Editor’s Note

Having just come back from the Los Angeles AES and PLASA London expos (and getting ready to head off to the LDI show and the Parnelli Awards), I can surely empathize with all the “living out of a suitcase” road warriors out there. And a few days back home gives me a little time to catch up on actually putting out the magazine and reflect on where the industry’s headed.

Way, way back a long time ago, the world was a whole lot different, when bands wore suits to studio sessions and recording engineers walked around in white lab coats. During this era — and for a couple decades thereafter — studio engineers were seen as the real smart guys, and live engineers were regarded as a step or two above roadie status. Of course, there was probably a certain element of truth to that notion, especially when a live “console” often consisted of a bunch of cascaded 5-input Altec 1567A’s that fed power amps wired to a couple stacks of Altec A-7 Voice of the Theatre cabinets. And if you had a rig like that, some paisley pants and a fringed leather jacket, you were ready to rock!

A couple of weeks ago, I dropped by to visit Ray Benson’s western swing band, Asleep at the Wheel, along with the crew, who were performing at the Bankhead Theatre in Livermore, CA, about a half-hour away from where I live. It’s no megatour — far from that — but I was genuinely excited about seeing the show (see “Production Profile,” Sept. 2014, page 48). I haven’t seen Asleep at the Wheel in a couple of years, and I also wanted to have a chance to check out the venue that’s just 30 miles outside the San Francisco Bay Area.

We are all in a business that revolves around gear, meaning a lot of techno stuff. But while most of our attention is focused on the technology, features and specs of gizmos and items involving electron flow and acoustics, there are other facets of the business that are often equally important — yet frequently overlooked. Just as essential to the equipment side is the people side and the service side.

Most of us are, by nature, really nice people. When there’s a noble cause or need, we’re all too glad to chip in. Truthfully, there are a lot of  important, meaningful charitable causes out there who could well use our services, and since most of them are non-profits, well it would be nice if we could just donate some of our time, staff, trucks and gear to the cause.

There’s a movement going on in New Orleans, where many of the city’s crown jewel venues have sprung back to life after surviving the horror and carnage that was hurricane Katrina and then enduring the economic disaster that followed in her wake. And this aftermath was devastating to this city that thrives on tourism, where the damage to many of the Crescent City’s music venues left outsiders wondering whether they would ever recover.

It’s hard to believe that in 2014 we’d still be talking about loudness and volume levels, but here we are, and it’s still a major issue on the agenda. We’ve all heard the pros, the cons and the who do you blame — sometimes it’s even us — but a news item I read recently brought us the subject from a new angle.

Okay, I don’t quite get it. It’s April. Up here in San Francisco, it’s pouring rain. Yet the festival season starts in just a couple weeks, with the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival kicking off for two fun (and work) packed weekends from April 11 to 13 and 18 to 20. It might be springtime, but I guess the chances of warm weather are better in the desert/Coachella Valley town of Indio, Calif. than up here in the fog belt.

I recently got an interesting letter (well, email) here from a reader who had a simple, yet thoughtful inquiry. In the message, he stated that he felt he was a pretty good sound reinforcement engineer, but was wondering if I could offer some advice on making the quantum leap from being “pretty good” to becoming a great engineer. The answer, I’m afraid isn’t so simple — if it was, I’d simply write it out and have it printed up in bags of audio fortune cookies with everything you need to know in a soundbite or two.