A Rare Good Use of Crowdfunding

A while back, I had the great luck to be the “soundguy” for a Peter Ostrouschko and Dean McGraw show at Hobgoblin Music in Red Wing. Peter is mostly known as a mandolin player (His first recording was on Dylan’s “Blood on the Tracks.”) or violinist, but he is a fine guitar player. I was a guitar repair student at Southeast Tech at the time and my being at the show helped draw a few of the school’s brighter students. We’d been studying the origins of steel string acoustic guitars in our lecture class and one of the origins of all things acoustic and steel is Larsen Brothers Guitars. Before that class, I’d never heard of Larsen guitars but Peter brought one with him. When I saw it, I couldn’t help oggling his instrument.

Peter asked me some questions about my interest and offered to let me play it. There is no such thing as a cheap Larson guitar. Some Larson Brothers instruments sell for more than a luxury car and I am generally terrified of antique anythings; even when they aren’t worth more than my life savings. Later, some of my classmates showed up and when I pointed out the Larson on stage they all took a look. Some of the more courageous or clueless even touched the instrument. Peter was nothing but generous and gracious to the kids who mostly pestered him with questions only a kid would ask.

Peter and Dean let me do my usual non-traditional mic’ing of their instruments and mostly made me look good with their brilliant playing and expert use of instruments and equipment. It was an all acoustic show (no pickups on any of their instruments), so they could have screwed with me all night. Peter did fool with finding the “sweet [feedback] spot” for the small condensor I used for his vocal mic and sang along with that tone once he found it. He did it with the most subtle and dry humor possible and I’d have been a lot quicker to fix it if he hadn’t made me laugh so hard. I will [I hope] never forget their version of “Pennies from Heaven” (“Benny’s from Heaven”) and the incredibly powerful instrumentals they toyed with all night. Peter’s talent is near-superhuman.

As always, the good get pounded on first (He is five years younger than me, 64.. Peter suffered a heart attack in late 2017 that required a quadruple bypass and post-op he had a serious stroke. As is typical in the US, his medical expenses are terrible. Someone started a GoFundMe page for him, titled “Help Peter and Marge Ostroushko.” If you were ever inspired to contribute to this kind of fund, this is the one to get in on. Please.

Getting Off of the Bandwagon

Mix Magazine has always been a marketing tool for the equipment industry. Rarely, the magazine actually prints an article that is of some use to a recording tech. Constantly, the pages are filled with pseudo-reviews that are barely more (or not more at all) than reprints of the product’s advertising literature. I’m not just picking on Mix, because that has been the industry standard since Recording Engineer/Producer died.

The Mix Studio Blog: article, “To Subscribe, Or Not To Subscribe” is a typical bullshit Mix faux-informational article promoting, while trying to pretend it isn’t, Pro Tools’ subscription policies. The author pads his pr work with broad statements like:

• "Subscriptions also make it possible for developers to give customers access to a broader range of products for the money than is feasible through the purchase model."
• "it takes a mental adjustment to stop thinking of your software as something you own, like your microphones or audio interface, and to consider it a service that you pay for. Some advocates of subscriptions respond to that concern by saying that you never really owned your software, anyway, you just licensed it."
• "Imagine if the company that makes your DAW goes belly up and your software ceases to function."
• "Actually, there's already one DAW developer that has a de facto subscription-only policy. Although it allows you to choose between a perpetual license or a subscription, those who choose the former also have to pony up for an ‘upgrade plan’ to get any updates (even maintenance ones)."
• "Outside of the music space, some pretty major software titles, such as Microsoft Word and the Adobe Creative Suite are available on a subscription-only basis (I'm writing this column on a subscription version of Word, because I don't have a choice), and it could be that it's just a matter of time before that's the case with a lot of music production software, as well."

In 2004, I wrote “Who Would That Inconvenience?” In that article I wrote, "Software manufacturers estimate that they've 'lost' somewhere between two hundred million to a billion-zillion dollars due to software bootlegging. According to their estimates, everyone on the planet would have purchased their products if they hadn't had access to illegal versions. Some of us would, surely, have bought those products several times if legal channels were the only way we could obtain software. Software companies have moved from vaporware to vapor markets. Their hallucinations of wealth and power have infected the magazines with whom they advertise, too." Like Mix Magazine. I also said, “That's a great business, if you can find it.  Build a crappy, unreliable product and follow that up by charging your customers extra for ‘supporting’ your mistakes.  That is the next step beyond planned obsolescence, assuming that your customers don't revolt.” You’d think, that revolution would have happened when Avid started charging $300/year for their “subscription model” or $2,500 for the HD software-only purchase plan that does not provide you support or even a good price on the next version Avid releases, just to piss off non-subscription software owner.

In “Gotta Have It” I wrote, “People did perfectly professional work on Sound Tools, the first 4-track version of Pro Tools, and the first serious multi-track version of Pro Tools (2.0) that produced the first Grammy winner for Digi. Marketing squirrels can yak about why we ‘need’ whatever crap they're pedaling, but the fact is we don't. We've had all the tools we need to record good audio, digitally, for at least a decade.” We need Avid, Apple, Steinberg, etc less today than in 2012 when I wrote that essay. Software updates may be the single best argument for disbelieving the whole supply and demand delusion. Software that is doing every job necessary perfectly well suddenly becomes unusable because a new, unproven, probably buggy version of that same piece of code is available? Nonsense.

Today, I’m doing fine with my 2007 MacBook Pro and 2006 Mac Pro tower machines, both running OS X 10.7.5. My Win7 machine is a 2007 Dell Latitude. All three machines run Pro Tools 10, the Dell a little more reliably than the MacBook Pro. Both Macs also run Logic 9, Mainstage, Soundtrack Pro, and Waveburner flawlessly. I have done dozens of video projects on the Mac Pro running Final Cut Studio. I’ve seen the newest versions of Pro Tools, Logic, and Final Cut and I can’t find a reason to “need” them. Logic X, in particular, is really cool looking and I can imagine using many of the new features, once I struggled through the learning curve on another weird, counter-intuitive Apple interface. But, as usual, Apple would require me to buy new machines, use the latest OS, along with the learning curves for those formidable obstacles. For what? Honestly, just thinking about the hassle of all that makes me want to quit messing with software at all.

As for that wimpy, irritating “I'm writing this column on a subscription version of Word, because I don't have a choice” whine, grow the fuck up and grow a pair while you are at it. “Don’t have a choice” my ass. You can do what ever you want as long as you are smart enough not to fall for the “I need to be state-of-the-art” fallacy. For example, I know quite a few highly functional people who are still doing fine running Office 2003, 2007, or 2010. In fact, I run 2003 on my Windows machines and 2011 on my MacBook Pro. If I “upgrade” to anything, it will be Office 2010 for the Win7 machines. Microsoft says Win7 and Office 2010 will be maintained at least until 2020. So, I don’t have any motivation to go newer until at least 2020.

There is no chance that I will ever become a software subscriber. Worst case, I’ll be using Open Source software for everything after my current equipment and OS becomes really obsolete. By then, Open Source software may very well be superior to the expensive brands. The newest version of Audacity is currently very competitive with the version of Pro Tools I am running and it is cross-platform friendly with many versions of OS X, Windows, and Linux and it uses practically every format of plug-in on all platforms. As for a subscription for Office, forgetaboutit. Never gonna happen. I already use Open Office almost as much as Office and it is also cross-platform compatible.

What I Learned This Winter

I learned a lot about running sound for a play, which was my 2018 late-winter, early-spring “experience.” I was the “sound designer” and FOH tech for a play, “Appropriate,” at the Sheldon Theater in Red Wing. I had a LOT to learn, since I have only been to kids’ and grandkids’ plays as a cheering section rather than participant or even an active and conscious observer. I have never thought about any aspect of sound for live drama . . . ever. When Bonnie Schock asked me to take this job back in late 2017, I asked about a few details and decided it wouldn’t be too much of a strain on my retirement. As I almost always am, when I say “yes,” I was wrong.

For starters, the reason I haven’t been a play-goer is because the historic quality of the performances or the non-subtle style of stage acting doesn’t work for me. I get the commitment and talent required and I respect that, but the art form just isn’t my bag. During my college years, a couple classes required watching video recordings of Shakespeare (who’s writing I love) performances and that reinforced my dislike of the aural aspect of stage acting. My wife, Elvy, is more of a fan of the format than me, partially because she enjoys the art of stage design. For her, the visual qualities distract her from the sound; as long as the audio isn’t awful. She really likes the traditional orchestra performances that are part of many plays, but I’d just as soon hear the orchestra without the play. I had given exactly NONE of that any thought when I agreed to be part of the Sheldon’s performance. At the time, it didn’t seem to matter much, because I figured getting a handle on the play’s audio would be fairly simple. Again, I was wrong.

I have done, and still occasionally do, sound design for television and budget film projects. It’s not like the job of creating audio cues and environments is foreign to me. However, that work has always involved a list of fairly concise sound-effect descriptions and audio cues that come reasonably far into the project’s development. There are usually some changes required, often determined after I deliver my first “draft” of the work, but the few directors I’ve worked with are pretty good at describing the changes they want and I’m billing them on an hourly basis so they have some motivation to be efficient. Plays are, apparently, not like that. The work is endless and the communications are as half-hearted as the focus on television and film audio was 50 years ago. In this production, I’d guess the director and stage manager put about 40 hours into the lighting design and about 15 minutes into the audio; although, there was always plenty of post-show and rehearsal criticism.


Like most facilities, the Sheldon’s FOH mix position is a good distance from ideal; sonically. As you can see from this picture, there is about 15’ of balcony overhang, a couple of very directional EV ceiling speakers, and a large projector shading the speaker and stage output from the FOH position. An upside is the extremely limited vertical dispersion (a claimed 5^o, if you can believe that) of the main speaker system. The diffraction from that balcony edge provides a very noticeable phase error signal-mix with almost any level of volume from the FOH speakers. I’ve only worked a couple of live music events here and I never know what the rest of the room is hearing. That, however, is true for everyone in that room, though. The historic 1900’s architectural features of the Sheldon Theater are acoustically hostile. Sound is oddly reflected, focused by concave surfaces, lost through glass and doors, co-reverberated by coupled spaces, and unevenly absorbed by stage curtains and padded seats. So, the upside is that no seat in the house sounds like any other seat, but only a few locations are capable of rendering decent fidelity under limited conditions.

I have some personality quirks that make me imperfect for theater work. I hadn’t put these pieces together before the third or sixth or tenth rehearsal, but there are no more than a half-dozen movies that I’ve watched twice in my life. There are maybe three I’ve watched more than twice. Most of those, I was doing other things while the second run of the movie was playing in the background in my shop. I have never learned to recite a poem because I get bored and wander away after one or two passes.

FOH tech, it is absolutely necessary to know the play almost as well as the actors, since no one cues the audio guy. However, you will have to listen to the lighting cues in your headset while you are trying to mix the show. Document the hell out of the script and color-code your documents. In the example at right, I have blue tabs are for my sound effects Pro Tools markers, the orange are sound effects fader positions, and the yellow are DiGiCo Snapshots. The underlined text are “key points” in the script to keep me in sync with the play action and the boxed text is where the Snapshots need to switch. Creating a document like this means I needed to be present for almost every full run-through of the play, which about quadrupled the amount of time I thought I’d need to invest in the project (Creating an hourly rate that I do not want to talk about.). Like I said at the beginning, I’m not a theater-goer, but I’d be surprised if many theater spaces are much better than this, acoustically or sonically. Theater is an art form mostly propped up by government and arts organization grants and one that mostly exists only in a few major cities. There are many reasons for that.

I can listen to the same ten second segment of a musical performance all day long without getting bored. The same is NOT true for a speech or play. I write a lot of stuff for a lot of outlets and industries, but once I’ve handed off a piece to an editor and I get paid or posted it to a blog, I do not ever re-read what I’ve written. No only does that mean I’m the wrong kind of audio guy for plays, but I have no chance of being a successful author because I would hate going to readings of my stuff. That is a deal-breaker.

The big picture for this kind of work is that you, the sound designer and/or FOH tech, are just a tool in the director’s pallet. More often than not, you will be the smallest, least important, least used tool in that toolbox. You will have as close to no control of your output as you would have working on a factory floor. Nobody wants your creativity, experience, or ideas unless those ideas can be morphed into the director’s vision. The audio tech is the low guy on the pecking order on stage, so expect to step and fetch for anyone from the props and scenery people to the lighting geeks. Audio is considered a necessary evil on the play stage and you are probably the only person in the organization who is not only unnecessary, you are unwanted. Keep that in mind when you ask for help, a budget, or equipment.

So, there are only two good reasons for doing this kind of job and, ideally, both justifications will be met in every project you do: #1 it pays a shit pile of money for the hours you’ll be working and/or #2 you desperately want the work to learn the equipment, the techniques, the credential, and the experience. I suppose you could do it for the art, too, but that means you don’t have any of your own and that’s just sad.

Epilogue: Not long after I wrote this, my wife and I watched a collection of big budget movies on our home theater system. The big takeaway from that experience was that with all of the talk about CG visuals and high tech videography, a substantial portion of all of those movies were . . . dark or pitch black. In other words, while we'd spent some money on our high resolution television, the audio system was about all that got a workout during several of these movies. 

As I wrote to a friend this week during a discussion about this play experience, "I did a bunch of television work between 1998 and 2010 and working the play was a lot like that. It's funny because when a camera guy screws up or a lighting cue gets missed or a whole bank of lights don't work, almost no one notices. It has to be a huge mistake before the audience will realize it wasn't an intended 'effect.' When one (out of a dozen or more) wireless mic cuts out or makes noise or a small part of the sound system fails or there is a break in the music, everyone is all over it. But we stay at the bottom of the pecking order because everybody thinks it's easy." It isn't and the general level of amateurism in most audio outside of movies and modern television demonstrates how hard audio is to do well and how "a little knowledge" isn't even close to enough to do a good job. 

When I was teaching audio students, I used to recommend that they stay to watch the credits roll after movies, just to see how many audio jobs there were in a typical big league film. The movies my wife and I watched this week were a good example; the audio credits roll for several minutes. As they should. Remember, sound without pictures is radio but a movie without sound is just pictures. These days, many people "watch" movies on their telephone or tablet screen but they listen to those movies on headphones. They are sacrificing the picture, but they don't lose much of the audio and they get the story just fine. 

Why Does My . . . Sound So Awful?

The “ . . . “ in the title is a “fill-in-the-blank” space for whatever it is that you are wrestling with that sounds awful": my band, my club/bar/restaurant, my living room, my recording studio, my practice room, my auditorium/church/theater, etc. The answer to that question is almost always “room acoustics,” except when the answer is “you suck.” I can count on the fingers of my hands the number of performance places I’ve worked or visited that weren’t acoustic disasters. On top of that, even the places that were acoustically decent were often wreaked by a poorly installed or inappropriate sound system. So, most often those two problems are enough to make a performance intolerable or disasppointing.

Room acoustics are tough to overcome. Lots of bars, for example, are reflective, resonant, reverberant disaster zones. There are extreme limits to the options for fixing that kind of room. Often, the closest thing to a fix is to deaden the room with lots of absorption. However, most types of absorptive material also absorbs smells and is relatively fragile; not ideal for a typical bar that serves food. Worse, the biggest problems in most rooms will be the room modes (resonances) and non-ideal reflection points (hard and flat or hard and concave surfaces, for example). Room modes are usually very low frequencies that resonate in a room like the pitch of a bell or drum. The treatment for that kind of energy and frequency requires lots of space for absorption; with the same problems as regular absorption materials.

The shape of some rooms is impossible to overcome and there is no point in attempting to spend any money making those rooms better because it will just be good money after bad. A lot of historic theaters—Red Wing’s Sheldon Theater or Saint Paul’s Fitzgerald Theater and most pre-1980’s churches, for example—are particularly unsuited for modern music. That is also true for practically every auditorium on the planet. Architectural features that include domed roofs or concave faces are particularly miserable acoustic problems. If those featurers are deemed “historic,” there is no hope for a fix from any amount of audio equipment or design. Those beautiful curved surfaces create focused reflections that are powerful, narrow band, and predictable only at the focal point. From every other angle the reflection point will be complicated by other architectural features and their reflection pattern. The end result of this kind of reflection problem is that every spot in the room sounds different. Usually, dramatically different. Any problem has a solution, but acoustic solutions are expensive and in a historic building their application is limited by the historical value of the original, flawed design. Since the most noticable reflections from these features is often mid and low-mid frequencies, it is possible to camoflauge absorption materials inside the curved features. Often the tactic is to used perforated panels covering layers of absorptive material and covered by cloth painted to resemble the historic artwork. Many historic facilities have created large absorption areas at the back of each level of the room. Sometimes a row of seats has to be sacrificed to obtain decent room reflection and modal control, but the sacrifice opens the room up to a broader pallet of performances.

The go-to solution for many facilities has been to spend even more money on sound equipment under the delusion that loudspeakers and electronics can power overwhelm the acoustic flaws. Louder is only louder. Better has nothing to do with volume and, usually, better is completely defeated by volume. The magic of speaker arrays has been grossly oversold and the physics behind array designs is usually ignored because the positive effects are inconveniently limited. For example, in the picture to the left, Meyer’s MILO array in the 3-cabinet (2m tall) application at the top of the illustration is fairly vertically directional at the 1kHz frequency illustrated. As the frequency decreases, the verticle dispersion pattern will widen until it is omnidirectional a little below the half-wave length diameter of the largest driver (30cm, or about 500Hz). As the frequency increases, those “beams” of acoustic power dispersion vary in direction and intensity, as you can see from Meyer’s illustration of verticle splay and coverage. Not only does an array’s “steering” capability depend on a large number of drivers and substantial array height to control dispersion range, but even with the most expensive array processors and ideal speaker mounting location (rarely available) the idealized verticle speaker control is pretty much sabotoged by the less convenient and unpredictable horizontal polar pattern. Personally, I’d give no more creditability to this manufacturer’s (Meyer Sound) below-500Hz dispersion patterns than Trump’s estimate of his own personal wealth. In some areas, wild optimism is probably of some value. Here, it is just more marketing drivel in a field overly-contaminated with marketing drivel.

So, if your situation is that you can’t avoid your room’s non-ideal reflection surfaces and you can’t overwhelm your room’s resonsances with any sort of speaker design. The chances are good that you probably can’t afford either the treatment cost or the cost of the lost real estate for appropriate acoustic treatment. If that is true, you’ll probably resort to the usual loud and irritating tactic most bars and theaters employ and that will drive away some customers and others won’t know the difference because that is the kind of abuse they’re used to experiencing. However, if you read and understood this paper you will at least know why your . . . sounds so awful.