dereksoundguy

I haven’t posted in a while, for that I apologize.  Since moving into our new building things at Heritage Park Alliance Church have been really busy.  As the Technical Director I have to learn all about our new equipment as quickly as possibly since we are wanting to implement the use of it ASAP, so i need to learn it, then train some volunteers how to learn it.  SO as you may be able to tell, I’ve been busy, so blogging was one of the things that got crossed off my to-do list for a while.  I hope to become more regular again with my posting now that we have gotten through our Grand Opening weekend.

Speaking of Grand Opening weekend (how’s that for a segue!!).  This weekend we had our Grand Opening services at HPAC, so I want to do a couple posts talking about how we did things this weekend.  We put together a large choir, it ended up being 53 voices I believe, give or take a few, with a full band (drums, bass, piano, two electric guitars) and 7 lead vocalists.  Since it was discussed months ago, I knew this weekend was going to fun, but also busy.  The sound person for this weekend was a volunteer on our team who is young, but is really interested in sound, and has expressed to me that he wants to be a live sound engineer in some degree for a living after high school.  He does great on our Sunday services so I decided to give him the reigns for this weekend.  I know he got stressed a few times, but he did a great job and I’m really proud of him.

He has never mic’d a choir, nor worked with that many vocals before, but he did a great job.  WIth the choir, we put two Shure KSM141 mics in front of them.  They sounded great.  We originally wanted to put them behind the choir, but we don’t have the proper mic stands to do it.  I thought about adding a third mic since it was a 50 person choir and its a general rule that every 15-20 people there should be a mic.  Problem is, I only had 2 of the 141′s and nothing else I had would be a good choir mic choice.  So I kept with the two and picked up the choir as best as we could.  Adding a 3rd mic would’ve put more phase considerations into play as well and to be honest, the 2 141′s really did pick up the whole choir quite nicely!

One of the first issues we ran into with the choir was monitoring.  I had no monitors anywhere on stage for the band, the musicians used avioms and the 6 lead vocalists used wireless In Ear Monitors.  But I can’t give in-ears to a choir haha, so I had to have monitors on stage.  I at first tried just one single monitor, positioned on the floor in the center of where the choir was.  It didn’t take long to realize that many people in the choir couldn’t hear through that single monitor though.  So i added a second monitor and spread them out across the floor to spread out the sound amongst the choir.  I still got complaints about them not being able to hear.

Obviously something needed to change, so physics came into play.  With the monitors on the floor the first row of singers was getting a great sound from the monitors, but they were then blocking the sound heading to the people in the other rows, speakers are directional and these were not in a good position to send to all the rows of the choir.  What we did is we found some speaker stands and put the monitors on the stands at either end of the choir and angled the speakers towards the singers from the direction with the monitor actually a good 4 feet from the end of the choir risers.

What this did is put the initial sound source (the speaker) at a more common level for all the singers and now the sound wave was flowing more directly into their ears.  The choir was happy after that with their sound.  They sang great and the whole weekend services went great!

I’ll talk tomorrow about using the click track and setting it up with the band.

It finally happened, we installed our Venue SC48 today!  This weekend will be our first service with the new board, and I am really excited that we finally get to start working with the new board.  Unfortunately my first service using the board was a funeral, not exactly something to get excited about, but nonetheless, the funeral service came and went with not issues (which was especially exciting since we also had cameras running live for the first time and our Vista S3 lighting board running for the first time as well).

The whole time I was on this board today i was thinking about what I want to do with it, how many more options I now have for stuff.  There is a video by Dave Ratt about how he sets up his mixes here (I may have plugged that same video in another post, but its always good to watch because Dave Ratt is awesome!).  I want to give that strategy a try, why?  Because it looks really neat, it looks somewhat complicated to set up, but it looks like a great approach to live mixing.

My issue lies though, in my timing and reasoning.  If i spend an hour setting up the board to use that mixing strategy, what have a I done for our church and for my volunteers?  No offense to the sound guys at our church, but I think setting up something like that would just hurt their progress, its too much at this point in their “sound guy” lives.

I have a really busy week this week … and next week … and next week …. and, well you get the picture.  I will find time to set up a mix using that strategy, but for the time being, I need to spend some time getting our sound board up and operational for our volunteers who will be using it this weekend.  I need to make sure that I make things as easy as possible for them since this will be their first week using the new console.

All of us tech directors and sound guys want to try something new all the time with our mixes to make them better, and I am no different.  But as a TD of a church with volunteer sound people, we have to remember our task, which is to make sure we serve our volunteers.  If my volunteers come in for practice on Thursday and the board isnt set up properly because I spent over an hour setting up my complicated mixing strategy that no one in our church will be using, then I didn’t serve my volunteers properly.

I’m not saying to stay way from challenging or complicated ideas, I’m just suggesting that we might all needed to be reminded sometimes to remember why we’re here and what we’re doing.  I will show this strategy to my guys at some point, but I need to make sure they are at that point before we go there.

Our church is still being built.  We’ve been in it for a couple weeks now but construction is not yet finished.  As a result, we still don’t have our sound booth done, which means our equipment has not been installed.

As a result of these unwanted conditions, we haven’t started using our Digidesign Venue SC48 console yet, instead we’ve been using the Yamaha LS9 that was purchased for our Chapel.  We’re using the LS9 because it is lightweight, and therefore can be carried back and forth after practice and after the service to a more secure location.  Nonetheless, this is still the first digital board that most of our volunteers have ever worked with, so there is still a learning curve with it.

Today while mixing the band at rehearsal, I wasn’t happy with the sound of the djembe.  I like to put a mic on top to pick up the slap and another mic on the bottom to pick up the thump of the instrument, and while I could hear the slap, the thump wasn’t to my liking.  We had an Audio-Technica ATM450 on the top and a Sennheiser MD-421 on the bottom.  I worked with the sound guy on the EQ for a bit before turning to some compression.  Upon getting into the compressor on the LS9 I remembered that compression is a very new thing to him.  We have done some training on it, but he’s never really seen it in action.  It was time to teach!

He understands the concept of compression.  Compression is trying to smooth out volume levels on a particular channel (or group of channels).  There is a threshold set and when the volume reaches that threshold the compressor kicks in at a specified attack time, and pushes the volume down according to a user set ratio.

Now how does it actually affect the sound? Usually with a kick drum, or in this case the bottom of a djembe, I use the combination of a gate and a compressor to thicken the sound up.  The gate does the opposite of the compressor and turns the channel off (or down) when it falls below a set threshold.  So when the volume is in that threshold between where the gate kicks in and where the compressor kicks in the instrument is at its most intense sound.  Since the compressor is keeping the volume at a relatively steady level, and the gate is turning it down when it starts to get weak, we can really thick and driving sound by only letting people hear the sound of the instrument at its most intense level.

Once we set the compressor, my volunteer could hear the difference.  I’ve explained compressors a number of times, but now to be able to actually turn the knobs and hear the difference brings a new level of understanding to how the compressor can be used to bring out the desired sound in an instrument.

This is a great illustration of some of the principles I taught in my “perfect mix” series about playing with things.  I want to let my volunteers play with knobs and turn them and see what they do so they can hear what happens and learn from that.

Great job to my will-not-be-named volunteer tonight.  I’m glad to see you learning new things!

Todays post is going to be more about recording engineering than live sound mixing.  I’ve had a lot of recording projects to work on lately and it has created a bit of a headache for me.  I enjoy using outboard gear when I’m mixing rather than plugins.  I have a couple of compressors and i use my Lexicon MX400 for reverbs/delays and effects like that.  The problem is that when I go from project to project, I lose my settings.  I can take a photo of my soundboard so I can see where my aux settings where for the sends to the MX400, and I can take a photo of the settings on the compressors as well.  But it is annoying having to reset it up each time, and its never exactly the same.

So last week I decided to go forward and did a major plugin install.  I got a ton of waves plugins.  Since then i’ve been doing my mixes using nothing but plugins.  The great thing is, the waves plugins are great!!! I’ve heard lots of comments on the “C” series compressors and they are amazing!  The C1 is a nice simple compressor that keeps the integrity of the instrument/vocal in place while compressing it at your desired amount.  The c4 is a great multiband comp, and it helps vocals come out sounding nice and warm and compressed perfectly, while again retaining the integrity of the original track.  I really enjoyed how the delay on my MX400 worked, but the Supertap delays by waves do sound good, I’m just still getting used to the way it is setup.

My real plus to all of this though, is the total recall I get with these plugins.  I can finish my recording, send it to the artist, receive their comments and when I go back to adjust things to their liking, I know the settings I have when I open the file are the exact same as they were when I sent them to the artist.

The other great thing about it is that my compressors are now actually set up properly.  Doing things the other way, I was sending my tracks out of pro tools, into my allen and heath mix wizard where my compressors were set as inserts, then recording back into pro tools for my final 2 track mix.  So my compressor was happening after anything in pro tools, even the fader, so the compressor wasn’t working like it normally does.  My volume changes that I wanted were actually just being compressed so it made it more difficult to make those volume changes on a track.

With nothing but plugins being used, the compressors are in the proper order in my signal chain.

In my opinion all these reasons make enough of a case for more use of plugins in my mixing.  Is there no room for outboard gear? Of course I will still want to sometimes use my outboard gear in my mixes.  But this plugin setup is much more user friendly, and these waves plugins just sound fantastic!

I’m finally catching up to the modern times in digital recording!

So i couldn’t go see U2 in concert and not come back and blog about it.  I’ll start with some disclaimers.  I’m not a u2 fan, per se.  I enjoy their music, I know many of their songs, but wouldn’t call myself an active fan.  I don’t know when their last album was, I don’t pay “that” close attention to them, I’m just a music fan and as a music fan how can you not know at least a certain amount about them?  I’ve seen some of their concerts on DVD before and have heard many great things about their production in concert and they’ve been on my list of bands to see for a while now.

My tickets were General Admission so I had no idea how close i’d get to stand, I was happy with how close I got.  If you don’t know their stage setup, see the above picture.  My seat was just inside the closest leg of the space station in this photo.  I was about 15 feet from the outer circular stage.

First thing I noticed when I got in was the number of speakers they hung for this show.  There were 8 line array clusters in total.  2 on each the front and the back and 2 on each side.  The front and back line arrays had 18 rows of speakers, 2 mains and 2 subs on each row.  The side clusters were still 18 rows, but only 1 main and 1 sub.  What a massive amount of sound!

Where I was standing, I got a lot of low end energy from the subs that were pointed right at us, i thought it was bass heavy mix, but friends who were seated in another location said they found the mix to be a little bright, so my assumption is that it was location for each of us.  Nonetheless, it still sounded great, just a little bottom end heavy.  The only problem I found with the sound was how “live” it was, and that isn’t the fault of the sound people, its the fault of the Rogers Centre.  The stadium has a lot of natural reverb and when the snare drum is heard, you heard it slap back again a few ms later.  It can be quite annoying actually.  Luckily U2 is a big enough band that they opened the roof and that eased up on the “liveliness” of the room quite a bit.

The video production of the show is amazing!  Its obvious watching the video screen that they seem to have taken a more “video” lighting approach to things.  I was close enough to watch them on stage and there were moments when it seems the lighting wasn’t that great on stage, but when i looked at the video screen, it looked amazing!  It was obvious their main concern was the video.  Not trying to say the stage lighting was bad or anyhting, but the focus was obviously on video.  And why not? They had 60,000 people there … I’d suggest 45-50,000 of those people were watching the video screens most of the night.

Bono has an amazing stage presence that blew me away as well.  He has a way of just demanding that you pay attention to him.  He seems to genuinely care about his audience, and seems to be genuinely into the show he is putting on.  Some performers, you can tell that this is their occupation and they are just doing the same thing tonight as they did last night but in a different city.  Bono seemed to be having fun, and he had fun with the crowd.

Many props to U2′s production crew.  There was very little on the stage, obviously they wear IEM’s and the Edge wears a headset now, so there are no monitors on stage, and just one mic stand for Bono.  And its awesome how much sound comes from 4 guys with no hired musician help, its just the 4 of them and it sounded so full!

Great job u2! Great job U2 production team.  If you ever have a chance to see these guys in concert, don’t pass it up, its a show you wont forget ever!!!

Hey everyone, its been a few weeks since I’ve done any blogs on here, and for that I apologize.  We have officially moved into our new church building, although construction is still ongoing so it still an interesting atmosphere there everyday.

This past Sunday (July 10th) we had our first service at the new building.  I will be open and honest, I was really nervous, and the closer we got to Sunday the more stressed out I became.  Since our building is not quite done there have been a lot of unknowns about how things are going to work, “tech” not being exempt in any way.

Our sound booth was not done, and we were told it would not be done for the weekend.  So we decided not to bring out the new Venue SC48 that we have sitting in a box waiting to be installed.  Why set up the new board, only to have to to rip it down again (or get sawdust all over it during the week when construction workers are in there … yeah, you know that was never an option).  The same with the lighting board, the Vista S3.  It made no sense to bring out the lighting board, when we didn’t have proper power run yet, most of our lights haven’t been installed yet.

So what did we do? We still need sound and lights right?  Correct! What we ended up doing was pulling the Yamaha LS9 that we bought for our chapel, into the auditorium.  This board is small enough that I could put it out Sunday morning, plug in the six channels coming from the stage (plus 2 wireless channels, and 4 channels for stereo inputs from computer and CD player) and not have to worry about it being damaged during the week. One problem, my volunteer has not been trained on this board at all.

The great thing is, my sound guy this week is a great kid! He’s a 15 year old high school student who just loves getting involved with the audio stuff, he’s got a passion for it, and the more I let him explore the equipment at the church, the more it seems that he seems to love getting involved.  So this was a great experience for him.  I gave him the quick run through on the LS9, and he ran with it and ran sound for the whole service and did a great job.  I’ve said great job to him multiple times already, and now I am once again going to compliment him on a great job done on Sunday!

For the lights, we did it real basic.  Our AVL installer gave us a quick 5 button switch with a couple of preset lighting plots (room, band, pastor).  I just told the lighting person to press the button that corresponded with where we were in the service.  It went smoothly, I was happy.

On propresenter I had two people scheduled.  I actually have 2 people scheduled for the next few weeks on all these positions until we all get used to them, but since we didn’t have the lighting board I cancelled one volunteer, and I was the other half of the audio team.  So on ProPresenter, our first week with this software, I had everything set up for them, and they ran with it great!  That program is so easy to use, that although it is different from Easy Worship, which we are used to, they adapted quickly and ran the whole service error free!

So I was nervous all week.  I ended up just walking around in the booth at the back for the entire worship time, sitting down and listening to the sermon, and I received many compliments at the end of the service on how great everything went technically!  I will say that it felt great, but I did make sure to bounce those compliments back to my volunteers of course.  They did a great job!  Yes, I did multiple tests on Saturday to make sure things were working, but they took it and ran with it Sunday morning!

Here’s a few pics of our service.

The Tech team hard at work

Back wall is unfinished, but everyone is enjoying the worship in our new facility!

Hey everyone,

Once again, sorry for the lack of posts recently.  Life is busy!  Our last service is this Sunday at our current location and then July 10th, we start at our new site.  Prayers appreciated as the building is not done, the sound/lighting systems are not in place yet so we are pressed right now.   Things are definitely under way, but it will be an interesting week!

I’ll be back to regular posts by the middle of July .. thanks everyone!

I’ve included a picture of our new auditorium for you to see it so far!