Inside the Mind of Sators

I and fellow engineer friends like taking the audio output from an analog comm unit and turn it into a 3-pin XLR cable to input into say a monitor desk so when we are monitor engineering, we can always have the comm sent to our cue unit for instance.

Every time we go to make one though…can never remember what pins on the 4-pin connector are what!  Here’s the diagram for our own sake and yours if you wish to follow the same technique.  Take pins 3 and 4 to pins 2 and 3 on a standard XLR and you have the audio.

Boy, I blew it.

This week I have learned a really hard lesson about not letting my frustration get the best of me.  I have joined the ranks of Kevin Colvin, “theconnor“, and others who have gotten themselves into carreer trouble through Facebook, Twitter, or in my case, their blog.

This weekend I had some unfortunate circumstances happen to me on the road.  Really in retrospect now it seems silly, but at the time I got really fired up about it.  At the time, it seemed like the people who could do anything to resolve it didn’t really care.  Perhaps I didn’t know them well enough…whatever the case, I was wrong.  All of these perceptions on Sunday boiled over and frustration and tension got the best of me, and so I let out what feelings I was having at the time on this here blog.  (Don’t bother trying to find the post…it’s gone.)  Boy, that was another example of where I was wrong to say the least. Not only did I say things I didn’t mean, but I brought up issues that weren’t even relevant or that aren’t even bothering me – seems my frustration was feeding on itself – and thus my demise.

I was sitting on a plane, created the blog, posted to my facebook, and the flight took off.  An hour and a half later when the flight touched down, I came to my senses, deleted it, and took every reference to it down.  Too late.

The people who I thought didn’t care actually did, and those same folks who could have and eventually would have resolved the circumstances in which I had suffered read my fuming blog post.  It is those same individuals who controlled whether I worked for them or not, and after reading my admittingly inappropriate post, decided it best that I not be with them any longer.

I can’t blame them, this is absolutely 100% my fault.  Just when I had started to feel like everything was going well with this gig, I go and shoot myself in the foot.  It’s definitely a wake up call to me – I’ve never done this before, being so blunt online or letting my frustrations and emotions run away.  I wouldn’t recommend it.  Not only was it just plain foolish, but I put in writing things that I didn’t even mean.  I let the emotion of the moment dig my grave.

It’s a sad day, naturally gray skies and starting to rain outside.  Ultimately, I’ve learned a big lesson here at the cost of working with a great band, an awesome crew, and in a fun environment.

Historically, my particular pattern of mixing monitors on a digital console is to take advantage of using scenes.  My buddy Nathan Miller got me started on this path while we were both on staff at Willow Creek Community Church.  It is a pretty powerful method of mixing monitors that gives a whole new dimension to the players on stage, enabling them to make specific requests that pertain to each individual song. From an engineer’s perspective, this definitely opens up new challenges that many may choose to simply avoid by not using scenes, however if you can wrap your brain around the concept, it’s worth considering.

Little Big Town Selective Recall

I’m on tour with Little Big Town right now and am on the Yamaha PM5D, so my comments are going to apply specifically to that console.  When setting up the board to do scenes, you definitely want to give thought to having some of the “Selective Recall” features enabled.  This is the 3rd table of the Scenes page.  By setting all of the channels selective recall safe with the groups as my image shows, any EQ, Compression, Delay, etc. changes you may make throughout a show stick throughout all the following scenes, thus not changing.  Now – there appears to be a bug here in the 5D software in that the phase reverse is not included in the ATT group and is only recall safe if you choose the “ALL” group, which you do not want to enable.  An email has been sent to Yamaha regarding this.

A common complaint to running scenes is – “what happens if a guy wants a level changed on something on every scene?”  The answer here on the Yamaha desk is Global Paste, last tab in the Scene group.  Choose the channel changed, choose only the appropriate mix send and no other parameters to paste, select your scenes, and paste away.  Yahama’s great downfall here is there is not a way to globally increase a level by a certain amount relative to where it’s current position is in the scene.  Global paste will paste the current level to every scene.  If someone wants 5db more of a particular channel that already has changing levels throughout the scenes, that must be done manually.  Other consoles do this better – I wish Yamaha would take note here and come up with a better method of Global Paste. (Again, the phase reverse doesn’t global paste unless you select “All” parameters)

Taking things another step deeper…some of the members of Little Big Town enjoy taking advantage of scenes, while others get distracted by instrumentation changing in their mix and do not want scenes affecting their send.  I was able to accommodate  everybody by, again, the selective recall feature.  As you will notice in my screenshot, in the Sends side of the screne, the final column “Ch to Mix” is recall safe on some mixes, and not on others.  By enabling this parameter, those mixes now are completely recall safe in that any changes I make to that mix throughout a show are not changed when I hit next scene.

So there’s a few things I’ve learned along the way.  Cheers!

Download Yamaha PM5D Owners Manual

Been a while since posting updates on what’s happening with Jamie and I and life, so here goes for March. 

In January, I started touring with Little Big Town as their monitor engineer.  That has been fun and a different change of pace.  Last group I was on tour with was Stellar Kart which at times was just me and 4 other guys.  In the LBT camp, there’s anywhere from 14-20 personnel on the road at any time among the band, crew, family, managers, etc.  The band also carries their own production, minus speakers/amps, so that’s also a nice change of pace compared to SK that only carried backline – being on the same console and the same setup every day helps with the confidence of always knowing what’s going on in the signal chain.  With the new territory comes new challenges though.  Some of the band individuals are very specific in knowing what they want to hear, which has at sometimes been a challenge achieving that successfully.  Overall though it’s definitely been fun and a good time meeting new crew and working in the new atmosphere.

Jamie and I are still in the “home moving” mindset.  While previously our minds were set on moving to Indianapolis, our final destination now looks to be Nashville.  As opposed to other groups in the Christian or Pop industry, the Country industry does not favor paying travel expenses for out-of-town crew members.  Right now, that means I’m getting myself back and forth to Nashville out of pocket. (Thanks to Southwest for less than $60 one-way travel back and forth to Nashville!)  So, with this in mind, Jamie and I are looking to rent a place for a year to start with in Nashville.

The million dollar question becomes when?  We have packed up a bunch of our stuff in Chicago and continue to load up everything we don’t need on a daily basis into a local storage unit in order too prep the house to paint, recarpet, and fingers crossed to go on the market.  No, it’s not on the market yet.  I really want to get the house to shine before we pull the trigger.  As with the housing market everywhere else, it doesn’t look too promising for here either.  Many of the homes in our complex are bank owned and selling for sometimes $60,000 less than our house…and I paid $159,900 for it.  Crap.  Even those houses that are selling for super cheap have been on the market for 3 months or so.  I’ve never sold a house before, and I know now is probably one of the worst times to get in the business, but we’ll see how it goes.  We’ll probably get the house on the market in April.

Late December and Early January I had both gum grafting surgery and hernia repair surgery done, all in the matter of about 2 weeks or so.  2 weeks after the hernia repair I was out on the road starting up with LBT.  Crazy – all went well though and those ailments have been out of mind.  I’ve been fighting a nasty case of bronchitus over the past two-three months that still prevails, took a nasty spill on my rip stick a few weeks back that the scars are still healing from, and this morning just hurt my neck washing/drying my hair.  This is not encouraging as my body gets older…sad.

Naturally, Jamie and I get the “kids?” question every now and then.  We’ll be married for two years in April and really with Indianapolis as our moving destination we were planning on delaying till we got settled there so that we could be by Jamie’s family.  With Nashville as the next stop…well, we’ll have to get back to you on that.  I think I speak for the both of us that we don’t feel ready…

I miss blogging…it’s always an ideal of mine that I want to hop on and write more often.  Maybe I’ll post up some good road stories here and there.  Till then…

Well, plans have changed yet once again.  Apparently whoever was looking at the budget spreadsheet for the Creation Fest Tour seemed to think that a monitor engineer is not a necessary expense for a tour with 9 bands, so I got the ax.  (My favorite line is the first sentence here.) Wow.  The more I think about that 9 band scenario, the happier I am to not be on the tour.

Instead, I’m picking up some work at Willow Creek, Sators.com is hopping, working on a lil site for myself in the spare time, keeping an ear to the ground for any other fall tour or gig opportunities, watching the news and economy, and taking it one day at a time!