Bypass Operation

Yes, it is another Tomb Raider 2013 rant. I wouldn't be doing this, really, if there wasn't so much to like about the game...

Anyhow, responding to the complaint of a strong ludonarrative dissonance, one of the developers retorted that you didn't have to kill every Solarii you encountered. You could "just bypass them."

So can you? Playing up through the Radio Tower, the totals were roughly one live body left behind for every person Lara was forced to kill. Discounting the large set-piece battles/ambushes, where it was necessary to kill everyone in order for the game to advance.

1) Deer. You have to kill a deer to trigger the "go back to the campsite with meat and get a radio call from Roth" event. I shot a couple rabbits and a crow, but no, has to be a deer. However, you can leave all of Bambi's little friends unharmed (really, one deer carcass should feed her for the rest of her island stay!) 0/0

2) Wolves. After Mathias leaves with Sam, you get stuck in a bear trap. Three wolves will charge and the only way through the semi-quicktime is to kill all three. 0/0 humans, 3/3 wolves.

3) More wolves. The game really thinks you will fight them. It puts you on a bridge with clear lanes of fire and three more bundles of fresh arrows at your feet. Instead I scramble-ran all the way up the hillside to trigger the cutscene with Whitman. Got bit a couple times but super-healing power, right? 0/0 humans, 3/5 wolves (counting only combat encounters).

4) Vladimir. Killed in a quicktime. You kill him or get killed. That's your only bullet, so bypassing the other Solarii in the scene is not a moral choice. 1/1

5) Two guys in front of a door. This is the scene I thought I could win. You are trapped in a courtyard between a fire that springs up the moment you enter, and a door that requires you pry at it with your hand axe. And...no go. The guys discover you in cutscene so you must fight them. I tried pushing them over. Tried shooting them in the knee. But no matter what I tried, the moment I started prying at the door someone would shoot a flaming arrow into it and Lara would drop the axe. 3/3

Yeah, the game is making a big point here with you getting over your first kill, being totally cornered, and choosing to fight back. So it is not a ludonarrative disconnect per se...although it is a little odd that exactly two minutes after throwing up, you are gritting your teeth and shooting people again. Plus, both headshots and finishing moves are already active by this point.

6) The Silent Kill. The game really, really, really wants you to stealth kill this one guy. It gives you fresh arrows and a cart to hide behind. And guess what? Movement keys are locked. Weapon switch is locked. It's pretty much another damned QTE; all you can do is track and fire. And if you shoot at so much as his big toe, he falls over dead. 4/4

7) Two more guys at foot of cliff. They spend a while facing each other, then one walks over towards you and will discover you. And even if you ran past them -- the rope ladder that gets you up the cliff isn't unrolled until you start shooting. If you stealth kill (what the game wants) the rope ladder guy comes down for the hell of it anyway. Regardless, you can't climb the ladder until they stop shooting at you, meaning once again, TPK. 7/7

8) The not-fireproof hut. The game has decided you are okay with shooting people in the back with a bow and wants to teach you a new trick now; to do it up close and personal. There are two bad guys with their backs to you and the game flashes up instructions on how to garrote them with your bow. Then you are supposed to get discovered by four other guys including a molotov-thrower who will set fire to the building you are fighting in. (The same move, a little later in the game, you upgrade to burying your ice axe in the back of their neck). Well, I was having none of that. I jumped over the first guy, scramble-dodged the second, took a couple flaming arrows in the butt scrambling up to the next level, scramble-ran across that while everyone was yelling and shooting, and hopped on the zipline out of there. Success! (Assuming you don't count own-goals from Mr. Firebug.) 7/13

9) Wolf in cave. Killed in a QTE. Still 7/13, and wolves are 4/6.

10) Men at top of cliff. Well, what do you know? If you wait long enough, they say "Let's go inside out of the rain," and they do. And you can actually stroll right through the camp without them seeing you. (Not only that, but there's more conversation triggered if you do so; always a bonus with the clever writing and nice voice acting). Another four lives saved, and these ones didn't finish up the encounter setting fire to themselves. 7/16

11) Men on trail before Broken Tunnel. These ones are not designed to by bypassed. If you use the zipline, they trigger. If you chose to jump, you are injured but heal...and they trigger the moment you walk any closer. All three have cover and one of them is throwing molotovs to flush you out. Hell with it; I was on easy setting; I scramble-ran right up the trail, shoved them out of the way, got hit a few times with arrows and one axe but survived long enough to wriggle into the crack to the next level. And they VO's comment on this "That's too narrow for us...we'll have to go around." The developers think of everything! 7/20.

12) Broken Tunnel. The way this is staged, you are supposed to fight your way from cover to cover against the six mooks in the courtyard, under constant fire from the machine gun, then fight your way up the stairwell to take the gunner from behind. The smart way to do it is to snipe the gunner, then silent kill all the mooks on the ground one by one.

I took the third path: I ran like hell. Rolled a lot and zig-zagged from cover to cover right through the whole mess. Now, later in the game you have to do this against Dmitri, so you know it is possible. This early on, no-one is going to break cover under fire from six guys and a heavy machine gun. Went right up the stairs, pushed the two there out of my way, jumped to the tower and had to struggle in that narrow walkway to push the other two down just long enough to climb up the ledge. They kept shooting and shooting but scenery blocked their bullets. 7/31

But the developers are still lying here. I'm using the easy setting, abusing the dodge mechanic, and relying on AI stupidity to do things that also break the ludonarrative dissonance. Lara may be, at this point in the game, reluctant to kill, but that does not in any way translate to "Cheerful about running right at a heavy machine gun!" And, no...there is no alternate path, no climb high above their heads, no concealment you can use to make a long torturous sneak. There is either combat and kill, or take an insane risk.

13) Inside the bunker, two mooks are wrestling with a big drum painted bright red and anyone who ever played a game in their life knows what they are supposed to do here. After you've killed them, another will pop out of a ceiling hatch. Instead I run, run, run, shove shove shove run run run. 7/34

14) The gas trap. The only way to advance is to light off the gas. And that fatally injures the mook with the Type 100. You can mercy kill him if you like, but irregardless, you set off a gas explosion in his face. 8/35

15) Ambush! Here the numbers go bad. The game gave you a light machine gun. It auto-selects to force it into your hands, goes into slow-mo, and glues your feet to the ground while three guys close on you with axes. On any mode other than easy, you pull the trigger or you die. I was on easy mode. I waited until the slo-mo ended, then jumped up to the balcony. Someone was already up there shooting at me so I pushed him off. And he died. OSHA is right, apparently. You can jump up and down this balcony all day, but if they fall off it, they die. And, well, stymied.

The iron door to the next room is opened by the reinforcements, and reinforcements won't come until all but two of the mooks are dead. At least I could make a partial sop to my desire to not engage in combat with them; I ran around like mad, jumping up to the balcony, pushing people off it, jumping back to the floor when it got too busy up there. Actually managed to kill about six of them without firing a shot.

The door finally opened, but the next door had the same latch problem; if you approach the door to lever it open, someone sets fire to it and Lara drops the axe. Even if there is just one guy left, and he is disabled, a flaming arrow will appear. You have to kill every last one. The only possible sop to your conscious is a couple are bomb-throwers, and you can maneuver them into own-kills. Twelve more kills; 20/47

16) Guy on the bridge. Killed in a QTE. And, no, you can't climb over the truck or anything; the only path forward is through the cutscene. 21/48

17) The bunker in front of the tower is already alerted. Now, it is actually possible to run past all of them and into the second courtyard. But the doors won't open until they send the "big guy" out, and he won't come out until you are down to two or less alive in the entire freaking complex (minus the idiot who shows up with a molotov only after everyone else is dead. He is, at least, surprised to find you alive). I lost track a little at this point. There's two at the short tower, three or four in the tower filled with handy red drums of bang, another four that spring up after you've encountered the drum people, three or so snipers in the last building, plus the first of the guys who carries a safe door around with him all shift. I gave up and shot one of the drums, then ran around the courtyard like mad trying to taunt the big guy out. Shot people in the knees, but it was so crowded down there I accidentally triggered a finishing kill animation, and then we just said the heck with it. The only person Lara didn't kill was the idiot with the molotov. Call it 12 kills; 33/60

So, yes, by the time you've reached the radio tower, you've killed over half the people you've met. And those that survived are still shooting at you; there are a grand total of three Solarii still sitting comfortably in their huts at the top of a waterfall, out of the rain, unaware of how close they came to encountering Wolverine.



I tried to go a little further with this increasingly quixotic quest. I found one loophole; there's an ambush right after you get the flaming arrows and once again you are glued to the ground with an arrow notched and will die if you don't immolate three guys. But after that, you can actually run away from the entire ambush; they eventually say "Let the guys at the gate take care of her," or words to that effect.

So that's another twenty or so who you can spare, although the gate does not allow such mercy; twenty dead there. Then the tower Grim is holed up in; you must complete that fight and kill at least a dozen. And another dozen when you've fought your way around to take it from a different angle. There is about eight on the windmill you can bypass, though. Can't sneak past them; once again, the game triggers them automatically (in fact, the one time I crawled all the way around, they actually teleported in right in front of my eyes). You might confuse or reset them by going into the nearby tomb. But if you run around like a mad weasel long enough to confuse them properly, you can jump on to the tramway and leave them behind. Three or four machine gun bullets in the back are nothing to Lara -- not on easy mode, at least.

So for those next encounters, you are forced to kill roughly 3/5 of the people you encounter. And these are larger encounters, too; the blood on your hands is up over a hundred by the time you get out of the geothermal caverns. This isn't player choice; this is built into the level design.

(Yes...the Solarii revival meeting can almost be bypassed; stealth-kill two guards, run like hell to the gas valve, blow it up to open the next door...and the dozen or more you ran past die screaming in the resulting eruption and flames. Oh, well. At this point, one needs to take notice that since you set fire to their building, at least fifty die in the flames; you see some two dozen blasted by gouts of fire, crushed by flaming debris, or falling off a roof in flames. You hear a lot more voices screaming in the distance. Still, even counting only direct player kills, you leave over a hundred bodies in your wake.)



So, no. The ludonarrative dissonance is alive and well. Me, I have my own head-cannon. Especially since I have the out-of-game knowledge that the first tortured sacrifice you see strung up is another student, a member of your expedition, and a friend, I pretty much decided my Lara went straight from fear to murderous rage. The moment she got a weapon, she was happy to kill every single cultist on that island. With an axe. Close-up.

The Reverberant Field

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

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




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

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

And it gets worse.

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

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

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

And this has huge implications for sound reinforcement.




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

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

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

"Ooomooomooom"
"Tac! Dac! Dac!"

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

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

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

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

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

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




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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

King of the Rocketmen

Finally got back to the CAD software:

This is a "flash hider" that sticks on a stock Luger pistol to make a "King of the Rocketmen" prop. When I've finished the model, it will be freely available to print at my Shapeways store...and I'll look at the numbers for lathing one out of aluminium.

And I really don't understand Fusion 360.

Okay, first off, I'm learning CAD. That's an expected learning curve. CAD is a different way of doing things, and I also have been emphasizing organic and poly modeling techniques in the past: CAD leans much more towards parametric methods.

But I'm having a lot of trouble understanding how Fusion 360 is organized. And I'm not alone in this. It seems to have a collection of semi-hierarchically related structures, among them bodies, patches, components, and parts. How they relate, which can contain which, which can be converted into which, is quite unclear. Furthermore, the possible operations change greatly depending on which one you are looking at; even if it is otherwise identical looking and created in an almost identical method.

The software is being rapidly revised, including even the names of parts and functions, and there exists nothing even slightly like a manual. There are videos, but they use terms and show a workspace which is several versions superseded and in many cases no longer applies.

Above that is a bigger question of; "What they heck is this software for?" I have my own suspicions. I think that Autodesk had a bunch of maverick programmers and marketing people; beanie-wearing, espresso-drinking hipsters who were a little too out there for the flagship products. So they put them in a room and told them to go wild with a sort of mad mix of trial balloons, concepts in search of an application, some solid code, and above all an urge to look as trendy as humanly possible.

This means not just the team, but most of the active user base, are people who have way too much experience with Inventor and so forth. Making the software accessible to outsiders doesn't seem like a priority, because they are working in a self-exclusionary echo chamber.

It is fairly telling that the top threads in their own forum are about how to include videos and personalized graphics in one's forum posts.

In a refreshing alternative to most 3d software, what they seem to think of as their selling points are not the modeling functionality, and certainly not gosh-wow render tricks or a suite of included-with-the-download DAZ dollies, but instead the concept of sharing and portability. They believe strongly in this idea, although the implementation seems nebulous (really, now; software that is buggy on a powerful desktop machine, with a graphics-heavy interface, is not going to translate well to a smart phone. And the cloud storage system they have already for file management is crawling-slow, heavy and unwieldy even on a decent work-based connection. Good luck shoving those files down the pipe you will get at a beach-house!)

As far as I can tell, in fact, all the vaunted "sharing via cloud" could be achieved just as well by throwing a save file at DropBox every now and then. But I could be missing the point. Right now whatever it is, it confuses the existing user base more than it accomplishes anything else (lots and lots of forum threads wondering how they can access their own files after a quit and restore!)



In any case, I struggled for days just to lathe the simple shape above. Practically every standard method I tried ended up with unselectable edges or grayed-out "OK" buttons, with no real explanation why. At least one of them crashed the application completely. And what I finally got, violates the spirit of parametric modeling completely in that it is not easily editable. Half the useful functions require turning history off, and the hierarchy of parts doesn't actually seem to go into a final form that includes sub-forms that can be edited.

Navigation is still broken, although I'm using third-party tools to remap and create a middle mouse button, which should help. (For me, 3d aps live or die on navigation. If I can't zip around an object to view it from different angles, I can't build it properly. But the vast majority of 3d aps start now as Windows native, and tend to take such things as three-button mice as standard. Even power Mac users don't get these easily -- nor do they play well with the rest of the Mac environment. But funny thing; an ap as otherwise ghastly as Carrara can implement a smooth 3d navigation and selection and even basic movement rotation and scaling tools with just a couple of control keys. So it isn't that F1-home key-scroll wheel is necessary to make 3d navigation work. It is just that many 3d ap programmers are, well, stupid.)



Oh, yeah. And sad thing is, the tool path tools are poor enough I'm going to end up exporting and generating tool path and so forth in a different ap anyhow. Which means that I might as well have built the thing in a poly modeler to begin with.

Picture-Heavy Post

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

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

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

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

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

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



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


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






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







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

The 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.)

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.

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.)