As our economy continues its spiral flush down the toilet, audio professionals everywhere are hurting, and scrambling for their next gig. More and more it seems that gig has something to do with sound reinforcement — as opposed to recording.
It’s becoming apparent that recording is no longer the financially viable pursuit it was in the past. It’s got a lot to do with the fact that pricing of the tools has reached a point where any kid with a few hundred bucks can go out and buy an Mbox or equivalent and record into their computer (they already own the computer, so there’s no extra outlay). And now — as any ad in the The Village Voice or Craig’s List will trumpet — you can record your song for 15 bucks an hour. Nowhere in these ads will you see mention of the term “engineer,” and it’s a good thing — I take offense at some audio hack calling himself or herself an engineer. Ads like this turn my stomach. Like you, I’ve spent my life devoted to the craft and art of audio, but now any wanna-be-er with Pro Tools and an extra bedroom is an audio expert? I don’t think so. That same moron can go into Home Depot and buy a hammer, but that doesn’t make them a carpenter.
The record industry succeeded in cutting off its nose to spite its face. We’re now into a second generation of kids who see no reason to pay for the music they listen to, and the surviving “major” record labels are still trying to force-feed us crap. Yeah, there are plenty of acts who can fill a room while lip-syncing (this week it’s Lady Gaga Blah Blah Blah. Looks like she stole that outfit from the mothballed set of Phantom of The Paradise) but the long-term, big-earning acts are the likes of Metallica, U2, Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen et al — acts who actually perform live and have repeat customers.
The Money Is On Stage
I work with a lot of classic rock bands, acts that no longer sell a lot of records, but certainly still make a good living performing, and, as a result, so does their crew. As the money moves away from recording and toward live performance, you can be sure that techs will follow it. The same is becoming apparent for audio manufacturers as well. Some of them are beginning to see that it makes no sense to focus their manufacturing efforts on a shrinking market. Boo hoo for the recording studios and woo-hooo for us.
Audio hardware and software manufacturers who never gave a damn about live sound are paying attention to our industry. It’s about friggin’ time. Sure, there have always been stalwarts in live sound, companies like JBL, EAW, Crown, E-V and Midas, etc. Plenty of microphones, speakers, consoles and power amps, but take a look at what’s happened to processing and software. Audio processing for live sound is experiencing nothing short of an explosion.
First, it was drive processing — no need for discrete compressors, 31-band ‘graphs, parametrics, crossovers and system delays. One drive processor does it all in a few rack spaces. Now it’s happening with outboard gear. I used to be able to judge the quality of a PA system by looking at the outboard rack. If I saw stuff like a TC 2290 delay, Eventide H3000 or Eclipse, Lexicon PCM81/91. I’d know the sound company was serious. These days I no longer freak out when I get to a gig and the only thing at front of house is a digital console and a CD player. Soon there will be no outboard processing — we’ll have to start calling it inboard processing.
The Plug In Parade
Now that audio manufacturers have the digital console down tight, they are taking notice of the fact that plug-in processing for live sound is a huge market, for many reasons.
First, there is the size and space factor. You can take hundreds of plug-ins with you in less space than a 2RU reverb. That makes the setup and FOH footprint smaller, so more tickets can be sold. Promoters love that. Tour accountants like the fact that you won’t be trucking a rack full of heavy hardware across the country for nine months (“saves gas”), and if you’re like me, you fly a lot and simply can’t take the hardware with you anyway.
Then there’s the gearslut factor: I’d love to have Neve 1073 EQs for my vocals and API 550b EQs for my drums, but it ain’t gonna happen. I don’t have the resources to afford a rack full of juicy vintage gear, and even if I could, I’d be afraid to truck it around for fear of theft and hardware failure. Vintage gear is cranky enough when it is in a stationary rack in a studio, where the temperature and humidity are relatively consistent. Imagine the maintenance problems on a tour. (I can just see trying to change out the tape loop in an Echoplex. Hey wait a minute… I may have created a new job position: Tape Tech — the guy responsible to cleaning and demagnetizing the tape heads on the Echoplex for the lead singer’s vocal channel!)
Then there’s the issue of “number of instances.” If I purchase a plug-in I can probably use it on a dozen channels simultaneously, whereas I’d need a separate hardware unit for every channel. Let’s see… four Fairchild 670 compressors… that’s about $80 grand. Yeah right. And of course, there are things you can do with plug-ins that you simply cannot do with their hardware equivalent. Take that Neve 1073 EQ for example. The hardware version doesn’t have memory slots to hold my favorite vocal and guitar EQ settings but the plug-in does. These days many plug-ins do a pretty decent job of emulating their hardware brethren.
Over the next few months we’ll take a closer look at the imminent changes in our industry, and how hardware is rapidly being replaced by software. Many companies are “all in,” as exemplified by Waves (a premier manufacturer of plug-ins), which recently announced the creation of a new department dedicated to live sound. These developments are changing the way we work, and once again we may have to redefine the title “live sound engineer.”
