Subject: review of Actorsingers workshop

You may remember a recent announcement of a lighting and sound workshop up
in Nashua NH.  I wound up attending for the whole weekend, and it was well
worth the time.  This was like Techno-Fandom University done bigger-scale,
with more time and resources and an actual goal to strive for [i.e. put
together the basics for a real live show].

Actorsingers is a community theater group with an almost 50 year history in
the southern NH area, that does a couple of largish productions per year
and a few smaller ones in between.  This particular event was evidently one
of the smaller ones, but even so they needed to fly a truss, rent a large
air conditioner, build a stage extension, bring in a lot of set pieces and
put them together and paint them, and have a week's worth of rehearsals
before the show.  They're pretty serious about it.  One advantage is that
they are able to rent out a hall for an entire week or more and have a little
bit of leisure in the schedule to hold these workshops, as well as get things
built for the show in a timeframe that doesn't give everyone ulcers.

The main instigator of the workshops is Dennis Schneider, who has evidently
been doing lighting and other production in various capacities for about 30
years and sound for only slightly less, in addition to holding down various
real jobs.  Googling for ( "+dennis schneider" +ariel ) will return ample
background on how he is able to put so much time and resource into
Actorsingers and other production efforts.  He appears to do almost
everything -- electrics, sound, lighting, rigging, video, HVAC, etc --
a clueful all-round techie.  He went to one of the Broadway Master Classes
a couple of years ago, including the Hog class given by Vicki Claiborne,
and an in-depth tour around the set of the rather large Lion King
production.  He owns an impressive amount of gear by himself.  [Generally
a yellow painted "DIS" is his ownership logo, if you've ever happened to
see that somewhere.]  For this show he had also rented and/or borrowed
some extra bits, such as the truss and moving lights and various power
hose.  Rentals came from his long-time colleagues at Port Lighting up in
Amesbury.  Perhaps his own summary is the best way to describe the
toy-pile he had available for the workshop:

   Lights will likely have an "intro" track for folks who do have not touched
   stage lighting before, and an advanced track mostly on using specific gear
   (JandsHog 500 - which runs WholeHog II software, 4 StudioSpot 575's, 3
   Intellabeam 700Hx, 12 Wybron Forerunner color scrollers). Pretty much all
   the light (except for the Ibeams) flies on a 50' box truss.

   Sound workshops will run thru the basics of our system -- which is
   substantial... we'll have a "rock rig" (2 bass bins and 2 mid-hi packs in
   stacks on each side of the stage), and a set of delays flown overhead.
   Music is all CD/prerecorded (so not much to learn about miking instruments),
   performers will come in via a half-dozen wireless handhelds, a couple of
   stand mikes, 4 PCC floor mikes.  We mix on a Yamaha 01V digital mixer, the
   floor mikes come in on a Shure FP410 Intellimixer. Nothing too fancy in the
   stack - FOH EQ is a SABINE REAL-Q, EQ for vocals is a SABINE GRAPHI-Q,
   distribution comes off an ASHLY Protea 4/24c.  The hall is a sound man's
   nightmare (a wavey 40' high dome with 100% hard surfaces)

Dennis' primary motivation appears to be love of the art, and a desire to
do whatever he can to make peoples' shows better.  He's very easygoing and
yet somehow still completely authoritative on the tasks and goals at hand.
In short, he rocks.  And just to make the world shrink a little more, it
turns out that he also knows Mike Bromberg pretty well, who often supplies
design and gear to the MIT GSP shows.

By the time the Friday afternoon/evening of their first loadin arrived I
was still not sure if they needed help or not, but just to get a jump on
all that was unfamiliar I went up there anyways.  The hall, as promised,
was a big weirdly-shaped barn of a room vaguely reminiscent of the Kresge
dome but with more shaping and of wood instead of concrete, but still a big
boomy resonant shell with no flypoints on the ceiling.  Well, a couple of
years ago Dennis decided to create some, and drilled some holes through two
of the main support ribs near the stage.  These now accomodate threaded
rods, from which can hang a couple of thick steel plates with holes for
shackles and cables.  You could pull trains with said hole-plates; they're
like 3/4" steel.  He admits that it's somewhat overengineered, but he had
done all the loading math for the truss and everything attached to it and
felt quite confident about suspending close to 1000 pounds over part of the
audience.  The truss hung at chest-height on two manual chain-hoists for
most of the weekend, and would later be raised up and directly cabled into
the hang points.

I was able to pitch in a little that afternoon and help run out some power
hose.  Most of this was sort of home-built using 50A "stove" type 4-pin
plugs to bring two phases down to small distro panels, fed from temporary
breakers inserted into the panels in a small room off the main hall.  Feeds
ran up along the top of a half-wall and then flew out to the truss.  One of
the feeders was rather scary -- a simple taped-together bundle of four 8
ga. THHN or similar, wrapped around a spool with the outlet sort of hanging
out through one side flange.  This meant that the spool itself had to sit
atop the truss, which was amusing.

We also took a gander at the rented air conditioning unit out back.  This
was a bit of a monstrosity, with three big yellow flex ducts stuffed in
through a back window of the hall -- one feed, two return intake.  This
beast was camlokked into the dedicated 480V disconnect out back, the real
purpose of which is still not entirely clear but for some reason feeds
independently from the street to the hall.  Evidently the hall's own air
conditioning units are nonfunctional and have been so for some time, and
without any cooling under that roof the temp can quickly push 100 degrees
inside.  The first year they did a show there they suffered through that,
and evidently had kids collapsing on stage and decided that something had
to be done.  I guess the hall isn't used for much in the summer, and its
heat works okay in the winter.

There actually wasn't that much else to do Friday since a lot of assembly
would be left for the workshoppers to perform, but at least I'd seen the
place and figured out the route there so I wouldn't have to think about it
the next morning.  The sets truck had arrived in the meantime and other
people were starting to noisily build the stage, so we hauled the truss
up slightly above head height out of their way so they could continue
carpentering into the night.  Dale and I tried to straighten out a leg
on the somewhat bent aluminum ladder we had just been using, I helped
carry a little more gear inside, and then headed home to read my new sheaf
of paperwork.

A number of good handouts had been prepared for both workshops.  There was
a packet of printed slides covering the agenda for each, along with various
items snagged off the net or excerpts copied out of books and spec sheets.
For example, the meat of the Forerunner scroller documentation, the entire
manuals for the Intellabeam and Studio Spot, and thick bundles of relevant
excerpts from the Yamaha Sound Reinforcement Handbook and Richard Pilbrow's
"Stage Lighting Design".  There was even the entire syllabus for Vicki
Claiborne's Hog class, which is way cool to have because I've been
wondering just what those classes cover.  Plenty to read, and I was glad to
be able to grab my packet a night in advance and wade through it before the
workshops themselves.

About twenty people converged on the place early next morning, and the
lighting workshop began.  Dennis first went over safety and basic electrics
with everyone, including an amusing description of how an unprotected short
at the far end of a generic extension cord would make it try to be a 50,000
watt heater for a short time.  He was quick to point out how all the gear
involved is heavy, hot, *and* delicate, and usually at potentially
injurious heights.  Then Dennis took what he'd decided was the "advanced"
group, all of four people including myself, off to deal with the wiggle
lights and left his colleague John to teach those who remained about color,
angle, and some example conventionals.  I actually wanted to hear what
John had to say too -- he's a funny old guy with a barn full of funny old
instruments at home, and with what appears to be a deep understanding of
design.  But I couldn't be in two places at once, and figure I can try to
eventually read Pilbrow cover to cover and get most of it.

Our small group uncrated and hung the Studio Spots on the truss, and after
that poked briefly at the innards of the old Intellabeams and then built a
small goalpost to hang them on.  The goalpost bases and pipe almost seemed
homemade -- the baseplates were simply flat half-inch steel plates, one
round and one square, with threaded flanges sort of roughly welded on at
the center, and the pipes themselves were definitely thinner than we're
used to, maybe 1 1/2 inch OD.  But with two-piece saddle clamps [as opposed
to cheeseburgers] it all went together quite solidly and wasn't about to
let the Ibeams fall.  A second crossbar was brought up behind the back ends
of the Ibeams to hold them more upright, so that they could point more
toward the stage from the back of the room than their normal 45 deg hang
angle would allow.

After lunch the "beginner" group attacked the truss, top-hung the twelve
ETC-pars and wired them into the dimmer packs, and attached the scrollers
to them.  We made sure to use "truss condoms" to not leave C-clamp bites in
the aluminum tubing, and in contrast to the ones I gave up on back at H2K2,
these actually *fit*.  The dimmers were these cute little 4 x 1200W packs
that can C-clamp anywhere and get power through two Edison plugs --
everything was Edison here, no stage-pin to be found.  Dennis had us mount
various devices with LED displays, like the Studios and dimmers, facing the
stage so the audience wouldn't be distracted by little flickery lights up
above.  Everyone was pretty much clustered around the truss at that point,
running wire and tying things up and getting all the scroller-control and
DMX sorted out.  Twelve scrollers and four moving-heads does make a
somewhat complex control-line picture, especially with the mix of 5-pin and
3-pin DMX and special stuff just for scrollers.  Dennis fed the DMX through
a splitter so there was no need for funny adapters.  There were also two
more devices we didn't entirely deal with but could add to the confusion --
two Coloram Eclipse DMX-addressible blackout shutters for the video
projectors that would eventually also be mounted in extra frames attached
to the truss, and the huge caveat here was that although the Forerunner
scrollers and the Coloram stuff all use the same 4-pin [yes, four] XLR
connectors to bring in power and control, mixing up their power supplies
would be BAD and cause immediate damage.  Another problem seemed to be the
trio of rotary switches for address selection on the scrollers, which slide
a flange around on top of a little block of plastic and leave a small
pie-wedge in the flange open on top of the number selected.  On these, the
numbers underneath were fairly worn down by years of the flanges sliding
over them, as well as being fairly small, and thus hard for some of the
older workshoppers to actually *see* to set addresses.

One nice thing Dennis had prepared was a 50-foot length of paper tape, on
which he'd attached sticky labels preprinted with all the details of what
fixture went at that point, its dimmer, its scroller DMX address or the
base address of a wiggle light, and anything else an electrician would need
to know at a hang.  This was just taped along the back of the truss and got
a bit beat up in the course of things, but it was a really good guide to
initial placement and setup.  Evidently such things are often prepared for
large hangs -- this show didn't really need it with the smallish amount of
gear involved, but it was a nice example of anal, no-excuse-for-confusion
documentation.

The truss was the only lighting location.  The stage provided nowhere to
install side trees or back lighting -- no grid, no legs, just a bare box at
one side of the room and not even big enough to accomodate the 50 or so
kids in the show without building a thrust out into the room.  So front
lighting was all they would get.  I suppose that side trees could have been
built and half-hidden behind set flats, but this show'd needs didn't really
warrant that and the point was to just light the actors well enough so that
the parents could point to the Imag and say "there's my kid!"

While the truss was coming together, Dennis ran the DMX feeds to the back
of the house and set up his Hog.  He put the entire truss on the first
universe and the Ibeams at the back of the room on the second, thus not
needing another splitter back there.  Everything got powered up, but then
most of the pars weren't working, and it turned out to be a problem in one
electrical distro.  A couple of the other Actorsingers techies spent a
while with it opened up and eventually fixed it, and I went along and
addressed all the Studios per the tattered remains of the paper strip so
that we could start playing with them from the console.

I mostly hung back and let the others get on the Hog since I already spend
quite enough time Hogging thankyouverymuch, but by this time it was getting
late in the afternoon and people were starting to drift out.  So I got to
poke at the thing a bit and re-learn the differences between the 600 and
the Hog 2, as well as check for the existence of a somewhat subtle
crossfade bug I had been chasing -- yes, it was present in this board's OS
too.  The lack of the touch-screens had me floundering just a little but
then I saw where they put things on the very small LCD built into the
board, and the normal-looking windows can be displayed on the external
monitor anyways.  I also noticed that the fixture-library definitions for
the Studios were slightly wrong here and there, which is surprising given
that High End and Flying Pig are sort of the same company now.  I have had
to correct for mistakes in Martin fixture profiles, which is more excusable
since Martin's the competition, but seeing off-by-one value errors for the
Studios was surprising.  Well, no matter -- it's easy to extract the
original fixture definitions into a plain text file, that can then be
edited/corrected and kept in an alternate library that gets loaded first.

It was kind of hard to see output from the lights, because the hall has
lots of high windows and the only light-blocking available is vertical
shades whose blades have *holes* in them.  So we were competing with lots
of spill from the afternoon sun.  Even so, the Studios, for their 575W
discharge lamps and supposedly great optics, seemed sort of wimpy in their
output -- especially with color and gobos dropped in.  On the other hand,
playing with focus "morphing" between pairs of counter-rotating gobos *is*
rather cool, and I can see why the flash-n-trash crowd loves the things
especially when used in large quantities.  Which you can do when you have a
huge lighting budget, I guess.  They're also very quiet [thus the "studio"
part of the name, i.e. they don't introduce extra sound into the space]
because their cooling is mostly done passively, with the entire back side
of the pod being a huge heat sink.

Dennis touched on the sheer scale of Broadway shows, specifically how they
try to light the stage to 200 footcandles which is about 4 times what most
people, even the vidiots, consider adequately bright.  This started getting
me curious about the relationship between lumens, candlepower, footcandles,
lux, and watts, so over a couple of days after the workshop I dug in and
studied it a bit.  I think I get it now, and have slightly more "gut feel"
for how much light I'll realistically get out of a fixture at a given
spread angle and distance.  Taking this into account will probably make for
better designs in the future.  It's also somewhat astounding how many
lumens are *lost* from a lamp's raw output while passing through most
fixture optics.  Evidently reflectors aren't what they could ideally be,
but then again too much reflector around a lamp would never allow it to get
enough cooling airflow...  but isn't that what lighting design is about --
understanding all the tradeoffs.

But by then it was late in the day and everyone was tired, so we shut
everything down and locked up the hall.  Then we were back bright-n-early
the next morning, gulping coffee and sitting down for the sound workshop.
The air conditioner was running and making its "white tornado" noise, and
the carpenters were also onsite occasionally hammering and running screw
guns, so it was sort of hard to hear Dennis as he started his talk.  But it
quickly became apparent that he was speaking deliberately softly, and when
someone asked him to speak up he said "can't hear?  Move closer!" and went
into a really good description of sound reinforcement as the art of getting
every listener closer to a more concentrated source -- either by using more
speakers, or placing the listener in a narrower "beam" of amplified sound
to override reflections and ambient noise.  He also pointed out how
intently everyone was staring at him for lip-cues, which is a large part
of listening even though it's visual, but only works if a speaker can be
clearly *seen* as well.  He turned away from us and kept talking to
illustrate what we were suddenly missing.  Sound reinforcement works
toward better clarity without needing those visual cues.

Then Dennis began playing some music with lyrics through a small powered
monitor speaker at the table behind him.  We could all hear it clearly from
ten feet away, no problem.  The reverberations around the hall weren't too
obvious.  But then he just had everyone stand up and start backing away
from the speaker, and note just how things started to muddy up.  He made
the source louder, so that the hall around it would "go active" and be more
involved in what we were hearing.  *Way* more involved, as it turned out,
since as he says there's a resonance for every possible frequency in that
place.  He got us to take note of where the lows and highs started to
vanish.  Could we hear the *words* halfway across the hall?  Where does the
sound appear to be coming *from* when we're all the way over *here*, or
over *there* way off-axis from the speaker?  It was a very effective demo
on the effects of distance, placement, and the effects of the hall, and
made it really obvious how the sound we heard from that one speaker could
get really trashed just by us moving around.  Then, we started working on
the answers.

First was an overview of microphones, including various wireless units, and
how the tried-and-true SM58 is sometimes used as a hammer but the delicate
hand-built large-format condenser mics can cost over a thousand dollars
and be completely trashed by being dropped once.  [Dale and I mentioned
Kludge's Kollection to Dennis at one point.]  To keep things distinguished
between people and sound pickup devices, I'm using "Mike" and "mic".
Dennis went over placement of lavaliers and what a pain in the ass they
generally are, demonstrating how feedback frequencies changed as distance
between the speaker and the mic changed and is usually one of those things
that gives sound guys fits.  He played with the pattern and proximity of
the '58 to show how incident volume drops *way* off as the mic gets farther
away from the mouth, and that typical rock singers' habit of swallowing the
mic is actually good for suppressing feedback since you get so much more
gain right up front.

This segued into a discussion of gain structure in general, where the right
thing to do is get as much as you can early in the game but not enough to
overload stages -- i.e.  yell "hey!" at full enthusiastic performance
volume at the expected distance from the mic in question, and set the trim
so that that level can never clip the input preamp.  This is interesting
because some of us, myself included, tend to compensate for soft voices or
instruments by tweaking trims up when we can't seem to get quite enough out
of the slider.  It's technically wrong, but is sometimes all you can do for
enough signal -- as long as you remain aware that you're beyond a safe
envelope and bring it back as soon as you can.  Dennis demonstrated
distortion by turning the output volume on his iPod way up to overload the
input of the monitor.  He played with running just on the edge of feedback
to try and make people aware of what to listen for -- that sort of hollow
ringing quality, increasingly centered around one frequency as it's about
to break over into oscillation.  The little monitor also had a little bit
of low/mid/high control with which he could illustrate basic equalization
principles.

Then we all wandered over to the corner where all the speakers and amps
were sitting just as they'd been rolled in, and got a basic tour of the amp
racks and cabinets.  It was then our job to lift said cabinets up to the
stage, stack them up, and start wiring them in.  They weren't light, but
there were plenty of people.  Two long runs of speakon had to go to the
other side of the stage, so someone crawled it under the extension.  Then
the PCC floor mics were placed at the stage edge with these cute little
plexiglass-and-sorbothane sound barriers between them and the audience,
and their outputs had to be run along the front to the snake head.  Some
wireless receivers in a rack also got wired in, and of course the returns
from the board into the crossover inputs.  Mike, the other sound guy, came
along to guide which inputs to plug where as he wanted to wire them.  I
think at this point things started to get a little over some of the
attendees' heads, and a few rather confused questions about channels and
amps and speakers came up.  We were dealing with a fair rats' nest of wire
by now, and perhaps it started to overwhelm those who don't deal with such
things regularly.

But once things were placed and wired we went back to the board and its
proximate processing stuff, which Mike had set most of up in the meantime.
Dennis bypassed the house EQ and ran some music through the system.  It
sounded pretty wacked, so we talked about EQ a bit.  The Actorsingers techs
have come up with this EQ allocation that works well for their shows: one
EQ for the house, an EQ for all the fixed mics, and an EQ for all the
mobile/handheld/wireless mics.  Do the house once and lock it; play with
mic EQ as needed later.  Dennis described the basic purpose of the Sabine
Real-Q, and then let it start doing its thing.  In contrast to the one or
two blasts of pink noise from the Power-Q, this one does a whole battery
of tests with many different tone bursts.  And he didn't put the reference
mic in the middle of the room, either -- we in fact were pretty much
directly in line with one of the stacks.  Dennis showed everyone the
resultant curve, and had us walk back and forth and pay attention to why
the music sounded better.  What we didn't really do was a quick A/B test
between EQed and bypassed, which might have driven home the point even
more.  And it was pretty clear that we were pulling farther and farther
away from the newbies with all this stuff.

There were several devices in the system that I'd never heard of, and
never even would have guessed at there being any need for.  The Shure
"intellimixer" is more like a set of smart gates, that tries to minimize
level from open mics that don't really have an active signal or just
weaker copies of the strongest one.  The way Dennis explained it was if all
the mics are getting the same input, possibly at different levels, the box
will effecively mute the other ones that aren't really the active one,
until another mic starts getting a different signal.  To this end, they had
it handling the four PCC floor-mic inputs in the hope of automatically
isolating the ones actually getting real signal and reducing the potential
feedback paths from the speakers.  Even with this, the floor mics seemed
*very* prone to feedback.  At one point Dennis went up on the stage and
started talking, and since I happened to be near the mixer I started
running the slider up, but I could barely hear him through the system
before it started to ring.  Maybe different things needed to be tweaked
to get them working better; I never really found out.

Another mystery box was a "BBE 882 Sonic Maximizer", which a little
Googling and filtering out the golden-ears-glowing-review verbiage took me
to http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jan00/articles/enhancer.htm which sort
of debunks the whole "enhancer" effort that really started back in the
seventies.  Dennis tried to explain that it "fuzzes" the phase of high
components a little in the time domain.  It did seem to give the music
playing a little more punch and clarity [oops, there I go with the verbiage
myself!] when switched into the loop, but I couldn't really tell in that
room if it was just mucking with the EQ curve or really doing something
more suited to that space or that particular bit of music or what.  Perhaps
the real sound weenies out there can explain it better.

The 01V mixer is way-cool; it's one of the new as-digital-as-possible
ones, that not only handles most signal in the digital domain but also does
a lot of "soft" slider assignment and zips the motorized faders around to
restore the last mode you were in.  Thus, if you select the "aux 1" button,
all the sliders whip to the current "aux 1" levels and then you can push
them around to new settings that will be remembered.  Switch back to mains,
and whiz! the current mains settings are recalled and you can go back to
mixing them.  Remote operation and recallable "cues" containing various
settings are a natural consequence of this, and makes me think once again
how lighting control and sound control methodologies are really converging
these days.  A complex show could have just as many sound cues as lighting
cues, traditionally done mostly by the sound guy tweaking knobs at the
right times, but eventually it might reduce down to a "go" button press
just like lighting control has had for some time now.  One concern, common
to both universes, is retaining the ability to hand-tweak two fairly
disparate things at once.  Digital, soft-assignable-mode control takes some
of that away since there are simply fewer physical knobs to grab.

Some of what I think of as semi-basics didn't get covered just because we
ran out of time.  Guidelines on proper setting of the main amp gains
probably would have been useful.  They were already pretty much set from
whatever the last show was, so things just worked okay without anyone
thinking about it.  We never set up the two slightly delayed fills flown on
the truss, or went over what delay stacks are for.  A bit of discussion on
routing inside a mixer, including auxes and returns and inserts, might have
helped open peoples' minds to the many options available to the sound
engineer.  But it was getting on in the day, and that night would be the
first rehearsal, and the truss was still dangling there at chest height --
we had never focused the pars, either.  Plenty of work yet to be done, but
most of the workshoppers had evidently had their fill and needed to get
back to their normal lives, so soon the hall was almost empty again.

I stuck around a bit to try and help, manning one of the hoists to raise
the truss and handing various shackles and quick-links up to Dennis as he
noodled how to finalize the fly rig.  Somewhere during this, the fire alarm
mysteriously went off.  My first guess would have been that one of the heat
detectors on the ceiling had falsed on the small vibrations coming from the
nearby chain hoist, but the annunciator said that one of the pull-boxes had
been activated.  But neither we or the fire department could find the
offending unit.  I guess they just gave up and disabled it until it could
be repaired for real.  Then all the moms and kids started to show up, and
it was *definitely* time to bail.

While there may have been a bit too much material and not enough time to
cover it that day, I got quite a few things from the sound workshop.  The
discussion of "amplify early, but not often" gain-structure was useful, I
got to see some different processing toys, and got a few thoughts/questions
I've had over time confirmed in my mind.  The observation was offered that
doing sound is very unforgiving -- make a tiny mistake and everyone will
hear it, and turn around to glare at the sound guy.  Lighting goofs are
generally harder to notice, or at least people are more willing to believe
that what they saw was intentional.  But with sound, our ears and brain can
single out and parse much faster events than our eyes can bring us, and our
hearing is in many ways harder to fool.

At one point we got into a little discussion about single-point grounding
and the problem of how to draw power from more than one disparate circuit
around a small venue without having a proper distro.  Dennis was amused by
my description of the male-to-male ground-only cables, but warned that
tying *connected* grounds together would likely make things worse since
they can still act like a big loop antenna as they pass through the
building.  One answer is to float the grounds of all but *one* of the
circuits, but then that loses the safety ground of the others.  The main
point that I hadn't fully realized before is that ground loops simply
happen because of different ground-wire paths through a space and mostly
capacitive and inductive effects, not because something else may actually
be feeding some leakage *into* ground.  So when ground potential is
different at two different devices along a sound path, and the shield
around a signal lead between them has currents through it, that's when hum
happens.  At this point the only halfway safe method I can come up with is
to float all-but-one, and supply safety ground from the single point with
plugs and cables rated at the full ampacity of the original circuit safety
grounds, in as close to a star configuration as possible, and hope for the
best.  Anyway, I probably want to rebuild my Scary NEFFA Power Boxes
differently at some point.

Before we all parted ways, Dale poked Dennis about the idea of helping us
work Noreascon 4 next year.  It didn't seem entirely outside the realm of
possibility...

_H*