The Mixer in a Box

The Daytona 2010 BikeWeek is now something for the history books. People came to the rally and partied. I did not talk directly to vendors but heard that it was a crowd of lookers, not buyers. The weather was somewhat less than co-operative. The temperatures were low for the whole rally. There was, however, only one rainy day and that mostly in the morning.

There were two bands that played the Full Moon Saloon where I worked this rally. Their schedule was broken up rather than straight through. This would have made for several remixes with an analog board, but with SAC, as any digital console, it is just a matter of saving the mix at the end of the night and calling up the proper mix session at the beginning of the evening. This was a good thing here but is really great for a regular rally or multi-band festival situation.

The stage and house PA in the Full Moon had been moved over the winter. The sound booth had not been moved. It is now located off to the side of one of the main cabinets. One cannot hear the mix through the PA from the house mix location. With the SAC system’s remote capability this was not such a problem. I mixed from the middle of the crowd using my NetBook. It is more comfortable to have at least a small table and even with the light weight NetBook my arm got a bit tired by the end of the evening, but I was able to hear the PA and the mix.

The NetBook worked fine for mixing the shows but the battery life is a bit of a problem. After the first few nights I spent some time uninstalling several programs that wanted to run in the background and shutting down several non-essential services. I also started putting the computer into hibernate during the breaks. There was a significant improvement in battery life.

The sets were one hour through out the week with a half hour break. Before the adjustments I needed shore power about 2/3 of the way through the second set. After the tweaks I had to plug in for the last ten minutes of the third set, and the last half of the last set if it went to four sets. The battery never makes it back to full charge with just a half hour, but it is much more workable now. Putting the computer into hibernate also helps as the lighting load is removed and the hard drive probably powers down, allowing more juice to trickle into the battery.

There were a large number of amazed people. They would see me in the crowd with the NetBook and wonder what the heck I was doing. I would explain that the little computer was a remote control for the sound system. Thanks to good bands and good equipment one of the patrons told me that the Full Moon was the best place to listen to music on Main Street.

The annual spring motorcycle rally in Daytona Beach Florida is underway. This year the event started on February 26th and runs through March 6/7th. I am mixing sound in the Full Moon Saloon on Main Street in Daytona. Main Street is the traditional center for the rally and is a must visit for the rally crowd.

The Full Moon has a house PA system. It is a good club system and covers the room without any problem. The room has just been redone and the stage rebuilt. The previous stage was a corner stage but the new stage is on the short wall and that is much better from a production standpoint. It has introduced one production problem though. There are exposed rafters and beams in the venue. The main speakers are flown and are between the beams and the ceiling. This means that the horns are reflected back to stage from close range and has resulted in some feedback problems. The horns are a bit hotter than I would normally run them as well. It took me longer than I would have liked to figure out the exact problem and make the necessary changes to deal with the problems.

I elected to take my SAC system into the venue for the event. Primarily this is because the SAC system is my preferred mixing environment. The house board is a small Yahama with limited features and the house mix location is left over from the old corner stage and is poorly positioned for the new club layout. The floor in the mix booth is also very resonate so that the low end in the booth bares little resemblance to reality in the room. With the SAC Remote operating over a WiFi connection I can mix from anyplace in the room (crowd permitting).

Mixing by remote control in this situation, as well as many other possible situations, is a great benefit. A sound man needs to be able to hear the overall sound from the stage and PA in order to do a good job. Monitoring a mix by headphones tells you what is in the mix but not what is in the room. Club sound is a combination of the stage sound and the PA sound. One reinforces sounds in the mains to maintain a proper balance in the room. Having the capability to hear exactly what is going on in the room is a great advantage. Being able to do this without taking up valuable real estate in a club has been impossible in the past. The SAC system enables this to become a reality.

February 4th was the evening of the annual spring Gospel Choir Concert at Bethune-Cookman University in Daytona Beach Florida. I have provided sound reinforcement for the Gospel Choir. This year was the first opportunity to use the SAC rig. This is a choir of singers. There is not too much problem getting the voices out. This year the Alto section was a little lite and the Tenor section was very strong, the reverse of years past.

Instrumentation included drums, percussion, and keys. Of course the prime instrumentation was the voices. As always with SAC the sound was excellent.

There was a mime group that performed to three numbers during the intermission.

There was video that was shot of this concert. I have a VST recorder available with the system. I recorded the performance and the video production crew had a USB external hard drive to which we copied the output file. They will sync it up and mix it with the camera audio for the sound track to the video.

I see that the last post was the end of May. I have been slack in posting to this blog. That does not mean that there have been no outings with my SAC rig.

In June I did two major events using the SAC rig. The first was the Laconia, NH motorcycle rally. This was a eight day event. I did carry the analog board along and it was used for the Bang Camero and Edgar Winter shows. I mixed all the bands between on the SAC rig.

Then it was on to the Harley Rendezvous in New York. That is an old school biker party held annually on a ‘country club’ grounds. It is a two day event with two shows plus several opening bands. The first night was Gator Country with several former members of Molly Hatchet doing primarily Hatchet material. They did not carry a front of house engineer so I was able to do that show with the SAC rig. The second night’s show was the Kentucky Headhunters. I offered the rig to their engineer, but he declined. He did come out to the mix location during the opening act’s show and commented that the rig sounded great.

In August I normally go to Sturgis for the Rally. I lost the contract this year so did not go. I did do a fund raiser in Tallahassee with a band from Daytona using the SAC rig. This worked out well. The organizers of fund raisers never leave space for a mix location. I set the rig up at the side of stage and used a netbook to remote control the show. Look Mom, no wires!!

In October I worked the fall rallies in Myrtle Beach and Daytona using the SAC rig. In Myrtle they were especially pleased that there was no snake to worry about. I did my mixing on the netbook there. In Daytona I ran the snake but it was only used for the FogHat show. I mixed the BlackFoot show on the SAC rig.

I have also done several smaller gigs with the rig and used it for the opening acts on a couple of other shows.

There have been several updates since I bought the software in March/April. Each of the updates adds features. The developer is very responsive to sensible feature requests. Each update makes the software more of a pleasure to use.

The BCASCA Jamboree is an annual event with which I have been evolved since its inception. BCASCA is the Brevard Caribbean American Sports & Cultural Association. The event was held Labor Day weekend for several years, but consistent bad weather and a hurricane caused them to change the date to Memorial Day weekend a few years ago.

There is a good bit of Island music both from live entertainers and a DJ. There are also the necessary announcements and some raffles and drawings. This is a two day event that runs from 9 AM to 7 PM (or so).

The weather the week of the event had been very wet. There was rain in the morning of set-up day that delayed the start of festivities. Because of the rain we got started at about noon. The weather did co-operate for the rest of the event. There were threatening skies and a few drops along the way, but nothing that slowed the event down. One of the bands was canceled on the opening day. They were from Miami and the weather was too uncertain at the time that they would have had to get on the road to drive to Palm Bay.

One of the filler acts that played to compensate showed off the quality available with the SAC system. There are always hand drummers in this crowd. There was a Sax player that was asked to play a medley to fill some of the time. He invited a couple of hand drummers to accompany him. With the SAC rig I had the best hand drum sound that I have ever heard. The Sax player had already played so I knew that I had a great Sax sound, but the hand drums were amazing. You could hear the fingers slid across the skins.

The second day of the event both scheduled bands played as well as the dance groups and track artists that were scheduled. The first band, Alize, I work with several times a year. The other band from Jacksonville has played the event the last three years. During the second band’s set there was an old gentleman in the crowd who was introduced as Byron Lee’s former bass player (of 35 years). Byron Lee is one of the primmer acts in the islands. After the show I stopped to say hello to the artist. He was effusive in his praise of the quality of the sound. This was made possible, in part, because of the quality of the SAC mixer that was driving the system.

This is always a good event. The island people are wonderful. There were vendors and rides for the kids. It is a good family event. The Palm Bay Regional Park has come a long way in the 12 years that the event has been held there.

Myrtle Beach Spring Motorcycle Rally – 2009 was the first motorcycle rally for which I used the Software Audio Console. The motorcycle rally business makes use of some SAC features that I had not had opportunity to use up to this point. For a rally there are typically multiple performances by various acts on consecutive days during the event. There are also two or three bands a day.

With the SAC rig I am able to save the mix for the band, including monitors. The first day I do the mix for the band. At the end of the show I save the mix under the band’s name. The next time that the band plays I am able to recall their mix and setup. This is a great convenience and improves the flow of the event because there is no time wasted on subsequent shows by the same band. The same thing can be done with shows and opening acts. The show artist can sound check and then the show mix can be saved. The opening acts can be mixed as necessary using all channels and when it is time for the main act the show mix can be recalled.

The rally itself was shortened due to local politics. There was a question as to weather the rally would go at all. The venue that I support ran for six days instead of the normal nine days. The overall attendance was poor, more because of the negative publicity than the poor economy. The local people are most unhappy with the current administration. I am hoping that things get better by the fall, as the little bump in income is always nice.

Overall the SAC rig performed flawlessly. During only one mix session there were two slipped buffers, but no audible clicks or pops. I suspect that this was caused by the wireless system. I set up a remote on stage so that I could take care of monitors from stage. In fact, our main act for the rally had a knowledgeable player and he adjusted monitors several times during the shows. This feature also adds to the professionalism of the presentation as there were no calls for monitor changes over the microphones. I think that I have a bad antenna with the new wireless card that I put in the remote computer. I hooked it up to a friends computer and there was no improvement in signal versus no antenna. I will do some further testing to confirm this.

The third time out with the SAC rig was the benefit event for Reuben Morgan aka ‘The Lounge Lizard’. Reuben has been a figure on the local scene for many years and has done much for the community in the promotion of live music. He has been stricken with a debilitating disease and so is unable to work for a time. The community came together to support him in his time of need.

The event was held at the Coliseum complex in Daytona Beach. There were three stages with entertainment through the afternoon and evening. I had been asked to mix the sound for the main stage. Nine area bands played in a ten hour period. I took the SAC rig in and used it to mix the show. We drove the house racks and stacks from the SAC output. There was good volunteer stage and provided backline equipment, so the band change overs went smoothly.

The SAC rig performed flawlessly and the sound quality was outstanding. As always, the SAC rig was a pleasure to use.

The second event for which I used the SAC rig was the Church of God – Cocoa office state women’s conference. This annual event is held in a hotel conference room in Orlando, Florida. There is a good deal of music with the COG conventions. There is typically a full band, 6 praise team mikes plus a solo mike, a wireless mike for the podium and a couple of other mikes for vocals. The sermons need to be recorded to CD for copying and sale usually when the service is over.

I had set up a starter mix session with the inputs that I expected to need and the necessary in/out assignments. I had done some general presets as far as monitor levels that I expected to  be requested. Set-up and the whole outing went a lot more smoothly than the first gig. I had set a second set of outputs for my record output and done the channel assignments so that I was ready to record. I also had taken a small Yahama mixer to handle the input/output interface with the CD recorder. Everything worked pretty much as planned and the event went without a hitch.

I will be putting up a gallery that will include a couple of pictures of the setup at the convention as well as some other gigs.

The first gig with the Software Audio Console was a local band gig in a small club. The band was a RainLord reunion. The club was Finn’s in Flagler Beach, Fl. Rainlord was a popular bar band in the area for many years. I worked many shows with them back in the day.

This show was really too early to have taken the SAC rig out. I had just put the system together. I had had an issue with slipped buffers. I got the machine stable on the day of the show, but there was not even a real burn in period. In addition to that I had no experience in using the system, but you have to start somewhere.

I got to the venue without so much as a starter mix session. I did not even have channel assignments for input or output assigned. I had to do all that at the venue. This took more time than it needed to because I did not know my way around the system all that well.

We got the band up an running and everything went relatively smooth. There were many comments about the quality of the sound. The system worked like a champ.

The second night there was someone there to record the show. This meant figuring out routing for more outputs so that he would have a source. I didn’t do that the best way, but I did get the job done. I should have used one of the monitor consoles and dedicated that to him. It would have been easier for both of us.

It was a good experience. I had a convention coming up the next week. I really needed the ‘hot’ time with the system