Features

Consider it the equivalent of hazing before getting into the fraternity of Front of House engineers–you're working with an opening band, and as you step up to mix a show, the main act's muckety-muck reaches over and turns down the entire P.A.

Welcome to the big time. Everything you'd hoped for, huh?

That situation has played itself out over decades of FOH history and new engineers accepted it both as a right of passage and brutal reality. The good news, according to Seether FOH mixer Howard Worthen, is that those days may be passing. "I've gotten the shaft pretty hard as far as them cutting me on volume and stuff. You don't see that a lot any more, and I think that comes from guys like me who started in the '80s going through that whole scenario," he says. "I know my point of view is that I've been through that and I would never do that to another person.

Why in the heck would Soundies go to LDI? Hellooooo? "Lighting Dimension International," oh boy! Come on, sound people, let's go listen to the lights! You must be joking. After the fifth person asked me, I began to wonder a bit and decided to do some research. Well, actually, I just walked over and asked Jon Rat what the deal was. Turns out that unlike the "real" audio trade shows, these Lampies came up with the idea of setting up a round robin of full-blown sound systems on actual stages all pointed to a central area. Over the course of three hours, you can hear each of the six stages do a 30-minute presentation showing why they are the magic solution to all that is sound.

"Welcome to the 5th Annual Parnelli Awards," said PLSN and FOH publisher and Parnelli Award dinner host Terry Lowe. And thus began LDI/ETS convention's most anticipated event. Held this year at the beautiful Rosen Centre, the industry's legends, stars, up-and-comers and likely a few ne'er-do-wells came to honor this year's top performers in 18 categories. Additionally, highlights included bestowing achievement awards on Patrick Stansfield and Bruce Jackson.

For a place that acts as the tabernacle for old-time American music, the Grand Ole Opry has kept itself remarkably up to date. Like country music itself, it benefits from a periodic infusion of new ideas. The Opry is an institution that once banned drums from its stage (though bolder artists in the 1950s would have a kit playing behind the velour curtain of the Ryman Auditorium, the Opry's original home). But on a night this spring, the drums were as up-front in the mix as they are on the radio. Top 40 radio, even.

Those who attended the very first concert at Los Angeles' Staples Center in 1999–Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band–can attest to the fact that the sound was abominable. In the vast arena full of hard surfaces–including those all-important revenue-generating glass skyboxes–sound ricocheted wildly with nasty, ear-damaging midrange the predominant sonic coloration. It was impossible to imagine that Staples would ever be a viable music venue.

Maybe I've got our old friend Hunter Thompson on the brain, but that phrase kept popping into my head throughout the proceedings of Pro Production 2005. Between economics of scale, changing client demands, technology advances and the creeping corporatization of the live event production world, the going has indeed gotten weird. But while those outside of our world certainly see us all as a bit on the weird side, we have all gone pro and it showed.

Everyone knows necessity is the mother of invention, so it's not a surprise that Marty Garcia saw an opportunity in 1982 to ease the vocal strain of Todd Rundgren with a change in monitoring techniques. What's not so clear is how he went from setting up monitor wedges one day to putting denture gel and ear buds into Rundgren's ears the next. "That's good," Garcia laughs. "The thing of it is that in my mind, I've always been trying to perfect what I thought was a good audio system."