Sometimes things don’t work out as planned, especially when there are “fly dates” and “one-offs” on the tour schedule. Regardless, the show must go on, and we do the best we can. A case in point was a show I did last week in Washington state. Surprisingly, the story does not include canceled flights, re-routing air travel via a foreign country or a last-minute, high-speed dash to an alternate airport.
We had a leisurely load-in at 12 o’clock noon. No support act, doors at 6 p.m., and show at 7 p.m. — an easy day. A few days prior to the show, I received a call from the sound company who informed me that the Avid Profile they planned to provide at front of house was in questionable health. Would I be okay with an Avid S6L? I’m a little slow on this desk, but it’s not a problem, and I already have a show file for it.
Pre-Launch Checklist
Sometime around load-in, the systems tech fired up the console to make sure it was passing audio, which is always a good start! Around 1 p.m., we loaded my show file. All of the inputs came up as expected, so we moved on to assigning outputs to main L, main R, subwoofers and front fills. We tested the output routing using pink noise, and everything was working as it should. Save this for later: Sitting idly in its shipping box at FOH was a brand-spanking-new Yamaha DM3.
One of the things I verify when I load a show file on any desk is the effects routing. Sometimes the effect inputs and outputs need to be reassigned, especially in cases where the file was created on a different desk, a similar desk with different firmware or an earlier version of operating software, or a system that had more I/O than the current one. It’s not unusual to find that one or two of the effects haven’t been loaded into their respective virtual rack spaces, or that they are grayed out (not active). These issues are often easily fixed by re-assigning the effects I/O buses. Sure enough, one of the plug-ins was grayed out. Removing it and re-assigning it cured the issue.
By now, much of the stage was patched, so I put on my headphones and solo’d a vocal mic (I usually save my files with everything muted, so we don’t have any rude surprises when loading the show). What I heard was that strange, lo-fi, distorted audio you hear when two devices are sharing digital data, but there’s a word clock error. I solo’d some of the other vocal channels and heard the same thing. I then brought the vocal mics into the P.A. to make sure there wasn’t some sort of issue with the headphone output. There wasn’t. I asked someone to hit the snare drum, which initially sounded fine. But when I raised the aux send to my reverb, I heard that same weird distortion on the snare mic.
The S6L at FOH was not networked to the monitor desk (an Avid SC48), and we were using an analog split — so there was no need for routing word clock between the desks and a common stage box. All of my channels were clean — except for the ones that weren’t, but why? A trip to the virtual effects rack showed that the distorted channels all had one thing in common: they were being routed to effects. Some of those channels had an Avid Smack! compressor plug-in inserted, while others were routed to effects via aux send/return. If we removed the Smack! inserts from the dirty channels, they were clean. If I turned down the aux sends for channels that were feeding reverb or delay, they were clean. All of these effects were stock plug-ins, so it clearly was an issue with the console’s internal effects engine.
Try These First…
Here are some of the things that did not cure the problem: Rebooting, reconnecting the console surface with the CPU, confirming that word clock was set to internal, using CLEAR CONSOLE to reset the entire console to its default state, removing and re-inserting the plug-ins in the effects rack; clearing and then rerouting the inputs to or outputs from the effects rack, reloading my show, reloading a show file that worked fine yesterday but had the same distortion issues today; re-loading the effects plug-ins, loading a manufacturer’s demo file, removing and reseating the iLok for the internal effects, prayer and a hammer. We burned a lot of brain cells on this one.
During this time, the systems tech was making calls to see if anyone could help, or if we could bring in another desk. It was a Sunday and already 3 p.m., so getting another console was unlikely. I was starting to think that I’d have to run the show without any effects. Not being able to use Smack! on a few vocal channels wasn’t a big deal because the stock channel dynamics and EQ were all working, but not having any delay or reverb would really be a drag. At least we were able to confirm that all signals coming from the stage passed through the console without any issues.
The Workaround
I looked at that DM3 and thought “too bad it doesn’t have enough inputs.” But right about the same time that a bulb was dimly illuminating in my fatigued brain, the systems tech had an idea: we could route an aux send out of the S6L into a channel of the DM3, use a send on the channel to route the signal into the DM3’s internal effects, patch the outputs of the DM3 to two open channels of the S6L, et voilà! We’d have effects. We did this with two aux outputs from the S6L, routing them to separate channels, each to a different DM3 internal effect. Alas, the DM3 does not offer more than two effects, but it was enough to give me a vocal delay and a much-needed second delay for my “gags” (long delays with lots of feedback for certain words or phrases). Unfortunately, I did not have any reverb for my drum channels. All connections were made in the analog world to avoid inviting any additional digital glitches.
In Fig. 1, you’ll notice that the S6L’s Aux 9 and Aux 10 are patched to the DM3; that’s because those aux sends were already set up as effects sends in my show file, so once the DM3 “loop” was connected, I could send to the effects the same as if they were internal to the S6L.
We were never able to find out why the S6L effects were distorting, (which is a little disturbing), but sometimes, you have to do whatever is necessary to get the gig done. And sometimes you have to think outside the box.
Special thanks to Sean at Cascade Sound for going above and beyond the call of duty!
Steve “Woody” La Cerra is the tour manager and front of house engineer for Blue Öyster Cult.
