I've added to the stack of supplies kept in the room where we apply microphones to actors. In addition to transpore surgical tape, we've added toupee tape, Tegaderm, moleskin, latex exam gloves, rubbing alcohol, alcohol swabs, and a pair of suture scissors (for cutting the various tapes). Plus an assortment of Decocolor paint markers in various skin tones, bobby pins, barrettes, and wig clips.
I haven't tried the Tegaderm yet. I've learned how to use toupee tape, though. Nasty stuff to work with. It is double-sided flexible tape. Very flexible, very sticky. It's like trying to work with flypaper made of gauze. You stick the stuff to the actor, stick the microphone element on top of it, and then put some transpore tape on top of that so hair and fingers and random set pieces don't get stuck to the actor as well.
The moleskin, I am cutting narrow strips and putting around the heads of the elements just behind the grill. It absorbs incoming sweat and keeps it from dripping inside the microphone element.
The Decocolor markers are to paint elements up or down and get them closer to the actor's skin tone. The paint does rub off in time, and toupee tape will pull it right off, meaning frequent touch-ups. When choosing element colors or painting elements, work down; lighter colors will read as scars, but darker colors usually read as shadows, or stray hairs. Or so I am told!
Another fact of life for wireless microphones is some actors are mic-killers. It's not their fault. Just for whatever reason, microphones fail when put on their bodies. Many shows will have one. Just treat that actor's mic with extra care and suspicion and don't stint the microphone check.
And while we're on the subject: There seems to be this impression (including among board operators who should know better) that microphone check means bringing every actor on to the stage, asking them to sing as loud as they do in the show, and adjusting their trim.
Sorry, no. To be blunt; that's why you are on the board. Expecting the actor to perform cold, without accompaniment, and sound ANYTHING like they will for the show is no better than setting a number blind and expecting it to be good.
Once your mics are dialed in, microphone check is to confirm they are still working properly and working the way you set them. If they sound obviously different, or you had to change an element or transmitter or the actor needed to change placement, then you start messing with the gain and the EQ until you think the mic is dialed in again. And then you tweak again when you hear it in the context of the performance.
Barring that kind of obvious change, don't mess with them! It's stupid. You'll muck up a perfectly good set of mic settings based on what random thing the actors do during mic check and what your tired ears are telling you on a cold morning.
Many, many actors will attempt to do mic check by wandering out with the mic held on with their hand, because they haven't gotten to taping it down yet. They will of course give you mic check without the wigs, hats, glasses, false noses, or whatever will be coloring their voice during performance. Work with stage management to explain to them why this won't work.
But use your regular pre-show mic-check to listen for problems, listen to the sound of the mic, and get a leg up on a congested or hoarse actor or anything else that may have changed and will affect the performance. Don't use it to re-design the show.
Saturday, July 16, 2011
Monday, July 11, 2011
Lessons Learned
My show opened. There were a few issues with the sound and I made a few stupid mistakes, but at least I didn't turn the knob:
In some facilities there is a regular post-mortem discussion about what happened, what went wrong, what went right, what can or should be done differently on the next show. The main trouble with these is they tend to come after everyone has put the horrors of Tech Week out of their memory, and are already working on the next production.
So mostly I have a few things I'll take home myself, and try to remember the next time I do a similar production.
Wireless: Nothing really new there. Elements die. I had six failures, of which only one happened in sound check before the show and could be corrected then. The others failed on stage, in front of the audience. I've learned a long time back that this happens, though, and having a smart and fast person backstage, and a clearly marked box of spares, is mandatory.
The worst loss we suffered is losing a mic just before a big solo. The others, I was able to compensate or kill until the replacement was put on the actor, and the worst hurt to the show was the burst of noise when the mic first died.
Also underlined was importance to check RF with the full show in operation. I tested a spare mic and had good signal, but when we put it on stage as a replacement during the show hetrodyne interference made it unusable. That poor actor spent a substantial part of his time between scenes in the dressing room with a technician taping new pieces of electronics to his skin.
My solution to the Countryman E6 "behind the ear" connector seems to be working out. I strip the heat shrink off, spray de-oxit on the connector, put a drop of solder on it to stop it from turning, and stick a single contiguous length of heat shrink over the join.
I've also now tried out toupee tape. It works quite well, although it is a pain to apply (you apply the tape to the actor, put the microphone on top, then put micropore tape over that.) Next up in my experimental substances is Tegaderm -- if I can find a cheaper alternative than a fifty-dollar box of it.
The Band: We had some ongoing keyboard issues...something was hitting something too hard and causing a slight crackle. So far we've been unable to track down where that clipping is happening (if it really is happening). Taking the gain down on the monitor sends helped the musicians a lot, though.
Switched out the basic DI on the bass for an ART one-channel "tube" jobby, and the change in sonic quality was immediately obvious.
My drum overheads didn't make me happy. They had a nice picture of the kit by themselves, but too much snare got in them and smeared the snare. If I had the ability to throw a few milliseconds delay on them maybe I could correct...but instead I re-purposed them, putting one over high-hat and crash, the other over ride and percussion toys. There's a moment in the show where I would love to have a pair of tom mics with a hard pan, but even with the other changes we made in the pit there's just not enough channels left on the board or even in the snake.
Snare is now a beta 57 aimed at the side of the snare. It still isn't tight -- even with a little compander action and some heavy EQ -- but it is better.
SFX: Playback hasn't had any problems other than the Stage Manager getting a couple wrong cue numbers in her book. My main issue has been the lack of an overall volume knob. Especially for ambiance effects, it helps so much to be able to adjust for the band volume, the actor's energy, the noise level in the house, etc. All of that changes too much to be really able to set a single level for a sound cue that will always work.
Although I started the show with sounds thrown mostly into speakers on the set, over the opening weekend I moved most of the ambiance underscore sounds to the house speakers instead -- especially when volume levels are getting extreme (and this is a VERY loud show, musically) -- it is better to move the effects out of where the actors are trying to hear, and push them out of speakers aimed directly at the audience instead.
I did manage to free up a single channel so several pre-recorded vocals (in one case, an actress who is unable to wear her wireless for one scene due to stage action) could be brought up on a fader grouped with the rest of the vocal faders and sent to the same vocal bus.
But what I really want is a single fader right by my master vocal fader and master orchestra fader that allows me to adjust sound playback levels for all cues on the fly. I've had that for other shows. I got talked out of it for this show. I was wrong -- I need it.
Added a quick back-stage monitor by sticking a Beta Green in the flies, running it to a Audio Buddy two-channel pre, and then running that out to a pair of daisy-chained JBL Eons. Dressing room monitor achieved, without costing any more board channels.
The main thing I noticed monitor-wise is that I really, really need a line of communication to the band. I need a system that doesn't hog cable and channels, that can be used in privacy without cast listening in, and that allows two-way communication and paging.
I'm looking around but I don't see anything obvious right now. Most people seem to be using walkie-talkies, cell phones, or setting up a second intercom. I'm thinking I may be able to find or build or re-purpose an intercom with integrated paging lights. And if I am really, really clever, set it up so I can patch it into my own phones and/or the band's monitor system (which is partially headphones also) -- if nothing else that will save fumbling around with multiple headsets.
In the best of all possible worlds this would be my personal kit, small enough to stick in my gig bag, and I'd set it up wherever I was to get through sound check and take it down after the show is up and running.
In some facilities there is a regular post-mortem discussion about what happened, what went wrong, what went right, what can or should be done differently on the next show. The main trouble with these is they tend to come after everyone has put the horrors of Tech Week out of their memory, and are already working on the next production.
So mostly I have a few things I'll take home myself, and try to remember the next time I do a similar production.
Wireless: Nothing really new there. Elements die. I had six failures, of which only one happened in sound check before the show and could be corrected then. The others failed on stage, in front of the audience. I've learned a long time back that this happens, though, and having a smart and fast person backstage, and a clearly marked box of spares, is mandatory.
The worst loss we suffered is losing a mic just before a big solo. The others, I was able to compensate or kill until the replacement was put on the actor, and the worst hurt to the show was the burst of noise when the mic first died.
Also underlined was importance to check RF with the full show in operation. I tested a spare mic and had good signal, but when we put it on stage as a replacement during the show hetrodyne interference made it unusable. That poor actor spent a substantial part of his time between scenes in the dressing room with a technician taping new pieces of electronics to his skin.
My solution to the Countryman E6 "behind the ear" connector seems to be working out. I strip the heat shrink off, spray de-oxit on the connector, put a drop of solder on it to stop it from turning, and stick a single contiguous length of heat shrink over the join.
I've also now tried out toupee tape. It works quite well, although it is a pain to apply (you apply the tape to the actor, put the microphone on top, then put micropore tape over that.) Next up in my experimental substances is Tegaderm -- if I can find a cheaper alternative than a fifty-dollar box of it.
The Band: We had some ongoing keyboard issues...something was hitting something too hard and causing a slight crackle. So far we've been unable to track down where that clipping is happening (if it really is happening). Taking the gain down on the monitor sends helped the musicians a lot, though.
Switched out the basic DI on the bass for an ART one-channel "tube" jobby, and the change in sonic quality was immediately obvious.
My drum overheads didn't make me happy. They had a nice picture of the kit by themselves, but too much snare got in them and smeared the snare. If I had the ability to throw a few milliseconds delay on them maybe I could correct...but instead I re-purposed them, putting one over high-hat and crash, the other over ride and percussion toys. There's a moment in the show where I would love to have a pair of tom mics with a hard pan, but even with the other changes we made in the pit there's just not enough channels left on the board or even in the snake.
Snare is now a beta 57 aimed at the side of the snare. It still isn't tight -- even with a little compander action and some heavy EQ -- but it is better.
SFX: Playback hasn't had any problems other than the Stage Manager getting a couple wrong cue numbers in her book. My main issue has been the lack of an overall volume knob. Especially for ambiance effects, it helps so much to be able to adjust for the band volume, the actor's energy, the noise level in the house, etc. All of that changes too much to be really able to set a single level for a sound cue that will always work.
Although I started the show with sounds thrown mostly into speakers on the set, over the opening weekend I moved most of the ambiance underscore sounds to the house speakers instead -- especially when volume levels are getting extreme (and this is a VERY loud show, musically) -- it is better to move the effects out of where the actors are trying to hear, and push them out of speakers aimed directly at the audience instead.
I did manage to free up a single channel so several pre-recorded vocals (in one case, an actress who is unable to wear her wireless for one scene due to stage action) could be brought up on a fader grouped with the rest of the vocal faders and sent to the same vocal bus.
But what I really want is a single fader right by my master vocal fader and master orchestra fader that allows me to adjust sound playback levels for all cues on the fly. I've had that for other shows. I got talked out of it for this show. I was wrong -- I need it.
Added a quick back-stage monitor by sticking a Beta Green in the flies, running it to a Audio Buddy two-channel pre, and then running that out to a pair of daisy-chained JBL Eons. Dressing room monitor achieved, without costing any more board channels.
The main thing I noticed monitor-wise is that I really, really need a line of communication to the band. I need a system that doesn't hog cable and channels, that can be used in privacy without cast listening in, and that allows two-way communication and paging.
I'm looking around but I don't see anything obvious right now. Most people seem to be using walkie-talkies, cell phones, or setting up a second intercom. I'm thinking I may be able to find or build or re-purpose an intercom with integrated paging lights. And if I am really, really clever, set it up so I can patch it into my own phones and/or the band's monitor system (which is partially headphones also) -- if nothing else that will save fumbling around with multiple headsets.
In the best of all possible worlds this would be my personal kit, small enough to stick in my gig bag, and I'd set it up wherever I was to get through sound check and take it down after the show is up and running.
Thursday, July 7, 2011
Too Many Wires
Sometimes it is nice to step back. Instead of each time pushing the boundaries a little, and doing a show that is even more ambitious than the last, you simplify a little and do a show that is entirely within your comfort level. One learns doing these, too; when you aren't to accomplish the near-impossible, you can actually spare a few neurons to look around and deal instead with finessing things a little.
This is not one of those shows.
I've maxed out the LS9-32 I'm using. Of course, I did this once before and used a sub-mixer on drums. But this time I'm achieving it by running almost all of my sound effects on a completely secondary system of speakers. The only connection between the two is a single pair on S-PDIF that comes out of my Firewire and into the two track digital input on the board.
Over at another house, I have a Dante card allowing the sound effects computer to send 16 channels in digital to the sound board -- without tying up head amps and the physical input jacks. At several other theaters, an ADAT card is used instead, with venerable old firewire interfaces being used as translators.
On at least one previous show, I just dealt with having sound effects limited to a simple two-channel playback. I'm still toying with the idea of using associated scenes in the sound board to reset the input routing on the fly, but although this would allow me to place individual sound effect cues in specific speakers/buses, it would not allow simultaneous multi-track playback.
For instance, in this show I have one moment where I am playing an ambience as a multi-channel surround, and on top of that I add a cell phone ring placed into one specific speaker near the actor.
Anyhow, Ood Laptop is happy playing back the cues from Qlab. My battered Korg Nano-key is used as a controller, with the keys labeled tape player style (play, stop, forward, rewind). A firewire cable feeds an FP10 interface, giving Qlab a potential 10 output channels to play with. At the moment all of my sounds are 2-channel or even 1-channel effects, but I mean to add a couple of layers using Qlab's Sound Group function to play extra effects into the surround speakers.
The FP10 sends two channels up to the mixer on S-PDIF. Two channels are routed directly to a pair of JBL Eons I've set up in the back of the house as surround speakers. The remaining active pair goes to what had been the theater's hard-wired side fill monitors.
For those, I had to splice into one cable (the monitors are on Speakon connectors and we don't have any of that in cable form. Actually, we are pretty shy of any audio cable in the theater). I shifted the position of the monitors to make them effects playback speakers. Also, since I was bypassing all the usual processors, I re-purposed the theater's old Quadraverb in order to use the five-band EQ function. This added a tremendous ground loop until I ran through a couple of inline balancing transformers. Also, one of the speakers is out of phase; rather than trace wires I added an XLR in-line phase reverser too.
The brunt of the show is the wireless microphones. 18 channels, a couple channels spare which are left unpatched (I'll have to physically patch them in to use them), plus one wireless taped to a moving set-piece and used to pick up an ensemble there. The latter is an old Shure, and to get it through the unfriendly RF environment I stuck the receiver under the apron and ran it though the snake.
Because it is a digital board we are able to put parametric EQ and compression on each individual microphone, plus some light reverb to seat them in the space. Between board and the Galileo speaker processor and the Meyer speakers is various levels of corrective EQ, contouring, phase correction, and time correction; the microphones are routed to a combined mono patch of center cluster, house mains, and house delays (a set of speakers 2/3 of the way back from the front of the stage).
To dial this all in we set up three laptops running Studio Manager, SMART, and a link into the Galileo. Plus of course reference microphones at various places around the house. I did not do this dialing myself -- I just looked over the shoulder of a more experienced person who did it.
Yamaha DSP isn't wonderful at this price range, but it is okay for what we are doing. Except for one mic, that needs some processing I can't achieve on the board. That is tying up additional channels and outputs, and adding more wires plus possibly a stomp switch to turn on and off the outboard effect.
I've been tempted several times to just stream the channels into my laptop, process them there with VST plug-ins, and take those back out. But real-time sound going through a laptop is a little scary. People do it. I've also seen people with laptops that crashed in the middle of a show. At least in the case of the sound effects playback I can add a second laptop that could be switched into the circuit in a handful of seconds.
There's also an ensemble mic tucked backstage. Our teen cast is vocally doubling the little kids who appear in a couple of scenes. The illusion is not bad; the off stage ensemble strengthens the sound (and the pitch centers!) and yet is still vaguely believable as issuing from the visible actors. This is my tried and true off-stage ensemble technique; a large-diaphragm condenser set high, well above head level, on a sturdy tripod, and an ensemble instructed carefully to look at the conductor and sing to the audience (instead of trying to crowd around the microphone and sing to it).
And the God Mic, a wireless handheld, which due to less robust circuitry tends to cut out when you get it too close to other active transmitters. Right now it is being used by the director and thus the receiver is stuck on a seat in the middle of the house on a long cable. When we clear the house and shift everyone into the booth I'll drag the receiver back up to the FOH position and find a space for it there amongst all the other equipment.
Finally we come to the "pit," which is on stage. I could easily run more on the pit. Oddly, for all the time I've spent with live music acts, I have yet to really mic up a standard drum kit. I have probably hung a great many mics on tabla than I have on kick and snare. The full rock setup is mics on every tom, mics top and bottom of the hat and snare, two mics on the kick. Well, this isn't quite that. Two overhead condensers (the good trick with them is to get them equidistant from the snare), a mic just inside the port (only the third time I've actually had my hands on a mic designed for kick -- this one's a D6) and one on snare. There isn't room for a 57 in there so I'm making do with a small condenser. At them moment processing is near nil. I'm messing around with a gate on the snare is all. IF we ever get an actual sound check with the band we'll be able to dial it in some.
Keyboard on dual DI, electric base with DI only (he didn't want to bring his cab to this gig), 'cello on condenser mic (unless he remembers his personal DI for the built-in pick-up), and a multi-guitarist with a full laptop-oriented rig and a Behringer board (and a separate condenser he supplied for acoustic guitar).
We're doing a poor-man's hybrid version of IEMs on this show; four tailored mixes are sent backwards through the snake to the band, which terminate in a pair of mixing boards (the Behringer and my old Mackie 1202). From these, monitor mixes are created for a pair of headphones and one (or possibly more) powered speakers. At least this show the conductor is on headphones, and he can tailor the amount of vocal feed he gets by just reaching below his keyboard to the mixer there. This seriously cleans up the usual monitor hash. However, the piano in the drummer's monitor is still howlingly loud; there is almost no drop in keyboard level as heard in the back of the house when I mute the rest of the system!
I think my preferences would be to snake out each wanted instrument to band in a situation like this; using pre-made mixes is asking for trouble, as there is no hardwired communication between FOH and band on this show -- and no sound check to really dial in and lock down the monitor settings.
As a last wrinkle there's yet another monitor mix sent out to a remote dressing room. Before we had the cast on wireless this was driven by a microphone in the house. For this application I've made very successful use of something as simple as a beta 57 in the grid. In this case, I had a CAD multi-pattern condenser set to omni, on a stand in the second row of the house. I may end up rigging something for the actual performance, but down the road we are going to add more of a semi-permanent solution -- and one that doesn't task the increasingly limited channels on the FOH sound board.
Because of the fluid nature of rehearsal, the band already added a PCC at the foot of the apron so they wouldn't be in complete dark when the actors weren't using their body mics. The problem with general pick-up is, as always, that you get lots of foot scuffling and scenery moving and off-stage chatter and air conditioning noise, and it isn't necessarily that easy to hear the action on stage properly. At least for this sort of use, there is essentially no feedback issue (which there would be if you were trying to use area mics for re-inforcement).
During rehearsal I also hijacked the kick mic's input for a conductor talk-back mic, and something else for a talk-back for myself from FOH. Plus I ran MIDI back through the snake so the conductor could "try out" two different keyboards from out in house and hear what they sounded like from there. I need a better solution for communications with band. The problem is, they want to talk to me without the whole building hearing them, and I can't be wearing a headset just waiting for that moment. For this show, it might be simplest just to drag a Clear-Com headset out to them.
I have five different snakes running, and a whole spool of individual cable. My circuit plan is almost unreadable. Because of various compromises of available channels, available circuits, and which direction an individual snake may be running, most of the numbers do not line up. The band monitors, for instance; they come from mix buses 9-12, are sent from omni outs 5-9, are picked up on the main stage snake channels 13-16, and miracle of miracles, are actually channels 13-16 on the band snake as well. The off-stage mic, on the other hand, changes identity numerous times. And I haven't set up the custom fader layer yet! (Plus I am very tempted to throw the entire band into layer 2, and then flip a few elements back to the custom fader layer from that...which means fader 31 will be channel 40 will be input 28 will be snake 14....)
The routing inside the board is a similar monstrosity, to the point where I can't even remember how I set up the dressing room monitor. And this is where the real downside of complex, pushing-the-envelope setups is; if anything throws a wheel during performance, it is going to take just that much longer to get to the appropriate element and switch it off, fix it, or swap it. Already there is a 19th wireless receiver tottering on top of the racks, dealing with a transmitter that crashed during rehearsal (with no spare in the same frequency band, of course!)
This is not one of those shows.
I've maxed out the LS9-32 I'm using. Of course, I did this once before and used a sub-mixer on drums. But this time I'm achieving it by running almost all of my sound effects on a completely secondary system of speakers. The only connection between the two is a single pair on S-PDIF that comes out of my Firewire and into the two track digital input on the board.
Over at another house, I have a Dante card allowing the sound effects computer to send 16 channels in digital to the sound board -- without tying up head amps and the physical input jacks. At several other theaters, an ADAT card is used instead, with venerable old firewire interfaces being used as translators.
On at least one previous show, I just dealt with having sound effects limited to a simple two-channel playback. I'm still toying with the idea of using associated scenes in the sound board to reset the input routing on the fly, but although this would allow me to place individual sound effect cues in specific speakers/buses, it would not allow simultaneous multi-track playback.
For instance, in this show I have one moment where I am playing an ambience as a multi-channel surround, and on top of that I add a cell phone ring placed into one specific speaker near the actor.
Anyhow, Ood Laptop is happy playing back the cues from Qlab. My battered Korg Nano-key is used as a controller, with the keys labeled tape player style (play, stop, forward, rewind). A firewire cable feeds an FP10 interface, giving Qlab a potential 10 output channels to play with. At the moment all of my sounds are 2-channel or even 1-channel effects, but I mean to add a couple of layers using Qlab's Sound Group function to play extra effects into the surround speakers.
The FP10 sends two channels up to the mixer on S-PDIF. Two channels are routed directly to a pair of JBL Eons I've set up in the back of the house as surround speakers. The remaining active pair goes to what had been the theater's hard-wired side fill monitors.
For those, I had to splice into one cable (the monitors are on Speakon connectors and we don't have any of that in cable form. Actually, we are pretty shy of any audio cable in the theater). I shifted the position of the monitors to make them effects playback speakers. Also, since I was bypassing all the usual processors, I re-purposed the theater's old Quadraverb in order to use the five-band EQ function. This added a tremendous ground loop until I ran through a couple of inline balancing transformers. Also, one of the speakers is out of phase; rather than trace wires I added an XLR in-line phase reverser too.
The brunt of the show is the wireless microphones. 18 channels, a couple channels spare which are left unpatched (I'll have to physically patch them in to use them), plus one wireless taped to a moving set-piece and used to pick up an ensemble there. The latter is an old Shure, and to get it through the unfriendly RF environment I stuck the receiver under the apron and ran it though the snake.
Because it is a digital board we are able to put parametric EQ and compression on each individual microphone, plus some light reverb to seat them in the space. Between board and the Galileo speaker processor and the Meyer speakers is various levels of corrective EQ, contouring, phase correction, and time correction; the microphones are routed to a combined mono patch of center cluster, house mains, and house delays (a set of speakers 2/3 of the way back from the front of the stage).
To dial this all in we set up three laptops running Studio Manager, SMART, and a link into the Galileo. Plus of course reference microphones at various places around the house. I did not do this dialing myself -- I just looked over the shoulder of a more experienced person who did it.
Yamaha DSP isn't wonderful at this price range, but it is okay for what we are doing. Except for one mic, that needs some processing I can't achieve on the board. That is tying up additional channels and outputs, and adding more wires plus possibly a stomp switch to turn on and off the outboard effect.
I've been tempted several times to just stream the channels into my laptop, process them there with VST plug-ins, and take those back out. But real-time sound going through a laptop is a little scary. People do it. I've also seen people with laptops that crashed in the middle of a show. At least in the case of the sound effects playback I can add a second laptop that could be switched into the circuit in a handful of seconds.
There's also an ensemble mic tucked backstage. Our teen cast is vocally doubling the little kids who appear in a couple of scenes. The illusion is not bad; the off stage ensemble strengthens the sound (and the pitch centers!) and yet is still vaguely believable as issuing from the visible actors. This is my tried and true off-stage ensemble technique; a large-diaphragm condenser set high, well above head level, on a sturdy tripod, and an ensemble instructed carefully to look at the conductor and sing to the audience (instead of trying to crowd around the microphone and sing to it).
And the God Mic, a wireless handheld, which due to less robust circuitry tends to cut out when you get it too close to other active transmitters. Right now it is being used by the director and thus the receiver is stuck on a seat in the middle of the house on a long cable. When we clear the house and shift everyone into the booth I'll drag the receiver back up to the FOH position and find a space for it there amongst all the other equipment.
Finally we come to the "pit," which is on stage. I could easily run more on the pit. Oddly, for all the time I've spent with live music acts, I have yet to really mic up a standard drum kit. I have probably hung a great many mics on tabla than I have on kick and snare. The full rock setup is mics on every tom, mics top and bottom of the hat and snare, two mics on the kick. Well, this isn't quite that. Two overhead condensers (the good trick with them is to get them equidistant from the snare), a mic just inside the port (only the third time I've actually had my hands on a mic designed for kick -- this one's a D6) and one on snare. There isn't room for a 57 in there so I'm making do with a small condenser. At them moment processing is near nil. I'm messing around with a gate on the snare is all. IF we ever get an actual sound check with the band we'll be able to dial it in some.
Keyboard on dual DI, electric base with DI only (he didn't want to bring his cab to this gig), 'cello on condenser mic (unless he remembers his personal DI for the built-in pick-up), and a multi-guitarist with a full laptop-oriented rig and a Behringer board (and a separate condenser he supplied for acoustic guitar).
We're doing a poor-man's hybrid version of IEMs on this show; four tailored mixes are sent backwards through the snake to the band, which terminate in a pair of mixing boards (the Behringer and my old Mackie 1202). From these, monitor mixes are created for a pair of headphones and one (or possibly more) powered speakers. At least this show the conductor is on headphones, and he can tailor the amount of vocal feed he gets by just reaching below his keyboard to the mixer there. This seriously cleans up the usual monitor hash. However, the piano in the drummer's monitor is still howlingly loud; there is almost no drop in keyboard level as heard in the back of the house when I mute the rest of the system!
I think my preferences would be to snake out each wanted instrument to band in a situation like this; using pre-made mixes is asking for trouble, as there is no hardwired communication between FOH and band on this show -- and no sound check to really dial in and lock down the monitor settings.
As a last wrinkle there's yet another monitor mix sent out to a remote dressing room. Before we had the cast on wireless this was driven by a microphone in the house. For this application I've made very successful use of something as simple as a beta 57 in the grid. In this case, I had a CAD multi-pattern condenser set to omni, on a stand in the second row of the house. I may end up rigging something for the actual performance, but down the road we are going to add more of a semi-permanent solution -- and one that doesn't task the increasingly limited channels on the FOH sound board.
Because of the fluid nature of rehearsal, the band already added a PCC at the foot of the apron so they wouldn't be in complete dark when the actors weren't using their body mics. The problem with general pick-up is, as always, that you get lots of foot scuffling and scenery moving and off-stage chatter and air conditioning noise, and it isn't necessarily that easy to hear the action on stage properly. At least for this sort of use, there is essentially no feedback issue (which there would be if you were trying to use area mics for re-inforcement).
During rehearsal I also hijacked the kick mic's input for a conductor talk-back mic, and something else for a talk-back for myself from FOH. Plus I ran MIDI back through the snake so the conductor could "try out" two different keyboards from out in house and hear what they sounded like from there. I need a better solution for communications with band. The problem is, they want to talk to me without the whole building hearing them, and I can't be wearing a headset just waiting for that moment. For this show, it might be simplest just to drag a Clear-Com headset out to them.
I have five different snakes running, and a whole spool of individual cable. My circuit plan is almost unreadable. Because of various compromises of available channels, available circuits, and which direction an individual snake may be running, most of the numbers do not line up. The band monitors, for instance; they come from mix buses 9-12, are sent from omni outs 5-9, are picked up on the main stage snake channels 13-16, and miracle of miracles, are actually channels 13-16 on the band snake as well. The off-stage mic, on the other hand, changes identity numerous times. And I haven't set up the custom fader layer yet! (Plus I am very tempted to throw the entire band into layer 2, and then flip a few elements back to the custom fader layer from that...which means fader 31 will be channel 40 will be input 28 will be snake 14....)
The routing inside the board is a similar monstrosity, to the point where I can't even remember how I set up the dressing room monitor. And this is where the real downside of complex, pushing-the-envelope setups is; if anything throws a wheel during performance, it is going to take just that much longer to get to the appropriate element and switch it off, fix it, or swap it. Already there is a 19th wireless receiver tottering on top of the racks, dealing with a transmitter that crashed during rehearsal (with no spare in the same frequency band, of course!)
Friday, July 1, 2011
Running on (Soldering) Fumes
I'm a bit under the weather this week. Did get a lot of soldering done, though; repaired...
Two laptop computers
A power supply for same
A pair of headphones
A half-dozen wireless microphone elements
A portable heater
Just got some more parts in the mail and the next half-dozen wireless microphone elements are on the table. If I can find time around making microphone bags, creating sound effects, setting up speakers, programming the sound board...
As I struggle to make the new novel move foreword, I realize the DIY philosophy is important to me, and is going to be a part of it. Heck...the protagonist of my first novel was a machinist, and even though it wasn't that kind of story she managed a couple of nice hacks (including a McGuyverish improvisation at the climax that almost got her killed but ended up saving the day.) And this works in with my desire to show some of the Bay Area, where I live, and some of the circles of people that interest me. Maker's Faire. The Crucible. Boutique stomp-box makers. Luthiers and Early Instrument builders. Experimental music.
Theater is after all my vocation and there has always been an element of improvisation and re-purposing and dumpster diving in it. It is not at all unusual to have to do something that properly belongs in a trade or craft -- bending wrought iron, painting in oils, running plumbing, making hair appliances, etc. -- and not having the funds to get a professional. So we end up being self-taught stitchers, electricians, welders, woodworkers, and so on. And not infrequently a show will bring you in contact with new materials and new skills you have to pick up (usually quickly!)
I am not up to writing an essay on the DIY philosophy right now. I've got a cold, collapsed on the sofa after a meeting and only woke up because I am starving. I have until the saffron rice is ready to write this.
But let me try to share a couple of things you should have to be a Maker.
1) A careful confidence. You start with assuming the thing is possible. That you have the mind to learn the skills, that your fingers are sensitive enough to carry them out. The more different kinds of things you learn to do, the more this confidence that you CAN pick up a new skill will grow.
2) I said "careful" for a reason. You also need humility. You respect that there are people with skills and you commit to learn from them. You also must have a healthy doubt in your own ability. Recognize your limitations, recognize your comfort zone, and more than anything else be aware that many of these things can maim or kill you. It is not saying too much that you must assume there are hidden dangers you haven't even imagined, and you treat the process with respect and look for mentors to try to show you where those dangers are.
3) Look forward to failure. Many people never attempt things because they don't want to fail. Many people will hang on to a broken thing, never daring to try to fix it for fear they'll make it worse. Word; if it don't work, and it's too expensive to take it to the shop, YOU CAN'T MAKE IT WORSE. You can't get less than useless. At the absolute worst case you will still learn something from opening it up (even if the thing you learn is "Hey, those things can't be repaired, can they!" Be aware of failure, be prepared for it, intend to learn from it. Maybe the first throw will be awful. If you studied why it went bad, the next throw is merely bad. And, eventually, you either make a pot you like...or you realize pots aren't for you, but in the process you've added more general knowledge and manual dexterity. Which brings us to:
4) The more you do, the better you get. You will never be perfect. You will never know it all. Start small if you can, work up. With each project you will not only get better, you will become a better judge of how big a project you can attempt.
And this essay is already longer than I intended, but some examples from this week:
The power supply. It had a loose wire. It sometimes worked if you jiggled it. It was long out of warranty, and expensive enough to be worth investing a few hours trying to repair. The fact that it sometimes worked meant that, in all probability, it was all in good working order (except for the one loose connection.) So the first step is, as with all repairs, crack the case and look inside.
I don't think that case was supposed to be opened. But since it was broken already, I couldn't make it worse. I took a razor saw and cut it apart. Inside, the problem was nicely obvious; the plug wiggled, and there was a nasty black mark of the sparks from a loose connection. Clean with some emery paper, re-solder, squeeze the case back together along the cut line, and drip CA glue into the crack. It may not look quite as nice, but it works as well as if it just came from the factory.
Actually, better. While I was inside, I slapped a meter on it and verified it put out 24 VDC in operation. Looked up the right ballast resistor and purchased a bright green LED. Soldered up the LED and confirmed you could see it through the case when lit. And soldered it inside before sealing the case. Now the power supply has a light to tell me if it is plugged in or not.
Headphones. One muff stopped working. Manipulated it, and it worked for a moment then stopped again. Again, obviously a loose wire. Plugged them in, turned up the volume, and carefully felt along the entire exposed wire that went from one side to the other. The bad spot was inside a swivel. Fortunately, I have a bunch of scraps of similar wire around from repairing all those wireless microphones. The only issue was feeding the new wire through all the little plastic parts.
Heater. Stopped giving heat, but the fan still works. Had a three-position switch; fan only, low heat, high heat. Pulled it apart. On visual examination the heater element looks fine. No loose wires, no discoloration. Traced the circuit; the thermostat and safety switch are "upstream" of the fan. That is; there is nothing specific to the heater element that might be broken. Except for the switch. So as an experiment, cut the wires and wired the element in parallel with the fan. It works. So went back, spliced the heater on to the first switch position (I don't need a "fan only" setting anyhow) and boxed it back up.
Laptops. My working laptop went dark suddenly. Tried to restart, wiggled the power cord. Magic smoke came out. This is not a good sign. The thing about the laptop is, I worked my way up to it. I did RAM a long time ago -- that's easy. Getting to the HD is a little tougher; you have to open up the back. Swapping the optical drive was next; that's even more connections you have to remove. Each time, you see, was a small step beyond my current comfort level.
Popped the keyboard and, yes, a nice scorched area on the motherboard and several of the SMD components are toast. This is not going to start again. Assuming the HD and other parts are still good, I went on eBay and found a "stripped" laptop of similar model (no HD, no RAM, etc.)
Swap the parts over, including my good optical drive. Lights up, goes into boot cycle but can't find the drive. Hrm. Stick a boot CD in. It boots. Drive is still invisible. Pull the drive, stick it in an external case. Drive reads good. Just for a lark, see if the laptop will boot from the external drive. It does. Stick it back in. No boot. But now there's an error message, and the system profile has an unknown device on the SATA bus.
Pry the drive out again. And THIS time I notice the other side of the connector, on the new mobo, is loose.
So I tried to re-solder it (and I am NOT set up for soldering SMDs). No joy, but remember...it doesn't work, and I really can't make it worse at this point. So back to eBay, order a new mobo, and stick the drive back in the external case again to boot from that and rescue some files I needed to work on.
New mobo shows up. Now I'm really out of my comfort zone...have to pull and swap a laptop motherboard. But as it turns out, it is just like a drive....just even more screws, even more connectors, even more little things that get caught and have to be carefully wiggled free. The boot CD is still in the drive and when I power up, it boots from that. But still no HD!
At this point I'm firmly in repair mode, though; I booted with the back off, half the component still uninstalled, and bits of sticky tape holding it together in lieu of putting all those fumbly little torx screws back in. So...the one thing I haven't swapped recently is the bit of cable that leads from the HD to the mobo. I swap this. It boots! Finish the smoke test, box it back up.
And since I've got a pretty good idea what's going on now, I stick the mobo from the second computer (the one with a busted SATA connector) into the original laptop (the one with the charcoal-colored motherboard from which all the magic smoke has leaked). Stick a spare HD I have lying around into the external case...and after some struggled, convince the boot CD to install a clean system on to it. I promptly christen the reborn laptop "Ood Laptop," as it is now carrying its brains outside its head, on the end of a gray USB cable.
And it is now time to eat.
Two laptop computers
A power supply for same
A pair of headphones
A half-dozen wireless microphone elements
A portable heater
Just got some more parts in the mail and the next half-dozen wireless microphone elements are on the table. If I can find time around making microphone bags, creating sound effects, setting up speakers, programming the sound board...
As I struggle to make the new novel move foreword, I realize the DIY philosophy is important to me, and is going to be a part of it. Heck...the protagonist of my first novel was a machinist, and even though it wasn't that kind of story she managed a couple of nice hacks (including a McGuyverish improvisation at the climax that almost got her killed but ended up saving the day.) And this works in with my desire to show some of the Bay Area, where I live, and some of the circles of people that interest me. Maker's Faire. The Crucible. Boutique stomp-box makers. Luthiers and Early Instrument builders. Experimental music.
Theater is after all my vocation and there has always been an element of improvisation and re-purposing and dumpster diving in it. It is not at all unusual to have to do something that properly belongs in a trade or craft -- bending wrought iron, painting in oils, running plumbing, making hair appliances, etc. -- and not having the funds to get a professional. So we end up being self-taught stitchers, electricians, welders, woodworkers, and so on. And not infrequently a show will bring you in contact with new materials and new skills you have to pick up (usually quickly!)
I am not up to writing an essay on the DIY philosophy right now. I've got a cold, collapsed on the sofa after a meeting and only woke up because I am starving. I have until the saffron rice is ready to write this.
But let me try to share a couple of things you should have to be a Maker.
1) A careful confidence. You start with assuming the thing is possible. That you have the mind to learn the skills, that your fingers are sensitive enough to carry them out. The more different kinds of things you learn to do, the more this confidence that you CAN pick up a new skill will grow.
2) I said "careful" for a reason. You also need humility. You respect that there are people with skills and you commit to learn from them. You also must have a healthy doubt in your own ability. Recognize your limitations, recognize your comfort zone, and more than anything else be aware that many of these things can maim or kill you. It is not saying too much that you must assume there are hidden dangers you haven't even imagined, and you treat the process with respect and look for mentors to try to show you where those dangers are.
3) Look forward to failure. Many people never attempt things because they don't want to fail. Many people will hang on to a broken thing, never daring to try to fix it for fear they'll make it worse. Word; if it don't work, and it's too expensive to take it to the shop, YOU CAN'T MAKE IT WORSE. You can't get less than useless. At the absolute worst case you will still learn something from opening it up (even if the thing you learn is "Hey, those things can't be repaired, can they!" Be aware of failure, be prepared for it, intend to learn from it. Maybe the first throw will be awful. If you studied why it went bad, the next throw is merely bad. And, eventually, you either make a pot you like...or you realize pots aren't for you, but in the process you've added more general knowledge and manual dexterity. Which brings us to:
4) The more you do, the better you get. You will never be perfect. You will never know it all. Start small if you can, work up. With each project you will not only get better, you will become a better judge of how big a project you can attempt.
And this essay is already longer than I intended, but some examples from this week:
The power supply. It had a loose wire. It sometimes worked if you jiggled it. It was long out of warranty, and expensive enough to be worth investing a few hours trying to repair. The fact that it sometimes worked meant that, in all probability, it was all in good working order (except for the one loose connection.) So the first step is, as with all repairs, crack the case and look inside.
I don't think that case was supposed to be opened. But since it was broken already, I couldn't make it worse. I took a razor saw and cut it apart. Inside, the problem was nicely obvious; the plug wiggled, and there was a nasty black mark of the sparks from a loose connection. Clean with some emery paper, re-solder, squeeze the case back together along the cut line, and drip CA glue into the crack. It may not look quite as nice, but it works as well as if it just came from the factory.
Actually, better. While I was inside, I slapped a meter on it and verified it put out 24 VDC in operation. Looked up the right ballast resistor and purchased a bright green LED. Soldered up the LED and confirmed you could see it through the case when lit. And soldered it inside before sealing the case. Now the power supply has a light to tell me if it is plugged in or not.
Headphones. One muff stopped working. Manipulated it, and it worked for a moment then stopped again. Again, obviously a loose wire. Plugged them in, turned up the volume, and carefully felt along the entire exposed wire that went from one side to the other. The bad spot was inside a swivel. Fortunately, I have a bunch of scraps of similar wire around from repairing all those wireless microphones. The only issue was feeding the new wire through all the little plastic parts.
Heater. Stopped giving heat, but the fan still works. Had a three-position switch; fan only, low heat, high heat. Pulled it apart. On visual examination the heater element looks fine. No loose wires, no discoloration. Traced the circuit; the thermostat and safety switch are "upstream" of the fan. That is; there is nothing specific to the heater element that might be broken. Except for the switch. So as an experiment, cut the wires and wired the element in parallel with the fan. It works. So went back, spliced the heater on to the first switch position (I don't need a "fan only" setting anyhow) and boxed it back up.
Laptops. My working laptop went dark suddenly. Tried to restart, wiggled the power cord. Magic smoke came out. This is not a good sign. The thing about the laptop is, I worked my way up to it. I did RAM a long time ago -- that's easy. Getting to the HD is a little tougher; you have to open up the back. Swapping the optical drive was next; that's even more connections you have to remove. Each time, you see, was a small step beyond my current comfort level.
Popped the keyboard and, yes, a nice scorched area on the motherboard and several of the SMD components are toast. This is not going to start again. Assuming the HD and other parts are still good, I went on eBay and found a "stripped" laptop of similar model (no HD, no RAM, etc.)
Swap the parts over, including my good optical drive. Lights up, goes into boot cycle but can't find the drive. Hrm. Stick a boot CD in. It boots. Drive is still invisible. Pull the drive, stick it in an external case. Drive reads good. Just for a lark, see if the laptop will boot from the external drive. It does. Stick it back in. No boot. But now there's an error message, and the system profile has an unknown device on the SATA bus.
Pry the drive out again. And THIS time I notice the other side of the connector, on the new mobo, is loose.
So I tried to re-solder it (and I am NOT set up for soldering SMDs). No joy, but remember...it doesn't work, and I really can't make it worse at this point. So back to eBay, order a new mobo, and stick the drive back in the external case again to boot from that and rescue some files I needed to work on.
New mobo shows up. Now I'm really out of my comfort zone...have to pull and swap a laptop motherboard. But as it turns out, it is just like a drive....just even more screws, even more connectors, even more little things that get caught and have to be carefully wiggled free. The boot CD is still in the drive and when I power up, it boots from that. But still no HD!
At this point I'm firmly in repair mode, though; I booted with the back off, half the component still uninstalled, and bits of sticky tape holding it together in lieu of putting all those fumbly little torx screws back in. So...the one thing I haven't swapped recently is the bit of cable that leads from the HD to the mobo. I swap this. It boots! Finish the smoke test, box it back up.
And since I've got a pretty good idea what's going on now, I stick the mobo from the second computer (the one with a busted SATA connector) into the original laptop (the one with the charcoal-colored motherboard from which all the magic smoke has leaked). Stick a spare HD I have lying around into the external case...and after some struggled, convince the boot CD to install a clean system on to it. I promptly christen the reborn laptop "Ood Laptop," as it is now carrying its brains outside its head, on the end of a gray USB cable.
And it is now time to eat.
Monday, June 20, 2011
The "Cert"
In Evan S. Connel's book "The White Lantern" he mentions an old medieval ship-building document called a "Cert." According to Connel, this was a chunk of wood with the basic dimensions of the ship on it, which also functioned as a contract to build.
I have not been able to find verification of this, but it is such a handy concept I've used it since. To wit; the idea of boiling down a complex project to a set of numbers that, if executed according to the ordinary standards and practices of the craft, are sufficient expression of the artistic intent.
As an antithesis, let me quote from Howard Bay (Stage Design, Drama Book Publishers 1974):
Lighting folk accumulate too many pieces of paper. Frustrated engineers unable to find an excuse for flashing a slide rule, they make up for it with complicated documents. This pseudo-organization leads to chaos at dress rehearsal time. With a full complement of actors, singers, dancers, musicians and stagehands in suspended animation, the light designer amidst his squawk box, headphones, and little beaver assistants with containers of coffee, is scrambling between blueprints, board diagrams, focusing charts, clipboard and cue sheets struggling to find one light and match it up with the one switch that turns it on and off.
Paperwork is good. Paperwork is indeed a great thing. But the worst error of confusing map with territory is thinking that lots of paperwork is a substitute for lots of actual work. And the second error is trying to make the map too detailed, too filled with what should be clear in context.
If it is sanely possible, there should be a few, even one, key piece of paper that is small enough to fold into a pocket and take on stage, and simple enough so a single glance is enough to tell you which microphone is which (or which light, or whatever). In the middle of a song is not a good time to be squinting at fine print on an elaborate diagram!
The other thing we are trying to do here is leverage skills (of your A2, of yourself), and contextual knowledge, and to thus escape duplicative effort. What you want is not a sheet that tells a completely inexperienced hand how to screw a mic clip onto a stand, but a sheet that will either remind you of what you planned (or what you already did but already forgot), or tell an experienced hand the basics of what you want done.
Much depends in the latter on the actual experience and rapport your A2 shares with you. Some wireless microphone wranglers, I can just say "ear, hair, hair, ear" and they'll put the mics where I want them. Others, I have to instruct them more; they may have learned bad habits of taping mics too low, for instance, so I need to train them to my preferences before I can say "My usual ear position" to them.
And some depends on the flow of the gig itself. Plenty of times I've been at one end or the other of the signal chain and the only thing we've shared is "I put a mic on the kick and there's one overhead on the hihat side." We basically hope that the other person will have either done about what we would have done, OR will have done something that their experience tells them works. And when we hit sound check, a bit of EQ will probably be enough to make it work for this show.
Because at least when it gets to paperwork, sure you can try to spell things out, but describing exactly how a kick mic is aimed is something you really have to see. So the most detailed I will normally get is "Oktava on the fiddle, looking down at the face 6-8" just above the bridge."
And when I put it on the "cert," on the diagram I will refer to during the performance and also the next time I set up that act, this is what I will put:
Okay: The above is a fake; I drew that one for this blog entry. But that is the basic principle. The numbers are usually channel numbers, and when possible my channel numbers match snake numbers as well (if not, I might notate it on the rough plot as well).
I've identified the microphones that matter most; anything else is probably pulled as needed. But let's look at the IMPLIED data. First off, the mic'd cab means we probably need a short mic stand. The overheads, on the other hand, are going to require tripod boom stands for stability and placement. The DI will require a pair of quarter-inch cables to connect to the keyboard.
And, really, a good audio person would probably guess that we wanted the only dedicated kick mic in the house, so would put the D6 there unless I specified something different. Same logic for the cab mic.
This doesn't show the exact placement, of course, or settings on the DI (ground lifted? Pad in or out?) or whether roll-off or pad is engaged on the mics. But this is the glory of standards, again. A good A2 can guess, and I will probably remember, and even if we get it wrong the default is good enough and probably won't kill the show.
But now for something completely different:
This is what I call a "Rose" diagram, after the compass rose found on a map. This is a diagram that encapsulates the heart of a lighting design. Although there are many nuances of specials, of area plot, of cuts and edge and so forth, this is where to me the heart of the concept lies; in the interaction of colors and angles.
I grew up on the Rosco book so most of these are Rosco colors. Why X as a prefix? Because when I started, the last sheets of Roscolene were leaving inventory, and Roscolux was taking over! Fortunately, this happened long before the Lee and Gam books (and the even less-used Cinecolor book) needed to have unique prefixes.
While I am working out the lighting scheme I'll often have several different roses, one for each basic "look." This is a combined rose. The lavenders from the left are always balancing the key, but daytime scenes are in the Rosco 08 and darker scenes are in the Rosco 61. Same for the twin back lights; the Lee 119 for night, the Rosco 14 for day. The x66 comes slanting across as moonlight in one scene, and the x35 in an extremely low angle for dawn in another.
The angles of the diagram are the angles relative to the acting areas. The length of the lines has a rough correspondence with the height angle (the angle to the floor). Notations are given on a couple of them for potentially unusual instrument choices.
With nothing but this rose, I could re-create 80% of a lighting design I'd completely forgotten about. And a different designer, given this to work from, could still get within 60-70% of my original intent. Because matters such as how much coverage per instrument -- hence how many areas in the area plot -- are as much photometrics as they are design. Hang positions are dictated by available pipes and position of scenery.
Not to say there isn't a great deal of artistic choice in all of these matters, but the fact remains that the essentials are in this diagram. Unfortunately, I do not have a copy at the moment of an even more useful scribble; the Magic Sheet. This is the sheet that, in conjunction with the rose as a key, links the area hit by each light in a system with the channel controlling it.
(As an aside...I used to have strange conversations at one house when a designer hadn't provided detailed paperwork and they realized during dimmer check that a light wasn't working. The point I could never get across is that if the rest of the lights are working, you know what the system should look like. Since you know that, you should have a good idea where the bad light physically is. Or, easier; since you know the channel that isn't coming up, and the dimmer number is in the physical patch, all you have to do is trace the cable from that dimmer to find the light you wanted.)
((Or, to make things even simpler, do a Broadway check and fix the one light that isn't lit!))
When I'm working out details of a design there are some elements the rose is not as suited for. It still is the best place to refer back to solve problems, but sometimes a different diagram makes it easier to visualize the solution in the first place:
In this simulated diagram, the left side shows how I wanted a rim light effect on the actors, with their shadow sides filled somewhat with diffuse lavender light (the x54) and an overall fill of deep blue (the Lee 119). The greenish-blue x66 also shines through a gobo to cast window patterns on the floor.
In the outdoor scenes, no gobos, but the street lamps are given practical bulbs and have boosters that throw pools of amber at their feet.
And some time, I'll have more to say about lighting design. I'm missing it a bit myself; haven't had a show for about a year.
I have not been able to find verification of this, but it is such a handy concept I've used it since. To wit; the idea of boiling down a complex project to a set of numbers that, if executed according to the ordinary standards and practices of the craft, are sufficient expression of the artistic intent.
As an antithesis, let me quote from Howard Bay (Stage Design, Drama Book Publishers 1974):
Lighting folk accumulate too many pieces of paper. Frustrated engineers unable to find an excuse for flashing a slide rule, they make up for it with complicated documents. This pseudo-organization leads to chaos at dress rehearsal time. With a full complement of actors, singers, dancers, musicians and stagehands in suspended animation, the light designer amidst his squawk box, headphones, and little beaver assistants with containers of coffee, is scrambling between blueprints, board diagrams, focusing charts, clipboard and cue sheets struggling to find one light and match it up with the one switch that turns it on and off.
Paperwork is good. Paperwork is indeed a great thing. But the worst error of confusing map with territory is thinking that lots of paperwork is a substitute for lots of actual work. And the second error is trying to make the map too detailed, too filled with what should be clear in context.
If it is sanely possible, there should be a few, even one, key piece of paper that is small enough to fold into a pocket and take on stage, and simple enough so a single glance is enough to tell you which microphone is which (or which light, or whatever). In the middle of a song is not a good time to be squinting at fine print on an elaborate diagram!
The other thing we are trying to do here is leverage skills (of your A2, of yourself), and contextual knowledge, and to thus escape duplicative effort. What you want is not a sheet that tells a completely inexperienced hand how to screw a mic clip onto a stand, but a sheet that will either remind you of what you planned (or what you already did but already forgot), or tell an experienced hand the basics of what you want done.
Much depends in the latter on the actual experience and rapport your A2 shares with you. Some wireless microphone wranglers, I can just say "ear, hair, hair, ear" and they'll put the mics where I want them. Others, I have to instruct them more; they may have learned bad habits of taping mics too low, for instance, so I need to train them to my preferences before I can say "My usual ear position" to them.
And some depends on the flow of the gig itself. Plenty of times I've been at one end or the other of the signal chain and the only thing we've shared is "I put a mic on the kick and there's one overhead on the hihat side." We basically hope that the other person will have either done about what we would have done, OR will have done something that their experience tells them works. And when we hit sound check, a bit of EQ will probably be enough to make it work for this show.
Because at least when it gets to paperwork, sure you can try to spell things out, but describing exactly how a kick mic is aimed is something you really have to see. So the most detailed I will normally get is "Oktava on the fiddle, looking down at the face 6-8" just above the bridge."
And when I put it on the "cert," on the diagram I will refer to during the performance and also the next time I set up that act, this is what I will put:
Okay: The above is a fake; I drew that one for this blog entry. But that is the basic principle. The numbers are usually channel numbers, and when possible my channel numbers match snake numbers as well (if not, I might notate it on the rough plot as well).
I've identified the microphones that matter most; anything else is probably pulled as needed. But let's look at the IMPLIED data. First off, the mic'd cab means we probably need a short mic stand. The overheads, on the other hand, are going to require tripod boom stands for stability and placement. The DI will require a pair of quarter-inch cables to connect to the keyboard.
And, really, a good audio person would probably guess that we wanted the only dedicated kick mic in the house, so would put the D6 there unless I specified something different. Same logic for the cab mic.
This doesn't show the exact placement, of course, or settings on the DI (ground lifted? Pad in or out?) or whether roll-off or pad is engaged on the mics. But this is the glory of standards, again. A good A2 can guess, and I will probably remember, and even if we get it wrong the default is good enough and probably won't kill the show.
But now for something completely different:
This is what I call a "Rose" diagram, after the compass rose found on a map. This is a diagram that encapsulates the heart of a lighting design. Although there are many nuances of specials, of area plot, of cuts and edge and so forth, this is where to me the heart of the concept lies; in the interaction of colors and angles.
I grew up on the Rosco book so most of these are Rosco colors. Why X as a prefix? Because when I started, the last sheets of Roscolene were leaving inventory, and Roscolux was taking over! Fortunately, this happened long before the Lee and Gam books (and the even less-used Cinecolor book) needed to have unique prefixes.
While I am working out the lighting scheme I'll often have several different roses, one for each basic "look." This is a combined rose. The lavenders from the left are always balancing the key, but daytime scenes are in the Rosco 08 and darker scenes are in the Rosco 61. Same for the twin back lights; the Lee 119 for night, the Rosco 14 for day. The x66 comes slanting across as moonlight in one scene, and the x35 in an extremely low angle for dawn in another.
The angles of the diagram are the angles relative to the acting areas. The length of the lines has a rough correspondence with the height angle (the angle to the floor). Notations are given on a couple of them for potentially unusual instrument choices.
With nothing but this rose, I could re-create 80% of a lighting design I'd completely forgotten about. And a different designer, given this to work from, could still get within 60-70% of my original intent. Because matters such as how much coverage per instrument -- hence how many areas in the area plot -- are as much photometrics as they are design. Hang positions are dictated by available pipes and position of scenery.
Not to say there isn't a great deal of artistic choice in all of these matters, but the fact remains that the essentials are in this diagram. Unfortunately, I do not have a copy at the moment of an even more useful scribble; the Magic Sheet. This is the sheet that, in conjunction with the rose as a key, links the area hit by each light in a system with the channel controlling it.
(As an aside...I used to have strange conversations at one house when a designer hadn't provided detailed paperwork and they realized during dimmer check that a light wasn't working. The point I could never get across is that if the rest of the lights are working, you know what the system should look like. Since you know that, you should have a good idea where the bad light physically is. Or, easier; since you know the channel that isn't coming up, and the dimmer number is in the physical patch, all you have to do is trace the cable from that dimmer to find the light you wanted.)
((Or, to make things even simpler, do a Broadway check and fix the one light that isn't lit!))
When I'm working out details of a design there are some elements the rose is not as suited for. It still is the best place to refer back to solve problems, but sometimes a different diagram makes it easier to visualize the solution in the first place:
In this simulated diagram, the left side shows how I wanted a rim light effect on the actors, with their shadow sides filled somewhat with diffuse lavender light (the x54) and an overall fill of deep blue (the Lee 119). The greenish-blue x66 also shines through a gobo to cast window patterns on the floor.
In the outdoor scenes, no gobos, but the street lamps are given practical bulbs and have boosters that throw pools of amber at their feet.
And some time, I'll have more to say about lighting design. I'm missing it a bit myself; haven't had a show for about a year.
Sunday, June 19, 2011
Redundancy
I believe in back-ups. I believe in redundancy. I used to say about parachuting, that you carried a reserve 'chute for when your main failed -- not "if."
I had a little recording session recently. My original plan was to do what I usually do; record on to the hard disk of my laptop via a firewire interphase, and carry a minidisc recorder as back-up.
At the last minute the venue changed; they would be on the main stage. So my modified plan was to run through the sound board into the firewire etc., and use the ability of the sound board to record an mp3 onto a flash drive as back-up.
But they looked like they were already starting when I arrived. So I quickly stuck a new battery in the minidisc and double-stick-taped it to a mic stand and turned it on. Then instead of mucking with the sound board I just pulled a power cable and set up laptop and firewire right on stage near the talent.
Unfortunately, my usual laptop had suffered a magic smoke leak earlier in the week. I'd loaded the drivers on to a borrowed replacement, but now that I needed it, it wouldn't recognize the firewire interface.
So back to Plan B. Grab the mic leads, run them over to the stage snake, turn on the house board, slap a USB thumb drive in the slot and assign the channels to record. Clean signal, the chip is recording, all looks good. The talent is ready to start and I give them the thumb's up. Made it with seconds to spare!
Over the next five or ten minutes I pack up the extraneous gear on stage, haul the laptop back to the sound board, and jigger up an adapter to make it echo what the USB drive is doing (but at higher audio quality).
The session ends. I pop the thumb drive......and it is blank!
So #1, the 48 kHz recording to hard drive, is missing the first ten minutes. #2, the mp3 recording, is completely blank.
But #3, the third recording, my little minidisc recorder, is still humming away where I placed it at the start of the session. And the quality is acceptable.
Once again, having not just ONE backup, but TWO backups saved the day.
One of the tricks to this is that each backup should be as independent as possible. In fighter airplanes, they will have two sets of control runs and one will be electrical and one hydraulic. In Army demolitions they'd have one electric firing chain and one chemical (aka time fuse).
The worst mistake you can make is to create a pinch point. I once saw a bit of rigging where the chain that backed up the terminal connections was attached to the same hardpoint as the rest. That's not a backup; that's just more stuff to fall "when" the hardpoint fails.
In my system above, there was no mic splitter. Whether the firewire or the sound board was first in the chain, if that item failed both recorders failed. However, sound boards are robust. It is much more likely to have the microphone fail, or the recorder fail. So hanging a backup microphone or using a backup recorder makes sense -- duplicating the board, not so much. Still, having the secondary backup as a completely independent system (the minidisc had its own mic, its own wire, even its own power supply) is a good thing.
When you are running sound effects off a computer it pays to have a backup. The easiest backup is to have to key cues on CD. The downside here is that you are going to miss a cue or two as you switch over.
Some people run two complete computers, kept in synchronization. So far I haven't seen anyone automate the switch-over, but the theory is that if anything in the chain fails you throw a couple of switches and everything from computer through audio interface is swapped out.
And in any case you have an entire working copy saved in a media that allows it to be loaded on to a replacement computer. Qlab is very nice for this; it will create a complete self-contained show backup with the "Bundle" command.
In the cast of wireless mics, professional shows (well, any show that can afford it) will stick two microphones on the leads. One pack is the primary, the other is switched to if there is any problem. It is however often difficult to find enough working packs and gaps in the RF band to fit that backup in!
Even in your basic band on stage, it helps to have another microphone or two you can quickly move into place. This leads to several of my basic rules of stringing cable to an onstage band:
1) Always designate a spare snake channel.
2) If there is a cable run that is hard to get to, always include at least one spare cable in it.
3) Set up a spare mic prepped and on a stand so the entire thing can be run out to the band by your A2 (assuming you have one!)
Of course there are a couple related basics:
1) Don't tape down until you've checked for signal.
2) Don't dress out all slack; leave slack at the business end. If you tape it down, you WILL end up having to move it.
3) Label. Things get moved and unplugged.
And that's all I have time for this morning.
I've been promising some more technically detailed posts. I have a few pages of stage plots and mic plots and so forth to scan at some point. I don't know what the audience is at this blog yet, though. I see some fairly technical questions ending up here via Google searches, but I have no idea if this is a place where they might get the help they are looking for.
I need a bit of feedback (the good kind, not the audio kind!) I'd like to know where I should be taking this in the future.
I had a little recording session recently. My original plan was to do what I usually do; record on to the hard disk of my laptop via a firewire interphase, and carry a minidisc recorder as back-up.
At the last minute the venue changed; they would be on the main stage. So my modified plan was to run through the sound board into the firewire etc., and use the ability of the sound board to record an mp3 onto a flash drive as back-up.
But they looked like they were already starting when I arrived. So I quickly stuck a new battery in the minidisc and double-stick-taped it to a mic stand and turned it on. Then instead of mucking with the sound board I just pulled a power cable and set up laptop and firewire right on stage near the talent.
Unfortunately, my usual laptop had suffered a magic smoke leak earlier in the week. I'd loaded the drivers on to a borrowed replacement, but now that I needed it, it wouldn't recognize the firewire interface.
So back to Plan B. Grab the mic leads, run them over to the stage snake, turn on the house board, slap a USB thumb drive in the slot and assign the channels to record. Clean signal, the chip is recording, all looks good. The talent is ready to start and I give them the thumb's up. Made it with seconds to spare!
Over the next five or ten minutes I pack up the extraneous gear on stage, haul the laptop back to the sound board, and jigger up an adapter to make it echo what the USB drive is doing (but at higher audio quality).
The session ends. I pop the thumb drive......and it is blank!
So #1, the 48 kHz recording to hard drive, is missing the first ten minutes. #2, the mp3 recording, is completely blank.
But #3, the third recording, my little minidisc recorder, is still humming away where I placed it at the start of the session. And the quality is acceptable.
Once again, having not just ONE backup, but TWO backups saved the day.
One of the tricks to this is that each backup should be as independent as possible. In fighter airplanes, they will have two sets of control runs and one will be electrical and one hydraulic. In Army demolitions they'd have one electric firing chain and one chemical (aka time fuse).
The worst mistake you can make is to create a pinch point. I once saw a bit of rigging where the chain that backed up the terminal connections was attached to the same hardpoint as the rest. That's not a backup; that's just more stuff to fall "when" the hardpoint fails.
In my system above, there was no mic splitter. Whether the firewire or the sound board was first in the chain, if that item failed both recorders failed. However, sound boards are robust. It is much more likely to have the microphone fail, or the recorder fail. So hanging a backup microphone or using a backup recorder makes sense -- duplicating the board, not so much. Still, having the secondary backup as a completely independent system (the minidisc had its own mic, its own wire, even its own power supply) is a good thing.
When you are running sound effects off a computer it pays to have a backup. The easiest backup is to have to key cues on CD. The downside here is that you are going to miss a cue or two as you switch over.
Some people run two complete computers, kept in synchronization. So far I haven't seen anyone automate the switch-over, but the theory is that if anything in the chain fails you throw a couple of switches and everything from computer through audio interface is swapped out.
And in any case you have an entire working copy saved in a media that allows it to be loaded on to a replacement computer. Qlab is very nice for this; it will create a complete self-contained show backup with the "Bundle" command.
In the cast of wireless mics, professional shows (well, any show that can afford it) will stick two microphones on the leads. One pack is the primary, the other is switched to if there is any problem. It is however often difficult to find enough working packs and gaps in the RF band to fit that backup in!
Even in your basic band on stage, it helps to have another microphone or two you can quickly move into place. This leads to several of my basic rules of stringing cable to an onstage band:
1) Always designate a spare snake channel.
2) If there is a cable run that is hard to get to, always include at least one spare cable in it.
3) Set up a spare mic prepped and on a stand so the entire thing can be run out to the band by your A2 (assuming you have one!)
Of course there are a couple related basics:
1) Don't tape down until you've checked for signal.
2) Don't dress out all slack; leave slack at the business end. If you tape it down, you WILL end up having to move it.
3) Label. Things get moved and unplugged.
And that's all I have time for this morning.
I've been promising some more technically detailed posts. I have a few pages of stage plots and mic plots and so forth to scan at some point. I don't know what the audience is at this blog yet, though. I see some fairly technical questions ending up here via Google searches, but I have no idea if this is a place where they might get the help they are looking for.
I need a bit of feedback (the good kind, not the audio kind!) I'd like to know where I should be taking this in the future.
Friday, June 17, 2011
I Hate Wireless Mics
When I started theater, it was as a carpenter, working towards set design. When I got sidelined into electrics it was largely lighting, and when sound become the major part, it was sound design and music composition.
But the last several years the growing field for me has been reinforcement of musicals. A little FOH mixing, a little sound effects, but most of the hours have been dealing with wireless mics.
I bring three skills to the table that are causing people to call me back. One is skill with sound. A more important one is skill in maintaining, fixing, and often doing spectacular last-minute improvisations to keep those sensitive fragile expensive things running. The last is being calm as inevitably some of them fail anyhow in messy and noisy ways.
A truism said a long time ago; the best wireless microphone made is almost as good as a microphone on a wire.
On the microphone side, these are extremely tiny electret condensers; ultra-fragile and essentially impossible to repair (even rewiring the connector takes nearly an hour of work under a bright light and a magnifying glass). And to help them hide on an actor, the wires are also thin and fragile. But we take these fragile, expensive little bits of precision audio and we stick them with tape to a sweaty actor who proceeds to jump around on stage, then tear the entire thing off in a hurry for a quick change (and oft as not leaves it in a wadded heap on a dressing room table).
On the transmitter side, another piece of precision electronics strapped to a sweaty actor, getting sat on and hit, getting the cord bent and yanked on...and it is a micro-power transmitter, putting out barely more power than an RFID tag. Which means the poor RF signal has to fight its way through the bags of salt water surrounding it (aka actors), the humming ballasts of lighting and dimmers, the electronic hash of the typical slapdash theater wiring, skeins of data cables and monitors and who knows what else hashing up the air with RF noise.
But the worse part is, that theaters have never been rich places, and with the current economy every possible (false) savings is being applied. Meaning equipment that should have been re-conditioned or retired long ago is asked to somehow make it through another show, and another, and another.
I've got packs that have drifted so far off frequency (with aging crystals) that they now show up on different channels. I've got elements so corroded inside they sound like a cell phone stuffed inside a pillow.
And it is the talent to somehow keep these things running and to do horrible, horrible things to the signal chain to hide the poor quality and try to control the errant noises, that is getting me work these days.
This is not helped by the fact that the theaters are often too cheap to hire an operator. So whereas the Set Designer and the Lighting Designer can go out to dinner on Opening Night then take the weekend off (and not come back until Strike), I am working each and every show.
Which usually means sitting at the board trying to keep from developing an ulcer as I wait for the next failure. And staying alert and hyper-aware and ready to leap into action to do whatever it is I can brainstorm at that moment to get the sound back up and continue the show. There are no good nights. There are only nights with the fewest (and least obvious) number of failures.
Needless to say, I don't fall asleep easily after those shows. I am usually so wired I can't relax until near dawn.
Sound has always been the end of the business where the most visible error to the audience is achieved with the least possible effort. In lighting, often as not you can accidentally turn on or off a light and most of the audience will never even know it. In sound, you can hit that same one button by accident and the entire audience will know instantly. And hate you for it, as the female soloists' microphone goes dead right in the most intense part of her song, or a screech of feedback erupts from the pit, or a quiet moment on stage is rudely interrupted by a cab company dispatching a car.
Vast, too, is the distance between what you could do with that singer and that band with good gear, in a controlled studio environment, and what you have to make do with because of the practicalities of getting through an entire show. It means there is a terrible urge to tweak and nuance, to adjust EQ minutely and try to find the magic compressor settings and get the exact amount of decay on the reverb to make that moment of that song sound as good as possible -- knowing full well that in the context of the screeching, failing microphone of the next song, no-one will ever notice or care.
It's like detailing the body of a car with bad brakes and an engine that only fires on two cylinders.
It is thankless work, of course. Everyone notices the failures. The best mention you can get in a review is not to be mentioned at all. Each mistake and each failure makes you look bad (and hurts the show), but the lack of obvious error is rarely remarked upon. When all goes right, the show is merely transparent. The band plays, the actors sing. Only when the signal chain drops (or worse, spits out bad noises) does the illusion that you are "just listening to the music" fall away.
At the very, very best, the directors and the other people you are on the production with will understand why a mic dropped and commiserate. Which is only a small help when you are going to be beating yourself up over that dropped mic until you finally fall asleep at 4:00 AM.
The less clue-full abound, however. But it all descends down to that error of microphones as MSG (just add mics and everything sounds great). And to an inability to understand how human perception adjusts to dynamics. No, I know it doesn't seem loud to you at the moment, but that is because you are used to it AND THAT DRUM IS FREAKING LOUD!
You get these conversations where a music director or artistic director will listen to the cranking band, and turn to you and say "The band isn't THAT loud. Why can't you turn the microphones higher? Is it that the speakers aren't big enough?"
No, the speakers are big enough. The issue is almost never that you can't get the sheer volume. The issue is that you can't achieve that volume without screaming feedback. And the subtler issue following that is that even if you could get the volume without the feedback you wouldn't get intelligibility. Oh, yes, and even if you could do all these things, the band would just compensate by playing louder.
The worst of all possible worlds is when you've got a kid cast, or untrained adults, and everyone looks to the magic of wireless microphones as if technology can somehow transform mumbling little Johnny into a source of clear song that can power over a nineteen-piece live orchestra.
With these sensitive, touchy, and often sheerly ugly sounding bits of technology, you would be best to have them running at very low levels, doing nothing but subtle enhancement. But, no. You are forced to bring them up to ear-splitting levels, and insane amounts of amplification of every bit of noise that comes down that long and fragile signal chain.
When Little Johnny is looking at 173 dB of amplification of the electrical signal, and 90 dB of the actual audio pressure, the tiny movement of microphone against cheek becomes as loud as a snare drum. Tiny electrical charges formed by the movement of his wool sweatshirt are amplified into crackling like a police radio. And when a cable tears and the phantom power for that little electret element is grounded at a full 5 V*O*L*T*S potential, it cracks like a cannon at the climax of the 1812 Overture, sending every meter into the redline and physically tearing the cones out of your speakers if your limiters didn't react fast enough.
And when Little Sally's mic conks out in the middle of the quarter, her unamplified voice vanishes like the Minnow sailing into the Bermuda Triangle. And when Little Sammy stops saying his dialog in a breathy little whisper and gives a full-voiced shout during the chase scene, every microphone within twenty feet peaks.
Sure...you put on extra-strong compression and peak limiting, you notch for every last possible speck of gain, you EQ everything but the most essential frequencies out, and you watch the mics like a hawk, but even if and when everything goes well and you don't have songs peppered by the additional percussion of actors fumbling at their mics because the tape itches, and amplified gossip from the actress who was SUPPOSED to be on stage but got involved in an interesting conversation in the dressing room instead, you end up with sucky sonic quality and a performance that sounds like it was done by mechanized dolls inside a tin hut recorded over a cell phone.
So I've got coming up, a show with a reasonable set of mid-range packs in decent repair that are not, unfortunately, paired with any elements that still work properly (and has millions of quick changes and everyone in the cast has masks and hats and other appliances), and another show in which some of the packs are as old as I am, NONE of them can be trusted to work for the length of a single performance, we don't have enough to cover the cast, and the company is so short they even stiff me on fresh batteries.
So, no, I'm not in my happy space right now. Hence the rant.
But the last several years the growing field for me has been reinforcement of musicals. A little FOH mixing, a little sound effects, but most of the hours have been dealing with wireless mics.
I bring three skills to the table that are causing people to call me back. One is skill with sound. A more important one is skill in maintaining, fixing, and often doing spectacular last-minute improvisations to keep those sensitive fragile expensive things running. The last is being calm as inevitably some of them fail anyhow in messy and noisy ways.
A truism said a long time ago; the best wireless microphone made is almost as good as a microphone on a wire.
On the microphone side, these are extremely tiny electret condensers; ultra-fragile and essentially impossible to repair (even rewiring the connector takes nearly an hour of work under a bright light and a magnifying glass). And to help them hide on an actor, the wires are also thin and fragile. But we take these fragile, expensive little bits of precision audio and we stick them with tape to a sweaty actor who proceeds to jump around on stage, then tear the entire thing off in a hurry for a quick change (and oft as not leaves it in a wadded heap on a dressing room table).
On the transmitter side, another piece of precision electronics strapped to a sweaty actor, getting sat on and hit, getting the cord bent and yanked on...and it is a micro-power transmitter, putting out barely more power than an RFID tag. Which means the poor RF signal has to fight its way through the bags of salt water surrounding it (aka actors), the humming ballasts of lighting and dimmers, the electronic hash of the typical slapdash theater wiring, skeins of data cables and monitors and who knows what else hashing up the air with RF noise.
But the worse part is, that theaters have never been rich places, and with the current economy every possible (false) savings is being applied. Meaning equipment that should have been re-conditioned or retired long ago is asked to somehow make it through another show, and another, and another.
I've got packs that have drifted so far off frequency (with aging crystals) that they now show up on different channels. I've got elements so corroded inside they sound like a cell phone stuffed inside a pillow.
And it is the talent to somehow keep these things running and to do horrible, horrible things to the signal chain to hide the poor quality and try to control the errant noises, that is getting me work these days.
This is not helped by the fact that the theaters are often too cheap to hire an operator. So whereas the Set Designer and the Lighting Designer can go out to dinner on Opening Night then take the weekend off (and not come back until Strike), I am working each and every show.
Which usually means sitting at the board trying to keep from developing an ulcer as I wait for the next failure. And staying alert and hyper-aware and ready to leap into action to do whatever it is I can brainstorm at that moment to get the sound back up and continue the show. There are no good nights. There are only nights with the fewest (and least obvious) number of failures.
Needless to say, I don't fall asleep easily after those shows. I am usually so wired I can't relax until near dawn.
Sound has always been the end of the business where the most visible error to the audience is achieved with the least possible effort. In lighting, often as not you can accidentally turn on or off a light and most of the audience will never even know it. In sound, you can hit that same one button by accident and the entire audience will know instantly. And hate you for it, as the female soloists' microphone goes dead right in the most intense part of her song, or a screech of feedback erupts from the pit, or a quiet moment on stage is rudely interrupted by a cab company dispatching a car.
Vast, too, is the distance between what you could do with that singer and that band with good gear, in a controlled studio environment, and what you have to make do with because of the practicalities of getting through an entire show. It means there is a terrible urge to tweak and nuance, to adjust EQ minutely and try to find the magic compressor settings and get the exact amount of decay on the reverb to make that moment of that song sound as good as possible -- knowing full well that in the context of the screeching, failing microphone of the next song, no-one will ever notice or care.
It's like detailing the body of a car with bad brakes and an engine that only fires on two cylinders.
It is thankless work, of course. Everyone notices the failures. The best mention you can get in a review is not to be mentioned at all. Each mistake and each failure makes you look bad (and hurts the show), but the lack of obvious error is rarely remarked upon. When all goes right, the show is merely transparent. The band plays, the actors sing. Only when the signal chain drops (or worse, spits out bad noises) does the illusion that you are "just listening to the music" fall away.
At the very, very best, the directors and the other people you are on the production with will understand why a mic dropped and commiserate. Which is only a small help when you are going to be beating yourself up over that dropped mic until you finally fall asleep at 4:00 AM.
The less clue-full abound, however. But it all descends down to that error of microphones as MSG (just add mics and everything sounds great). And to an inability to understand how human perception adjusts to dynamics. No, I know it doesn't seem loud to you at the moment, but that is because you are used to it AND THAT DRUM IS FREAKING LOUD!
You get these conversations where a music director or artistic director will listen to the cranking band, and turn to you and say "The band isn't THAT loud. Why can't you turn the microphones higher? Is it that the speakers aren't big enough?"
No, the speakers are big enough. The issue is almost never that you can't get the sheer volume. The issue is that you can't achieve that volume without screaming feedback. And the subtler issue following that is that even if you could get the volume without the feedback you wouldn't get intelligibility. Oh, yes, and even if you could do all these things, the band would just compensate by playing louder.
The worst of all possible worlds is when you've got a kid cast, or untrained adults, and everyone looks to the magic of wireless microphones as if technology can somehow transform mumbling little Johnny into a source of clear song that can power over a nineteen-piece live orchestra.
With these sensitive, touchy, and often sheerly ugly sounding bits of technology, you would be best to have them running at very low levels, doing nothing but subtle enhancement. But, no. You are forced to bring them up to ear-splitting levels, and insane amounts of amplification of every bit of noise that comes down that long and fragile signal chain.
When Little Johnny is looking at 173 dB of amplification of the electrical signal, and 90 dB of the actual audio pressure, the tiny movement of microphone against cheek becomes as loud as a snare drum. Tiny electrical charges formed by the movement of his wool sweatshirt are amplified into crackling like a police radio. And when a cable tears and the phantom power for that little electret element is grounded at a full 5 V*O*L*T*S potential, it cracks like a cannon at the climax of the 1812 Overture, sending every meter into the redline and physically tearing the cones out of your speakers if your limiters didn't react fast enough.
And when Little Sally's mic conks out in the middle of the quarter, her unamplified voice vanishes like the Minnow sailing into the Bermuda Triangle. And when Little Sammy stops saying his dialog in a breathy little whisper and gives a full-voiced shout during the chase scene, every microphone within twenty feet peaks.
Sure...you put on extra-strong compression and peak limiting, you notch for every last possible speck of gain, you EQ everything but the most essential frequencies out, and you watch the mics like a hawk, but even if and when everything goes well and you don't have songs peppered by the additional percussion of actors fumbling at their mics because the tape itches, and amplified gossip from the actress who was SUPPOSED to be on stage but got involved in an interesting conversation in the dressing room instead, you end up with sucky sonic quality and a performance that sounds like it was done by mechanized dolls inside a tin hut recorded over a cell phone.
So I've got coming up, a show with a reasonable set of mid-range packs in decent repair that are not, unfortunately, paired with any elements that still work properly (and has millions of quick changes and everyone in the cast has masks and hats and other appliances), and another show in which some of the packs are as old as I am, NONE of them can be trusted to work for the length of a single performance, we don't have enough to cover the cast, and the company is so short they even stiff me on fresh batteries.
So, no, I'm not in my happy space right now. Hence the rant.
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