Cats, Empire and Ex-Colonies

First Published November 2010

Hello and welcome to my brand new monthly column for Audio Pro International. Please allow me a moment to introduce myself, after all it would be rude and presumptuous of me not to if you have taken the time to read my words.

I’m an audio engineer in the live field, working with artists such as La Roux, Amy Winehouse and a fair few others over the last 15 years. I’m also the author of a book called Live Audio: the art of mixing a show, which is more of a point-you-in-the-right-direction kind of book rather than a text-book. The reason behind it is that you gain an understanding of how and why things work, and get into the frame of mind of an engineer. It runs in a linear order from load in to sound check, getting your mix together and load out, so that you get the information as you need it rather than having to retain the information from previous chapters.

Over the next few months I’m going to be writing about what I’m doing, where I’m going, and give you hints, tips, stories and situations from the road. So where do we start now?

Luckily for me, I had a pretty busy year, so at the end of August I started a nice long break. As October approached it was about time to get back to work! So off I went for a nice quiet 6 days holiday before meeting The Cat Empire in Amsterdam. You might, and probably will be thinking ‘Who on earth are this Cat Empire lot?’ Well, they are probably the biggest unknown band ever. They hail from Melbourne, Australia and by the end of their month-long European tour will have played to about 40,000 people. Quite impressive for a band no one has heard of. I only joined the band for a small portion of their European adventure as another pressing La Rouxment had come up in my schedule.

The list of gigs on the UK leg includes Birmingham, Bournemouth, Bristol and Brixton academies. These kind of venues start to highlight a small problem being faced by live engineers the world over, and that problem presents itself in the form of consoles.

Don’t worry, you aren’t going to be hearing those hackneyed sayings about analogue being better than digital, or that we should embrace these new technology. No, no, no, none of that, I have my very own thoughts on that of analogue vs. digital. The way I see it is that analogue is like 35mm film, and digital is like HD film. Both equally stunning in their own right, but both have two completely different feels. It all depends on the application; if you watch a nature program in HD, it looks stunning, but when watching a film in HD it can feel too real. A nature program shot on 35mm can look flat and boring, where as a film can look rendered and warm.

I’m one of those people who grow up learning to mix on analogue consoles, which in itself doesn’t cause any problems with today’s more technologically advanced mixing consoles, but might give a slightly better understanding of putting a mix together. In days gone by, we use to have our entire audio pallet in front us to enable us to create a mix. Now with scene recall, and channels being hidden way in layers, the creative side seems to be slipping away because by the time you want to tweet, the moment has passed. Not only that, but if you aren’t able to carry your own console and house consoles are the order of the day, you have to spend time re-learning the console because they all have different.

I love the new tech we have, and the options we now have at our fingertips are immense. But the instinctual nature that once was has now been replaced by thought processes because of the varying amount of different layouts. It’s like changing the pedals, and indicators round on your car. Everytime you approach a stop sign, you really need to think otherwise you’ll end up in the front garden opposite with your windscreen wipers on full blast. And this happens a lot if you think about the amount of different venue consoles we encounter everyday.

We’ll get there, but I just feel we aren’t just yet.

Istanbul

Finally made it to Istanbul. Having a quick look round, then off for load in.

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My first ever Greek service station

We were all a little surprised to be honest…

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Thessalonica to Istanbul

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How Loud Is Too Loud? part1

I was fortunate enough last month to be asked to head out to Berlin to meet up with the chaps from Underworld. We were to play Berlin’s newly erected O2 World arena. It’s a big old place (a capacity of 17,000), but actually the sound of the room wasn’t too bad considering it’s a bloody great airline hanger with a bit of decoration. The show was called ‘We Are One’, which has something to do with Paul Van Dyk who I thought was Dutch but turns out he is actually from Berlin.

The PA was a Nexo GeoD system, which some of you may know is a line array type of system. I, on the other hand, am not the world biggest fan of line array, but I’m there to do a job so I’ll do it the best I can. We had an XL3 at FOH, and some nice little toys in the outboard rack that set us up for a good show.

We ran the sound up and it appeared to be what can only be described as rubbish. The typical bite you get from these PAs I was expecting wasn’t there. For a big hall like that, with a full dance floor, the system would really need to have that harshness to cut though later, but would be softened when the audience are there. The sound was very flat and uninspiring, no real clarity in the mids, and no low mids so the drive of the sound wasn’t really there. There was, on the other hand, loads of sub; well, when I say loads of sub, it was all in the middle and not a lot at the sides.

Where do you start at getting this right, apart from telling the system techs to use their ears? We played around with the graphic for a while to see what exactly we were missing, then went to ask what EQ they had over the whole system. Now, when I saw the EQ for the whole system I was horrified. There was a massive scoop over the entire top-end, and another scoop over the top of the other one at about 4-5kHz, reducing it to next to nothing. This is where all the harshness had gone.

The reason behind this was that the audience was going to be in the venue for about 10 hours. Which is an awfully long time to be exposed to a constant noise level. The engineers want to decrease the exposure to high frequencies for the length of time, but in doing so sacrificed the sound of the whole system. The noise limit had been set at 99dBA over 30 mins, which is ok, but in the world of dance music is fairly quite. You could take a stroll down the road to any of the other Berliner clubs and find systems pushing 110-115dBA for exactly the same period of time. So my question is, how loud is too loud?

It would seem a lot of venue management, local and national governments are spending a lot of time and money chasing noise levels, and becoming more paranoid that someone will take them to court. Don’t get me wrong, I do believe there should be some form of restrictions as a guideline and you should be protecting the people who work in the venues; even protecting the neighbors.

So let’s say someone is taken to court with excessive noise level charges. How would the argument that this particular show caused this persons hearing loss? If the person had an iPod, and they had been walking around for the past 10 years listening to it on full blast, surely that would have had more of an impact? It seems to me that people need to take responsibility for their own hearing. More people are turning up to shows with ear plugs because they know its going to be louder than they are used to, and the venues should even be supplying them to people who want them.

We can mix our shows with noise restrictions, but some of these restrictions are extremely low and they suck the life out of the live industry.