It’ll still be a bit until I have a pretty layout back up, and regular posting, but OFTR isn’t dead yet!

-Andy

Back looking pretty soon…
Update: So, the WordPress upgrade seems to have managed to change something that is adding a slash before every apostrophe and quote on the site, which means that posts look strange, and, worse, links and images aren’t working right. I’m working on fixing it, but it may be a day or so.

(If anybody has any experience with that sort of thing on WP, give me a shout, Andy@DucksEcho.com. I suspect it’s somehow related to PHP’s magic quotes, but that’s getting over my head!)

Hey gang, if you’re in/near NYC, do everything you can to get in for one of the two days of Sound411 that Stage Research is hosting. Should be a cool chance to learn some stuff, see some new toys, and network. And, in addition to the new stuff SR and the other companies there will be showing off, rumor has it I may have a big little something to debut there, too…

(If you are going, be sure to RSVP so they can get a head count, and do me a favor and tell them I sent ya!)

http://www.ratsoundsales.com/1_day.html
–Andy

Just a quick pointer for those who service Midas consoles…conveniently, the two Torx bits in a Klein 32477 10-in-1 Screwdriver/Nut Driver
(my daily go-to screwdriver, I love that thing) are the two sizes you need for a Midas, the larger one to get modules out, and the smaller to get faders out.

Yamaha Gear

Musical Instruments

Stage Sound

The first and last are a little two photo-realistic for my tastes for system diagrams, but they may be of use to others, and the instruments would do really well for pit diagrams!

–Andy

Second, a cool big-but-little trick I discovered that makes notating scripts in word super easy. In the “Table” menu, there’s a sub-menu labeled “Convert”. If you go into that, you can choose to convert your selected text to a table. Once you’ve made your initial edits to the script, and are ready to start dropping notations in, use this feature, telling it to divide cells based on paragraphs. It’ll turn your script into a table, dividing rows roughly after each character name and line. Then, by adding columns to the left and right, as needed, it’s super easy to add notes that stay in line with the text, without having to mess with text boxes and stuff like that. It’s also easy to bulk-format those notes, since you can select an entire column. This is what I do to add VCA number notations in the left margin of my mixing scripts, but it’s pretty useful for all sorts of notations for SMs, too.

–Andy, who now is headed back to his current script-notation session in Word, and cursing at the wonkiness of how Word 2008 inserts graphic elements and text boxes. Aargh.

–A

–Andy

*-I’m specifically referring to the fact that on musicals, we don’t put actors’ mics in monitors, as Jason details in his article. So, as a result, we need to understand that from an actor-centric point of view, if they can’t hear themselves singing comfortably onstage, they’re going to ask for “more of myself in the monitors”. It’s the sound designer/engineer’s responsibility, however, to know that in almost all cases, they don’t actually mean that they want more of themselves in the monitors, just that they want to be able to hear themselves more clearly. In other words, they’re actually asking for “less of everything else in the monitors”. Turn down the band a little, and they’ll be happy, and probably won’t even know they’re not going through the monitors at all.

On the flipside, I’ve seen the bad that comes with not understanding this. I’ve subbed a bit on a show I used to mix fulltime, and found that the GBF had significantly dropped since I’d last been on the show, and when I would instinctively hit the peak levels I used to be able to hit, things would begin to hit feedback. A little investigating revealed that the current engineer, when the cast complained that they couldn’t hear themselves, turned them up in the monitors, instead of just turning the monitors down. Now, not only is the entire GBF of the system (at least as far as vocals go) compromised, but there’s no easy way for anybody else to ever fix the problem, unless there’s a complete cast change. You can do it, but it’s got to be a very, very gradual process of rolling back the overall monitor level and the vocal level in tandem, while listening to yourself through mics onstage. Not easy, and not quick. And not my job on that gig, so I’m just making the observation :-)