Inside the Mind of Sators

Shoot – I happened to fly through my blog yesterday and realized that I hadn’t posted anything since my ‘regret’ post.  Well, that’s definitely not an accurate representation of life here.  While yes I definitely regretted what I wrote on this here blog a while back, as opposed to how this blog would appear, I am not allowing that to weigh me down.  On the contrary, I spent that day dealing with how I made a mistake, it was my fault, and learning from that process.  The next day, I woke up, and it was a brand new day with a brand new outlook and horizon.

What’s this mean?  Something new is ahead, something unexpected, something different.  How exciting is that?!?  Sure it’s a little bit daunting not knowing exactly what that might be, but hey in the meantime I’m able to reconnect with friends at various gigs around the city here and offer my help to them.  I actually do enjoy the relaxed days of being on the computer, doing some web design, exploring new technologies, experimenting with different software or server and definitely sometimes getting frustrated and scratching the whole project.

A lot of people in the first week were coming up to me asking if I was ok, how I was doing, etc.  Totally felt loved and cared about which is so appreciated.  But really, I am ok.  Our bills are paid this month and will be next month too.  There’s different jobs/gigs coming in that will keep us going.  Jamie is able to pick up some more hours at the portrait studio.  Things are alright.  Sure the bank accounts might be dipping a little lower than I might be comfortable with, but as Jamie and I have said to each other, things could be much worse and we’re still blessed to be where we are.

Speaking of where we are – are we still moving?    I should rename this blog – to move or not to move.  Well, the definite answer is that yes we are moving.  When and where?!  To be determined.  The fact of the matter is that we can’t even show the house yet because some of us are a little backed up in getting everything packed and making the house ready to show.  I guess it’s not as much of a huge priority since we don’t know where the next steady gig will be or really have the funding right now to get into the next place, but moving somewhere (Indy/Nashville) is definitely in our future.

Side note – I didn’t really ever mention that a few of the local Chicago news stations got word of my little scenario of getting canned over a blog and asked if I would be willing to sit down in front of a camera to tell my story and to encourage others to be careful what they write online at their blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc.  Thanks to the wise council of my friends, I’m letting that 5 minutes of fame pass by for the sake of the career.  Sure would have been fun though.

So ya – web designing a lot, keeping in touch with old friends, and making myself available to the next gig needing an audio engineer, tour manager, production guy, whatever!  If you might be in need of any of that – hit me up!

I got the webcam hooked up and been Skyping pretty frequently lately.  My username is satorsdotcom.  Skype me!

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

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!

In my adventures with Stellar Kart and previous groups that I have traveled with, there have definitely been times where promoters and personnel putting on a concert have gone well and below the bar of trying to make the band feel welcome and sometimes being rude and disrespectful.  This post goes out to the would-be concert promoter who is considering bringing in a band….don’t do the following: Read more…