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.

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

Over this weekend Jordan and Adam from Stellar Kart and I went to the Namm trade show in Anaheim, CA. Yes, the most common question I get after saying that sentence is “What is Namm?” It’s basically a trade show for the whole music industry where any and every instrument, audio, lighting, etc. company has a booth setup and you can walk all around, check out the new gear, make connections, etc. I don’t know the exact number, but there was probably 7000 booths and vendors setup. Ya, it’s big. Fun too to see different “famous” people too – we saw Carlos Santana, Joe Satriani, Slash, among others that we simply didn’t recognize who they were. Read more…

Whew – tough title. It’s sad but true, in the professional audio engineer world, church sound guys get a bad reputation. They’re stereotyped. More often than not, they are the electrical / technology aware and savvy folks who are recruited into running sound. This poses a challenge to these friends because they may not know anything about sound and frequencies, nor anything about music or how a band should be mixed. Thus the sound coming through the speakers during services may be less than ideal. I do believe that everyone is trainable and has the ability to learn new things, and I’ve met many church sound team members who are open to learning how to run sound better which is awesome and the mindset that they need to have. Granted it’s also church sound engineers who deal with the most amount of politics of trying to have to please the congregation on a happy medium for a loudness, or quietness if you will, level.

Last night I was hired by Trinity United Church of Christ on the south side of Chicago (the same church that Senator Barack Obama attends) to come in for the afternoon and train their new sound engineers and stick around through part of a worship band practice and help them learn the ropes a little bit. They have two Yamaha PM1D digital sound boards which is the same consoles that Willow Creek uses, which is also why I was hired as I have a pretty fair amount of experience around the console. Historically, this church has hired outside sound engineers to mix their services, however they are wanting to transition to having in-house engineers on staff that mix the services from week to week. I was working with two engineers (who I believe were hired that same day) who both had watched the professionals on the console, but never had hands-on experience. They both really caught on well and had a lot of good questions and the whole evening I felt was a positive experience for them.

This was fun for me as well – the south side of Chicago is where Caucasian folks are the minority, definitely a change of pace which felt awkward, but in a good way too – allowing me to experience what other minorities might experience in our world. The worship practice was nothing short of a full African American culture too with lots of feeling and soul behind the music, etc.

There are times where I feel a lack of confidence. Despite the fact that I have toured for many years, ran sound in….sheesh, maybe 350 different rooms? Been on staff at Willow as a sound engineer, hired by multiple bands, etc., there are shows where I just feel uneasy and nervous on how the sound is going and question myself on if I really know what I’m doing. Man – that sounds crazy, but it’s true. Then there are days that are polar opposites and I feel like I’m hitting a home run. This training session was a positive experience for me as they, makes me laugh, considered me the “Yamaha Expert”. This past week I mixed monitors for the midweek service at Willow and some of the band members were commenting me on that it was one of the best monitors mixes they have ever had. What a compliment, but at the same time, what a standard to keep having to live up to!

I absolutely love running sound and having the opportunity to have 24 channels of a quality band at my fingertips. It’s a competitive field though…running sound and being an audio engineer. I think that’s what makes me loose confidence sometimes if I have a few bad shows in a row. If you can’t make it sound good or do your job well, there are plenty of others out there who can. Maybe it’s that mentality too that keeps me striving forward and learning new tricks here and there and trying to make every mix that I have my hands on the best that I can. Who knows, maybe I’ll even get to run sound a few more times.

Last week I had the chance to go with the guys to Anchorage, Alaska; all of our first time up that direction. We were all amazed by the incredible views and landscapes and wildlife. Despite the fact that we did pass a dead body on the side of the road, also a first, we went on a boat tour and saw huge glaciers crashing down into the ocean, whales, sea lions, otters, puffins (lil birds), porpoises, etc. The gig itself that we did was nothing too much to brag about. The crowd was fun. A guy who I worked with 5 years ago at Moody was the sound guy there, cool to reconnect, however somebody had a brilliant idea to hang a huge cloth of fiberoptic stars in front of the speakers, so the whole night sounded like somebody draped a big wet cloth over the band. Despite all that, the trip, close to 12-13 hours of flying, was definitely worth it.

It’s a photographers dream world up there – every 5 minutes the scenery completely changes. I uploaded all my photos for your viewing pleasure!