Well, it’s time to start the webinars back up again. Our January webinar will take place this Friday January 29 at 10pm Eastern. We’re going to try Friday night this time since some folks have reported they are in rehearsals Thursday nights. This months topic deals with designing new systems and upgrades.

I’m pretty excited because this month we’re going to have my good friend, Bob Nahrstadt, from Next Creative Media as a guest. I’ve known Bob for a long time and have worked with him on several projects. Bob is one of my favorite guys to work with, and I love referring people to him because his heart is always to help you find the right solution for your situation. I’m glad he’s going to be able to share his experience with us this month.

Update Feb 4, 2010
Here’s the audio from the webinar.

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Link

You can also subscribe to the webinar as a Podcast via iTunes.

There is some really interesting stuff in this video. In particular, I love the demo that Poppy Crum does beginning around the 5:30 mark. After watching Poppy’s demo, think about it in the context of putting the lyrics up on screen on Sunday morning.

Sorry I’ve been away. I’ve got a lot on my mind, and I’m trying to get it all organized to maybe write about at some point. In the meantime, here’s a relatively quick one. I hate to call this a New Year’s resolution or a goal for 2010; it’s just something I’m working on this year. You see, I have an addiction, and that addiction is called Solo-In-Place.

I can’t exactly remember when it started, but Solo-In-Place (SIP) is something that I I know turned into a problem for me. Not every console has the feature so for those unfamiliar, SIP is essentially the ability to cue up a channel or channels in your PA. When SIP is engaged on a console, pressing the Solo or Cue or AFL button on a channel will mute all other channels in your PA. It can be a great tool, but I fear it is also easily overused.

Last year I started working on cutting back my SIP use, but I’ve been motivated more lately by some interviews I’ve been reading with some big name record mixers. A lot of those guys stay away from the solo button when they’re mixing and prefer to only work on things in context. After all, that’s the way things will be heard when the record comes out.

Of course, things can be a little different in a sound reinforcement scenario. While a portion of what I do as a mixer will only be heard in context of a song, there are also instruments I know at any given time might be naked in the PA. These can be things like lead vocals, acoustic guitars, and keyboards. So one of our challenges in sound reinforcement is to somehow make these sound good within the context of a full mix while also being able to stand alone if necessary. SIP can be a great tool for checking how these things will sound on their own. SIP can also be a great troubleshooting tool to identify specific problems with a sound.

However, once exposed to SIP, it can be very easy to start working on everything primarily using SIP. Once you start down that road, I feel you must be very cautious. When we start working on every sound in isolation, we aren’t mixing. Mixing is about blending things. It’s layering and making space. It’s how everything sounds together, and that can’t happen listening to each sound in isolation. Don’t get me wrong, if you have everything sounding really good, it’s been my experience that you can push up and balance faders and have things in pretty good shape. However, if I need to get stuff to play nice together, I need to work on everything together.

So one of the challenges for myself this year is to spend the majority of my time mixing things within the context of the mix. What are you guys working on this year?

So here’s a quick one to think about next time you find yourself hung up on numbers while mixing. I’ve recently been demoing some new plugin emulations from Waves of some classic studio compressors. The cool thing about the Waves emulations are there are pre-existing emulations from Bombfactory of the same classic compressors that have been on the market for almost ten years now. So we’ve got the same hardware inspiration recreated by two different digital manufacturers over the course of maybe ten years.

What’s interesting to me is how different the emulations are. You can set the virtual knobs on either plugin to the same settings, but the attack and release times are clearly different. Even the Input and Output settings are different. It’s visible right on the meters, but more importantly it’s audible. These differences could be for any number of reasons. The plugin manufacturers were probably using different hardware boxes to do the modeling, and when it comes to analog gear two different boxes–even of the same type–may sound and behave differently.

Now I’m not saying that one of these emulations is better than the other; you can go download demos and decide for yourself. But, I would like to point out that the numbers are the same, yet, the numbers are different. So next time you’re reading about how so and so likes to set his attack at 6ms and his release at 75ms or set the knobs a certain way, you might think about whether you have the exact same piece of gear so and so is talking about. And if you don’t have it, remember that you can always fall back on your ears.

Have a safe and Happy New Year!

Earlier this week Avid announced that the highly anticipated v2.8.1 software update for the Venue is available for all consoles. SC48 users have had access to v2.8 since the console’s release earlier this year, however, the rest of us have been patiently waiting for the Venue team’s refinement of the software to gain access to the new 2.8 features on our D-Shows and Profiles. I’ll probably have a full write-up on the new software at some point in January once I’ve spent some time on it, but in the meantime I have a trick formerly available only to SC48 users.

If you’re like me, laying out your channels is essential to a successful event. One of my main goals is to keep key faders within reach at all times. However, as a typical service or event progresses, the programming elements change and what was important to have within reach five minutes ago might now be worthless. To more easily deal with this, I’ve been hoping the Venue team would one day implement a way to customize channel layouts via snapshots. I think an approach to doing this is now here now thanks to the VCA Spill feature added to v2.8 of the D-Show software.

For those unfamiliar with VCA Spill, it allows you to double-click the “Select” button of a VCA and have the VCA’s members spill across your input faders so you get instant access to the channels assigned to that VCA without having to go searching across multiple banks. By coupling snapshots with VCA spill, you can easily create a virtual customized Bank of channels you can modify with each snapshot: