KDAVE-FM
Originally uploaded by Dave Stevens No static at all...
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I've had a great time doing A Barking Dog for the last five years or so, however infrequent it's been over the last year. This post for me marks the end of an era, the last post of A Barking Dog. The stories were true to life, at least how I remembered it to be afterward or how I saw it those times when the posts were in real time. Some of the people weren't exactly pleased in the way I protrayed them. Bummer, I called it like I saw it. Which is one of the reasons I decided to stop posting. I'd like to keep this gig until either I retire and move to some Del Webb gated community (I'm almost old enough..) or until Ambi and I figure out how to get those couple of acres of land either in Nor Cal or the PNW and start our organic produce farm, with of course, a race shop.
My current corporate overlords, while not as hard core and tight assed as the first place I worked on The Strip still wouldn't appreciate some of my observations. On a pretty frequent basis I have a "you gotta be fucking kidding me" moment, at which point I turn to one of my colleagues and say "you gotta be fucking kidding me". It's an interesting mix on The Strip of audio types. Not a lot of rock guys and not a lot of guys that have done big time stage mons. I think there might be a dozen of us with most of those at the big time music gigs or rooms in town. The production show crews while they have bands and monitors, don't have a lot of real monitor guys. There are a couple of guys that can do it pretty well but there are also many guys that think they are a lot better than they are. The bands for the most part know the difference. They need rock mons in a theatrical production show environment and a lot of the kids on the mon desk weren't born when some of us started doing mons or playing in bands. They need real monitor guys on real monitor consoles and that doesn't look to be changing anytime soon. It's no wonder why some of the younger, higher caliber guys spend a year or two on The Strip then hit back out on the road. I don't blame them but for an old roadie like me that wants to wind down and spend the back nine of the career working with cool, high tech stuff from the creative angle (these days I'm doing a fair amount of mixing both FOH and mons) back on the road isn't really a good option.
For a quarter century I based my life on getting the next gig and getting a bigger gig. I had some success and a couple of failures along the way. I had a good run. Just like A Barking Dog. It had a good run, though belabored over the last year or so. At one point there were about 15,000 people a month reading. Now it's time to turn out the lights and go into archive mode.
Like Shakey says, it's better to burn out, rust never sleeps.
Thanks for a great run, gang. We'll see you around...
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At the front end of the career it's a competitive environment. And that doesn't change as the years rage on. There are always more people than available gigs though there never seem to be enough GOOD people for those gigs. As one gets on in years, like the seasons, things change. What was important at 25 is no longer important at 35 and things like family start to take priority over things like gigs. What do you think is more important? Making sure your TPS reports are properly filled out, or making sure your kids are healthy and happy? Lumdberg might be pissed, but those reports are a distant second, if not further down the list.
When you're a young turk in this biz you don't think about what you're going to do next year. Let alone when you are 40, 50 or 60. I know I didn't start thinking about it until Crazy Uncle Kenny's dot com entered a death spiral and I saw my six figure livelyhood disappering faster than Britney's panties. Forty years old, no college degree, years of experience in the Varsity of touring audio. Outside of touring, that and six bucks would get me a double tall, low fat, half soy, part vanilla, part hazelnut latte. For all intents and purposes in that case you don't have a pot in which to piss, as they say. It really hit home when shortly after the dot com was sold for pennies on the dollar and the operators at the time determined they didn't really need my services. No prob, I thought. While the first dot com bubble burst, it was still a boomtown in comparison to the rest of the world.
I was attending a technology job fair up in Seattle, fresh on the dole of the State of WA just ending a nearly three year run at the dot com, the heart of which I started as a labor of love not quite a decade earlier. Google was advertising a contract position for someone to maintain storage space in either the Chicago or Atlanta data center. Basically, you read a log and swap dead hard drives from clusters. Even though I'd been able to build dot com, build and run the data center infrastructure I wasn't qualified for the job as a contractor swapping drives. I was Red Hat certified, Sun certified and a former MS certified tech with commercial experience on the Internet since the Internet became commercial. No matter. I didn't have a college degree, even though most of the kids applying were in grade school and had no idea what a server was at the time I was starting to build the property. While I had the knowledge and experience to do the task, according to the search kings, I didn't have the most important part. A piece of paper that said that I was able to tolerate four years of school regardless of any real world experience.
That left a mark. And at the same time was a huge wake up call. Had I stayed at Cal Poly Pomona about a quarter century earlier I might have had the paper to get that gig, but I surely wouldn't have gotten the gigs I did, when I did had I stayed in school. As they say, when you find a fork in the road, take it. And I took this one and that was where I was at the time. The next day I confirmed an offer for a tour that would take me through most of that year. One door closes, one door opens. At that point, the dynamics and structure of touring had changed. Controlled more by the bottomline than quality in and of itself the pricing structure for most continued to decline. What was once a US$2500/wk gig plus PD, business class travel and own room in a good hotel was a US$1200/wk gig, light PD, coach travel and sharing a room with some twenty something concerned with getting the most out of the party atmosphere. Or about where I was nearly two decades earlier.
I suppose that's standard economics. Supply and demand. It's OK when you're 20, or 30. Less tolerable when you're 40. How about 50? I'll be there in a few years. At 60? The problem for many of us is we didn't start thinking of exit strategies until well into our careers. You can milk a good twenty years from the road, but can you do thirty? Or fourty? And at what cost? In the mid 90s there was a very popular band that we had a vendor contract with. They were from Austraila and were tearing up the airwaves at that point. The mon guy from OZ was a family man. He'd been on the road for sometime. At one point during the tour he called home. His six year old son answered. "Hi, it's daddy" the mon guy stated. To which the kid replied "Who's daddy?" Within the next couple of days, the mon guy headed home, to my knowledge never to tour again.
My point is to have an exit strategy so at the point you turn 50 you're running the show instead of changing RF mic batteries and shouting "climber 2 check, fourteen, one-four, check" into a french Canadian's face just prior to the show. Even the best laid plans shit the bed. Make sure you have a handle on where you wnat to go and how you want to get there. What you are doing at 30 isn't going to be what you want to be doing at 60.
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But it's not come at some expense. The compressed time frame of our recent "enhancement", (sound is awesome, but a reported 6 mil worth of lights looked like shit to me) unmanagable colleagues and demands from upper management make the technical nirvanna secondardy to the petty politics, greed, arrogance, incompetence and ignorance that seem to permeate my existence on the gig at this point. Just like with touring, it became not fun to come in everyday inspite of having one the best gigs in the biz using some the most advanced tools available. The horseshit factor outweighed any enjoyment that might be derived from such a job. It's not like I didn't like those with which I work, as I do. It's just that I have a different veiw of Varisty than some of them did. Or at least in my mind, I think that I do. I do enjoy the genre of the modern circus style Las Vegas production show in the terms of scale, scope and artistic endevor. You'd never find me doing some of the things the performers do. Ever. Well, except perhaps imbibing on a favorite spirit at the Artisan or Peppermill.
It's a bittersweet time, full of angst and indecision. As Ed says, "but I know that I know I don't want to stay". So I left. About six weeks ago I put in my notice, much to the "disgust" of English John, our leader. I don't know that disgust was the word he was looking for. I've only voluntarily left one gig before, work of Sid for the "riders that go for great distance", or the "riders that are very tall", as Jordy would say. I did mention that after nearly a couple of decades, I did run into Jordy in Spain again? I mentioned that in the Euro 2k6 season when we were doing the castle tour. Still have some great castle gig video. I should post that one of these days. I should also not cuss, bathe regularly, brush my teeth and not be such a crusty old fuck. But that's not likely to happen either.
Much like an infant in a shit laden diaper, it was time for a change. Not that I didn't like the show or the people I was working with, I did. But the challenges were few and a couple of the personalities I had to deal with made the gig less than fun. I told the powers that be that I left the gig to pursue greater opportunities. That's partially right. But I also didn't have any shirts with a rainbow picture of the sun with French writing. Well, Quebecious anyway. I figured that if I was going to spend the back nine of my career doing this kind of show (with an outstanding benefits and good compensasion package) I might as well be doing it with the people that are considered to be the top of the class. Even if they are based in Canada, err, I mean Quebec.
So if this is such a good move, why is it bittersweet? Other than the fact that Fuel record is on Dave's iTunes now? I had (and still have it) it pretty good. I was instrumental in redesigning and programming a big ass monitor rig on one of the most complex shows on the planet. I was working with (mostly) some pretty cool people. But after a year and a half I was going nowhere. I need to be the lead dog on the sled team. I can't stand looking up the other dogs butts on the sled, particularly when I think I can be faster than them. On tour it was easy. Cut the mustard, be good at your gig or your ass gets shipped out. In LV Strip world, don't work like that. If you're kind of good enough to do the gig, don't piss anyone off too badly and don't invite any lawsuits, they'll keep your ass around no matter how much you know or don't know about doing mission critical pro audio. To me, that ain't right. Know your shit, do it well or get the fuck out. It's really that easy.
As wistful as I am for the touring days, it would take a call for a long term gig where Rog and Dave brought the inflatable pig and styrofoam bricks for the wall to get me out of retirement. And somehow I don't think I would be on the short list for the call.
So what did I do? I started over. Again. Shit. Part of this is having to work my way back up from my former life of being the big swinging dick on the desk to being the guy on deck that makes sure that all the IFBs, ear mons and mics are working. About a hundred packs at this point. No, really. That's an assload of batteries. And not counting wireless com. Sometimes you have to go backwards to go forward. Of course, the trick is to know when the time is right and see the payoff at the end of the tunnel. Otherwise you're just going backwards. And that's the bittersweet part. Knowing that you can do the heavy lifting but being relagated to what one might consider crap work. That, my friend, is what separates the men from the boys, the Varisty from the Jr Varisty.
]]>The discussion was regarding the parallel spliting of microphones with regards to sound reinforcment applications. Jim Brown and Bill Whitlock presented AES 118 in Barcelona "A better approach to passive microphone splitting" (paper 6338) Full text is available at http://www.audiosystemsgroup.com/AESPaperSplittersASGWeb.pdf
While the research presents compelling arguments and data for reasons not to Y split mics it fails to address practical and business concerns and offer a comparison of real world parameters aside from what is very comprehensive test data. In other words, plugging a mic in and using it in an app without all the test gear and using perhaps the most important audio test gear, human ears. My point is that even with the science, in a real world SR application one will be challenged to tell in the majority of cases which mic is Y split and which mic is transformer split. The paper does an excellent job of explaining the phenomenon though it doesn't address the use of lower cost transformers when used degrade or change the audio more than a Y split would, particularly on the low end with high amplitude apps. To me that's been much more noticable than Y spliting. Also, the current breed of active mic splitters add thier own signature to the sound, offsetting many times the subtle differences in esoteric mic pre amps. In practice I've found the results of using active mic spllitters and inexpensive transformers to impact my app more than the results of Y split mics. Given the same level of other equipment, talent, environment, etc.
I had hoped to make a more comprehensive comparison but due to time and other restrictions, I won't be able to at this point. This weekend I trade my polyester blend polo shirts from the swanky dive on the Strip for some tee shirts with a picture of a yellow sun at another dive down the street where they do the same sort of thing. This time, though, instead of flying 90lb french chicks through the air then dunking them in water, we'll turn the beach into a forrest and then into a mountain and fly 90lb asian chicks through the air but with no real water to dunk them into.
Here's what I did for the mic split comparison. Using a PM1D V2 with the new mic preamp cards, supposedly based on the XL4, the LMY4-MLF or as we call them, the MILF cards. I used a Neuman KMS-104 with 100' cable and split it with a standard Y into two channels of the PM1D. I routed the preamp out (pre HPF) of each channel out of a DIO MY4-AT (Lightpipe) into a Digidesign 192 I/O feeding a Pro Tools HD2 system @ 24 bit/44.1kHz. One file is the direct, unsplit sound of the mic. On the second pass two mono tracks recorded the indentical source concurrently in real time and the mic in the second track is used. The most difficult thing for me was keeping the mic technique consistent between tests.
I've uploaded the files at http://roaddog.com/video/split_test/file1.wav and http://roaddog.com/video/split_test/file2.wav . I'll leave it to our gentle readers to decide which is which or even if so inclined to run a transfer function test to see any differences or if that test matches the differences in what one preceives between the two files.
EDIT: I've opened comments for a while so if you have anything to say, post it.
Dave
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The Princess of Darkness is special though. She's touched. If she were an Absolut commercial, it would be "Absolut Batshit Wacky". The arrogance doesn't bother me as much as the lack of respect for the 200 other people working on the show. Consider this, someone sets up a huge creation zone in front of what is one of the busiest departments in the show. Then complains about how we go in and out of our offices. Sorry you set up in front of one of the most trafficed places in the production. What's more sorry is the lack of support from upper management and the propensity to kiss her ass so hard that they may likely suck out a turd. Everyone thrown under the bus all because the Princess has been nominated for several awards from that Tony guy and she's in the favor of Jesus. Still haven't found that Tony guy, I hear he doesn't like sound guys. And it looks like shit. But what do I know, I've only been doing this and enjoying live shows for more than three decades.
Sweetiebabycookiehoney, we don't give two fucks about how they do it in New York. This is Vegas, baby. And if New York wasn't such a run down shithole, we'd consider buying it. But they don't have 24 hr booze, gaming and quality hookers so it doesn't quite fit our business model. Well, they have that, but not legally so we can give the State a taste. That's what we sell here, kids. Fun and fantasy. And we tax the shit out of it. And no one complains.
At one point the Princess proclaimed to all within earshot that "this is how we do it at the highest level of lighting". If by that, Princess, do you mean wash the stage with so much lighting you can't see what's happening then move the lights not in time to the music? It looks like a Full Sail graduate's time at a Whole Hog in the Martin booth at NAMM rather than a multi million dollar lighting design by some acclaimed Broadway designer. But then what do I know? I'm only some broke dick ass that's done rock for the last few decades.
Well what the hell is the point, Dave? Glad you asked because I was ready to go on another tangent. The point is, no matter how good you are, or more importantly, how good you THINK you are, don't be a dick. In the long run it will bite you in the ass. I know this from experience. Also, don't think because you are good at one thing and got really rich from it, don't think you can be good at other things automatically. I call this the "transitive property of having your head firmly in your ass". You're good at what you're good at, and that's it. It's really is that simple. Too bad Jesus doesn't get it.
Dirty hair and titty rings sold separately.
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