Porta-Blog Paris Sept 1 2011

The attention to detail that occurs in prepping a rock show on this level can be mind boggling. There are complex rituals that the backline techs go through from polishing frets, waterproofing against sweat and to bullet proof against a myriad of potential failure points.
So for this blog I thought I would discuss the nuances of setting up Anthony's vocal mic. You are most likely thinking "how hard can it be? Mic, stand, clip and cable, no biggie, right?
So here is a description of just one of the myriad of adventures we address:
1). The mic. Anthony has been using an Audix om-7 for probably about 20 years now. These mic have a very high feedback stability and pick up very little room sound. This allows me out front to get a real 'up close and personal' vocal sound and if I need more air or space, it's easy to add with a vocal reverb. Also, the om's are really durable and the grills don't dent when they are dropped. Conversely, the drawbacks are that the mic falls off in volume quickly if you are not really close to it. Also, they tend to be susceptible to 'spitting out' faster than other mics. Since Anthony stays on the mic and we swap out the vocal mic mid show and again before encore, the drawbacks are not issues for us.
2) The stand. The mic stand is integral to the performance so it must be exact. Straight stand, no boom Atlas MS12. The 12 stands for '12 pounds' and that is the weight he is used to swinging around. The Atlas has a larger diameter tube than the Euro manufactured metric stands and is less likely to bend. The metal clutch is more durable and the larger diameter cast metal base makes it less likely to tip over as well.
3) The cable. Belden 8412 has been around for decades and is amazingly durable. With it's real rubber jacketing, (not plastic), braid shield, multiple fiber wraps and twine filler, it has minimal stretch and a withstands more abuse and tangles less than any other cable we have found.
4) The clip. Even though the mic is an Audix, we use a Shure SM58 mic clip as the Audix clip is too rubbery. It is the older version clip that is not flared up top. This clip requires the mic to be slid in and not popped in and the mic won't jump out when the stand is swung or bounced on the ground. Oh, also, if the clip is new, we heat it up with a lighter and bend it open to get the proper grip on the mic that is not to tight or loose.
5) Taping the cable. The mic cable is taped to the mic preventing AK from accidentally unplugging the mic. This is done with a single non overlapping layer of black gaff. It is critical that the mic and tape will slide out of the clip, not too easily but also not jamming either.
6) Taping the stand. A ring of gaff tape is wrapped around the inner pole to prevent the stand from getting shorter, should he bang the stand on the ground downward. Each stand is measured to be exactly 55 3/4" in height, base to thread ring. There is always at least 2 spare built and measured stands in case one breaks during the show. We go through dozens over the course of a tour.
7) Boring the clip. The stock old school Shure clip has a sharpish edge that prevents the mic to slide out with the tape on it. To solve this, the rear sharp of each mic clip is beveled and rounded out with a Leatherman tool or any sharp knife and checked for 'slide'.
8) Clip tension. The clip need to hold the mic firmly at an angle and not loosen to floppy, easily. Cheaper imitation clips do not have the tension washer stacks inside and will loosen when repeatedly moved.
9) Cable length. The mic cable is 50 feet long and plugged into a stagebox located center stage.
10) Spare mic. An identical spare taped vocal mic is figure 8 coiled center stage. The spare mic, main mic and a wireless mic all are plugged into a 3 way switcher located at monitor position. This allows Anthony to grab any of the three mics and have it instantly switched in line to both mons and house.
And so ya have it and now ya know how to prep snake channel 24!
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Dave Rat Porta-Blog

Oooh, Chili Peppers worldwide simulcast video shoot gig in Cologne.

First order of business, drop some subs to improve sightliines. I don't think anyone expected that, as I walked in and said "take away that, that and all of those please." I try to never lose track of the big picture, as much as I enjoy shoe-horning a giant PA in a small club, today is about getting a solid clean mix and steering clear of screwing the recording/broadcast truck sound. And no, it does not bother me or make upset, quite the opposite. I enjoy the challenge. I enjoy constantly changing parameters and redundant bores the shit out of me.

I'll be rocking a Verona console keeping my world slim and trim. My focus is also on keeping cohesion between all departments. Need backline to watch volume levels, gotta keep the truck happy, try and give the band the most condusive to rocking setup we can so they can do their magic. Hyper calm is magic plan, regardless of how hectIc or how much pressure presents itself. We got no problems, just challenges, solvable puzzles. And not many hours from now, Peppers will be playing live in movie theaters in 30 or 40 countries around the world.

On the pics above: check out giant archery chick! Looking like she should have a violin.

I thought the little wall spot for brooms and brushes was interesting, we usually hide that stuff.

The church view pic is from my morning run through cologne.

No one is gonna steal that fence!

Soundtip: The drumfill is part of your FOH drum sound. If you have fairly dead drums and a rocking drumfill, the combo when tuned right, will give you a huge drum sound. Yes, I know drummer tend to like resonant drums. By using deader drums you can increase and control the resonance of the drums with the drumfill and all are happy.
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Fun fun fun on the ...

Random panic is a weakness exploited by the crafty. I find both sides of that equation apathetic. Being predictable offers a perfect opportunity to support the financial predators tracking you.

Wow! The TV news sure annoys me.

Airport adventure and off to Germany, bye bye for a month ending with South America stadium shows..

This last week was full of tying up loose ends and we will be moving fast and far.

This last week kept us busy with production rehearsals at the LA forum, a Fuse Tv video/sound recorded show at the Roxy and a benefit for Flea's Conservatory of Music school at Club Nokia.

Meanwhile, Rat Sound is still running on all cylinders. I was fortunate to be invited to a screening of Pearl Jam's new Cameron Crowe movie "20" and it was truly magical to see. Rat has had the honor of being trusted with their sound for 20 years now and it was wonderful to feel the connection with such a incredible band.

In one of the pics above you can see pearl jam's amp racks being prepped for the current tour.

Hey, check out my living room table with the ping pong mod!

Ok, plane is about to leave so I'll see ya all from the other side of the pond!
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Wheels and Wires

We've now entered the real ramp up phase of the tour, it's all about building the rock show. Humans from all over the world cluster in a single spot, gear gets wired, hung and tested. Concepts that started as napkin drawings and absurd "what if's" have mutated into tangible realities. Huge moving screens and light fixtures, nuanced signal paths the way sound will travel it's invisible paths all come together, the bugs get worked out and with big eyes and ears, all the departments interface to construct a cohesive presentation soon to be a traveling rock show.

Ya just don't get to or last at this level if your not damn good at what ya do, and when you have a lot of people that good working together, the outcomes can be quite impressive.

The new songs are great and I don't think there is a person amongst us that does not feel the welling anticIpation of an epic tour ahead. Can ya tell I'm excited?

Oh! And check out the pic of Chad's drumfill! 2 EAW MicroSubs under the blow through drum riser and 2 MicroWedge 15's up top. MicroSubs are only 13" high and the 15" speakers angle upwards at 45 degrees, so it lined up perfect. With the Exception of Anthony's wedges, which are the vintage Rat L-Wedges he's used for the last 20 years or so, the entire Peppers monitor rig is MicroWedge!

And wow is this a brand new adventure stage wise as well. We now have Mauro an awesome percussionist adding 10 inputs, a piano or electric piano depending on the gig, a marimba, Chris Warren rocking some keyboards driving me up to a stratospheric 40 inputs. I will share more about all that over time as well as go over a bunch more of the sound nerdery side of things.
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Chris Warren is synonymous with happiness! Here is him repaying me back for a series of "Oh man, you should have been there's"  I have been tossing his way as the flight attendant gave him drinks but not me.

I just thought the flex of the Boeing 777 wing tip looked cool

Phone pic of the Peppers in Tokyo playing Summersonic

And the setlist

And I love flight attendants! Fellow earth travelers!

The first Chili Peppers non secret, real gig, adventure soars to a close. I say "close' as if there is some sort of separation or finality to the Asian segment consisting of 3 shows and a TV broadcast. Fight home, a 3pm Monday Tokyo departure for a dozen hours only to arrive in LA 6 hours before we left.
The free hours are all good news as we are going to need all the time we can get. Does a tour leg really end when the flight home sees us going right to a load in?
Ahhh, living that glamorous life of rock n roll! There are people out there that stumble on success but the Peppers' world is not one of them. This is a collection of quirky charismatic humans working hard for many years to perfect their craft and quest forward.
Oh, if you have not seen the movie 'Water for Elephants' do it or I will stab you in the eye. Well, not really as that would be overly inconvenient for all of us. But anyway, the movie captures a bit of the essence of crossing the line to road life.
So here is today's sonic quandary. "Why in the heck would we, given the option, mix in mono when stereo is already at our fingertips? Now I am not talking about the just main PA sIde because that fairly obvious, this time I am talking about subs.
Let's rewind back to band practice. You walk in, meet introduce yourself or hang with old friends. The new songs are well developed with some finishing touches dealing with converting some of the recording studio tricks to actual playable live approximations. Between learning the solos and mind bending on how in the heck you'll make any carefully crafted studio song effects into something humanly possible, you step back and listen. Listening not only to the song structure and important cues,, but also to where the sounds actually emanate from in the room. The realism and natural dimension of the sonic landscape created by a band playing in a relatively small room makes the larger scale stereo sound mix end up mixing sound like a crayon drawing copy of a nature scene. Sounds comes from everywhere, left, right, high, low and all the in betweens. This is real, our goal, or at least one of them. If we can create that rush of a great rehearsal jam, in a giant venue, we win!
And so, in our sound engineer infinite wisdom we combine the sounds created by our musical friends down to a stereo facsimile with high hat sent to the subwoofers because some of us are to lazy to send subs on an aux send.
What is interesting is the prevalence of mono subs on an aux and the complete absence of stereo subs on an aux. But why? Why not send subs stereo aux, lean kick left and bass a bit right. Not drastiaclally but rather yet another step toward achieving that variation in the mix as you move about the room. Why deprive ourselves control over something so easily achieved? Don't know but I have been guilty of it for years, but no more!
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Porta-Blog #2

107 degrees in the audience?  Yikes!

Last night was not perfect but if the first full sized show was perfect, my standards would be way too low.

It came up clear, strong and everything there from the get go. Am so excited today to have the console already set up, this whole "start from scratch everyday" gets old fast.

So I am quickly developing a mix strategy and sonic feel for this tour that I will shoot to lock in asap and hold onto.
I have been putting a lot of thought into it and as always for me, my goals are to present what the artists create in the most inspiring and connected way possible.

I have been asked whether I will do the doublehung PA again and at least for now I will not be using a dual rig as a baseline system. With the new L-Acoustics K1 system's added clarity and volume I can get very close to many things I was able to achieve sonically with the double hung V-dosc rig in a much less cumbersome package. Also, since single hung K1 significantly sonically exceeds all other systems I have mixed on, double-hung K1 at this point would be overkill.

On Soundgarden and Blink 182 tours, I really made some solid strides in subwoofer setups like the Vortex/Orgasmatron and more recently the Subfan. I even have a new sub processing technology I developed that works really well. I will cover a lot of that in future posts and if you want to read about any of that stuff, you can poke around searches of my old blog at www.ratsound.com/cblog

With the main PA and subs all dialed in I am going to redirect my focus on this tour to the console and control side of things. While resolviing the path to follow, I wrote an article for prosoundweb.com that covers the fundamentals

http://www.prosoundweb.com/article/mixing_beyond_stereo_delving_deeper_into_aspects_of_sound_perception/

Working on the "stereo-ness" of the mix is especially exciting with addition of Mauro playing percussion.

Well alright, nearly done with the bullet train ride to Tokyo and another cooking hot day to setup for real gig #2 tonight.

And hey1 Say hey to ML Procise!





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Porta-Blog #1

7:20 am lobby call, on a bullet train from Tokyo to Osaka and appreciating the little clicks of the non touch screen keyboard as I type this out on my mobile phone. If all works as planned, at some point I will hit send and the rambling words will post as well as tweet and facebook to give a heads up to anyone whom cares to read.
This process is similar to when I first started touring except for a few minor variations. Scale, as in the # of people I was able to communicate with from afar seems to have increased a bit. I remember quarters being very important. As in, "pull the truck over, do you have quarters, I need to make a phone call and get the address of the gig."
I remember being more excited back then about when mail came, or perhaps equally sad when no letters came for me. The only solidstreet address was band management and once a week they would fedex out all the letters from loved ones back home, if there were any. Whereas now a week has collapsed down to mere moments and mail call has morphed into a small red flashing light. Indefinitely muted, mail and messages are not permitted to interrupt me with their existence using sound, if for no other reason than to honor the long journeys of their folded pulp based ancestors that navigated the globe in silence.
I remember Greg Ginn scratching out the address of tomorrow's gig on torn scraps of paper and handing it to us equipment truckers and another for the support act van. Then I remember needing quarters after forgetting or loosing that scrap of paper on several occasions only to find no one to call that also answered their phone.
Heading towards city center in search of used record stores was always a good bet as they often had solid pulse on which punker band was playing where. Sometimes we'd get lucky and spot a mohawk, skinhead or some girl with way too many zippers on her pants and they'd point the way with enthusiasm.
'No itineraries in writing' was the rule. The cops back in Los Angeles were on a nation wide faxing binge to all the other police departments urging them to mobilize and shut down the scruffy hoodlums trying play music and corrupt the youth in their cities.
Looking back I now see that they were afraid. Law and order. Fear that the disturbing mosh pit undercurrent of society could gain traction and spread into youth fueled chaos. Perhaps fears justified as scanning the current news seems to reveal.
And I realize that even back then I blogged as well, except only to an audience of one. Scratching an illegible mix of print and cursive into journals that I often was able pen the last pages of, before it escaped to unknown adventures without me, never to be seen again. And away with it went memories, bye bye chunk o life.
So here we are, off to Osaka to do Summersonic festival and I am still drawn to embrace chaos. Or more accurately, less dramatically, I enjoy pushing the envelope.
The thought arriving after doors to dial up a zeroed out a Midas H3000 from scratch for the headline act, with no soundcheck for a stadium show, brings me no anxiety. Nor does it excite me.
I will patch my racks of gear that showed up with one of the only two effect units I use no longer operational and 4 of my 14 compressors dead from transport.
I will tune the system during set change and see if I can pull off hitting the sound and mix I seek without ever hearing anything more that a single blurp of the techs playing each instrument.
So success for this one will be the ability to come up solid and strong and hold it together without any of the normal tools one would typically have to do so.
I do wish I had tech out with me but running solo is helping me really burrow in and get my head around the gear I'll want, need and new audio adventures to tackle as this tour coagulates into a rhythm.
I call it coming in cold, ice cold. And that will be the only thing cold as it is near a 100 degrees and as humid as it gets. And when the Peppers hit the stage I will either smile or scramble, but either way I know I will be hot, sweaty, tired and stoked to be embarking on yet another adventure I will never forget.
And soon enough the outcome will be at the finger tips of 50,000 Osakians to post on youtube. Well alrighty then. Let's go do a rock show!
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