About a week before we put this issue to bed, I had a day full of contrasts. After the usual morning of too-early rising, getting my daughter to school (did I mention that high school in Las Vegas starts at 7 a.m.?) and then making my daily bitch-out phone call to some casino PR guy who was standing in the way of a story, I went down to the Strip. There I met up with Ross Humphrey and the rest of the Blue Man audio crew at their new theatre at the Venetian, which they are set to open right about the time you are reading this. Very cool, very state-of-the-art and very creative. And yes, you'll get to read all about it next month. Later that evening, I got together with my wife and a couple of friends of ours and met up with Tom Young and Rob Orlinick at the Golden Nugget and heard Tom mix a Tony Bennett show that was a thing of beauty. At 79, Bennett still sings most pop phenoms half his age under the freakin' table. As for the show, the band was perfect and Tom knows how to make a piano actually sound like a piano. It was just stunning.
When I first talked with friends and FOH cohorts about this, I was thinking about the contrasts–old Vegas vs. new, classic American pop and jazz vs. experimental and hugely drum-driven performance art, 90 dB peaks vs. 105 average A-weighted, one guy mixing both FOH and monitors from a single console with maybe 18 inputs, to a pair of engineers running 95 inputs and dealing with SMPTE issues when I got there. But then, I started looking at the similarities instead of the differences.
Ross has been doing Blue Man since the beginning and has designed their systems and sound for shows all over the world, including the recent Complex tour. Compare: Not only had Tom mixed both Bennett and Frank Sinatra countless times in the room at the Nugget, but I found out after the show that he actually had a big hand in the original design of that room. The Venetian Blue Man room is brand-new and looks it, but while the Nugget showroom may LOOK like old Vegas, over the past couple of years it has been through totally new installs of both audio and lighting that make it one of the higher-tech rooms in town. The consoles on the Blue Man show were DIGITAL Yamaha PM1Ds. Tom mixed Tony on a DIGITAL DiGiCo D5.
I love looking at the similarities because it leads right into The Message for this issue, which is this: FOH is officially going into its fourth year, and we are growing and changing as the live event audio world does the same. Whether you are providing sound for acts that have a bit of gray hair or you are making sure the bottom ends thump right at a rave, chances are you are working with different methods and gear than you were just a couple of years ago. Example: Raise your hand if you did not even care about–much less own or use–a digital speaker controller four years ago. If you have and/or regularly use one today, put that arm back down. I'm betting that there are not a lot of hands still up, and that the ones still aloft are attached to folks who will be using these tools within the year.
With that in mind, we have been talking for months about adding a second tech column that explores the bleeding edge digital stuff that is migrating from the studio to the stage. We are proud to begin that this month, and it's called–natch–On The Bleeding Edge. The writer is a guy I have known and worked with on and off for about a decade. Steve La Cerra embodies the split between the analog and digital worlds as a tech'edout recording artist and producer, as well as spending much of the year as tour manager and FOH engineer for classic rockers Blue Öyster Cult. He is also a damn good writer.
The second addition is still a bit in the formative stage, but we are making a big play to better cover the great middle of the live event audio world. We cover the big tours and theatrical installs, and the Anklebiters have helped lots of newbies get their live audio feet wet, but the regional guys have been harder. Mostly because they are too busy busting their collective asses on gigs to do anything like send out a press release or pitch us a story on a cool gig. With the new Regional Slants department, we will be covering the middle by letting regional providers tell their own stories. We start with a regional guy who I know and like (yeah, it helps to be nice to the editor when he's in town), Larry Hall of H.A.S. Productions in Las Vegas and his take on gig safety. Ideally, we want three or four regional live and install guys to contribute here. If you are interested, drop me a quick e-mail at bevans@fohonline.com. The idea is to let the market know what is happening in the big gulf between the small local provider and the big national guys.
We have also made a change in the Anklebiters to make it a little less L.A.-centric. Tim Williams will continue to contribute regularly (because he's done a good job for a couple of years now) with Road Tests and such, but we have moved half of that pair a little further east and paired up Jamie Rio with Paul Overson of Salt Lake's Onyx Sound.
So, say hey to the new guys and let us know what you think. By the by, if you are wondering why we didn't make these changes we have been talking about for almost a year sooner, it goes like this: Just like you get to buy new toys when you get better paying gigs, I get more editorial space when we publish more pages. The number of pages we publish is directly related to advertising revenue. Yes, I recently went off about separating ad and editorial CONTENT, but the link between revenue and page count is eternal.
I bring this up because pages in FOH are up as more manufacturers look to influence the audience that we have worked hard to grow and support, and the only way they know that you like and read FOH is if you are telling them so. Thanks for spreading the word and keep letting your suppliers know you read and value FOH. That means more dollars, which means more pages, which means more editorial space. And I already have some ideas on how to fill it…
