Very Interesting TED Talk from Elizabeth Gilbert

Yes, I know that the gaps between posts are getting longer and longer.

No, I don't have any amazingly good news about the future of Underground.

I do, however, have an interesting video (regarding creativity) for you to watch. Here you go:

An Excellent Quote

"Any electrical filter on an acoustical device is a spatially invariant solution to a spatially variant problem. As grownups we have to decide what part of the space to tune the solution to and let the others go." -Bob McCarthy

I wanted to post this here so I wouldn't forget it.

If you're not into audio nerdery, you're probably wondering what this means. My personal interpretation of this is as follows:

Your friendly, neighborhood audio technician has a responsibility to deploy the PA system at their disposal in some environment. Inside, outside, whatever. That environment has acoustical properties, and the PA has acoustical properties too. Us PA guys most often use equalization (electronic filters) to make the PA system sound good in the environment where we've got it set up, but that's only a patch on any problems that exist. It's entirely possible for that patch to be very good, but it's still just a patch. It is not truly possible to solve an acoustical problem with an electronic solution. To truly solve an acoustical problem, you have to change the room, or change the PA deployment, or both. However, that's usually not possible, so a professional PA operator needs to decide what compromise will work best for the situation at hand, and go with it.

I don't know if the above is truly in line with Mr. McCarthy's original intent for this quote, but I think that it does fit. (My belief is that Mr. McCarthy is really getting at the issue of not being able to have "perfect" sound everywhere in a performance venue, but I think there are wider implications as well.)

This Was Posted on ProSoundWeb

All I have to say is (and please pardon the implied bad language) "F!@# YES!"

After-Math (PUN!!)

I've had these materials sitting on my desktop for months, but haven't had the motivation to post them. In a sense, they don't really matter that much.

Still...

The above is a picture I took after the "Christ-mosh" festival. It was a wild night, with tons of people and tons of bands - yet the good management provided by Fire In The Skies and Matchless Records made the night go off without a single major issue.

Now, this here is a chart showing the relationship between show attendees and the number of bands that played a show. The progression is decidedly non-linear, and I would argue that the "sweet spot" is found with a 4-band show. Even though the 5-band shows had better average attendance, 4-band shows are easier to run (from an audio technician's perspective).

You wouldn't think that cutting out one loading cycle and mid-show changeover would be as big of a deal as it is, but speaking for myself, the impact is very noticeable. I feel like the show is just a better experience for bands when things can be done at an unhurried pace - and when the show is better for the bands, it's almost inevitably better for the fans.