Electrical Memories

I was freelancing as a set builder when the economy crashed. Packed myself off to Boston for a winter season, sleeping on the floor at a friend's house, while I recovered financially. Followed a show back to California and three days after I got back there was a call from someone I'd designed a show for at a six tin-can pub with a ten foot wide stage.

I ended up spending ten years working as Master Electrician at a small theater tucked into an unincorporated area near Hayward. That's where I started getting serious about sound, and composing. That was the time most of my MIDI-keyboard and rack mount synthesizer stuff was written.

So here's another blast from the past:

We'd do about six shows a years; two musicals to get butts in seats and four plays that with luck would earn back their costs. Then two to four concerts from our associated 80-member community chorus.

My friend Don Tieck did most of the composing chores on the straight plays. I had Lend Me a Tenor and A Man for All Seasons to myself. A couple more shows -- like Play it Again, Sam -- that were drop-needle. And when we had the 20th anniversary gala I was asked to write something to accompany the slide show.

So that's it. Bombast around a simple fanfare, ducking into a few different moods and styles to represent the variety of our shows, heavily referencing some of my friend's favorite orchestration tricks in honor of his work, and ending with a long trail-out because the slide show wasn't exactly timed.

And, yes...almost all keyboard work, but there is a wee bit of "Baaaand in a Box" in a couple measures. (The friend who'd made that phone call always pronounced it like the chorus in that Wings song.)




Pretty primitive. I look back on those days and there were a lot of times I pushed for more musical respect than I had earned. I'm not saying my stuff is that bad to listen to, but I lack the theory and associated musical skills to communicate and integrate and there were times when I butted heads with a conductor because I wanted to try something but I didn't have the skills to carry it off.

And now? The big thing is I have a day job that pays better and gives me free time on a more regular schedule. That means I can finally afford "real" instruments and even a little time to practice on them. Makes me no more of a musician than I was before, though; just faking it in a new way.

Today wasn't terribly unproductive. I got 20-30 minutes of practice in (dragged my horn out to Guitar Center after brunch but the piano rooms didn't open that early in the day.) I can hit the notes on the Hellboy trumpet part but it's still a nasty leap. Can get through a bar of Godfather before my pick can't handle faking a mandolin any longer. And the Terminator penny whistle part is getting close to recording quality.

I finally found the combination that works on that piece, at least for the beginning. It's mostly back in a MIDI mock-up, with just the low bodhran part and the "great highland crumhorn" as acoustic material. 

I still don't know if I can go full Celtic, and if it is worth continuing to mess with the mockup or if I should record what I have so far. There's a tough finger-picking arpeggio on the folk guitar that I wouldn't mind a few more days of practice on before I turn on the microphones. And I'm so far off the bar lines now I'm really not sure the best way to notate my parts for the recording session.

The vague plan is to blow through this one, then see if my horn is up to doing Hellboy yet. For which I'd love to give Don a call because buying bongos, much less a 14 x 5.5" wood-shell snare with stand and brushes at this moment would be silly.

I also have vague thoughts as to doing a mini-lecture on the evolution of the Nathan McCree Tomb Raider motif over the multiple games. Which reminds me -- I dreamed up a possible motif for my own "Tomb Raider: Legacy" sketch, which is sitting on my phone right now if I am lucky.

A Flicker of Light

"Birds" is closed. Here's what I learned about remote lighting effects:

This is one of the effects modules. Off-the-shelf, no custom PCB, and all purchased at Adafruit:

Feather MO/RFM69 board: Arduino-compatible with an ARM Cortex processor, hosting a 900mHz packet radio (as well as power regulation, LiPo charge management, and native USB capability)

NeoPixel Jewel; seven 5050 RGBW LEDs with internal controllers so the whole thing can be run from a single data line.

And a 3xAAA battery pack with switch and "JST" connector.

These are two of the "lamps" -- rather, incense holders. After fumbling around with a couple different ideas for diffusion the final choice was surprisingly low-tech; I stuffed bubble wrap inside.

And this is the setting. A little neighborhood church, minimal lighting setup. The transmitter (all the RFM69 chips are transceivers) is wired to a matrixed keypad and, to get just a little more power, a proper antenna also sourced from Adafruit. That's one of our musicians down there; the actors were doing photos before the house opened.



Radio performance? Fine. This is the lower power version of the chip and I've verified free-air transmission of half a block. I did have problems with one of the units when it was inside a brass ball; on the final weekend I stuck the wire antenna outside the lamp and it worked flawlessly after that. I also found they dropped connection when the batteries got low.

Battery? I didn't try to program sleep mode on either CPU or radio. One unit I turned off between performances and it lasted part-way into the second weekend. Another I left on night and day and it made it through two performances. A self-test and battery monitoring (which is quite possible with the transceivers) would be a good idea moving forward.

Intensity? Not spectacular. I only had eight standard theatrical fixtures (500W range) in the show, and even with all of them on the illuminated diffusor was quite visible. But they were incapable of putting useful face light into the acting area, at least in this configuration. I'm coming around to 3-5W as the minimum for a practical lantern or flashlight prop.

Software? This was a thrown-together mess, using a combination of library examples and repurposed Holocron software.

The most successful "look" I had programmed was a flickering lamp (since these are warm-white RGBW's, green+red to get an amber and a little white to make it brighter). It is a surprisingly good flicker considering it's simplicity:

At the heart of the program is a little function that compares a target value with the old value (for each channel of the LEDs), then divides the result by a rate, giving a float value of the difference per program cycle.

Then it cycles through, again by the rate, adding or subtracting this float, arriving at a new float (aka a fractional value), and temporarily converting it to the nearing integer to send it to the LEDs.

This allows me to fade up, down, or cross-fade between static looks. It also allows animation; for that, at each completion it will fetch a new number. In the case of the lamp flicker, this number is a random(constrained) intensity and rate. So sometimes it will quickly make a small change, sometimes it will slowly make a large change, etc., etc. The result is surprisingly realistic.

    By the way. I gave the musician one of my old Arduinos to play around with.

No, not that Hermione

Week is done. Did a full day at work and made it through the performance Friday and now I can sleep. More-or-less. Actually, I made a mistake on the Holocron kit I shipped earlier in the week and need to ship out a missing part. And I didn't get as far on the big project at work as I was hoping, meaning I may need to do overtime on it next week (assuming the materials arrive....!)

The show is "Conference of the Birds," a new adaptation for the stage of the epic poem written by Attar of Nishapur some time in the 12th century. Some of the stories within the story are familiar; stories of Joseph and Moses.

Because that's one of the fascinating things about the Bronze Age. The myths and stories which form the foundations of so many cultures were taking shape in the Bronze Age. Sure, they borrow from earlier tales, all the way back to the Sumerians, and the latter parts of, say, the Bible are largely informed by the Roman times in which they were codified. But the setting for so much of it is the Bronze Age.

Take the Greeks. I'm simultaneously following a podcast of the Trojan War and reading a fictionalized account of Helen's daughter -- which is to say, a story of the aftermath of that war. And, yes, Homer or the Homers built the stories we know in the forms we know around the needs of people coming out of the Greek Dark Ages, but they are set in and assume traditions of the late Bronze Age.

The Greeks lack a holy book. Pantheists anyhow, with every city having its own local deities. The stories and legends still fulfill those twin roles of origin story and moral guidance -- and none more so than the Iliad. So powerful was the influence of this text it continued on as one of the foundation texts of the Western World at the dawn of the 20th century.

Heck, even the Egyptians got in on the fun. For various reasons papyrus copies of the Book of the Dead start showing up during the New Kingdom, and perhaps in part due to having an easier script to work with, many of the stories and myths as we know them today were getting written down in the Greek era.

The foundational myths for so many cultures, coming from the other side of the lacunae of the Greek Dark Ages. Strange to think on.

Assuming Direct Control

It is tough getting home from Opening Night. Often it is such a struggle to get everything done, staving off fatigue by sheer willpower for the long weeks of build and Tech, that when the show is ready and the pressure is finally off...you discover you've got nothing left holding you up.

So "Conference of the Birds" is open. That's one more thing off the list of the six things that decided to all happen at once (among other things, had a Holocron kit to ship and a microphone rental to prep.) Unfortunately it opened Thursday. Means I still have to go to work tomorrow. Can't really relax until Saturday. Worse, I'm working the show. Means I still have to make it not just through work but through another evening performance before I can finally sleep in.



The LEDs worked...okay. I had another bug to track down in the software (annoying thing the compiler should have caught -- I overloaded an array variable, writing data into a bit of memory that hadn't been reserved for it.) Means I only got one chance to write the various "looks" in the show. They work good enough, though.

See, the typical arrangement for a theatrical lighting effect is for the scripting to happen at the lighting console. The console tells the fixture what color and how bright, and if you want something like a candle flicker you have to write a loop into the console. The things I built for this -- and the philosophy behind my "DuckLights" -- is to handle animation at the fixture itself, and use the console only to switch between pre-baked effects.

The radio link turned out to be marginal once I moved up to the lighting booth -- and stuffed the lighting modules inside closed brass containers. Bet I could improve it a lot with external antenna. Lacking that, I may try adding a ground plane to my transmitter (I really don't understand antenna design, which is why it has a simple monopole quarter-wave on it now).

Future (theater) shock

The Control Booth forum has started emailing notifications again so I logged in to see what they were talking about.

At least two of the projects I'd been tinkering with over the years have been done by others. And done well.

The simpler is the QU-Box, which leverages a Teensy (Arduino compatible with native USB capability) and some arcade buttons to make a dedicated controller box for QLab. Honestly, though, I was an evening of soldering away from doing it for decades -- but my Korg nanokey worked so well for me I never saw the point in completing the project.

Still, kudos to Simon for making a solid, functional device and offering it in kit form for the extra budget-conscious.

The other product I spotted was the RC4 wireless dimmer system. These are quite pricey but I'd still recommend them without reservation. I have nothing against hacks but by the time you come up with a working system you will have spent almost as much, and a lot of time you usually can't afford on a theater tech schedule.

And the guy is smart. He's thought of all the things I thought of, and put most of them in the box. A lot of people would just rig a bunch of PWM outputs and call it done. He's recognized the nonlinearity of output and subsequent color rendering, and put in a much more sophisticated version of the gamut look-up table I have running on my Holocrons.

He's also added what he calls Digital Persistence (another thing I've had to do in many of my projects), which is modifying the output so instead of coming on and going off near-instantly, LEDs will behave more like incandescent bulbs. This is easy for him because he's implemented another thing I was using as a paradigm; although direct multi-channel control is the default, his devices can run a baked-in animation in stand-alone mode instead of having to receive a constant stream of instructions.




Okay, I'd still like to see my prop light thing. But skip the wireless stage -- I'm not doing that much theater anymore and it adds too much complexity. Free-running behavior, preferably set through a full-on GUI running on a host computer and uploaded via USB. Built-in LiPo management, because again, AA batteries make more sense in a theatrical context but LiPo makes more sense for cosplay and other replica prop use.

And, here's the thing. Theatrical props, especially, it makes sense from a budget and time standpoint to take something commercial (usually a toy) and throw it in there. Often it is enough that it lights up. But even something more color-critical like a storm lantern or an old radio it's easy enough for theatrical purposes to wrap some gel around it or otherwise get it "close enough."

For a replica prop, there's more of an onus on getting it to look exactly right, so flexibility and programmability are good. But here it makes sense to leverage the mostly-done-for-you end of the hacker spectrum; Arduinos, various lighting boards, neopixel strips, etc. You pay a little more but given how many hours and bucks went into the prop, that's not a real problem.

The exception I still see is when a specific prop places something at a premium. Cost (because you need dozens of duplicates), space, etc.

For instance, my Wraith Stone. What I want it to do requires a dedicated board. And I'm fine with that -- just as I'm fine with people hacking up a $4 LED charm bracelet if that's what works.

Brother, can you paradigm?

Dracula drained me.

First rehearsal at the actual space and I only went because we were going to use that time to figure out the basics of lighting and sound.

Lighting was software on a Mac. ETC "Eon Family." Which is a Mac port of a stand-alone application of the offline programming software for the Eon board. Which is at least one generation, perhaps two, past the last ETC board I was comfortable with.

So a lot of changed paradigms to deal with. First challenge; this is so much the now-accepted way of doing things, there's no introductory text to the software. There's no overview in the manual, no quick-start guide, no introductory tutorial (at least, none that aren't a three-hour training video). All the resources I was able to quickly Google up on my phone jumped right in. And as this was the latest version of a popular software offshoot of a popular board, pretty much everything I turned up was detailed lists of what had changed since the last version.

I had to figure out the underlying concepts sideways. With a fair amount of trial and error. Mac port of an offline version of a hardware board, remember? So OS GUI standards are absolutely no guide (so much so; when you invoke the "save file as..." command, it pops up a virtual keyboard you navigate with the arrow keys. No, this was not written for the computer. It was ported from hardware.

Thing is, lighting controllers -- all the lighting controllers I grew up with and used through the years -- were at the bottom of it all riffs on the paradigm of the two-scene preset. Think of it this way; for each light/control channel you had a knob. Set each knob to a different value to achieve a particular blend of lights.

Now make an exact copy of that row of knobs and add an A/B switch to switch from one set of knobs to the other. Actually, a pair of knobs, one reversed from the other; turn them one way to turn all the settings from one set of knobs all the way down and all the settings from the other set of knobs all the way up. Reverse for the opposite effect.

This was effective enough and fast enough. On the old manual boards (such as at my high school) one "scene" (one set of knob settings) would be on stage while someone quickly twisted the offline set of knobs into the next desired look. Cross-fade (as the process was called) from A to B and now A is offline and can be programmed for the upcoming look.

Boards evolved from direct physical control via rheostats to electronically controlled dimmers with the knobs -- that is, faders -- now operating on a 0-10 volt control voltage, to digital controls; at which point, all the settings could now be stored in RAM and read out with software.

But through all of this, the A/B paradigm, the so-called "Two Scene Preset," was maintained as a useful way to organize the data.

ETC began to change this back at least with the Express and Expression consoles. Since the desired position of the actual dimmers -- the big triac choppers delivering power to the actual lights -- had long since been decoupled from any direct physical control, the first big shift in paradigm is to think of a "scene" not as a collection of absolute values, but as a set of changes to whatever was the current status.

This was already a de-facto way of viewing the data, as even back in ProStar the console went out of its way to indicate which values had changed, with the values being continued from a previous cue being left in the original color.

ETC implicitly (as I read when I eventually found a more useful manual) converted to looking at all commands to the dimmer packs as being changes. Like an engine room telegraph, the dimmers (as indeed so all the new arsenal of digital fixtures, from LED pars to moving-head lights) will in the absence of new commands maintain the last directive.

Well, that's enough on that particular change. Suffice to say there are other old models which have also gone the way of the dial tone (cell phones have no need and no place for that). The only vestige still there is that the Eon series still has the default characteristic of bringing the previous commands OUT simultaneous to bringing the new commands IN.

(Another major uncoupling from the old two-scene preset paradigm is that "analog dimmers" -- aka devices that put out a varying and significant wattage that is generally poured into a variety of incandescent bulbs -- is a smaller and smaller part of what is connected to the console. Most of the light is coming from various digital fixtures, which require only digital information and which almost without exception use multiple channels of information. The analog dimmers still have a one-to-one correspondence -- or, rather, can -- but as a single LED par uses at least three control channels they are organized instead into "fixtures." The latest crop of ETC boards no longer pretend that a channel can be mapped directly to a circuit, with the rare exception of the analog dimmers, which are treated as a special case. Basically, analog dimmers are fixtures that only have one channel each.)




In any case, it wasn't the stress or the mental exercise, both of which I found invigorating. The mystery illness is back again, pretty much on schedule, and I've been barely dragging to work this week. (Work hours are still not helped by having to put in long unpaid lunches to work on my friend's project).

Invisible

Not a new thought.

But I was listening to radio coverage on yesterday's eclipse, and cicadas came up, and I found myself remembering the process of several sound designs.

Crickets and birdsong are part of that suite of sounds that tell the audience where a scene is taking place, indoor or outdoor, city or nature. They can describe a biome and an emotion; a peaceful meadow or a spooky jungle. And, of course, a time of day (excepting when those crickets or birds get confused by a solar eclipse).

But it is never so simple as just grabbing "birds chirping" from a free online sound library. Besides those little matters of audio quality and legal use, you need to particularize. Chickadees making a racket in a Soho pet shop are not the same as morning sparrows on a farmstead in Illinois. Not all library sounds are equal -- or equally appropriate.

Worse, most plays will have multiple locations, and multiple times of day. For something as simple as Bye, Bye Birdie I had three or four different cricket-and-night-insect backgrounds, depending on the time of day and the emotional mood I was going for; the background to the anticipatory twilight of a hot summer night prior to "Got a lot of living" is quite different from the one-AM still of the final tired chorus of "We love you Birdie."

But that's just primary selection. Then comes the next task.

Library recordings vary hugely in their equalization. Some of the birdsong I reach for frequently have huge (even oppressive) low-end rumble in them. So these need to be equalized and focused in to bring out the sounds you need without masking the stage action and dialog you need to preserve.

(A lot of them also have a huge white noise content. This comes with the territory; birdsong is outdoors sound and wind and background roar are always there. This is wide-spectrum noise, though, and pretty much impossible to edit out. You can only work around it).

Then you need enough so it covers the length of the scene. And starts and stops smoothly, without a jarring effect. Often the library samples you start with are too short. A little over a minute is typical for a library effect and ten minutes isn't unusual for a scene. And you don't want to simply loop (especially because the raw library effect will either start with a bang or will fade in and out leaving an obvious silence in addition to the obvious repetition.)

This is why I like layering several different tracks. I can duck them in and out and change how they line up to present an ever-changing picture that doesn't have so many obvious repetitions in it. (This also plays well with how I like to approach background sounds; to start them louder and more complex and drop them in volume and complexity as we move into the scene proper).

And we're still not done. Because birdsong, particularly, is pretty much defined as being stretches of silence separated by distinct calls. If you leave most library tracks alone, they will be too quiet to make a background track -- except at 1:03, when the bird nearest the microphone suddenly lets out a loud chirp.

I edit the sounds manually. I go into waveform view and "ride the fader" (as in adjust the amplitude moment-by-moment to smooth out the levels.) Audacity has a very nice "envelop" mode for doing this quickly and smoothly.

And here's the trick, and what ties back to the title of the post:

If I do all this, and do it well, no-one will ever realize I did it.



I've mentioned this before. It struck me, while I was listening to that radio program, that the majority of my creative work over the years has been exactly this sort of invisible work.

Hemingway famously tried to write so the words went away and all you perceived was the story. A fellow lighting designer shared with me the conundrum of the box set and the fireplace. The audience will notice a fireplace effect. But if you did your job right, a box set interior (a room in a castle, a hotel suite, whatever) will just look like a room. It will never cross their minds that giving the impression of light coming from chandelier and sconces and or the big bay window is really, really difficult to integrate with having everyone inside properly lit, easy to see, without too many distracting shadows.

(As my friend put it, you spend three days focusing that damned box set to try to control the shadows and the scoop shapes on the walls and so on. And then you plop a $15 fire log from Wallgreen's in the fireplace and plug it in and the audience goes "ooh" and "ahh.")

What little stabs I've taken in the direction of engineering is the same; a good engineering design does what it needs to do in the most direct way possible. A good design ends up looking simple and obvious -- a simplicity and obviousness that was not there when the design process was begun.

With a stretch, you could even include violin practice, since 90% of the job over your first couple of years is the not-making-obvious-mistakes part of it. Your skill is defined largely by how much someone doesn't notice how much (or, rather, how little) skill you have.



But, you know, it really sucks when it comes time to getting credit. For people to mention the sound design in reviews or in the big thank-you-everyone at the opening night party. For reviews, in particular, the only mention is when it went wrong. Never when it went right, because "right" for the bulk of the work is being invisible; the illusion that the singer and the orchestra just sort of showed up in perfect balance and clarity to every pair of ears in the house.

(And since your director and music director and producer and so forth have no freaking idea how much work went into achieving that illusion of transparency, and how fragile it is, they will go behind your back and change stuff and then blame you for when it "for no reason at all" suddenly sounds like shit.)

And it shows up when payday comes around, too.




(There's another example for the bucket; I've been listening to a bunch of archaeology podcasts, as well as the Writing Excuses podcast. The latter is properly engineered. If you just listen to the latter, there's nothing to hear; you just hear the people talking. Listen to the former and you get it; distracting background noises and huge level shifting that makes listening to a dialogue an exercise in daring and frustration as you keep racing to adjust the volume on your earbuds between "I don't know what he said" to "would she please stop blowing into the microphone!")

TRL, the OST: introduction

I've got random thoughts to sort out on what will probably be my next big music project.

First some notes about me. I'm strictly an amateur. I taught myself how to get sound out of a couple of easy instruments (recorder and ukulele) and I'm currently in my first year of teaching myself violin. I also messed around with piano/keyboard for decades. Took a few basic classes in music theory and read a half-dozen books on orchestration even though I can't even sight-read.

I mean, I've always enjoyed messing around (mostly on the piano) but I got into trying to arrange more-or-less as an outgrowth of trying to learn how to mix on a sound board. I'm not even near the skill level for public performance or to jam with others.

Be that as it may, I have in the past tinkered up a few fairly complicated little pieces. Some have featured in previous blog posts:

Bow in Hand

Doomed Drums

Move Over, PDQ

History in Gear

These run from pieces I composed for use in a play I was designing at the time, to personal pieces, and the latter ranged from expansions from something I found noodling around on the keyboard to pieces developed to intentionally fit certain artistic goals; often, mock soundtrack excerpts for imaginary movies.

In a few rare cases I had real musicians to work with and record. In most cases these were done with sampling and synthesis; from a grab-bag of old hardware synthesizers, to the loops and drum machine riffs of Reason to a couple of modern orchestral libraries to another grab-bag of freeware samples and oddities and found sounds.

I flirted with both pseudo-orchestral, working that "Viennese Grammar." and with unabashed synth sounds -- culminating in my noise-and-found-sound sketches for a staged reading of Agamemnon. And I often found excuse for pianistic (or at least keyboard) parts.

I toyed a lot with leit-motivic writing, finding ways in which themes could be developed, showcased in different rhythmic and melodic transmutations, interweaving them. My second-to-last major theatrical work, Moon over Buffalo, played three major themes against each other, echoing the conflict of the main characters that drove the show as well as being so connected to the action as to be actually diagetic in places.

Mostly, however, I started and abandoned sketches. Often there's only enough of a sketch to show how the musical idea is connected to a potential arrangement of it, but only the bare bones are there, in the roughest of performances.



Here's a sample of some of that non-theatrical work (I'd need at least a full post to describe some of my theatrical work at the same depth):

In any case.

For this new project, I hope to include more "real" clips; live recordings (whatever that means) for as many parts as I can sensibly manage. To that end I've been learning both violin and penny whistle. Fortunately, the former is not intended to be used in a front-and-center mode, but instead filling in string section backgrounds.

It may easily fall by the wayside, but the journey is at least half the fun.

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 Machines are Revolting

So penultimate weekend of the kid's show I'm doing. At a new theater a fair drive away. So as I set out I start to punch in the address on the smart phone and....no keypad. A restart fixed that, but fixing it distracted me enough to get me off schedule. I get to the theater at last and no open doors. Apparently one (ONE) of the people inside tried to call (instead of, say, having a door open, answering the bell, or even giving instructions on how to get in or a contact number.)

However, all the company phones have been having a huge problem with spam messages. We've stopped answering any call that comes from out of state. Guess how the anonymous, unknown number that tried to call me ID'd? Out of state.

When I'm finally let in, there only available FOH position is taken up by their own board. And it is a deep house; possibly too deep for our wireless mics in this modern age of increasing interference. So snap decision; leave the receivers backstage, plug into the stage snake and use their board to mix it.

A Yamaha M7CL. Which I knew only by theory and looking over the shoulder of another operator. And I hadn't used a Yamaha digital board since leaving the Playhouse. And the van with our gear was late, the house tech was friendly but not terribly motivated, and there appeared to be some RF issues, and the cast didn't even get into mics until well after we'd opened the house anyhow (they were too busy adjusting the choreography to a new and much larger stage).

So I mixed the show cold. Without even the benefit of monitoring over headphone to see if I had signal. I had nothing but eyes and guesswork -- years of experience in watching signal hit the bridge of a good board from wireless mics sitting on actors as they talked and slapped on makeup and quietly warmed up back stage -- to rough in the levels. And only verbal guidance as to where that would actually fall in the loudness range over the actual speakers.

And it was a lot better than I had expected. But just a wee bit tiring. Especially the opening number. I was well and truly worn out by the time the show was over. Time for a little take-out Chinese, some Anderson Valley Amber, and update my blog before much-needed bed.


Hrm. Actually, it's a Dogfish Head Indian Brown this time. Pity none of their "Ancient Ale" series of historical recreations appeared to be in stock at my local. Now that I know they are brewing them again I'll have to make some calls...

Vibrations

I'm on show schedule again. Non-profit theater that does free morning performances at local grade schools. So that means a different school every Tuesday and Thursday, show up at 7:30 AM, unload the van, set up the gear, one hour show with no intermission, then break it all down again.

This was the setup as of Tuesday. Today I patched in four more channels of wireless microphone. Which needed a second mixer as submixer. See, that's the thing about these small boards. It may say "16 channels" but what that means is 8 or less mic-level inputs, then the rest of the channels are line level and shared in pairs.

Some mixers take this even further (looking at you, Behringer). Digital input channels are counted, "tape" inputs (RCA jacks that patch directly to the main bus with no trim or EQ) are counted. They even count channels that share controls, meaning you can use "5 and 6" or "7 and 8" -- just not both at the same time.

Well, it didn't go well. There were massive RF issues. Drop-out as well as interference. Some of that may have been the environment (different school every show, and not enough time to do a scan of the RF environment or adjust frequencies). But some of that may have been IM; intermodulation interference between the microphones themselves. So I'm running Shure's wonderful freeware program Wireless Workbench before the next performance to see if it can identify any intermods and find me new frequencies.



This has also been a week for progress on the violin.

Here it is being all tacticool with the clip-on Snark tuner, new shoulder rest, and new (black) carbon-fibre bow.

Anyhow, had a neuromuscular breakthrough; stumbled upon the right mental signal to do the proper arm vibrato gesture. Only for a second, but that was enough to find it again, and again, until I could find it reliably. Soon I'll be able to practice it and start refining it until it becomes instinctual. At the moment, though, it is still a ton of concentration to hit that exact gesture.

There's nothing exactly "vibrating" about the Holocrons. Aside from the "talking" one -- I got fairly decent results clamping a surface transducer against the outer shell and using the Holocron itself as a speaker cone.

There is PWM, of course. Unlike my other LED projects, I'm not using my hand-rolled software PWM library, or the on-chip hardware PWM the multiple internal timers of the AVR series makes possible. Instead the Holocrons are leveraging the WS2812 chip, a chip that combines stand-alone PWM, a constant-current limiter, and serial bus. The "neopixel" sold from Adafruit combines that chip with an RGB LED. More costly at a couple of bucks each, but really makes wiring simpler. All you need is a single signal lead and a 5V source. And they are free-running, which means your code can be busy doing other tasks while the LEDs work away in the background.

(My Holocron code is calling them about 500x a second, though; a slow dim up and down, and superimposed on that, an even slower color shift from blue-red to blue-green and back again).

Anyhow, I'm finally over the 'flu, show is open, so I'm hoping to start shipping within the next few days.

"Not-This-Task" ism

So now I want to work on holocrons. Now that this day is being taken up with prep for the next show I'm working.

We go into tech Tuesday morn. The company has practically nothing, so I'm bringing most of the sound system with me. A pair of Yahama powered speakers for front-of-house, with stands (and adaptors). A pair of small but powerful powered monitors as foldback speakers. I'm using the company snake and mixer, which is a low-mid 16-channel (which is to say, eight actual mic level inputs, then shared faders for all the inputs above that).

The company has six body packs, and I'm bringing seven. The cast numbers fourteen, but because of the above limitations of the board it is tough to control more than twelve channels. One day I'll get a better board for gigs like this (it would probably be software based, with a DAW structure and an iPad control surface. After that lottery win.)

So I need a short snake and a bunch of XLR/TRS adaptors to plug the mics in. And because of the limitation of channels, I may have to use the "direct in" many boards have, which usually shows up as a pair of RCA connectors. I don't want to try to resurrect any of my old laptops so I'll bring my primary machine to each and every show. Which has a broken audio jack so another interface needed there.

I also need a work light since it is usually dark during the show, and a script stand and script light. And since there's a paucity of cable in the crates we already loaded up into the show van, I need to bring sufficient XLR and AC "stingers" (aka extension cords) to run all my various powered speakers. I already purchased and packed up condoms, batteries, and surgical tape for the microphones -- and if we are very lucky, this time the company will remember to bring the belt pouches with them.

This company (like many) finds it impossible to grasp the concept of tech, or even that the very first load-in of a show will take longer than the typical load-in of the tour. They've given me an hour. So be it. But that's why I have to check all of the gear and try to pack the correct parts and adaptors. Because there's no slack in the schedule for any but the quickest (and dirtiest) improvisations.

Heck, they haven't even given me the backing tracks yet. So I'll have to program QLab during that same hour.

All in all, it should be no surprise that I'd prefer to work on holocrons (despite having spent the previous week shirking that work). Heck, I'm even attracted to doing more practice on my violin right now, instead of digging through boxes of random sound cables.

I made and posted my "four month progress" video yesterday. You know, the tone is really bad. I'm sure at least half of that is the fact that my articulation still sucks. I still am not cleanly getting into and out of notes, especially around string crossings and shifts. I'm grazing strings a lot during string crossings as well. Each time I practice, about half of it is pure technical exercises designed to tighten up these problems (and others), and half of the remainder is going over and over problem areas in the few songs I've learned so far, trying to find solutions to the technical issues.

But I'm hoping some of this poor tone is because for these progress videos I'm using the violin un-amplified. An electric violin lacks the sound board and hollow body of a "real" violin -- which is why they are quiet enough to practice in an apartment -- so you are hearing as much of the mechanical noises of scratching a bow across the strings as you are the tone coming off those strings. And that, is getting picked up by the built-in mic on the laptop, which is contoured towards voice. 

At least I think this is what's happening. I've listened on headphones a few times, but I have to turn up the volume further than I am comfortable with to cover up the natural sound of the machine. I need to record it and listen to that. 

Maybe I will -- after I've figured out how to do vibrato (I've been practicing Katyusha lately, and it just doesn't work without vibrato, so sometimes I lock down the shoulder rest and do my best attempt at hand vibrato on it. Which means everything else goes to heck but, yet, it does seem to be a better sound.)

Kudzu Plot

Just opened another show.

Actually, "kudzu" is used of literary plotting, and it means lots of bits left dangling. That's actually a good thing in a lighting hang. Learned that myself from a tech named Steve, who had been Production Manager at a regional theater I'd worked for, was getting stress-related illness and took time off from that, meeting me at a smaller community theater as the outgoing Master Electrician. He taught me the value in leaving tails (dangling cords) on any instrument that was in indeterminate state (to be moved, to be decided, not circuited, etc.)

What I found when I went in for this show (my first "Earnest," actually) was more like cruft. All wiring develops cruft. Under the time pressure of Tech Week, and later during the run, stuff that breaks or is changed gets fixed with a fast band-aid. Then in adherence to Joe Ragey's First Law, what you opened with, stays up for the run.

More than that, those unlabeled, poorly routed, barely dressed cable runs are still there when the show closes and get used again and again until no-one knows how power from here gets over there or which of two dozen identical dust-covered bits of wire in a huge tangle are actually carrying the audio to the house mains.

And it can be built on for a while. The story was told from the first Myst game that there were so many cables linking the computers of the render farm, when something died they'd just purchase a new piece of Cat-5 and drop it on top of the pile. Trouble is, in budget-strapped theater, if a free dimmer is showing up there, even if it is impossible to trace how it gets there, someone will grab another length of cable, plug it in to where the dimmer showed up, and run it out to where the new light needs to be. Eventually there are cable runs that literally circumnavigate the grid to come back two hundred feet of cable later to a couple of feet from where they started.

The term in software is Technical Debt. And it follows a similar path. Every now and then someone will spend the effort to trace one or two critical leads and will stick labels on them. But those break, change, are re-purposed, and in time there are layer upon layer of old falling-off obscurely written and mostly wrong labels as well.

And finally you just have to refactor. Which is what I did over about two weeks. Tore out almost everything and then hung from scratch. But I couldn't touch the giant tangle that is the primary run from booth to stage; a huge bundle that contains audio, DMX, power, Clear-com, and who knows what else that at one point someone put in and if we knew what it was would be very useful.



The other lesson from this particular show was how to handle a dishrag cyc. See, in some sets you will have a cyclorama, a big seamless usually pale blue piece of fabric stretched across the stage in front of the back wall. And they are a pain to light smoothly, with a variety of speciality instruments designed for that purpose that still don't do the job well.

Thing of it is, there's a big John Cage element here. If you don't light a cyc, it still has color. The color of all the stray light, bounce light, etc. Which means it usually looks like a dirty dishrag. And this is a problem if the act is set in, say, the interior of a flat in London. Because the back wall shouldn't be bright glowing daylight blue.

So what I tried this time was the same trick I've used on set walls where the coverage is spotty and the wall itself has wrinkles you are trying to hide. Stick patterns in. Unfortunately, I only had one 50-degree instrument to work with and even that was a little small. What I needed was a bank of four. But, still, throwing an intentional pattern on the cyc -- even if it is run low and pulled slightly out of focus to draw less attention -- looks vastly more intentional than the spill light which is also falling on it. So it looks better.

(I could get away with a lot of patterns on this show because the set concept was period posters and postcard art. The pattern I used most was GAM's "homespun." Which is now in my list of favorite patterns along with "Summer Leaves" and "Construction A, B, C, D.")



So the show is finally open. I begged off the gala and went home shortly after the Act II curtain, slept ten hours and spent a very quiet Saturday.

Now it is Sunday. I have hopes (but faint hopes) of getting a couple things done I've put off during this long show. Practice the violin (and post up another progress video), clean up the place a little, assemble holocrons (with more documentation photographs to go into the assembly instructions), complete and order the next run of PCBs, and do paperwork for some of my various jobs.

Reality is I'll probably take a short walk, listen to NPR, and read backlogs of archaeology blogs.

Blackout : the 4'33" of lighting design

Most plays are presented as if they take place in several different physical settings and over a span of time longer than that which the audience has actually been sitting in their seats. The last line of Act I, scene 3 is said, and the first line of Act I, scene 4 is spoken by a different person, in the following Summer, in a different part of the forest.

The solution too many Directors reach for to cover while the actors change places, the furniture is moved, set pieces are shifted, etc., is to turn off the lights and then turn them back on when everything is ready.

I would swear that some Directors actually believe this is like making a cut in a film. The lights go out, then come back on and magically we are somewhere else.

Reality is that there is no such thing as a blank, a void. You don't present "nothing" by turning out the lights. You present something different. Usually (and especially in the smaller, less professionally-experienced theaters) what you get is several long minutes of shadowy figures visibly fumbling around in the blackness, cursing quietly as they try to find their spike marks.

John Cage's point was that the "silence" of a concert hall was filled with the sounds of rustling paper, air conditioning, coughing, shuffling feet. And to him this was on equal musical footing with a piano concerto. Perhaps. What is certain is that the activity of scene change has a specific character -- and it may not be in keeping with the character of the play.

The more charitable interpretation of what is expected to take place in the minds of the audience during a theatrical blackout is that it is akin to a commercial on radio or television. The audience skips over it, edits it out of the experience of the play in the same way they don't include intermission as part of the world of the play.

I still find it distracting. Watching a scene change, especially a difficult scene change, takes me out of the play. Intermission only happens once, and it happens at a dramatic point that practically demands you sit back and take stock of the situation before heading back into the action. Scene changes break the flow. A slightly better argument is that scene changes, like the velvet seats and the proscenium arch and so forth are part of the total experience of live theater. One watches certain shows (Phantom comes to mind) for the moments of "How did they do that?"

But other shows -- many, many shows -- the Directorial intent is to distract as little as possible. To keep the audience immersed in the story and the world of the play. And I have to say to these Directors -- I have said, and more than once -- that a blackout fails to accomplish this.

Because especially when you've got an awkward set and less-skilled crew people, the actual experience of a blackout is the discomfort of watching dimly-lit people struggling. 

Better, in my opinion, to light it. Put enough light on it -- I like the term "Change Blues" because Directors get what I'm after almost immediately -- so the crew can find their spikes and move with grace and surety instead of fumbling and trying to hide their flashlights. And take the time to work out the changes, to choreograph them a little.

And, depending on the show and the design, you may be able to do the change au vis. When we did Shrek not long ago we pushed the rolling units out in full lights. And more than that; I made sounds for them so a tower would grind on with a sound of stone against stone, and Shrek's house would pop up like a mushroom sprouting with squelching leafy noises.

This is, for some shows, going too far in the other direction. And I have no problem with a blackout if you can make the necessary changes in under thirty seconds and without a lot of noise. But otherwise: it is my strong opinion that you are going to see it anyway, so instead of pretending you are hiding it and achieving nothing but hazard for the crew, discomfort for the audience, and a less-than-stunning visual image, you should light it enough to make it pretty. And make the whole thing go faster and smoother so you can get on with the play.

Microphone Chart

A lot of people have been hitting this blog with the above title as a search term.

For me, the tough part is doing the breakdown. I have several posts on that already, but I will recap briefly:

Use French Scenes if you've got them. A costume chart is a good alternative if not. Failing that, find out from the Music Director who she is asking to sing certain numbers; this way you get the key people in the ensemble. You see; figuring out when principles sing is easy. Figuring out which ensemble members need to be on mic at any one moment is more difficult!

And you will almost never have as many mics as you have cast members. My preference is the fewest microphone switches the better. When you change actors, there is a chance for the microphone to be damaged, as well as a chance the change will be missed or forgotten -- meaning instead of the chorus member you wanted, you get dressing room chatter. Not fun. Also, multiple assignments means you can't trim the mic as tightly to each voice (well, depending on what options your sound board gives you.)*

A French Scene, if you don't know of it, is a breakdown with the scene number along the top and the actor name along the left side, with the character they are playing written in for each scene in which they appear. So for principals this may be the same name across the sheet, or perhaps "Mr Darling/Captain Hook/Mr. Darling." For ensemble it will be more like "Maid, Pirate, Indian, Pirate, Jenny, Mermaid, Pirate..."

You can actually write over this with blocks for each microphone. Otherwise you make a flipped version of this; a chart with the scene number on top, the microphone number on the left side, and the person assigned to it by actor name in the blocks. Spreadsheet programs are great for this, and I've never been disappointed by the freeware OpenOffice.

For handing out to actors and mic wranglers I've found this is more detailed than is needed; just list the mic number and the actor(s) assigned to it, with a notation as to when the switch needs to happen, aka;

#9 Brad G.
#10 Suzy B/Karen M (switch during actI scene 3)
#11 Marsha B/Marsha M/Marsha B (switch at intermission, get back to Marsha M before ActII scn3)




There's one additional wrinkle. What if you are double cast? In almost all cases it makes most sense to keep the mics with the character, not with the actor.  So Mic #2 will always go with the character SARAH and will be marked that way on your sound board, even if two different actresses are swapping out. This seems to work most smoothly even if you have a single cast swapping roles on alternate days; the downside is of course that you have to tune the mics to the appropriate voice each performance.

Of course, double casts are not always identically arrayed. One cast may include more ensemble members, one cast may split a role that was handled by a single person in the other. So these are the times you really need to keep individual paperwork for each performance.

The thing to remember is that things will go wrong. A mic will die. Someone will get the wrong mic. Someone will take sick and there will be a last-minute substitution of understudies and merging of ensemble parts to cover the gaps. So the guiding principle in any scheme of charting and mic assignment should be that the person mixing the show will always know what role will be under each finger when the next song comes up. So that's why I default to character labels, even when it would seem neater to have the same actor keeping the same microphone even when they are singing a different role that night.


* A word on this. Voices change from night to night. And I'm a tweaker anyhow. So although it is easy to memorize trim and EQ with every scene on a digital sound board, it works better to adjust to that actor's performance on that night through the first couple of songs, then keep those settings through the show. And retain them until the next one, assuming you liked them and think they will make a good starting point for the next performance.

So what's the alternative? On something like the Yamaha LS9, you can assign a single input to multiple input channels. So Mic #1 can also show up on the board as Mic#14 with different trim, EQ, and digital effects. I've found this extremely helpful for those times when you want special processing for a scene or a moment, but there just isn't the board space to assign all the mic swaps to individual channels (not and see the live band which I'm also trying to mix...)

Clients From Hell

I've been around a bit -- recording and editing voice-over sessions, doing original sound designs for plays and musicals, mixing a live band or two, working as a house technician for comedy acts and dance and multi-media. So I could say I have a list of warning signs for when you are going to be dealing with a Client From Hell.

But here's the rub; you always are. The expectations of what can be accomplished with sound are almost always wrong. The client will never accept the time it will take, the equipment needed, and what it will cost.

Be that as it may.

"I know sound." -- they don't. The people who actually know what the hell they are doing never say this. They don't talk the talk; they walk the walk. Really, everyone will try to tell you they understand the sound better than you do; the "I know sound" people are simply a wee bit more arrogant and even harder to understand (as they insist on phrasing everything in terminology they only think they understand.)

And related to that:

"I know what I want, I just don't know the technical terms." -- they don't. They are using this supposed lack of a common technical vocabulary as a shield to protect them from having to admit that they don't know what they want. Technical terms apply to technology. They are paying you to work the technology. It is, absolutely and explicitly, your job to figure out how to implement their creative needs. Using technical terminology is an attempt to dictate the tools and processes for you, constraining your work and cutting both you and the client from the ability to realize the creative goals.

This phrase is also a signal of another related attitude:

"I don't know what all those buttons do but..." -- what this really means is "Your job is so simple I would be doing it myself if I had the time." And they are wrong. Their first mistake is assuming that the tough part is figuring out "what all the buttons do." No...that's the easy part. Where skill begins to come into play is understanding why and when to use those buttons.

"Show me something and I'll see if I like it." -- means they have no clue how much time this takes. Yes; in a perfect world (and there are such worlds, I've been there. Rarely) you can indicate directions with a sketch, get that approved, purchase materials/record tracks/whatever, get the rough approved, polish that up into the final cue or mix or setup. Reality is that it takes skill, a lot of skill, to intuit from a smaller clue like a single microphone being soloed or a rough sketch of an effect what the final mix will sound like in context. Reality is that the client will focus on all the rough edges, forcing you to do time-consuming final-quality work before they reject it. These are, yes, the same people who will solo a single instrument on stage and tweak it forever with absolutely no grasp of what it will sound like seated in the final mix.

And, yes, within those conversations is usually invoked:

"I can tell just by listening..." -- no they can't. No-one can. Every seat is different, every performance different, every set of speakers different. The actual cue or mix in show conditions is a minimum, and then it much be heard from as many different parts of the house as possible. But then, these are the same people who will critique a mix from on stage.



Here's a few slightly more subtle ones from the world of FOH (aka music performance). Lack of a tech rider. A poorly constructed tech rider. The best ones are when they give you a printout of an email that has been passed through a dozen levels of reply in a chain of Chinese Whispers that finally drilled down to something like, "We need four microphones."

The band arriving half an hour before showtime. Surprisingly common. It is a given that said band will have a completely different line-up than what the client had been describing up until that moment. And inevitably, that same management drone will grab you away from the very moment you are greeting the band with a "Can we have a Sound Check in...?" (insert original schedule, before the band ran late).

From live theater, "The guy who used to do our sound." Someone was there, they might have even known what they were doing, but they were kicked out without notice and left no documentation, and all the things that needed to get repaired, restored, or returned after the last show didn't. And no-one even has the keys -- but the client still expects at least the service they had last show; as a baseline, with the newer and better sound tech building upon that with all the skill they aren't actually paying you enough for.




Inspired from reading at a website of stories by the same name. My last two or three clients were all wonderful to work with and I had no troubles with them.

Physics of Sound : Addendum

aka "We're doomed, doomed." c.f. "Kids these days..."


In my previous essay I emphasized how real-world physical acoustics leaves fingerprints in recorded sound. For instance; record in your living room, and unless you smother it with excessive post-processing, anyone listening will know it was recorded in a living room. Which is fine, unless you meant for it to sound like it was recorded on a wind-swept moor.

The corollary is that acoustic physics can be the easiest way to load desired information into a recorded sound. Want a cue to sound like it is coming from an iPod speaker? Play it back on an iPod speaker. Or play it back on that speaker, record the result, and play that back! (Leaving aside whether placement in space is also desired for that particular effect).

However.

Your audience is increasingly not getting that necessary reference to the real acoustic world. They are increasingly surrounded by processed sound. By amplified sound, by reinforced sound, by manipulated sound, and more than anything else by recorded sound.

This is the latest serve in the volley between audience and sound designer. First one could be said to start back in the Mystery Plays. By the time of Opera and Vaudeville, a whole symbolic language had been built of artificial sounds, standing in for elements of the desired environment; mechanical effects from the slapstick to the thunder run and the wind machine.

This is a trend developed through the golden age of the radio play and the early sound films, advanced by creative directors like Hitchcock and Wells, and reaching fruition sometime in the 70's when film sound became a fully designed element; no longer thought of in terms of mere reproduction, but a canvas of substitution. Film sound has become akin to film editing in being a language the must be learned by the audience, until they accept without thinking that the cry of a red-tailed hawk means the mountain on screen (whether it is meant to be in Peru or on Barsoom) is tall and majestic.

A Hollywood gunshot or fist no longer sounds much like any "real" gun or fist, to the point at which the sound designer takes a risk in putting out a sound that goes against that programmed expectation. The otherwise unmemorable action film Blown Away went through expensive effort to record the actual sounds of explosives before test screenings forced them back into the stock, expected, "blowing on a microphone" effect that was itself a relic of earlier and more primitive microphone techniques.

The next volley is amplified music on stage and ADR dialog on film; an audience raised to expect the kind of pristine vocals and instrument reproduction possible in a studio (or with studio techniques laboriously introduced into every available cranny of production audio and married as seamlessly as possible with studio re-takes). The audience of 1940 heard mostly unreinforced voices on stage, even on the musical or in opera, from the pulpit and even from the podium and bandwagon. Now, reinforcement is omnipresent. And the vast majority of story and song that is delivered to the theater audience is outside of that still-acoustic space.

In short, the audience is used to hearing every syllable clearly, every finger pluck clearly. They don't have to pay attention, much less strain, when listening at home to radio or television or recording, and they aren't listening to unassisted voices in an acoustical environment in the movie house or concert stage. With rare exceptions.

And they have brought those expectations to live theater. They expect to hear dialog as crisply, and with as little effort on their own part, in that still-acoustic space. So the poor theatrical -- and even operatic -- sound designer is forced into ever more technologically sophisticated (and expensive) systems to reinforce and amplify and (usually less successfully) clarify.

So now we come to the last salvo. And that is an audience who spends a significant part of their waking life with earbuds in. They no longer have any first-hand experience with a physical acoustic environment. To them, the sonic cues that tell how far away a sound is, or how big a room is, are those created by designers -- by film and television sound designers, but even more frequently by game programmers.

Just as we can no longer trust our audience to understand an actual recorded gunshot -- how we need to present them with the fake, wrong, ersatz gunshot they expect -- we can no longer trust them to pick up environmental or physical acoustic clues that mimic or are taken from the real world. To them, increasingly, distance is reverb and a shout is merely volume.

We may, as designers, have to learn this new and artificial language instead if we wish to communicate with our younger audience.

But then, the way some trends are going, we might just put aside the microphones entirely and put the whole thing in the form of tweets.

Essay: Worldization

The human brain is very good at picking up subtle audio cues; the little changes in phase and frequency content and direction that between them reveal the size and distance of an emitter and the size and surfaces of any enclosure around it.

These elements are difficult to fake, and nearly impossible to remove. If you record a voice-over session in a room, it will sound like it was recorded in a room. There is almost nothing you can do to remove those tell-tale clues.

Physicality matters. And physicality also sells. So as a sound designer, you can leverage that same physics.

One of the old tricks used in cinema was Worldizing. Basically, this meant taking pre-recorded material and playing it back in the same or similar acoustic space that was being shown on screen. Then record that. A similar trick has been used in record production; the most obvious being the "transistor radio" effect, achieved by -- yes -- playing back the track through a small speaker and picking that up on a mic.

You can perform this same trick live in the theater environment. If you have a sound effect that is pretending to be from an on-stage radio, then play it back through a small speaker. And place it as close as you can to where the prop is; again, that human audio processing system is uncannily good at figuring out where a sound is coming from in 3d space.

Of course, there are ways to fool that mechanism. One very useful trick for theater is the Precedence Effect. Simply put, the brain localizes on the first source heard (and/or, within a graph of intensity versus precedence, the loudest). So you can reinforce the sound of that small speaker to make it louder and fill in more of the low end content with other speakers, and as long as you stay within certain constraints of volume and time the sound will still "appear" where you physically placed the small speaker.

It isn't just speaker size. Placement matters. And so does the environment. If you place a speaker behind the set it will reverberate around the off-stage spaces and carry with it an aural "map" of that space. Put it on stage, within a defined space there (say, the couple of set walls that represent what the audience can see of a connected anteroom or bathroom, or inside a cabinet or coffin) and those acoustic spacial cues will be aded to the sound.



The simplest recording process is to record dry and add the appropriate ambiance later. However, there are times it makes sense to record within a specific acoustic space to begin with. Record in a stairwell and it will sound like a stairwell (or, at least, sound like a tall enclosed space). Interestingly, you can record on the actual stage and, if you've placed your microphone well (either in the audience, or near the speakers) on playback you will get phantom sources that seem to exist right there in the space with you. I did this once for Rosencranz and it was most effective.

On the flip side, you don't want every VO session to sound like the lobby, or every instrument you record at home to sound like your living room. Dampen those give-away reflections. I often record VO in costume shop storage, because all those hanging fabrics provides an acoustically dead space.



Physics appears in sound in other places. The vibration modes of any object -- not just a musical instrument -- change over various intensities. You can not record speaking and make it sound like shouting, or record a light tap and make it sound like a hard crunch. Or even record a piano played softly and make it sound like a piano being played vigorously. Physics doesn't allow it.

Again for voice-over work, if you want a voice to sound like it is twenty feet away, record from twenty feet away. Conversely, if you want it to sound like it is on a phone or a headset, then get that mic that close (or, better yet, find a phone or headset and record through that).

The latter is better because, once again, physics. You can simulate what a carbon element sitting in a phenolic handset sounds like, but you get a more accurate simulation with less work if you just record through that actual technology to begin with.

And this blends into sound effects. There is much more to be said on sound effects; about how audiences have been trained to expect things to sound a certain way (which they do not in real life), about how you need to focus in and strip down real sounds in order to "sell" them in the limited sonic window you have available in a play, and how distorting the real and creating the unreal are part of the art of sound design. But the best starting point is with real sounds. Not necessarily the sounds of that exact thing, mind you -- see above! -- but with real sounds. A microphone pointed at an actual mechanical object be it a snapping twig or a wind-up clock delivers multitudes of detail that is difficult to synthesize.

And real sounds have, well, reality. A gravitas, even. They carry that verisimilitude of real objects operating under the real physics we've instinctively absorbed through living in that physical environment. Even when you use a sound out of context, or use it to sell something quite different from its actual origin, those tiny cues of vibration nodes and damping and the little bits of noise of clattering and chattering and slithering and scraping are all there making it feel more real -- as well as more complex and more engaging.



Lastly, microphones have response curves and pick-up patterns. Equalization after the fact introduces phase shifts (as well as other artifacts); the better way to get a "bright" sound is to start with a "bright" mic. Real objects -- this is particularly obvious in musical instruments -- radiate from multiple sources in multiple directions. A microphone a few inches from a violin will hear a distinctly different sound picture if over the bridge, the neck, the back, or over an f-hole. And that same microphone a foot away will get yet another set of pictures depending on what part of the violin you aim for.

This is why placing microphones properly is so essential to getting the desired sound from a musical instrument that is being recorded (or reinforced in a live sound situation). The right mic, the right position, the right distance; these are all things that are difficult but not impossible to correct at the console or with plug-ins in the DAW. Which is not the same as saying post-processing never happens. There are instruments that are almost defined by artificial processing of the original acoustics, primary among them being the rock drum kit.

This matters for voice-over recording to. Or for foley work. It is essential in both to put on headphones and find out what is actually going to the recorder. Search out the sound field, move the mic and change the angle, to find the sound you are searching for.

Rice Surprise

One of the tricks of engineering is to know what you need to be looking for. The entire Holocron project has been an exercise in belatedly realizing one thing after another that needed to be researched and calculated and worked out.

I was so sure I was on track to start slapping down components. Then while I was re-reading the pdf on the lithium polymer charge monitor chip I'll be using (a cute little SOT-23 package), I realized the programmed pattern of conditioning charge and monitor before delivering full charge, and the taper off to maintenance charge, were all going to play badly with the requirement of the rest of the circuit to suck power for the LEDs.

It took only a moment of googling to discover this was properly called a "Load Sharing" problem, and articles had been written and circuits proposed to deal with it. Meaning I need to add more components to the board. And as I discovered when I checked my Eagle libraries, meaning I needed to source the parts, get their footprints into Eagle...

(I also worked for a while trying to make the footprint work with the through-hole neopixels I'd found. Looked for a while at SMD versions, but couldn't figure out how to properly surface-mount on the back side of the PCB. Looked for a while for pre-wired strings and finally decided on a minimal breakout board that could be easily assembled into a string with ribbon cable. Once I've made my final decision on a supplier for that, too!)




And then there's times that empiricism is close enough. I've done so much trick-line rigging, I knew before I walked into the theater I could use span-sets (rather, some slings from my rock-climbing collection) as supports and quick-links as pulleys. I also knew I'd need a little weight to drag the line back down to the ground after we'd put it away the previous night. So with about twenty minutes to go I finally got around to stitching up a tiny sand-bag. Which I filled with....rice from the kitchen.

I don't call it impossible that there might be some strange interaction between rice, nylon, canvas, the steel of the old building, or whatever. Or some unusual factor like hungry bats or a lightning strike. If I was doing this rigging on a ten million dollar satellite you'd bet I'd check every wacky suspicion that occurred to me. But for this, for a two-week run of a lightly-attended show in a black box theater, none of the plausible failure modes are of high enough probability to worry about.

It's the holocron -- which will be available both as kit and fully assembled board to purchasers -- that I have to get it right. And more and more I think that with the first one I just plain got lucky.

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.