Friday, November 21, 2014

Picture-Heavy Post


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

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

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

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

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

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



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


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






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







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


Monday, November 17, 2014

The Engineer's Dilemma

It take a lot of the fun of quitting if there is an infrastructure involved. Because, if you did good work, the new guy can coast for a while with doing less work, spending less money, and being less of a pain in the ass to the powers that be.

Until the lack of maintenance and the added cruft finally brings down the system -- whether it is a machine, a code base, or a properly set up sound system. But by that time they will have long forgotten you, and management can make up other self-serving excuses why they are forced to go back to spending money and taking what seems excess time and unnecessary concessions.



(Another frequent scenario is when the gear is old, management refuses to authorize any upgrades, and you spend way too much of your time in repairs and patches and work-arounds. Until a new guy shows up via social circles and dazzles them with "unlike your old hire, I am a professional." And the first day on the job, they are upstairs complaining; "How can a professional like me work with such outmoded equipment?" And the stuff you wanted for so many years gets bought for the new guy.)


Saturday, November 15, 2014

Men With Hats

I don't like to wear a hat when mixing because it blocks out some of the sound. Tonight, I mixed the show with the hat on -- because it blocks some of the sound.

Specifically, the way I'm configured now, reverberant sound dominates at the mixing position, but direct sound is prominent in most of the seating (I'm located behind and slightly above the audience, not within them as with a proper FOH position). And the psychoacoustics are drastic; with the reverberant sound in my ears, the mix sounds muffled and boomy. With the reverberant sound partly blocked, the mix sounds clear and possibly over-bright.

It gets even more complex since the band is in a pit under the forestage and being pushed out of stage monitors; their sound has a higher fraction of its energy sent into the reverberant sound of the hall. Which means that using the reverberant sound as a guide, the voices are low in relation to the band. Using just the direct sound as a guide, however, the voices are too loud in relation to the band.

And a hat turns out to be about the right level of partial blockage to give me confidence in the house mix but not steer it in the wrong directions.



I'm also making a conscious effort to keep my head up, looking at the stage. "Everybody look at your hands" is bad advice for an FOH mixer. Dave Rat goes so far as to turn his mixing desk sideways, to further reduce the temptation to bury his head in the knobs and meters. I've got this show programmed and trimmed to where I really don't have to look down very often to confirm I've got the right thing up. And I'm basically done with tweaking EQ, so no need to be staring at the displays during the show, either. Like a lot of recent shows, though, there are so many scenes, I still need to flip script pages occasionally to remind myself of what's coming up.

The eye is one of the stronger guides to localization of sound in an environment with conflicting or confusing sonic clues. Watching the stage helps you hear the show the way the audience does, with your attention pulled into lips and faces and the input of those additional clues to help sort out the sonic mess.



So all to the good...even if it is not, yet, safe to dance.

Thursday, November 13, 2014

Hedgehog Renewed

Right, so no more grinding at home -- I'll do that at TechShop. And no more welding with the flux-core wire welder; I'll take the SBU on the MIG at TechShop and use that instead. A good choice anyhow, as it is more convenient, and MIG allows me to weld on aluminium.

But on impulse I took the grinder to the new piece anyhow, just to see how bad it was. And I'm glad I did. Because I've got enough done now for a trial fit-up.

And that's a real confidence booster:


Feels pretty solid already, even though the receiver is still in two pieces, held together only by the fake bolt. And surprisingly heavy -- this is no Rambo one-handed wield (and I say this as a former M60 gunner, too!)

(And, no, this is not and will never be a functional firearm. For one thing, I lack the gunsmithing skills to achieve the tolerances and the quality of welds, much less little details like heat treating. Even less do I have skills necessary to make a fully legal semi-automatic weapon -- as cool as that might be. In short, I could just barely -- if I chose -- make something dangerous to shoot and illegal to own, and I have no intention of going in that direction.)

(933(r) et al gets rather complicated. The gist is that since 1986 no "new" machine gun can be created or imported into the US, and it is the receiver that makes it a machine gun. What I have right now is still, legally, "steel scrap" and non-regulated. But the instant I complete the last weld, I have by law created a machine gun -- unless I take steps first to make sure that it can not be, in the language of the BATF, "easily converted into" a functional weapon. Which language appears to be defined in practice as "...in about eight hours by someone with a fully-equipped machine shop.")

(Since I'm switching to MIG now, I will be able to weld the fake bolt in place. That should satisfy; someone would have to cut it up at least as much as the original demill in order to salvage it -- and at that point it would legally become scrap again.)

Rack Management

I've been looking at pictures, in the context of some rather snarky articles, about wire management in audio racks. The two racks I'm currently maintaining are far, far, far from that ideal.

The places I work, however, are live theater. We don't set up the same way from show to show. There isn't a standard, there isn't a way of marshaling it all down to a turn-key solution. My racks are untidy because they are works in progress -- even, in progress in the middle of a run.

I've even been tinkering with the house speaker aim points and the processor settings for same. This is due to having to adjust to the sound I am attempting to reinforce itself changing location and character (such as, moving the orchestra into the pit instead of having them onstage or back stage).

At the other venue I support as more-or-less house engineer, we are about to do our first "straight" play after a bunch of musicals. How will we end up changing the new system to better support canned sound effects playback? Perhaps once we've discovered that, I can drag out the clips and wire ties and make something a little more sensible inside that cabinet.

At my primary theater, we're talking about moving the entire rack now. So it's a little early yet to be thinking about nailing things down!

Conversations with Solarii

Well, not really conversations. Lara hardly says anything to them, and you have no playable options to extend those few brief exchanges.

(Well, practically no. Turns out, if you intentionally prolong the fight on the Endurance's deck, or better yet, let Boris get a couple hits in, there's more dialog triggered. Lara will even yell, "Will you shut up!" at one point.)



In any case, I've been skulking around the island seeing how many extra Solarii I can trigger and, with luck, listen in on their conversations. What makes this happen is thus; the game provides a lot of collectibles. You can make it to the end game without bothering to pick up a single one (the only plot-important items are handed to you in cut scenes). But for whatever reason, the designers decided to implement a system that lets you keep the same saved game but go back to previously crossed areas to search for additional relics.

Because in the standard progression, your path is often broken behind you (forcing you to stay on the tracks of the railroad plot) the way the designers chose is by the somewhat reality-straining Instant Transport function. From any camp, you can immediately visit another camp.

To keep things interesting, when you do this re-visit, there are fresh mooks guarding the goodies. Like all the mooks, they appear to be triggered by you crossing certain points on the map. You can very much search a room thoroughly, then walk across the entrance and spawn a couple mooks in the middle of a long game of chess right where you were searching. And this sort of thing happens more often when you are on the less linear path of trying to collect every last mushroom or coin or whatever.

Because these encounters are generic, the conversations you overhear don't tend to refer to anything in the evolving plot; the fact that the stronghold is in flames, the mountaintop is in the middle of a snowstorm, or that Himiko is dead and the sun has come out for the first time in months (to take a few examples from play). Pity. I'd love to hear what the excellent voice actors might be talking about if they realized they are free to leave the island and their entire cult was a pointless waste.

The highlight so far was listening to the poor Solarii looking at the elevator you broke to get up to the General's tomb and grumbling about how he has to fix everything on this junkyard island. That's an entire mini-scene -- recorded dialog, encounter -- you'd never encounter in strictly linear play. A more spectacular example is if you go back to the first camp with Roth after the rescue plane crashes, you find the plane strewn over the campsite and Solarii busy taking it apart for salvage.



Another weird little break from reality I've noticed. This is a scaling problem. What I mean is, game mechanics often have to satisfy both a single use, and multiple uses, and it is impossible to optimize for both. In the Civ games, it is fascinating to learn about the origins of crop rotation, to send you people out to find and quarry stone and build a road back to your growing town in order to build a granary...but by hour six of the game, with fifty cities to manage and a technology tree longer than your arm, it becomes painful clicking through the long build list and trying to manage tens of idiot workers.

In Tomb Raider, one mechanic is to allow you to rifle bodies for a few bits of extra salvage. Another is to gain small amounts of ammunition in those same searches (which you unlock by purchasing the appropriate skill). Another mechanic is of course limiting maximum ammunition carried so you can't just hose everything. A last minor mechanic is one that limits the number of entities on the map by getting rid of slain entities over a certain number.

The result, however, is that you end up searching the bodies during the fight. Especially if you are trying to cherry-tap, using only the pistol to get through one of the big set-piece battles; the only way to reload is to take a few bullets off dead enemies on the run. Which is pretty credulity-straining as a concept.

Because searching happens over and over in the game, it is made a very brief action (having a five-minute animation played every time would be annoying). Also, the AI has lag. Some of it may be programmed in that way, and some may be a result of a mechanic that says if you are "scrambling" (aka moving around with frequent taps of the "dodge" button) you are harder to hit. So you can pretty much run over to a body and perform a search while under fire; it will take the AI that long to figure out where you went.

These same limitations in the AI also leaves opportunity for a more interesting combat style for some levels. The game really wants you to hunker down among cover and snipe. Instead, I'm having fun running right up among the attackers, getting inside their lines and hewing away with the axe. They get so confused they have trouble figuring out which way you went, and it takes them long enough to switch from ranged weapon fire to hand-to-hand you can usually get crippling blows in before they can react properly.

I did get killed a lot doing this, but it was a lot of fun.


Wednesday, November 12, 2014

Alas, Poor Hedgehog

The next weld did not go as well.  I still can't see what I'm doing, and still ended up with a lot of voids. Worse, I got a spot of weld metal on the end cap, which worked its way into the threads, and there was nothing for it but to twist the thing off anyhow...stripping the threads in the process. Fortunately, this is just the receiver threads (the end cap is made of sterner stuff. Or at least, it is now, having not been brought to annealing temperature by the original plasma cuts and the more recent welding.)

Anyhow, freeing the cap took tools and time I didn't have at the theater, so I gave up welding for the day and took it home. With the second piece tacked on, I now have enough to properly space the last weld. And it looks like a very large fill involved there (the plasma torch seems to have cut, backed off, then cut again at a slightly different angle, leaving a really large gap). I'm not sure puddling flux-core wire in there is the best move. I'm thinking I really do need to switch to MIG.

The next MIG class is a week from today. Now I just have to figure out how to restart my TechShop membership and still have money left for bills....