wrong cables or where you are giving orders so fast the crew can't understand you. And most importantly; don't let that spill on to the performers. It is fine to let them know things are a little tough and you are a little harried. But they don't need to know that the sound might not be there at all (unless you get lucky or have a sudden inspiration on how to make it work after all).

Prioritize: No, that's not even the right word. Triage. Make a (mental) list of everything you could survive without if the worst happens, and do all of those last. This isn't a simple matter of ranking a list; everything is a balance between how long it is expected to take, what kind of risk you are willing to take, and how much you really need that thing.

For this show, there were a few absolutes. I had to have the backing tracks. The musical doesn't happen without that. But outside of a complete failure of the venue's sound system, that is a matter of plugging in two cables and getting a rough level. So it doesn't need to be the first thing we do. Low down on my list was floor mics, because there's only three solo lines that use that mic, and it doesn't have the reach to save me if the body mics aren't working.



The other thing I had working for me on this one was Experience. I knew the show very well. I knew the voices. In a sense this was like mixing a trio; if you only have piano, bass and drums on stage it's pretty trivial to figure out channel is which when you have to adjust on the fly. I knew when I popped up the first four mics for the opening number I would be able to hear if C. wasn't in the mix, or if T. was the one who was overpowering everyone else.

I also knew the board family and had spent literally a decade watching wireless mics on the meter bridge. So I could actually do a rough trim by eye (it is really nice when you have warm-ups, because then the mics are all hearing a singing voice at typical volume. Well, more-or-less typical; far too many actors mark their way through warm-ups. But with a good pair of 'phones I can hear exactly how hard they are trying and adjust the trim to compensate.)

There are also standards for a well set-up sound system. These were Meyer speakers, a mid-range Yamaha board, and a clean new-looking theater. So I had good reason to believe that the overall system gain would put me at an appropriate volume level if I ran a healthy-looking signal (plenty of green, space left before it hit red). The house tech advised me on his typical starting point for wireless mics (they tend to be set for a +4 line level. relatively consistent across brands -- again, assuming healthy gain staging through their own signal chain).

And I had one starting point already; we'd fired up the backing tracks to set a rough level on the floor monitors.

So when I started the show, I used the Overture to quickly dial in the level on the backing tracks. Then rolled up the first four mics. I can mix at least four fingers at the same time, so I knew I could compensate with the faders if my rough trim was completely off. As it turns out, it was close enough that I could quickly pop through the head amps and match them. And since I'd rough-trimmed all the mics to the same average level, all I had to do as the other characters entered is bring their faders up to the same position and fine-tune the trim.

It is a little trickier than that, because I have several "yelpers" in the cast who require constant riding of their mic (or as a tech at the Paramount called it, "the five compressors I have on each hand.")




But there's another dirty trick here. No two mixes are identical. One person emphasizes bass, another emphasizes the Bass. Each new song or set or band you listen to, you as a listener spend the first minute or two adjusting your ears to it.

And that means if you have to mix a band cold, without a proper sound check (sometimes, without even a line check), you have a couple of minutes while the audience is adjusting to try to get a mix out of the mess you've got coming off the console.

I've done this, as I said, and again there's a lot of experience that goes into it. I know where to place mics that generically will get a certain sound. It might not be the perfect sound for that band but it will work. And perhaps more importantly, I know what sound that is.

Because I can go back to the console and without the instrument even being there I can set a rough trim and do some basic EQ. I know a snare is a lot hotter than a drum overhead. I know my lone Karma mic is much hotter than the little Oktava's. So I can eyeball a really rough level on them, and be prepared to deal with some known EQ issues (cheap condensers have that 6K-8K boost, for instance. Kick sounds terrible if you let too much mid and mid-low through. In fact, you can go right ahead and dial up a starter frequency for the "crack" and "whoomph" but don't put a lot of gain on it at first.)

And then you work your way from foundation, just as if you had an afternoon and a finished multitrack to mix down. Get the rhythm section in. Add the front men. Then work your way through the rest of the band.

It is hair-raising, flying-fingers work, and really requires you know your way around the board blindfolded. But I've done it enough that I don't shut down in terror if I have to face it again.

Oh, yeah, and the last thing in your tool kit; Hubris. You've got to have the willingness to subject hundreds to thousands of people, people who may have paid upwards of fifty bucks for a seat, to your gambles. You've got to be willing to let your instincts of that moment, that direct connection between your ears saying "more sax!" and your left ring finger on the fader to override the probably better judgement of the promotor, the music director, the punter yelling at you from an aisle seat, and the musician himself. You've got to gamble with all of the efforts of everyone who rehearsed so long and worked so hard (and spent so much money) and do what seems to be right at the moment -- or at least what appears to be working.

I call it hubris because I can never and will never let myself forget of what it means when I step up to that board. I will make mistakes. My judgement will always be suspect. But someone has to call it. Someone has to get a semblance of order into what otherwise would be sonic chaos, and there's no time for a second opinion.

You have to COMMIT. The lead sax is too brassy? You have a split-second to make the call; fix it fast enough that it makes just one little bubble, one small forgivable flub in the overall song. Or let it ride and find a way to defend it as musically valid. The only thing that is worse than a mix that is wrong is one that can't make up it's mind. The ears can adjust to the former. Not the latter.

The Internet of (Theater) Things

I was at Maker Faire this weekend, and like so many other parts of the inter-tubes it was all IOT, IOT, IOT. And I'm wondering if it is time to rethink the usual objection to using Wifi in a performance context.

The old assumptions were that wifi wasn't reliable enough for performance. But then, we used to assume computers weren't reliable enough. I have seen the pleasant glow of the Blue Screen of Death from a sound booth or two, but I ran into many, many more people over the years who insisted on using tape, cassettes, or (eventually) CD's for effects playback because they didn't trust that a computer wouldn't break on them.

Well, I think most people have moved past that. Computers have become the default for sound playback as well as video playback. Crashes still occur but they tend to get ironed out in Tech; the show-stopper failures I have personally observed have been due to the batteries running dry on a production laptop.

I've seen a slow movement towards acceptance of iPad links to sound boards. I remember when the Yamaha board was iffy at best, but now that Wifi link is considered reliable enough for use in the time-critical environment of Tech and Sound Check on a professional-level show.

(On the other side of the technology-adoption bell curve, I've personally run numerous productions with laptop and software tools due to not having the budget for rack-mount equipment. Sub-mixed drums for one musical on the laptop, and that worked well enough that on a later production I few all of the sound reinforcement through it, using freeware plug-ins within Reaper to achieve a graphic equalizer for the house speakers. My last show, I was running sound effects, projections, and even running lights from the one laptop. And I've seen a lot of this sort of exercise in similar improvised micro-budget shows.)

After all, some of the oldest documented theater technology was borrowed and adopted methods from Elizabethan-era sailors; rope rigging, counterweights, whistle codes. It's a natural path from there to modern techs using cell phones to communicate to back stage (instead of trying to come up with the money for the old-school hardwired headset systems). And a lot of people are using DAWs for sound manipulation or MIDI hosts for live keyboards, or (again on the other side of the technological bell curve) personal music players or similar software like iTunes for backing track and effects playback.

In fact, at some levels of theater it is considered ordinary and natural to plug an MP3 player into the sound board and hit one of those little fiddly buttons at the exact instant called for in the script. (Putting the sounds on the hard disk of a computer with sound playback software that was specifically written for performance use is the more reliable alternative now!)



Which brings us to a segue. Effects -- or more broadly, all the possibilities of both the established ideas of theatrical lighting properties and scenery, and the less widely accepted ideas of interactive technology -- are not exactly called for in the script. One even suspects that in the golden age of musicals and old chestnut standards, the Annie and the You Can't Take it With You, the writer brought the same awareness of what could be practically done with multiple settings in scenery and quick-changes in costumes to what could be achieved in the way of on-stage telephone calls and so forth.

Which is to say, most shows don't require really clever technology to get a sound or lighting effect to happen in the right spot. Between the way the script makes the timing of the effect non-critical, and the way the presentational aspect of the box set with the missing fourth wall et al makes playing a telephone sound out of a speaker appropriate and sufficient (or at least sufficiently appropriate), there isn't a need for something more elaborate.

At least, not there. When you get to more modern works, and better yet, to those experimental works that straddle worlds of dance, improvisation, performance art, et al, there are plenty of spaces to explore more complex interactions than "play back a sound effect at a specific moment in the dialogue."

Of course, these also tend to get worked out in development. Sometimes I have had a performer or a puppeteer or a musician or whatever come up to me and ask, "I'd like to have this happen when I do this; is it possible?" But mostly, a choreographer or a props person or someone sees something interesting that's already out there in the world, and the performance is designed around how that existing thing functions; designed to accommodate the existing advantages and the existing flaws.

(Specific case in point; in a production of Wizard of Oz we used light-up globes extensively. Each time these were brought out, there was specific choreography to allow each performer to turn their back to the audience and page through all the available colors in these off-the-shelf devices until they got to the desired effect for that moment in the show.)

So it seems to me that the process of using the kind of effect modern electronics makes possible starts from the Designer. Instead of problem-solving something that the rest of the design team would like to happen, you become the one to suggest an effect. Which means you are effectively working out of what already exists or is known to be possible, rather than working from something that wants to happen on stage and developing a solution to it.



For that reason among others, I'm not that interested in the experimental end -- in the kind of process that puts accelerometer-controlled LED strings on a dancer, or whatever. Because as I pointed out above, this is more a process of adoption than design. You more or less start with available consumer products, and you develop a way to use them over rehearsal.

My interest from pretty much when I started using electronics in theater (where the height of my technological output was sticking leaf switches around a motor-driven cam to create a hardware string light chaser), is to, well, I'd call it "sweetening."

Here's a conceptual framework from another industry. A movie is more-or-less filmed MOS. In the older days this was a technical necessity, these days it is an artistic choice. Dialog may be taken from the shoot, but the totality of the sound environment in the finished product is a created thing. This is for focus and nuance; the noise is stripped away, and the only sounds still there are those that tell the story -- and they are pushed, too, for artistic nuance and emotional effect.

And this process has already begun in theater. We can't pan, zoom, or cut; we don't have that control over what the play-goer watches. But we do control lighting and we build and even paint scenery to place the eyes and the attention where we want it and to make essential story-telling and emotional points.

And artificial sound has entered. Even in smaller spaces, even in opera, subtle reinforcement and other acoustic shaping is already taking place. In larger houses and in the musical dialog is already passed through processing to make it larger than life in the same way Hollywood takes the best the boom mics and hidden lapel mics can carry back from the live stage, marries those with ADR done in the studio, and presents the final honed and processed mix to the audience.

At the very simplest level, I think we can now have the sound issue naturally from an on-stage walkie-talkie or phonograph or bugle (or appear to), and we can have the light from a television or cell phone (or the lights of other items of technology) doing what seems natural for them to do. The history of technical theater is full of examples of sticking colored lights in empty TV cabinets and sticking speakers under chairs and otherwise producing these illusions. Well, we can do them better now -- even if that means just pushing actual video out through a length of VGA.

But at the more complex level, I think we can have a gunshot sound "right." I think we can have a sword fight with the exiting (and thoroughly fake) sword sounds of a movie. And more subtly, I think we can treat voices and footsteps so the actors sound like they are walking a marble hall instead of wooden platforming.




But many of these require wireless control. Props move. Actors move even more. Cheap wireless is one of the necessary parts to make it possible to bring this sort of realized environment, this sort of naturalistic (or hyper-naturalistic) stage environment. And it may be that Wifi and the IOT has reached a point of maturity where it can be trusted in a production context. And not just on experimental theater pieces with fourteen people in the audience, but in staid professional theaters where your equipment breakdown is seen not by mostly your own circle of friends, but by hundreds of people paying thirty-five bucks a seat.

Fish and Chips

The Irish pub near me does a decent fish and chips. I've been making a semi-regular Tuesday thing of that. On Saturday, went to see the show I lit, and at the end of curtain calls the producer came out and made me stand up to be acknowledged. That's neat. At my previous theater (the one I mixed shows at for over five years) they had a "nice" habit of giving special thanks to all the designers at the big opening night bashes. Except for sound. They never mentioned us. Once again, I'm reminded of how well I am to be rid of those people.

This week has been slow. I've been putting in a solid forty as I wait for the new hourly position (and the pay raise and benefits) to start up. Wouldn't bug me so much, the waiting, if they hadn't gone ahead and promised it. Four months ago. I want to stay there. I'm making the schedule work, and I can see retiring in that job. I mean, against the rather unlikely chance that WETA workshop will suddenly phone and tell me to catch the next flight down to New Zealand. But still being on the Temp Agency and still getting only a little over minimum wage is really starting to irk.

And that's the news from Lake Woebegone.*



Sometimes I think engineering is about knowing the right questions to ask. I've been complaining recently about black boxes in modern electronics. There's so much imbedded intelligence in everything now. Take the "humble" lithium polymer battery. You'd think you'd look at the chemistry, check out graphs of charge and discharge curves versus internal resistance and heat dissipation and so forth. Well, not exactly. Tucked beneath the foil jacket on any decent LiPo is thermal monitoring and overcurrent protection and a nifty little voltage monitor that won't let you bottom out the charge.

So it becomes a lot more about looking at lists, of truth tables instead of graphs, where digital switches will be thrown inside the black box when certain conditions are met. And not everything is documented, so this has a lot of what old-school programmers will call the Deep Magic or other Incantations; little tidbits of information passed hand to hand like secret rituals.

But then, a lot of engineering is about how to make use of existing solutions. You don't want to design a wheel every time you need to build a cart; you go out and find a wheel that someone else has already done the heavy lifting on, and compare the final tested performance of the thing against the requirements of your project.

And even when you are working down to raw materials, there are rules of thumb and working formulae and other places where someone has done the measuring and the tabulation and the algebraic manipulation and the empirical results for you, so you can apply an industry-standard calculation instead of having to sit around in a lab discovering melting points and so forth for yourself.

Anyhow.

This is all sideways to my latest work on the Holocron. It occurred to me to take a closer look at the current draw. And there I hit a big snag. The rule of thumb for LiPo cells is maximum current draw is the same as maximum charging current; half the capacity (in milli-amp-hours), expressed as milli-amps. (A safer working value is .2 C) Well, that's fine; the cell I had in mind is a 2500 mAh battery, meaning I can draw up to 1250 mA off it, and two channels at 350 mA is only a little more than half that.

However. The design is that it will run stand-alone on rechargeable battery, or it will run from a USB port and charge the battery while doing so. And anything above 100 mA breaks the USB standard. (Sort of. It's actually rather complex. The USB standard permits current draw of 500 mA if negotiated by the device. But not all computers and certainly not all hubs can supply this safely. Off the standard, devices can and have drawn as high as 1.8 amps -- but this is nonstandard and unsafe.)

Even if I accept 500 mA as the cut-off, I can't power the LiPo charge circuit and still be able to push two 350 watt LEDs. And even if I shave the power requirements; run the LEDs at half the rated current and a 50% duty cycle, it still ends up exhausting the battery in a mere four hours.

So, yeah. Somewhere down the road I'm going to need or want a gadget that can push that 1-2 watts of LED, but the Holocron is not the appropriate project for it. Nor do I think it needs it. So I'm back to neopixels. Especially as I figured out the easy assembly for them; use the through-hole mode and simply bend the pins 90 degrees so they all face out in a wheel.

And here's the math there; 20 mA each (per channel, that is). At a single color and four of the units, the MCP73831 will handle them with a little bit left over to recharge the battery, and the draw is only a little over the 100 mA USB standard.

Of course some colors are best achieved through running two channels wide open. That would be 160 mA and I'd have to push the MCP73831 up to a 250 mA charge rate in order to ensure there is enough current. But that still beats trying to come up with 1400 mA.

And four neopixels worked fine in the first one.

The big trick in the Holocron -- all of the design, not just the electronics -- is to make it as cheap as possible and as easy a kit for the customer to assemble as is possible. So I'm happy to avoid needing surface mount components, but I'm willing to spend a little extra to keep from having either of us have to fiddle with hand-soldering micro-USB connectors.

And this applies in force to the programming. Yes, there are ways to provide computer control for customization. But even the best of these require dealing with drivers for a huge variety of operating systems and even if I could handle the programming I'm not up for the support. So the only user customization I can support with this go-around is on a primitive "VCR Programming" level; walk through menus with one button and change values with another one.

But I think I can do it within an 8-pin ATtiny, which means I don't have to play with a surface-mount component for the main CPU. It is tight, especially when I add a general-purpose "sense" pin (probably tied to a capacitive sensor, like I did with the first Holocron).

Now I just need time to Eagle out the new circuit board, and Inkscape the new design elements. Oh; I made one other bit of progress. I checked scale, and I'm happy staying with 4" outer dimension. Which means my already built and tested outer shell files can be re-used.



*It somehow feels deeply meaningful that Apple's spellcheck is still staggered by basic scientific and engineering terms but has no trouble with "Lake Woebegone." It also passes, without comment, "Darth Vader" and "Frodo Baggins."

Quick Mix

I didn't intend to do any theater for the rest of this year. Told my new job that. Didn't expect to...until yesterday evening, when I got a frantic email.

Fortunately someone else was bringing gear, and there were two people setting up when I got there. I was mentally prepared for it to be anything from "come back at 9 to help us pack up" to A2 to...well, that was a good thing, because I was FOH. Simple show, though. Three-piece combo, lead vocal, guest tabla, a couple of choir bits.

Unfortunately the mains were set up right behind the band. They liked it -- meant they didn't need monitors -- but meant I couldn't do overhead on the drums or as much as I'd like with piano. Baby grand anyhow, which with a few noted exceptions always sound bad and are impossible to mic. No time for sound check, no rehearsal, no idea what the show was going to entail, so I had to stick with whatever I gambled with in setup and hope it worked.

EV on kick and snare (don't remember the precise models at moment). 57 on the bass cab, and I was glad I had it. Shure PX (sigh) on lead vocal. And tried out my Karma silver bullet on piano -- it was on full stick, so under the lid and as far as it could get from the strings. Wolf tones and nasty harmonics, plus incipient low-end feedback, but possibly better results than I would have gotten with any of my other mics (the Karma is like that...weird, almost indescribable mic and sometimes that's the right choice).

And that's the name of the game some times. Take your best guess from experience, stay calm, react to the changes, and deal with it ahead of time that even if the sound doesn't suck you aren't going to be satisfied with it.

Fresh Pi

I worked the East Bay Mini Maker Faire yesterday. It seemed calmer, also smaller than the years previous. I was only supplying PA to one room this time, and I didn't have any competing gigs, so it was a very relaxed day for me. I tried not to pack too much this time; even though I did end up with extra, I didn't feel like I was making a hundred trips to the car lugging audio gear.

Basic PA was my two Jolly 5A's mounted horizontally with an ad-hoc adaption of the U-brackets I bent out of bar stock a number of years ago -- bolted them to Yamaha stand adaptors and that let them sit on top of my 6' On-Stage speaker stands. I did try to print a more elegant adaptor, but the print from the M3D Micro failed under load. I'm pretty sure the SLS (nylon) prints I've been getting at Shapeways would have held up. And I think I got better adhesion between layers with the Type A machines at TechShop, too. Not to say the Micro can't be tweaked a little and possibly get better performance...

Anyhow, ran them from my aging Mackie 1202VLZ Pro, so I could patch four different microphone options -- hand-held, hand-held wireless, lapel mic, and headset mic -- as well as a stereo feed for any audio tracks that might come with the various video presentations.

I did use all the mics. It was nice to have those options, in fact; some lecturers were comfortable with a hand-held and some wanted to go hands-free. The only failure was one very quiet speaker that went with lapel (and would have benefitted from headset mic).

I stuck compressor, Lexicon effects processor, and a Firewire interface in the rack but didn't use any of them. Basically, the rack functioned as a mixer table. If the layout had been very different, I was thinking about going Maker and using Reaper as speaker processor (and probably mixer as well). But I didn't need the various delays I was contemplating, or a graphic, or even compression (except for that one presenter. Sigh.) So I kept it simple -- simple enough I could just hand the mic over then go stroll the faire.



This time was volunteer. I wanted nothing more than ticket, lunch, and a t-shirt. Didn't get a t-shirt (that makes three years running they've forgotten!) Lunch was skimpy. So on one of my wanders I picked up a bottle of honey from some of the beekeepers. And a Rasberry Pi.

Been meaning to play with Pi sometime but the price point always made me re-think. So grabbing one on day-of-faire sale was a good way over that hurdle. I've just started looking into what I need just to get the thing up and running. I don't think I even have any spare keyboards drifting around. Bought a touchscreen, but there's a Munchausen problem here; have to get in to the Pi to program the touchscreen to be able to use it to get into the Pi.

So I'm probably dropping some more bucks at Adafruit. I'm in no hurry. I think working with the Pi is going to improve my Linux/command line skills, and I have thoughts towards building my own media player (I'm getting bored enough at work to listen to music I bring, and the only portable player I have is a no-name three-button MP3 player that doesn't give the ability to select albums or even see what you are playing. Was $2 at Allelectronics and I got two of them entirely as a possible cheap sound playback device for future props.) But other than that I have no real application for Pi.

Really, electronics speaking, I need to move ahead on the next revision of the DuckNode -- specifically, work up the Holocron fork, with an on-board LiPo management system. Gonna be a lot more surface mount in the next iteration, too. Someday I need to either build a reflow oven, or learn about Seeed Fusion (or whatever they call the thing that looks like it might be a full board fabbing service).

Lighting Lamps

This has been a challenging and sobering time for lighting.

I'm about to go into tech on a micro-budget show, and I've been up for four hours wrestling with drivers before I finally got the dimmer pack to talk to my laptop. Not fun. I did a lot of calling around and pulling favors and so forth, and I've managed to rent a pair of Elation 4x dimmer packs and several lighting instruments to go with them. The sole lighting equipment the company owns is an Enttec DMX512 interface.

Enttec is a good company. A lot of companies would chose to make their hardware proprietary and closed-doc and force you to use only their software. Not only does this company allow third parties to use their hardware, they also understand and accept that companies move on and they are making sure to make the hardware documented enough so it can still be used even when that line has been discontinued.

One wishes Apple would act that way sometimes. Instead of pretending that no other Mac existed prior to the one they are selling now (so much does Apple have this attitude, they make it difficult to even figure out if the model you have is actually different from the model they sell...little details like model number are made purposely obscure.)

Anyhow. There was a very nice project known as QLC, which forked and stuck around a little at SourceForge as QLC+. It is a Max/MSP flavored free-form open source lighting controller.

Apple's craziness with how they support FTDI drivers nearly did me in, but finally through either doing a manual uninstall (typing sudo stuff down at the UNIX core -- always a scary business) or running a nice little helper ap created by one of the Enttec programmers I finally got DMX flowing through the box.

What's also nice is the forensics are clear. Not just what failed, but how it passed the pre-test. Well before the dimmers arrived, I plugged in the interface to see if the software would see it. The software recognized it was connected to hardware and displayed the correct hardware name. I didn't see an issue until I (fortunately!) took the dimmer home with me last night in order to confirm it responded to the upstream hardware. Good thing I forgot my USB cable, eh? Otherwise I would have been at the theater all night struggling with it, instead of home where I have wifi and could look for help.

So what happened? Simple. Hardware name is in the basic USB stack. And the lighting software was only using that as a hardware check (it wasn't actually looking for through data.) The DMX functionality, however, has to pass through the FTDI drivers. And that's why the interface recognized and displayed okay but there was no DMX passing through it.




This is going to be a tough show on my computer. I'll be running video through QLab (or possibly just VLC), sound effects through QLab (likely triggered via MIDI so I don't have to lose focus from the lighting console), and of course lighting. Which meant I also had to juggle video cables, finally finding a mini-DVI to VGA adaptor (for far too much money) after being confused by both the existing DVI connector I had and the mini Firewire connectors I'd also purchased recently. Stupid Apple and their ever-changing connector types!

And what is the lighting? Turns out the lights that came with the rental package are a pair of Source-4's -- in 19 degrees. Oops. I think I can still use them as a long raking side light. Then there's two Source-4 PARS: thankfully with all the lenses still in the box, so with WFLs in them I should be able to get a decent backlight. That leaves two generic 6x9's I picked up at another place (and have to put Edison plugs on, still). And my own little 6" fresnel. With no better choices, those will have to do for all of my front light.

It is a very strangely-shaped space, with pillars in the way, and it is going to be pretty ugly no matter what I do. I do wish I'd managed to score the smart light I was asking for (a Studio Spot 250). Unfortunately, that fell afoul of politics. The theater that owns it would be happy to loan it to us, but the theater that currently has it upstairs and unused in their loft doesn't want to let it leave the building.

I did manage to hoosier another company around to loaning a scroller or two, but backed off when I realized I didn't have any five-pin DMX to spare. I also tried to talk them into letting me have one of their broken ones so I could see if I could repair it. I'll try that negotiation again another time.




One of the eye-openers in QLC+ is seeing just how many automated fixtures, color changers, LEDs, and so forth there are, and how much more evolved the software control of these has gotten since the old 2-scene preset days. But this was already underlined for me; I worked two lighting calls over the weekend, and both spaces had ETC Ions and wireless RFUs (both running on what looked to be Apple products). Even the RFU was confusing to me; it presented lights not just in dimmers and channels but in groups as well, and multiple universes were visible in a way that makes it obvious that multiple universes are expected as part of a standard plot.

I got to talking to one of the techs at the second house. Since I last designed sound there, they upgraded the sound board -- and added full digital snakes on Cat-5 to backstage and the pit. Plus finally installed the new speakers they'd been holding on to when my company was in there. I didn't see a hot controller for them, not even a Galileo (or, pasta forbid, a Drive Rack). But according to the tech they had gone for a full Dante system so maybe that was the controller. It looks like a hot system now, and I wish I was designing shows on it now. With, however, the budget to get some decent microphones!

(This was the company where I was babying a grab-bag of aging body mics, down to such horrible things as old Telex's -- built like a tank with a steel frame, and using a 9V battery -- and even a trio of Sampsons. Oddly enough, the least trustworthy of all these mics was the more recent and expensive Shure SLX. Shure? Unsure! And I'm not talking the T4f pulling out; we had solutions for that. I'm talking multiple RF issues.)

Look-Ahead Sound Mixing

I was mixing microphones for a school tour yesterday, and I realized I was, once again, not just mixing for that moment of that song, but mixing in context; of the whole song, of the total performance.

I'm reminded of a couple of classics of science fiction when I think about this. In Robert Heinlein's "Blowups Happen" the staff at a power reactor are going insane from the tension of the job. This was written before the operations of the first pile became publicly known, and Heinlein had extrapolated a fission reaction in positive feedback; balanced on the cusp between dying out or going into runaway (what the industry now calls a "power excursion."

His people, experienced nuclear physicists all, were forced to monitor the processes inside the massive power reactor second by second, using calculus to project the widely varying curves to decide when to moderate -- knowing if they slipped a decimal, a massive explosion would take out half a continent.

The stakes are similar in SF Pioneer E.E. "Doc" Smith's The Vortex Blasters. In this case, the (seemingly) natural phenomenon of a loose atomic vortex behaves chaotically. At any given moment, you can take the past few minutes of activity and attempt a best-fit curve. And if you could do this well enough, you could time a large explosive charge to arrive at the core of the vortex at the exact moment that the yield matched the energetic output of the vortex, thus snuffing it out like an oil rig fire.

Enter "Storm" Cloud, physicist and lightning calculator, who did this personally using his ability to perform complex calculations in his head (eventually he is replaced by a specialized computer...but the real solution to the loose atomic vortices and the source of the problem is more interesting than that. The story stands up well -- still worth a read today).

Fortunately mixing a show is much smaller stakes. But that doesn't change the problem. Given an ideal audio space, ideal sources, perfect equipment, and no psychoacoustic or physiological auditory limits, you could set up a perfect mix for every moment.

In the real world, you have issues you have to map around. One big one is hearing fatigue. If you want to have the ability to push a powerful musical moment into the peak power you are legally and ethically allowed to deliver to the audience, you need to hold back until that moment. Otherwise the audience will already by fatigued and will be unable to appreciate it. Every show, every act, every song has an internal dynamic arc, and you don't start every song with screaming levels; because that leaves you nowhere to go.

I also look ahead knowing a flute is going to enter and I need to carve sonic space for it now, instead of having its entrance masked by competing material. I mix knowing I have one singer who isn't on microphone and the mix that will work during her solo is not the same as the optimum mix a few bars before that.

And I also have to mix into history. Say I guessed wrong on the EQ for a trumpet and gave them a specific and distinctive flavor. That means I have to make a lightning-fast decision about where to go into total artistic mix. If I change it now, the audience's attention will be attracted to the change instead of to the solo, leading to a poorer experience. On the other hand, when the trumpet entered it was new, and the audience is not burdened by the same preconceptions I (or the musicians) might have about how it is "supposed" to sound. Within that first few seconds, they may accept this as musically valid, and the song will work.

The window to make this choice is only a second or two. And it is a multi-variant problem; the sound might be "slightly" off, but it might be so in a way that will stand out later in the song, but the song itself may permit adjusting before that other moment occurs...

And in the middle of this same window a vocalist may have decided to shift her position on a mic and need to be fixed now. Which means even less time, and even less brain power to spare on figuring out where the potential fixes may fall within the total context of the moment, the song, the act, the night. And, yes, I do slip. I have someone suddenly sound utterly wrong, and as I'm fixing that, I blow an entrance.

It Ain't the Heat, it's the Humidity

Actually, it is both.

A very simple bit of physics. The speed of sound changes due to the density of the air. Which means altitude, temperature, and humidity.

The absorption of sound by air (that is, the way acoustic energy falls off with distance in addition to the geometry of inverse-square dispersion), also changes with humidity, and this is frequency-dependent.

But let's take the first. Assume you EQ'd your house until the speaker response was nice and flat. Well, when the audience walks in, you've got a problem.

What is room EQ? Two things, primarily. There's the response curve of the speakers and amps. And there's the response of the room. This latter is due largely to multipath reflection. Sound comes from a speaker. It travels across the audience, hits the back wall, reflects back over that same audience. Where the two paths meet, parts of the waveform will be in phase and combine, others will be out of phase and destructively interfere. Thus, peaks and valleys in the response -- the most prominent of which can be related directly back to the dimensions of the room itself.

So what happens if the speed of sound changes? The two paths increase or decrease in time. But they do so as a proportion, as a percentage, of their previous time. Which means the phase relationship changes. Which means the peaks and valleys are not in the same place.

Which means that 2 kHz peak you notched out of the mains is no longer there, and you are taking a 2 kHz cut in the middle of the sound. And there's a new, uncorrected peak at 2.5 kHz. Or maybe 1.5 kHz -- depending on how the speed of sound changes, and how it relates mathematically to the critical dimensions of the room.

Oh, yes. And the temperature and humidity does change. Not only does each human body in the audience pump 100 watts of heat into the air, each gives off water vapor, raising the humidity. And that's not the worst of it. The graph changes radically between 10% and 30% humidity. Which means starting with a dry room and introducing warm sweaty bodies will have a much greater effect on the speed of sound in your venue than you might expect.

And that's before we even get to considering the frequency-dependent attenuation that also takes place over that critical humidity curve. Which -- just to put icing on the cake -- is most prominent at 12.5 kHz; right in the middle of our frequencies of interest.

The Reverberant Field

Graph the strength of your singers versus the volume in the orchestra pit. For any shared acoustic space, there is a point where your show becomes unmixable. 

Which is to say, nothing you do with microphones and speakers will restore the proper balance. And it's worse than that. Sound reinforcement for music -- much less a musical -- is not about winning the volume wars, it is about achieving intelligibility. To follow the story, the audience must be able to understand the words. And that's much tougher to achieve.




A large part of the reason is the reverberant field. When sound enters a space, it reflects. When it has reflected several times, over a period of up to several seconds, it becomes what we call the reverb tail. But there's several very interesting things about this tail. Since it has bounced back and forth from all available surfaces, it is essentially anisotropic and omnidirectional. Since it is composed of reflections from the last second or several of material, it contains no identifiable transients. And since high frequencies are more easily absorbed, it is weighted towards the low end.

What all this means is the acoustic remnant left after the vocal energy of singers, musical instruments, and sound reinforcement speakers has entered the space is a muddy, boomy, mush. Referencing only the reverberant field, a string bass is just "Ooommooommooom"; no pluck, no notes, no rhythm. For vocals, you are lucky to make out the basic vowels; consonants are lost.

And it gets worse.

As you add volume, whether directly from louder singers or instruments or by turning up microphones, you "pump" the space. The reverberant field becomes stronger in a non-linear way, becoming closer to a continuous wall of white noise. And certain frequencies are pumped as if in a laser cavity; room nodes emerge, standing waves, tones that are captured and amplified and sustained.

(There's a few other side effects; fixtures and architectural elements rattle, adding more noise, and the audience becomes noisier as well.)

Since the reverberant field is practically by definition at equal volume throughout the acoustic space, the direct sound forms a ratio with it. Put a singer at one end of the room. Close by the singer, their voice is louder. By the time you get to the back of the room, the reverberant sound dominates.

And this has huge implications for sound reinforcement.




FOH mixing in any space smaller than a stadium is all about selective reinforcement. Take a small-scale example; a recorder and trumpet duet. In a small space, you might put a mic on the recorder and feed it into the house system to help it match the trumpet's volume.

Problem is, your house speakers aren't on stage. So if you stand in front of a speaker, you get just recorder. Stand in front of the stage, you get just trumpet. Only a little ways back in the hall do you get equal amounts of trumpet and recorder.

Take another typical example; bass player with their own amp. From the audience, all they hear is "oomoomoom." So you take a DI off the bass and emphasize the attack a little. This means two streams have entered the acoustic space:

"Ooomooomooom"
"Tac! Dac! Dac!"

And at the proper distance, they blend into the proper "Toom doom da doom doom da doom." But anywhere other than down the alley where direct projection from stage is roughly matched to direct tweeter radiation from speakers, you get something other than a good bass sound.

Go back to the first. One alternative is to mic both instruments. So from anywhere within range of the speakers, you are hearing both amplified recorder and amplified trumpet. Plus the reverberant field. And therein lies the catch. If the trumpet player, freed from the responsibility of blending with the recorder, increases in volume, the reverberant field increases non-linearly. And as you increase the speaker volume to compensate, the reinforcement is also fighting its own reverberant field.

Why is it non-linear? Well, air has mass. It takes a certain amount of energy to overcome the inertia of the air and set up standing waves. On the listener end, perception starts being non-linear; it takes ten times the power to be perceived as twice the volume, but this is also frequency dependent and the frequency response changes at different volumes. At higher volumes, masking effects in the cochlea become more dominant, up through the onset of hearing fatigue; short-term hearing loss.

Which all work out to progressive loss of perception of the high frequency content. As you crank higher and higher, the desired sound; the harmonics that define the character and timbre, the higher-frequency sounds that define the attack transients, and of course the very transients themselves get lost in the smear of reflected, bottom-heavy, indistinct noise that makes up your reverberant field.

But good luck getting it fixed. If you ask for the trumpet to perhaps play a little softer, all you will get is well-meaning suggestions to turn his mic down. Which, of course, devolves us back to the first set-up; where the people directly in front of the speaker hear the recorder and only a couple of seats get a decent balance.

(Only you've lost that, too, since the reinforced recorder is now masking itself; the transients are lost in the echoes of the reverberant field, and the characteristic timbre is masked in the thrumming low end you've filled the hall with. And of course the trumpet is also lost in the reverberant field now, meaning you might as well have two fretless basses up there for all the character and melodic content that comes through).




Consider what selective reinforcement means for design of a musical. From the back of the house, the reverberant field overwhelms anything coming directly from the stage. From the back of the house, then, it becomes clear you need to roll off the low end and push the presence in the vocal microphones.

Which if done right can provide a pleasing voice in which it is generally possible to make out the words.

But move closer to the main speakers. If you stare down the throat of the speakers, you are getting just the reinforcement; an overly bright, tinny, compressed voice with lots of artifacts. Not pleasant to listen to!

In many seats towards the front of the listening space, some direct bleed comes off the stage and mixes with what's coming off the speakers, plus of course you have the reverberant field. So low end is filled in by the field, mid-range and localization cues come directly from the singer, and presence and definition and consonants are coming off the speakers. And if the speakers are time-aligned properly and not too far away in the horizontal plane (the human ear gives more of a pass to misalignment in the vertical plane) you get a pleasing voice.

Of course, the reverberant field is delayed. That's what it is; reflections from the distant walls. So that smears the lower end. And, yes, it is impossible to align your mains perfectly for all seats; a little geometry will demonstrate that! But here it gets even trickier; the human perceptual apparatus will bring in all the frequency data more-or-less without question, but it will provide perceptual focus based on location, time-of-arrival, and frequency content.

Which boils down to -- the total mix may or may not be pleasing, but it is nearly impossible for untrained ears to sort out which elements are contributing what to the total mix. The reverberant field, particularly, is generally unperceived. The influence that low end leakage has on the volume sensitivity and resulting frequency sensitivity curves in the listening ears will always be underestimated and overlooked.

As that reverberant field rises in ratio (whether due to sheer level, or to increasing distance of the listener from stage and/or speakers) the ability to sort out the desired musical information becomes less. It is like the dark matter of sound at that point; making voices sound muffled and inspiring lots of orders to "turn it up, turn it up!" when the problem is the unseen drag of low-frequency white noise.

And this means the correct emphasis to blend with the acoustic material in the space is different for each seat. And different for each voice. And changes there, too; the singer who needs a lot of help will be emphasized more in speakers, the singer with the strong voice will be almost non-existent in the speakers (depending on where you mix to, of course; whether you mix for the person standing in front of the speaker, the person in the back of the room, or try -- as most of us do -- to achieve a compromise that will work for as much of the audience as possible).

This means if Ethel Merman singes a duet with Little Suzy, the people near the speakers will complain all they hear is a child's screechy voice being amplified way too much, and the people everywhere else will hear nothing but Ethel Merman. This of course evens out the flatter your speaker coverage is!

And it gets subtler than this. Take two singers of similar vocal timbre but different strengths of production. As the reinforcement is balanced for tonal deficiency, they will sound the same in the sweet spot, but one will have an odd, artificial sounding microphone voice right next to the speakers. And that same one will be dull and muffled compared to his partner when listening from distant in the hall.

Or take either of those singers, and change the total volume of the song. At low volumes of reinforcement, the natural voice dominates in the front of the hall and the reverberant field dominates in the rear. At higher levels of reinforcement, the microphone sound dominates over greater and greater parts of the hall. And if the microphone sound is tailored to emphasize needed frequencies and otherwise selectively reinforce the voice, the amplified sound will pass through insufficient, to nicely blended, to artificial as you increase volume.



This is why reinforcement -- working around and supporting the natural acoustic sound from the stage and the orchestra -- is the most difficult kind of sound. 

It is also why amplification -- powering over the direct sound with a fuller-range, more accurate picture -- only works within certain boundaries.

And in both cases, you remain at the mercy of backline leakage. No matter what the strategy you pick, if a band continues to turn up their instruments, there will come a point where there is no alternative left for mixing. The show is just going to have to suck.

In other news, I just finished the third weekend of mixing "Poppins."

Picture-Heavy Post

So that's my view for most of a show.

Well, not really. I sit pretty high, and I make it a point not to let my head get buried in the gear. I just have to glance at the computer every now and then to make sure the right sound cue is loaded. Cues are fired from the MIDI keyboard, with additional wind noises improvised from same. The script is out of frame to the left. The major entrances and exits are all programmed, and scenes are called up with the User-Assignable Buttons there at the far right edge of the LS-9. Unfortunately there aren't enough channels to have body mics, chorus mics, sound effects, effects returns, and band all on the top layer, so I spend a bit of time flipping back and forth between layers.

Anyhow, a lot more spacious than what the poor muso's see during the show:

This is from behind brass land, looking towards the center of the pit. That big piece of nasty-looking fabric is a dust cover for the second keyboard. Barely visible tucked in a corner under the stairs is an old television set connected to a chip camera taped up to the edge of the stage and looking directly at the conductor.

This is looking from about where the MIDI gear of first keyboard sits towards drum land, with the multi-reed seated in a tiny corner right beside the drums.

I'd have the kit properly mic'd, but the drummer is uncooperative; he's playing loud and inconsistently, and he took it on himself to move the kick mic because he thought it sounded bad. I only use the overhead for the show now; the rest of that is all muted.



And just for fun, here's how I'm dressing one of the body packs for the show:


Connector is sealed with heat-shrink and hot glue. Then moleskin is wrapped around the connector, the antenna, the top of the mic, around the element right behind the head, and on the cord just before the connector.






Next, first condom is sealed over the mic with wraps of waterproof tape. Then a second condom is put over that, then the whole thing goes in a mic bag.







This sort of abuse explains why, at least once a run, I have wipe the accumulated goo off the microphones with Goo-Gone, and soak the elements and filter caps in alcohol.

The Wheels Come Off

Last night was the performance I feared. All the compromises I'd been forced into depended on certain things being true, and all of those things changed; leaving me in a place where the show sounded like ass and no amount of knob-twisting at FOH could save it.

I'm composing what may be a career-ending email. They think they need a Sound Operator. I think they need a Sound Designer, as well as a Sound Engineer. At the moment, they are blocking me from doing what a Designer does, meaning they are basically getting an Engineer for Operator's wages.

And, well, this gives me a chance to talk a little about roles and functions. Because that may be a little confusing to those new to the industry.



In some very small theaters, it actually does operate like it does in the excellent web comic Q to Q; the designers run their own shows. Well, except for sets -- Set Designers are rarely employed as the running crew for their own show!

For most of the industry, the jobs are broken out. The kinds of skills, experience, and maturity required of a designer is incompatible with the kind of wages, stipend, or volunteer nature required of the person who will be there on every performance.

In that construct, a Sound Designer is the person responsible for creating effects, making mic plots (often the Director and Stage Manager will take a hand in those as well), setting levels. The Sound Operator is the person who sits in the chair in the booth pressing "Go" on QLab, or out in the house at a Front-Of-House (FOH) mixing position mixing the show from night to night.

Both of these titles are show-related positions. Both are hired for the show, by the show; usually contract for the Sound Designer, contract or stipend for the Sound Operator (when they are not a volunteer or a student picking up lab hours). At a well-organized theater, there will often be a Master Electrician as well; this is a salaried employee (or a seasonal hire) who maintains the equipment.

In many cases, the ME is also responsible for lighting, including the schedule and hire of crews for hangs, focus, and strike, and doesn't spend a lot of time cleaning up the sound closet. In almost all cases, the system itself is a Contractor install, and was probably designed by a professional audio contractor. The sad reality to this being, as well, in many smaller theaters and particularly in schools and recreation departments and churches, the sound system is designed by people who do corporate sound, not theater sound. The systems do decently at reproducing rock and roll music at moderate to high levels, and very poorly at supporting musical theater.

In any case!

As you move up to bigger ponds, the food chain becomes longer as well. Whereas for a drawing-room comedy in a box set a mere "Sound Operator" will suffice for playing back effects (and in most budget-conscious theaters these days, the left hand of the Stage Manager is forced to suffice in this role) to actively balance the vocals on 20-40 wireless microphones the Sound Operator needs a bigger title.

Preference among us working stiffs is to use the same one used by the bigger world of live music; FOH (or Front-of-house mixer). And when the number of mics and the budget around them is sufficient, they start getting little fish of their own.

An "A2" is a catch-all audio assistant. (The A1 -- not that you ever hear the term -- is the FOH). The A2 lives backstage and deals with all the things the guy or gal stuck out in the middle of the audience can't. On a big music show the A2 will supervise a whole crew of mic-shifters. But back to the musical; in those, the A2's primary job is their alternate title; Mic Wrangler.

A good Mic Wrangler will hover over every quick-change, making sure the microphone survives the exchange of clothing and wig and the quick dab of fresh make-up. They will get instructions from the FOH or Stage Manager to swap out ailing microphones, tape up dangling wires, and they also have the unhappy task of pulling batteries and wiping the things down after every sweaty show. The really good ones have their ears open all the time, and will prophylactically change out suspect microphones before you even have an issue at the console.

Go a few steps more professional, and the crew increases again. Dialog Mixer (one person mixes the vocals on songs, the other mixes them on spoken material). Band Mixer. Monitor Mixer. Backline techs (people moving among the musicians keeping their equipment in working order. In the live music world, mixing band monitors is so important a task it is not just a different person than the FOH, it is often in a different location altogether -- Monitor Beach, often to the side of the stage for easier access.

But that's not theater. Maybe Broadway, but not the theater most of us see. We're basically lucky to get an A2, and good luck trying to crawl into a typical crowded pit to fix a keyboard issue or plug a mic back in.

So You Want to Learn Sound

...and it looks like a lot of stuff to pick up, and things like my posts (although neither John Huntington nor Dave "The Rat" are exactly comfortable reading in that regard, either) are scaring you.

Don't be.

Like a lot of things, sound is easier than you think to do (and is harder than you think to do well).

It is an Art, a Science, Engineering, and a Craft. Not all of these have the same weight. At the very top, at the most basic, it is about achieving a desired aesthetic effect. In the words of the immortal Duke Ellington, "If it sounds good, it is good."

And, oh, but this is where the part that resembles Science comes in. Because the final measure is your ears. Because even if you've done reams of engineering analysis, applied tons of highly technical test equipments, and so on, the final tweak is by nothing more than your ears and your own sensitivities.

But...and here's the big "but," before you can apply your ears in this way you need to absorb a little piece of the Scientific Method. To wit, to acknowledge Feyman's Dictum, "You are the easiest person for you to fool."

It is this simple; using tools like the double-blind test is what separates an audio professional from the snake-oil salesmen and credulous consumers of certain "audiophile" magazines. All the measurements in the world won't tell you if the system "sounds good," but the best Golden Ears in the industry won't save you if you are only hearing what you want to (or expect to) hear.

That's why we measure, that's why we test, that's why we calculate. That's why a sound person walks around, moves their head, covers one ear. That's why you turn off the microphones every now and then to figure out what is actually in the sound system and what is actually in the room.

What separates the good sound person from every other person in the room with an opinion -- from the producer down to the guitarist's Significant Other -- is that you know not to trust your own impressions blindly. You've learned to test your assumptions.

This happens at every level, in every part of what you do with sound. Don't assume the power is cut off when you are tying in; apply a chicken stick before you apply bare flesh to a 220 bus. Don't assume the mics are where you placed them last night, or the speakers are still working, or the hiss is the air conditioning.

And don't assume your own particularized aesthetic reaction and baggage of associations hold true for every listener. For some people, the mere sound of a dentist's drill gives them the shakes. For one director I worked with, "Do You Believe in Magic" was the most romantic piece of music they knew. I personally don't listen to a lot of pop, and rarely pay attention to lyrics anyhow, but many people will chose a piece of transition music based on the words. Which of us is right? It depends on the audience, the production, the surrounding material. It has to be a conscious choice, in other words -- not the untested assumption that what you like, others like, and for the same reasons you like it.

And, yes, this is true of all art and true of all theatrical arts in particular. Because a Fine Artist can turn up their nose at the philistines who "don't get their intent" but in theater we have a duty to communicate to the audience. They don't need to hear your aesthetic interpretation of what a train really means -- they need to know the 12:04 is pulling into town with the gunmen on board.




And that's it. That's the most important part.

Listen. Test your assumptions. Test your hearing. Educate yourself. Experience as many different sounds and environments as you can, explore how sound is shaped by the environment, and discover how perception is shaped -- including your own.

Learn both what a gunshot really sounds like, and what an audience expects to hear. Personally move a microphone around and hear the changes this causes in the sound it is picking up. Stick your ears close to a musical instrument and hear the very different sounds from different distances and directions. Listen to a room, then look at what an RTA is showing you about the room. Make changes, rinse, repeat.




Understanding acoustics (and electronics, and power distribution, and rigging...) will come. That's the engineering part. If you are contracting for a $20K sound system install in a new building, you'd better be doing some math. But a lot of the gear you will encounter is designed to be operated by musicians and amateurs. Most of it will be installed, existing systems (small theaters, clubs, etc.) They may not work optimally, but they will work, and the engineering aspect of your job is largely confined to asking someone else how to turn the thing on.

In practical terms, 98% of this job is a craft. And it is a lousy craft, in that an absurd amount of what you find out you need to know can't be easily derived from first principles. So forget the underlying science, and largely ignore the engineering. It comes down to, more often than not, memorizing long lists of "SM57 works well on snare, is harsh on vocals (unless you are doing metal)" or "If it looks like a Speakon connector but is blue, it is probably a Powercon connector" or "Tip in, ring out, except on Panasonic -- like the old Ramsa board -- where ring is in and tip is out."

Which also sounds like a heck of a lot to digest. And it is, except no-one knows everything and everyone continues to learn, constantly. The trick is, learn the gear you have to hand. Make choices of established, well-parameterized gear when you purchase (there's a reason there are so many '57s out there; people know what they do and understand their peccadilloes.) Pretty soon you will collect a little box of frequently-used parts and tools.

They aren't optimized, and they won't always work, but where there's no time to be creative or to engineer you reach into the box. 57 on the snare, check (I have two standard positions I reach for all the time). 100hz roll-off and 1.7:1 compression with a 44 ms attack on the wireless mic (my standard starting position in many theaters). Track_04 wind from my second purchased sound effects CD for, well, pretty much everything. (Track_06 is nice for cold drafts, snowy scenes, and the like).



Lastly, and to recap, think like a scientist (always double-checking your assumptions, doing math if you can and where you can, using test instruments if you have them, and otherwise checking to see if what you think is happening is what really is happening).

But act like a musician. You are a performer, whether you are creating canned sound effects or mixing a show from FOH. Your choices are artistic and aesthetic and individual. Mics can be turned on and off from a script, but mixing a show is a performance -- and a good FOH performance adds as much to a show as a good trumpet solo.

Musical Paradox

I think I'm one step closer to understanding why there's never enough time to work music, and why I'm broke all the time.

Theater is a strange beast. Even at the regional level, a lot of people aren't making a living at it. They have day jobs. The difference is how it breaks down.

Actors (aside from a few Equity) get paid a stipend, or not at all. The schedule of rehearsals is organized around their need to get from their 9-to-5. What exactly they do during Tech Week, I'm not sure -- other than get no sleep, or use up some sick days.

Designers are in a worse cramp because their time commitment is over a shorter period, but has longer hours. Tech Week for a designer is not 6 pm till midnight, it can be 9 AM till 2 AM. The tendency seems to be for Lighting Designers to have part-time jobs in the business (often they are a part-time Master Electrician at some other theater; another frequent option is working for a rental company.) Flex-time is almost mandatory to make it possible to invest in the morning focus sessions, the daytime production meetings, and the all-night cue-setting sessions.

Set designers need to spend more time in drawing and in consulting with the shop as they build -- set design goes over a longer period. So more often set designers (and costume designers) are theater full-time. But because no show pays a living wage by itself, they are inevitably working more than one show at a time. What saves them is set design operates a lot more like a consultancy than does, say, lighting or Music Direction; the Set Designer doesn't have to be in the room for the entirety of tech.

A similar division exists in the labor; lighting techs (and running crews) work relatively limited evening shifts which are completely compatible with jobs, school, or even other designs. Techs are flexible parts; you don't need the same tech focusing a show that had been there last thursday hanging the show. Carpentry, on the other hand, takes place in the day and takes all day; set building tends to be freelancers who stick with a production over the 3-6 week build then move on to the next show (I did this for about ten years).

Musicians, then, become the odd bird. You would think that their calls (even shorter than actor's calls) would permit day jobs. But few musicians spend their working hours away from music. Most are doing music elsewhere -- often as not, teaching classes. This gives them the flex time they need to accommodate show calls: but it also puts them in a mindset where sub'ing is customary.

Since all the income a musician makes is by "service" (aka a set fee to sit down for a fixed number of hours and play) -- teaching classes, especially one-on-one, works out similarly -- they are very much not disposed towards arbitrarily adding hours. Quite the reverse; their financial viability depends on them being able to run from gig to gig and stuff as many into the available slots as they can.

And where does that leave me? Somehow, I seem to be caught with the worst of both worlds when it comes to hours. That comes from wearing two hats; as designer I need to be free to follow any arbitrary extensions to the schedule during tech, and as a performer I need to be there every evening -- and my call starts earlier and runs later than that of the actors, meaning it overlaps the traditional 9-to-5. The only work options that seem possible are flextime partime -- and it is best (because of the incredible impact on my load-in schedule caused by the arbitrary changes of others) that this part-time work have little in the way of set deadlines or mandatory friday meetings.

And this is still not the best economy to be looking for THAT understanding a job!

The Flat Field and the Single-Point

In mic'ing a stage musical, one of the most basic choices is between reinforcement and amplification. The former is the more challenging, especially as spaces get larger. "Oklahoma," for instance, is an old-school musical and aesthetically demands the illusion that you are listening to the people on stage as their voice carries out across the open plains.

To achieve this effect requires clever speaker arrangements, careful adjustment of delay lines, and of course gentle amplification.

The opposite case is a show like "The Wiz," or "Grease"; pop songs in vocal techniques characteristic of amplified voices (as well as musical instrumentation with a sound defined by the electronics; keyboards, electric guitars, etc., as opposed to the strictly acoustic strings and woodwinds of the classic Broadway pit).

At my current theater our overall aesthetic (imposed at least in part by the quality of the voices we have available, our budgets, and the number of [noisy!] young people in our audiences) is to go in a direction of amplification for most shows. "Sound of Music" is the only show in my recent memory that really strove to create the illusion of un-amplified voice and band -- an illusion that the very young voices of our von Trapp children could not sustain.

At a previous theater, our, well, terrible equipment meant the amplified voice didn't match the natural voice. This made for a sort of uncanny valley you navigated with great care; below a certain volume, the reinforcement backed up the voice, but above that volume it took over and changed the character in an obvious (and often unpleasant) way.

My systems now are a much closer match, allowing me choice of where to go on that line; from imperceptible amplification to the point at which the natural voice is completely masked.




What makes the difference between reinforcement and amplification? In my mind, two elements dominate; volume, and delay. Following more distantly is acoustic placement (whether the vocals appear to come from a sonic space related to the stage, or whether they appear to come from speakers or another clearly defined point) and processing; the more pop material is usually treated with harder compression and a lot more reverb.

But here's where we get into system design. In both, the dominant concern is managing the wavefront. What hits audience ears is a combination of direct sound from actors and musicians, direct sound reflected off scenery and room, amplified sound from various speakers, amplified sound from foldback monitors (aka backline leakage), and amplified sound reflected by the room.

It is of course impossible (unless you are Meyer) to control all of these sources so they line up in the desired temporal order at all seats in the audience. But it is largely by juggling the temporal order that you attempt to manage at least some aesthetic goal out of what is otherwise sonic chaos.




My "flat field" approach for amplified music is actually quite simple. The speakers are time-aligned so energy from them all reaches the audience at roughly the same moment (obviously this relationship is different for each seat, meaning a lot of variance in seats across more than one zone of coverage). There is the smallest possible overall system delay and the system is run hot; overpowering any direct acoustic contribution.

This means the audience member is basically presented with a mix coming from a speaker. Any direct vocal energy from the stage, or backline leakage, arrives later and at a lower level and is psycho-acoustically folded in to the existing room reflections. In simpler language; the actual voice from the actual stage is perceived as part of the reverb tail of the processed sound.

The obvious drawback is that this requires powering over all other sources. If the drummer is loud (which they often are for pop shows!) I have to power over them; the original sound of the drummer has to reach audience ears as a distant, muffled echo of the heavily processed, close-mic'd sounds of the kit.

This means skirting local noise ordinances, frightening matinee audiences full of little children, and fighting aural fatigue. It also means that the equipment becomes super-critical; lose a wireless mic and you lose that singer. And a musician who is careless with the position of their mic can spoil the entire mix.



To contrast, the reinforcement technique primarily relies on an overall system delay. In this case, you are aiming for the magic corridor of about 10 milliseconds. Acoustic energy that fall within this corridor is perceived as originating spatially from the first source the listener hears. As long as the wavefront from the sound system falls slightly behind the direct acoustic sound of the actor, and the level is moderate (in a perfect world, you can get up to 10 db OVER the original sound without it being perceptible at all!) an illusion is maintained.

The more tricky element is that each source falls off in a different taper; the vocal energy of the singer is semi-directional, the sound of the pit orchestra is nearly omnidirectional and falls off roughly inverse-square, and although each single speaker is even more directional than the voice, the combination of all speakers in the tuned system can "fall off" in any arbitrary manner chosen.

So the tough task is to not just create the correct delay and an appropriate volume, but to maintain this relationship of delay and relative volume across a complex acoustic space. And this is a sensitive balance; if the drummer plays out, or the dancers demand more piano in their monitors, or a singer is tired and marking, the entire relationship can fall apart.

And because even something as basic and simple as The Precedence Effect (this psychoacoustic principle that can cause a reinforcement source to become literally imperceptible to all but trained ears) is impossible to explain to most people, the poor sound designer finds themselves completely helpless as those elements above (drummer, piano, marking singers, etc.) are arbitrarily changed by people who can't accept that they just wrecked the sound of the entire show.




Which brings me around to a new approach. It is an approach of basically brute force and ignorance, driven by bogosity, and will only work for some material. I call it the single-point solution, and it is what I am using on "Poppins."

The system is made possible by the fact that the band is in the pit, roughly along the same proscenium line as the main house speakers and the primary set of foldback speakers. So I've started by not even trying to control the band. Then pushing even more band at the stage with the most insanely loud foldback I've ever used. However, because of the physical alignment, this is more-or-less perceived by audience as just more pit leakage.

The mains are run hot with vocals, with system delay aligned to that same proscenium edge. This means that, roughly, all the various sources congeal in time at the proscenium edge. Since most of the amplification of the band is from foldback, it falls off as the natural pit does; in almost pure inverse-square. And since the vocals are shoved into just the mains (and the down-facing front fill) and are backed by stage energy (and vocal leakage from the insane levels of the band's own monitors; yes; vocals are feeding back from the pit before they feed back from the mains) they also come close to the inverse-square -- particularly when an entire ensemble is singing.

Or, rather, the colder I run the vocals, the closer the match will be to the taper from the band and stage noise. The lightly-amplified ensemble fares best; exposed soloists, less well.

With the delay speakers turned off, the wavefront that hits the majority of the audience is pretty much characterized as a large speaker the width of the proscenium, plus reverberation from the room. And at FOH in the back of the room, the reinforced sound and the direct sound (both desired sound like singing and un-desired sounds like stage noise) are in roughly the same volume relationship as that which the majority of the audience hears.

Where this falls down is obvious; the phase relationships are completely shot, and the musical material is smeared across time. Intelligibility suffers, fast arpeggios become sheer mush. The band suffers most here, as the majority of what is heard by audience has bounced off the set walls and returned to them in a nicely time-smeared multi-path.

The energy content across frequencies is even worse; most of the sources are indirect and highs are of course absorbed more readily, meaning the sound is heavy and muddy. And I can't make it up with the usual trick of putting more highs in the mains, because that would pull them out of the unified front.

The place where it goes most bad is the uncanny valley is back; if I push amplification too hot to try to power over, say, the tap dancing in "Step in Time," the reverberant, time-smeared, highs-attenuated material is pushed aside by direct, dry, full-frequency sound.

From close-mic'd instruments, of course; with the ensemble tap dancing directly over the pit, the only way to get the clarity in the foldback the ensemble requires is to stick the band microphones practically into the bells of the horns. Which means the amplified component of the total mix doesn't match at all what is leaking from the pit, and the band audibly changes sonic character when I have to shove the faders up to cover a scene change or blast my way over the top of tap dancers.

Probably the only thing that saves the mix at this point is the band themselves are varying wildly in their tone from number to number; mezzo from the brass and brushes from the drums, then suddenly a ear-tearingly crisp side-stick and a straining forte passage from the brass. So it isn't quite as obvious that their sound also alters dramatically every time the set moves, or a dance starts....

Poppins_03: Building In-Situ

Turns out this was not the best show to do a detailed account of the sound effects process. "Poppins" is an odd beast. The impression I got from the Broadway Cast recording, and the early orchestra rehearsals, turned out to be correct. The Director came to the same impression independently and strongly agreed with the choices we had to make.

Which is, in essentials, that this is a show about silences. About exposed melodic lines, about pauses, about the air between delicate, Mozart-like arpeggios. And it is practically through-composed; there is very little space that doesn't have music in it, and the music is harmonically and rhythmically complex. I watched our Music Director beating out a problematic section for a struggling singer; 4, 2, 4, 2, 4, 2, fermata, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 4 rit and long fermata...

This isn't like "A Little Princess." In "Princess," the material was strong rhythms (often expressed through simple ostinato) and long, legato vocal lines. This left a ton of sonic space where continuous background sounds were not only not distracting, but added (I think!) to the total effect.

In "Poppins," the rhythms are practically implied by light, lilting runs. Filling in the spaces harms the feel of the music.  And as far as sound effects go, in addition, most of the magic performed by MARY is accompanied. It is in the score. So, all in all, there really aren't a lot of effects.

In addition to this design issue, there was a process issue. The sound effects we did have fell into two categories; transition effects, and spot "sweeteners" for some of the physical effects. For the former, discovering what worked for transitions required the entire acoustic environment to be in place and in timing; the orchestra, the actual set movement, and any additional cover we added (we added BERT to several of the transitions in order to give the audience something to look at while the set was being moved.)

The orchestra is still (several days after opening) changing their make-up, and the very books they are playing. In addition to altering what selections they are playing during transitions, if and when they will vamp, and their dynamics during transitions. The set crew is still refining; we didn't finalize which pieces are even on stage until First Preview, and the order that pieces move is still as of the close of opening weekend a bit...fluid.

Fortunately, my choice for transition effects was a new sample set. I'm using the venerable, low-profile shareware VSamp for this, driven by a 2-octave Ozone keyboard I can park right under the laptop to the right of the sound board. I re-assigned the modulation wheel on the keyboard to Expression (CC #1) via MidiPipe, and set Expression sensitivity in the envelope section in VSamp so I can use it for real-time fades and crescendos. This does mean I'm basically making a Vulcan Salute with one hand while mixing BERT's vocal and selecting scene presets on the LS9 mixer with the other, but it works.

In many places I'm simply sitting tacet and letting the band play. In others I'm forced to play out a little more with my rain and wind and thunder -- in order to cover the distracting noise of the flying system being reset for MARY's next magical entrance!

In the case of the practical effects, they were of course delivered late in the day (among other things having to wait for set building to finish so they could be installed) and the actors are still developing their timing around them. Fortunately the Director understood perfectly that I would be unable to cut these cues until all of that happened. And I'm making some small timing and volume adjustments still.

(Techie stuff; both of these are screen-shot via the Quicktime player and edited in iMovie. To get the audio stream off Reaper and into Quicktime sound was passed through SoundFlower. For "Poppins" these are my actual build files -- during the show, of course, rendered stereo tracks are played back from QLab. For "Princess," this is a comp of two mono busses recorded off the board during performance, combined with the effects files in Reaper in order to reconstruct a semblance of the performance experience.)




Thus, this was the abbreviated process:

For underscore/transition effects, auditioned wind and rain and birdsong over the speakers, tweaked EQ a bit and created seamless loops that could be loaded into the sampler. Tried that out during dress and set an overall level and sensitivity for the sampler before finishing the gain-staging.

For practical effects sweetening, waited until I saw the actors actually doing the effect, then constructed brief "story-telling" sequences for each using only my own memory for overall timing. They simply aren't going to match that closely. Fortunately the kitchen sequence can be broken into four individual cues (and another four for the magical restorations), meaning there's at least some vague correspondence between stage action and accompanying sound.

Really, though, "Poppins" proved a lot less interesting as an effects show, and a lot more interesting from a reinforcement and system design perspective. Which I may get into...when the dust clears a little.

Makey Makey

East Bay Mini Maker Faire has a lot of amplified sound. The music stage is handled by a local sound company for a sweetheart deal, and I don't envy them -- there's a challenging bunch of groups to set up for. The smaller demonstrations and makers and so forth (like Game of Drones) bring their own PA (the school also has a few old speakers lying around). Between these extremes is me.

I'm covering 2-3 lecture rooms and presentations with whatever I can beg or borrow or cobble up. Year before last was insane; we were spread out all over and weren't given access until the day of the Faire. So I had to hand-carry self-powered speakers and other heavy audio gear across a crowded Maker Faire to one of the distant classrooms where I was setting up. I literally plugs in the mixer, turned on the speakers, popped batteries into a lapel mic and handed it to Chris Anderson as he went on as the first presenter.

Fortunately I'd guessed right in enough of my connections and settings, I had sound.

Helps a lot to know your gear, and know the acoustics. I've dialed in a rough mix on a band without actually turning on the power. I like to think it looks kind of cool to outsiders, when you walk up, select a mic and place it, walk back to the board and get a decent sound. (But then, outsiders really don't understand how incredibly critical having the right mic in the right place is. As I've said before; the right mic in the right place and a mix is all but done. Wrong mic in the wrong place, mix is all but done for.)

I went simpler this year and set up a mono system in the big room, with the mixer nearby instead of trying to set up an FOH-like position for it, and hooked in a pair of handheld wireless with a lav as backup, and a mono connection for people to plug in laptops for movies or slide shows with sound.

The outdoors stage is always problematic because the presenters there don't have outside voices. So we give them a lav and a desk mic and crank up the gain as far as we can. I didn't even bother with two speakers this time (the audience spread was narrower than in previous years and one speaker covered them adequately).

Then an hour into the show, a request came down to help out a children's string quartet. Since I was being simple, all I had was the extras I'd thrown in the box.

Single large-diaphragm condenser on the one tripod boom stand I'd brought. Passed through a Behringer micro-mixer only because of needing the phantom power. Put the mixer on top of the cardboard box it came in and set that in the dirt. Stuck the first speaker they asked for -- JBL Eon on a speaker stand, aimed towards the causeway to entice people over to listen to the quartet.

But since the audience was mostly congregating on the path, I dashed back to where I had the gear stashed, and made one more trip with a Jolly5 miniature (but powerful) powered monitor, and set that up on a chair directly in front of the quartet.

When I set out the condenser, I had it on omni to reach the whole quartet. I was also getting a lot of chatter from passers-by and other extraneous noise (including feedback). So flipped it to figure-eight, and turned it so one lobe was pointed at the talent and the other pointed at the sky.

And it was a decent sound. Pulled in all four strings and not too much environmental noise.

Updates, Downtime

I opted into the beta test of Tomb Raider 2013 at Steam. The first update I put in made the saved games slots visible. It also cleared up the need to toggle V-Synch every time I started the game. However, it also seems to have removed the option to turn off motion blur, and because of that, or just because that level has all sorts of wind effects including animation and camera over-rides, I got killed several times on the final level when I couldn't turn fast enough to line up a shot or make a dodge properly.

Also tried out the "Go back to the island after finishing the story and try to collect the remaining GPS locators and so forth" mode. Oddly, there are still pockets of Solarii around, but as much as I've been hanging around eavesdropping, I haven't heard any of them commenting on the fact that the magic rain has stopped and there's sunlight all over the island now. Although I also haven't explored enough to see if this is true! It is another nice aspect of the game, that the environments change over play. They change due to game events (such as getting set on fire) and they even remember which crates you busted open.



Worked the usual four performances over the weekend. The drummer is getting steadily louder again, and the frequency at which the Music Director needs to rap on his cage and glare at him is also going up. He's trying, though. He's pulled together a much more even sound across his various tools, and for 70% of the show he is seated in a good place where I can get a nice mix. And then he gets excited, or tired, or deaf after playing a matinee, and he goes crazy on the remaining numbers. Still, I'm managing to keep the dB's in the mid-80's at the FOH position, with only a few excursions over 92-93.

And for some reason finished Sunday's show completely exhausted. It is an early show, and it was still light out, but I went to bed within an hour of getting home, and slept for fourteen.

Needless to say, Monday I wanted nothing to do with driving or operating heavy machinery. But I think I might get a little lathing in today. And the fourth chapter to my Tomb Raider/SG1 cross-over is going well -- finally got through the Valley of Kings sequence. Next exotic location will be Prague Castle, to which I'm adding such varied bits of esoterica as the Voynich Manuscript, Silphium, and the Tribute of the Falcon.

(Yes...I've been spending a wee bit of time reading up on random things.)


And tried the most recent beta build. Regression in graphics; the flicker is back and the save slots are invisible again. Not only that, they seem to have decided the final boss battle is too easy. No, not the Oni. Mathias. Which is entirely a QTE. What puree-brained spavined excrescence of an incompetent designer thought they could improve this game by making one of the QTE's even more arbitrarily unwinnable? 

Especially annoying because, if this wasn't a QTE, you'd just dodge back, then give him a few incendiary shotgun rounds to that bare chest. Instead the damned game wants you to guess whether to hit "F" when the red circle hits the red dot, or after it hits. And, no, the damned thing never turns yellow (the usual sign that this is now the right time to press the button.) So I watched Lara die a dozen times in a row with no input from me having damn-all to do with it, then quit the game in disgust.

Thanks a lot, Crystal Dynamics. I'm not buying your next game until it also goes on $1.75 sale.


Just to put the final laugh to the lamentable QTE that litter an otherwise wonderfully playable game, it turns out that many of them, including the wolf, Mathias, the teleporting Solarii on the bridge and the not-a-rape early in the game, can all be solved by ignoring the stupid distracting unhelpful graphic completely. Apparently there's no actual code sensing if you hit the button too early -- so just start mashing it right at the top and keep mashing until the damned QTE is over with.

I've now made it through the stronghold on "role playing" mode, where I plunge ahead to each new plot point instead of hunting for salvage crates and random experience points. The early fights were rather tough without the axe, or dodge counter! I also made it a point of walking into ambushes, and otherwise letting the Solarii get all their forces in place. Perhaps because of that, experience points begin to accrue very quickly by the middle of the game -- you have all the essential combat skills long before you make it to the Tramway of Fitzcaraldo.