Easter 09: New stuff…

Easter 2009 was filled with lots of new techniques and systems things that were implemented. In no particular order, here’s some notable stuff…

#1 – Ever since I started mixing on Venue, I’ve learned a lot from studying other engineers’ show files to see how they run the console. One common theme I had noticed was the use of virtual channel strips or EQ/dynamics plug-ins on vocals. I never completely understood why but had not really tried it either. Too many people do it for it to be a fluke. This holiday was a turning point in my channel workflow, especially when it comes to vocals!

For Easter, I used the Digi 7-Band EQ and Compressor on each vocal and it made such a difference in a couple ways. First, the extra bands that were available instead of the 4-band on-board channel EQ were welcome. But the bigger benefit came in automation. By running vocal channel processing from dedicated plug-ins, I was able to easily automate independently from the rest of the band channels. There were multiple instances where I wanted to create a snapshot that had faders/mutes/dynamics scoped and the only channels with EQ scoped were vocals. Using the plug-in route, I could add their plug-ins to the snapshot scope without having to effect the EQ on the rest of the console or needing a second snapshot only to scope the EQ changes. Since this revelation, I’m investigating full blown channel strip plugs and think I’ve landed on the McDSP Channel G as the one we’re going to go with.

#2 – There were three audio playback cues needed in the service – a drama voiceover, music for the crunch, and a testimony voiceover at the end of the day. Inspired by the latest Scovill Digi webinar on advanced Snapshots, I finally got MIDI going back and forth between our ProTools machine and the D-Show. This is so slick! Now, using MMC and a snapshot, I can locate PT to a specific time code associated with said clip, set the level on the fader, and start the clip. Worked perfectly every time. On our second service day, I also used MMC to start and stop recording to PT for all of the sections I wanted. All I had to do during the turnover between each service was set a new playlist for all 56 tracks I was recording and at the end of the day I had all 4 services with each service’s tracks on their own playlist.

#3 – While I was working with MIDI, I also routed MIDI time code from our MOTU Timepiece into the Venue for the first time. I must say, I tried using timecode with our PM1D during my first holiday at KCC and it was more trouble then it was worth. I don’t remember all the specifics of what I tried to do back then or whatnot, but again inspired by the webinar, I thought I’d revisit it on the D-Show.

I think this proved to be even cooler then MMC control of ProTools! Since all of our tunes in the day other than the piano ballad were to click tracks that came from the video system, I was able to lock all of the video rolls to time code so as soon as the video rolled, my console responded and I never had to worry about missing the start of the tune/video. This was also handy for a few snapshot changes mid-song for a couple of the tunes, mainly for subtle effects changes or vocal mix stuff (mics up/mics down). These were the sort of things that were too intricate to hit manually, but since they could be done automatically, added an extra polish to the mix.  It worked flawlessly and was so easy to work with that I think some of these basic time code functions will be a normal part of my operation mode going forward. It was so nice to be able to just focus on mixing and not have to remember to hit every cue manually!  Because our video playback comes from a digital source, the timecode is very stable and locks nearly instantly to the console.

That’s it for now. If more things come to mind, that will have to come as a part two!

PQ Assignments

Since I’ve recently covered my love affair with Digidesign’s PQ mixers, I thought it might be interesting to go through how our PQ monitor channels (which could be used for ears or a wedge mix) are setup. Each PQ mixer has a choice from the following sources:

• Kick (direct off channel)
• Wedge Drum Mix (Mono Aux – Snare & Hat with a little bit of toms if necessary)
• Stereo Drum Mix (Stereo Aux – for ears)
• Bass (direct off clean channel)
• Guitar 1 (direct off channel – mono)
• Guitar 2 (direct off channel – mono)
• Keys Submix (Mono Aux, includes verb for piano)
• VOX 1 (could be a mono Aux submix of lead vocal mics for the day or a direct of single channel)
• VOX 2 (could be a mono Aux submix of BGV mics for the day or a direct of single channel
• Click (submix of drummer’s Dr Beat and click channels from ProTools & VTR)
• Track/Loop
• Extras Stereo Mix (ambience, speaker mics, playback – basically everything else that artist would want to hear when they aren’t playing so they’re still connected to what’s going on.

As you can see, I have to dedicate 12 auxes to monitor functions in addition to the PQ mixers in order to execute the above configuration. My auxes are setup like this…

• Aux 1 – VOX Verb
• Aux 2 – VOX Delay
• Aux 3 – Band FX (generic bus for specialty effects)
• Aux 4 – Talk (this is for various talkback stuff from comm to get to the wedges since it gets to ears down the extras aux mix. This means this aux is only used for wedge mix PQs)
• Aux 5/6 – Vocals Submix 1 & 2 (sometimes used, sometimes not. Depends on the vocal configuration for the day)
• Aux 7/8 – Band Submix 1 & 2 (used to submix multiple inputs for an artist to 1 PQ channel. Ex: acoustic & electric.)
• Aux 9/10 – Stereo Drum Submix
• Aux 11 – Wedge Drum Submix
• Aux 12 – Keys Submix
• Aux 13/14 – Stereo Extras Submix (ambience, playback, speaker mics, talkback from comm)
• Aux 15 – Click submix
• Aux 16 – Feed to Subwoofers

Looking at the assignments, one obvious question is how do I survive with only three aux dedicated to effects? Pretty easy actually. The trick is to make more use of direct outs or inserts to feed specific effects for any case where a single channel is the only thing feeding the effect. For example, the snare and piano verbs are fed direct off their channel. If I need an acoustic verb, also fed direct. Once you include this in the equation, I now have 8-10 discreet effects busses available, plus the 14 submix auxes and 8 PQ monitor mixers.

Again, if there’s questions, please ask away!

Transient Designer Tips & Tricks

Here’s a few tips and tricks I read about Transient Designer a long while back.  I’m not sure where I found these – copied them into my Evernote without noting the location!

Boosting its attack controls on drum tracks can give kick, snare and toms the extra punch often needed to make them come alive. When you’re processing tom tracks, lowering the TD4′s sustain controls is a much more transparent (and speedier) remedy for reining in timpani-like sustain than smothering batter heads with duct tape. And for reducing excessive cymbal bleed into tom mics, just turn the TD4′s sustain controls counterclockwise for inputted toms and you’re done.

I wouldn’t dream of mixing a drum kit in my room without Transient Designer.  However, Transient Designer sounds great on more than just drums. Crank that sustain knob on soaring guitar solos to make David Gilmour blush. Or boost the attack on dampened ostinato parts played low on a six-stringer to make that rock ‘n’ roll vamp jump. These are just a few of the well-known — but powerful — applications that the TD excel at.

Tight, discrete-sounding drum tracks are cool, but trash is a bash. When your drums’ overhead mics sound like they were placed in a shoe closet and you’d prefer the sound of an empty warehouse, Transient Designer can provide instantaneous moving services. Route the stereo room mics through two of the TD’s linked channels (channels 1 and 2, or 3 and 4) and crank the unit’s attack controls to put a point on the traps. Then, slowly raise the sustain controls on both channels to bring up the room tone for an “all-buttons-in,” 1176-type sound — without pumping cymbals. Fine-tune the sustain control settings so that the room mics’ envelope more or less ends on the desired upbeat or downbeat for a driving rhythmic effect.

Are you bored with using the same tired reverb patches on your productions? Patch your reverb’s left- and right-channel outputs through linked Transient Designer channels to add a little pizzazz. Boost both attack controls on TD to the max and lower the sustain controls to their minimum settings. You’ll notice that the reverb’s intensity at its onset will subtly increase while the apparent decay time decreases.

Take the exact opposite approach to process a reverb patch so that it exhibits a pyramidal slope. Turn Transient Designer’s attack controls on two linked channels fully counterclockwise and crank the sustain controls to the max. With these settings, the onset of the reverb patched through Transient Designer will be de-emphasized, but the effect will bloom and then tail off over time (as long as the reverb program’s decay time is set to a sufficient length so that it continues evolving during the unit’s sustain phase).

Transient Designer can also be used to superimpose the dynamics of one track onto those of unrelated tracks. For example, patch two mults of a kick drum track into channels 1 and 3 of TD and send the outputs of those two channels “out to get pizza” (i.e., somewhere they won’t be heard). Patch a stereo keyboard track into TD’s channels 2 and 4 and activate both of the unit’s Link switches. Next, boost channels 1 and 3 attack controls to emphasize the kick drum’s slammin’ nature. TD will dynamically adjust the attack of its processed keyboard tracks to track the dynamics of the kick drum. Try it — you’ll get the point!

Transient Designer has come to Venue!

Its a great day to be a Venue engineer! Somehow I missed its initial release a few weeks ago, but yesterday I loaded the new SPL Transient Designer TDM plug-in and enjoyed sweet audio bliss!

Why so excited? Danny Cox, Kensington’s music director and accomplished studio drummer, first introduced me to a 4-channel hardware version of the Transient Designer a few years ago and I had one in our previous PM1D rig for maybe 6 months. In that time, I quickly found it to be one of those magic tools that just makes things sound better.

Its very simple to use – only attack and sustain controls – and the combination allows the engineer to completely reshape the attack and sustain characteristics of a sound. On snare, adding some sustain adds a natural verb of sort to an otherwise too tight sound. On toms, reducing the sustain a few clicks gives a similar effect to taping up a drum that’s a bit too resonant. On kick, dynamically adjust the click of the tone vs the sustain. On piano, add or reduce the initial attack of the note.

If you’ve been following me for a while, you know I’m a big proponent of getting the mix right at the source. While Transient Designer made its name in the industry to fix in the mix otherwise poorly recorded tracks, I found it provided a great tool to adjust for the variety of styles of drummers that play on our stage and make otherwise great tones even better. The whole key to using it effectively is moderation.

Now on any given week I will have at least 6 or 7 instances of the plug-in set up in my rack on kick in and out, snare 1 and 2, rack & floor toms, & piano.

Dave Stagl said today that its a bit early, but it seems likely that Transient Designer TDM is destined to become another must-have plug-in for Venue. I must agree! Much in the same vane as Cranesong Phoenix, Rane Serato Dynamics, & the Pultec/Fairchild combo on guitars, Transient Designer will be a staple of my live setup going forward.

SPL has a 14-day demo available on their site. But be warned: don’t try it unless you’re prepared to purchase!

Rebooting Venue

Question: What is the recommendation regarding how often a Venue system should go through the shutdown and startup process? Our console is installed in a permanent venue so it is easy to just turn off the displays and rest of gear at FOH while leaving the FOH rack on 24 hours a day on a UPS. Does Venue run better if it is software reset each day? Its occurred to me the console could be like any other Windows machine where it runs better with daily reboots.

Background: I had a Bombfactory BF-3A inserted on a couple of vocals, using it for the first time, and experienced a strange scenario. When we started the song in rehearsal, suddenly no audio was passing through the channel strip for the vocals with the BF-3A inserted. There was signal showing up on the signal meter, but not hitting the PQ or main busses. Unassigning the channel from any VCAs or mute groups didn’t make a difference. Going to the plug-in screen for said channel caused the screen to not redraw completely with a blank space where the plug-in should be. After trying to cycle to another screen and back, the entire software locked up. I could still control levels from the control surface, but said vocal channels would not pass audio. Scary!!!

Resolution from Digidesign engineer: While the system is designed to be able to run with no end, it is difficult for *any* system to actually *prove* that no bug is going to appear just because the system was up for too long. You’d have to perform full regression suites (which includes all configurations) with weeks of up times. It’s just not realistic. While you can have a few systems kept up & running the same configuration for a large number of days, it’s impossible to do with all configurations SW/HW (how many thousands exists?).

A classic problem for SW is counters rollover. If your system does include counters (and it pretty much guarantied to have some, no matter the OS, in your applications or drivers), you have some level of risk exposure. The textbook example of this was found in Windows 95/98 which crashed after 49.xxx days (http://news.cnet.com/Windows-may-cra…_3-222391.html). This is the type of issues that have given Windows a bad reputation, but the same condition happens in so many different ways. You also have potential memory leaks slowly saturating VM, etc. I’d like to tell you that we keep a bunch of systems running for over 50 days in each SW/HW configuration…

So let’s be practical: if your system has been running 24/7 for more than a week, you are in an increasingly less tested condition. Your system won’t burst into flames, but then, the chances that something is going to misbehave start to grow. So if a daily shutdown doesn’t work in your situation, I’d recommend a weekly restart. I pick a week because it’s the most practical period to remember. That will keep you in a reasonable uptime range, and if you forget it once in a while, it shouldn’t matter.

Additional: I also reinstalled the Bomb Factory plug-ins just to make sure there was nothing corrupt there. I’m using the BF-3A regularly since the incident and haven’t had any more strange behavior. I don’t know for certain that the problem was caused by too much runtime without a restart. Since it was the first time I used the plug-in, it is possible that something was corrupted in the initial install.

Lesson: Restart the console. Don’t leave the mix engine on 24/7. And test plug-ins before using them in a pressure environment since anything is possible in the world of software. I’ve had strange behavior from a PM1D and now I can say I’ve had a strange scenario with Digidesign Venue. Hopefully it doesn’t happen again.

How did we live before PQ?

I need to take a few minutes to sing the praises of the Digidesign PQ controllers as a part of a Venue system.  I know there are some other alternatives out there, but after going through my first major holiday on our Venue platform, I can’t imagine doing monitoring any other way without adding another console (which is out of the question for us).

When Kensington began 18 years ago, FOH and monitor duties were covered by a single desk and operator.  Fast forward 18 years and FOH, monitor, and broadcast duties are still covered by a single desk and operator.  Because we’ve lived this way for so long, it is not in our paradigm to do it differently.  Enter PQ.  Now we get the best of both worlds because we are still technically functioning under a single desk and operator, but we’ve been able to move the far bulk of monitor mixing out of the engineer’s head and into the hands of the artists.

The magic of the PQ system for us is in a couple things…

1. Because PQ is simply a remote control for a stereo matrix on the console, we are able to provide an artist with control whether they are using ears or wedges.  Our stage is probably 80% ears week to week, but there’s normally a mix or two of wedges in each service.  Because PQ is so tightly integrated into the console, I don’t have to worry about giving the artist control since if it gets out of hand, I also have access to the mix.
2. Being able to automate PQ mixes throughout a service is really cool.  I’ve found that the majority of our guys would rather not have their mixes automated since they don’t need very many changes.  But PQ ties so cleanly into the console automation that it is wonderful to be able to offer a patch or level change to be stored so they don’t have to worry about it.
3. It sounds great.  I’ve listened to some other systems and have never been impressed by how they actually sound.  PQ really sounds good.  You can drive it hard and it will respond just like the console – smooth and analog sounding.
4. Because no audio passes through the PQ controller, we’ve been very successful giving a mixer to the stage center worship leader for rehearsal so they have full flexibility to dial their mix, store it into each song’s snapshot, then remove the mixer for the service so we don’t have to look at it.  Works great!

Now it is rare to have to worry about monitors.  Soundcheck has been revolutionized because we don’t have to spend all the time for me to do FOH things – dial gain and get stuff happening, then go around the stage and build everyone’s mixes.  Once I’ve established gain for everyone, the band just needs to run a verse/chorus a time or two so that everyone can dial in, and we’re ready to go.  It should go without saying that I’m also able to provide a better FOH product because of not having to think about monitors.