Category Archives: Audio
Hokey = Good (occasionally)
At EBC we’ve had this ongoing issue with our PA that’s been bugging me something fierce; a 3-5 db cut needed at both 900Hz and 180Hz for many months. Since I’m not there every week, I had yet to do anything about it until today I finally gave in to the ‘awesome monster’ inside me. Our main venue is still running a mega analogue setup, so I only have 2 Mackie Onyx PEQs to work with, and end up cutting in these frequencies far too often. I often feel that I never having enough PEQs to get things sounding smooth as I’d like.
Our PA is an all EV setup installed by the awesome folks at Lift A/V, and we don’t touch our NetMAX controller for fear of tarnishing something that generally sounds amazing. I’m not sure why it never struck me to ask them to make this fix for me before today. None-the-less, here comes the hokey: I unplugged our main sends to the PA from the board and put them in the output of a Peavy 31 band GEQ, made the needed cuts, and ran a balanced line from the board to the Peavy’s input. We were worried about excessive noise, and this change up definitely added some ‘hiss’ with how our gain structure is set up (PA is really hot). Peavy is my second least fav make of audio equipment, so this was difficult to follow through with.
I’m happy to report though today was one the best mixes I’ve been able to put together in that venue. I was able to ignore those common trouble area frequencies and focus on the other things that needed to be cut. The overall result sounded really different and I wasn’t sure if I liked it at first. The music was powerful and smoother at the 90dba we run at, and this was confirmed by a handful of people who mentioned in passing that the sound was really ‘good’ and ‘powerful’ today. I also have to attribute much of that to the band doing really well, especially the bass/drums/e guitar being really tight.
Now to make the phone call to the A/V system vendor so I can undo this hokeyness…
~Jason
Reverb in Daughtry’s Latest
It seems like reverb has had limited use in the last 5-6 years for mainstream pop and rock music, except for the every now and then occurrence. Even in mainstream studio recorded worship music, it’s used somewhat sparingly in a historical context. It’s been very dry, compressed, loud, busy, etc…but not very ‘spacious’. I guess bands like Coldplay don’t fit that description, but you know what I mean?
Listen to Chris Daughtry’s latest single, ‘Crawling Back to You’ and the space the producers/engineers gave it:
(Listen at higher quality if u can)
It’s a different sort of space and I think it sounds awesome, especially on quality speakers. Other effects in this track aside, I really like its use of reverb. For his voice it sounds like a couple verbs, one of which has a time sync’d pre-delay (so it it’s on/off beat). The drums sound equally awesome, with a perfect amount of decay on their medium-large room sound-you don’t really notice it during the chorus or bridges…but definitely in the verses. The overall sound seems like a throwback to the ‘Celine Dion sound’ for my mixing ears. That’s all for today.
