This feature allows you to easily highlight an important channel or to color code groups of channels for quick reference. This is a good addition to the UI.

There are sixteen colors available and the color palette is adjustable through the options menu. If you make adjustments to the default color picker they will be passed down to the remotes when they connect to the host.

To place a color on a channel a left/right click or an alt right click on the label area will call up the color picker. The screen shot shows the sixteen colors available from the default palette. In use I find that holding the left mouse button and giving a quick tap on the right button seems to work best with my wireless mouse. Calling up the color picker has been a bit touchy. The available colors are displayed in the right column but must be selected with the buttons on the left.

This is one of several great new features available with the free update to SAC Version 2.6.

The major visual difference is that the shades system is now fully implemented. This was in the plan for SAC from the beginning, but the developer held off on activating the shade system until he was fairly sure that graphical changes to the UI will not be needed. It was possible to use shades on earlier versions by replacing the default graphics file with another file using the same file name. With the shades system fully activated shades can be switched on the fly while the engine is live.

Another very nice feature that has been introduced with 2.6 is the ability to color code the channel strips. There are 16 colors available. These line the sides of the label area. You could use this feature to highlight important channels or to color code groups of channels that are related.

There are some additional operational features that will improve the usability of the software. There is now an indicator on the channel number if a channel is disabled. Disabling unused channels saves CPU cycles, but you needed to hold the fact in memory if you had disabled some channels and then wanted to add channels to a mix.

The biggest operational enhancement from my stand point is that pop-up long throw faders have been added to adjust the compressor and gate thresholds. The original small faders were hard for a shaky old guy like me to deal with. The pop-up faders will make setting thresholds much faster and easier. There are now pop-up faders in other areas where before there were horizontal bars with a + above and a – below. These were always difficult to set precisely. There is a pop-up chart available and I often made adjustments by popping up the chart and selecting the value that I wanted. I will be using the charts a lot less now.

Another very good operational feature that has been added with 2.6 is an auto-save function. This will save the mix session every so often. This would have avoided one of my most embarrassing moments with SAC. There was a power failure. I did not realize that there was a problem before the system shut down (I run a UPS, but did not know that the breaker had blown and the amps were on other circuits). I had neglected to save the session before this, so I had to remix house and monitors on the fly. The monitor set-up was the biggest problem.

3M has come out with a multi-touch screen. Added with this release is the capability to do 10 finger control on a touch screen monitor. (I won’t be doing that anytime soon unless wads of money start falling from heaven!)

There is a list of bug fixes and some new traps to keep people out of trouble. These are listed in the release notes for the update. I am looking forward to using Version 2.6 this weekend.

The rally was shortened a bit and was not well attended, but the venue I work had a good weekend and is planning to continue the tradition in the fall. Myrtle Beach decided that they did not want to sponsor a rally and has become very biker unfriendly. They are suffering the consequences in that the area lost a great deal of revenue on which many local residences depend.

The outlying areas are still promoting the rally and did well with it, even though overall attendance was down.

The D. B. Bryant Band, one of the scheduled bands had to cancel because the drummer quit on them. They were scheduled to play early in the week. They had a replacement drummer lined up, but he was not available until later in the week. Because of that I got to see my friends Blue 88 and the first real biker band with whom I ever worked, the 69 Band. Joe Santana filled the other slot early in the week.

Wednesday through Saturday we had the Dallas Moore band and the multi-tribute group – Paradise City – Dead or Alive – and Silver Bullet doing G&R, Bon Jovi, and Seger. We also had headline appearances Friday and Saturday nights by Hells Bells. These are all bands that I have worked with in the past.

Paradise City had worked recently in Bloomington, Indiana. The tech in the club talked about his SAC system but was running the house system. Then they got to the rally and saw a SAC system in person. The community is still relatively small and many SAC users are active in the SAC Forum. I was able to make an educated guess as to whom they were referring. I confirmed by email that my guess was correct. They were very interested in the system as they are planning to move to an in-ear monitor system and the capabilities of the SAC system are impressive.

I did take a good number of pictures of bikes and motorcycle art and plan to post a gallery on my MC Rally site.

In the fall when I did the Youth Convention in the same room my remote refused to connect to the main computer via WiFi. I mixed the Youth Convention on my netbook. This time I had forgotten the netbook and again had a problem. I traced the problem down to a wrong passphrase to my router. The remote computer worked fine for the whole event after I got it connected.

There was one problem with the recording of one of the messages. The CD recorded a bit more data than the duplicator felt that it could copy. I did not have any audio utilities on my SAC rig to deal with the problem. We went online and downloaded CDeX and Audacity and I installed them on the SAC host. I then ripped the CD to the SAC host and opened it in Audacity and chopped about four minutes off the end of the recording. This made the duplicator happy and the copies were burned. The last CD we recorded had a scratch in the surface that caused problems. I was a bit nervous about using the ripper while the SAC engine was live, but they needed to try and salvage the content. I ripped the CD and there were about 50 errors, but the ripper made it through. I then burned a copy and it worked in the duplicator. I am sure there was some noise through the area of the scratch/errors, but they were able to make copies for distribution. The computer had no problem multitasking with the engine live and there were no slipped buffers through the exercise.

The hotel had set my mix location up on the opposite wall from my usual location. This placed me away from the musicians, but did not cause any real problem. The hotel staff does like the fact that there is no snake to the mix location. I like that feature, too, as there is a lot less to pack up at the end of the event.

This week I will be headed up to Myrtle Beach to work the motorcycle rally there with the SAC rig. I will write up a report when I return.

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 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.

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.

The SAC aux section consists of six full stereo modules. Each can be patched with either plugin effects or as hardware send and returns. This offers a great deal of flexibility. While six aux busses may not seem like a lot, there are twenty five consoles in the Software Audio Console package. Many of the functions that require an aux buss in a hardware console can be better served by using an additional console with SAC.

Check out The Auxiliary Section Page at Mixer in a Box.