Distributed in 94 countries, Mix is the world's leading magazine for the professional recording and sound production technology industry. Mix covers a wide range of topics including: recording, live sound and production, broadcast production, audio for film and video, and music technology.
ONCE UPON A TIME, WAY BACK IN THE 1970s, I was part of the independent filmmaker’s scene. I used to live, breathe and exist for the whole concept of the filmic art, working on my films, crewing on other people’s productions and (at least partially) supporting myself teaching at local schools. At the time, the availability of low-cost 16mm and Super-8 cameras allowed anyone with a vision and a modest budget to cinematically express their feelings. Suddenly, short art films were the rage and campus screenings, film festivals and local cinema societies all offered at least some outlets for independent filmmakers.
Compared to the bulky, low-res video equipment available at the time, film offered a means of generating broadcast quality color images—even using a simple spring-wound 16mm Bolex camera. Meanwhile, better gear, such as Arriflex and Eclair cameras, were available at affordable rental rates in the major markets and many a budget producer did weekend shoots, where a complete camera package could be picked up on Friday night and returned Monday morning—all for a one-day “Saturday” rental fee. The main drawback was that sync sound was a complex process, requiring a team approach—or at least a second person to run the Nagra and hold the fishpole boom.
After the shoot, the independent then had to weave a tangled web of lab work—ordering edit workprints from the original film, resolving the 1/4-inch location audio tapes to sprocketed mag film, editing the separate picture and sound rolls, preparing multiple rolls of mag for the audio mix and finally conforming the original picture footage into checkerboarded A/B (or A/B/C…) reels for release printing. The process wasn’t exactly easy—on the sound or picture side. Compared to those Neolithic days, DAW-based audio post-production is a breeze–you still need talent, but the process is whole lot easier now.
Today, low-cost HD format DV camcorders provide better than broadcast quality video and digital audio recording in easy-to-use, compact packages. Combined with desktop Mac/PC editing software digital video production has transformed the independent video scene in the same way that ADATs and DA-88s revolutionized digital audio 15 years ago.
DV offers a high degree of instant gratification—where a simple point-and-shoot approach can yield a remarkable image. That’s not to say that everything’s easy: Just because an image shows up without lighting doesn’t mean a shot is well-lit and just because sound is picked up doesn’t mean you’ll get a useable track from an on-camera mic that picks up LOTS of room tone. But for those who are willing to take the extra step of learning some of the basics (yeah, I know, that’s the boring part), the DV medium can yield remarkable results–you just have to work at it a little. And if you actually know something about audio, so much the better.
The tools are cheap and plentiful. For a ridiculously small investment, you could have all the tools required to create great looking/sounding projects—shorts or features. You do need a great script, and the world is filled with great stories to tell. Is the revolution really limited to YouTube clips of people riding bicycles into swimming pools or cats that play the piano? Not that there’s anything wrong with funny little snips, but where’s the revolution? Sure, there are people taking advantage of the technology to do serious work, but with all this technology available, the movement should be pandemonium and not a trickle.
BRING ON THE REVOLUTION!
When not working on Mix stuff, George Petersen records and performs with the SF Bay Area-based rock band ARIEL. Check ‘em out at www.jenpet.com.
THE WORLD IS FILLED WITH WAY TOO MANY COINCIDENCES and is getting smaller everyday—at least thanks to the Internet.
A couple months ago, I got home late at night and was still wired from doing a session earlier that evening. Doing a little web surfing to wind down, I decided to do a Yahoo search on some names of a couple bandmates I hadn’t seen for decades. Trouble is, if you type in a name like “Tim Walker” (a real name—where are you, Tim?) you’re gonna get a huge response that you’ll never filter through, especially when the last time you saw them was loading gear out of a club at 3:00am back in 1968, in Naples, Italy (my actual hometown).
I figured I’d start with a name less common and typed in “Bob Lewellyn” and “guitar.” Sure enough, there was one obscure reference to Bob playing lead guitar on his younger brother’s Les Lewellyn’s album and said brother has a website (www.preyinglizardmusic.com) he uses to promote his band Dixie Lizard. A quick e-mail to Les verified that was the right brother and he remembers his brother Bob’s band back in Italy: Hey, it was only 39 years ago. Score one for the web!
Going onto Les’ site, I was blown away by what this guy–singlehandedly–is doing to promote indie music. Back in 2005, he started his series of Pirate Radio Shows, with multiple three-hour streams of new, interesting music and new shows each week—a great downloadable fix for your iPod (or mobilized to your cell phone), especially for anyone who remembers what FM radio USED to be like.
Now, Les has expanded with daily and weekly podcast shows, including the Hot Sheet Mon (hard rock); The Chill Pill Show (soft-er rock); InstruMental Madness (instrumental rock); Preying Lizard Music’s Road Rash Blues Show (blues); and No Man’s Land (all-female rock performers). As a bonus, Les also includes cover art, band links and a new online reviews section. To make sure he never sleeps, he also hosts Eclectic Pod, the top-rated music podcast sponsored at www.towerpod.com (an arm of Tower Records, which after downsizing its brick and mortar empire, continues online at www.towerrecords.com).
I might have stumbled on Preying Lizard Music through odd happenstance, buy hey, there’s plenty of great unexplored new music to hear, explore and download. In these days of big-money, corporate radio, here’s somebody who’s doing it right. Check ‘em out, tune in and enjoy. Best of all, it R-O-C-K-S! Thanks, Les! www.preyinglizardmusic.com
When not working on Mix stuff, George Petersen records and performs with the SF Bay Area-based rock band ARIEL. Check ‘em out at www.jenpet.com.
At a press conference yesterday in Los Angeles, Ozzy Osbourne and promoter Live Nation announced that the ticket prices for OzzFest 07—the 25-date, hard-rocking spectacular—would be free.. nada… zippo. Evidently it won’t be a completely out of control free-for-all, as attendees would have to log onto go to www.ozzfest.com or www.livenation.com and be directed to sponsor sites where the free ducats would be doled out.
These days, ticket prices are astronomical, even before you ante up for parking, beer, a hot dog, T-shirt or program book and the all-too-familiar “ticket service fees.” And if The Stones or McCartney are in town, you can have a great date for $1,000 or so—-chump change for the average billionaire. So if there’s a better way to make it happen, so much the better. There’s no shortage of great local acts to fill in the gaps at each tour stop and Ozzy’s banking on finding some headliner types that would be willing to do a couple free shows—in exchange for selling CDs, T-shirts and other merch.
The big question is whether it would work? Maybe–this crazy idea does have some merit, especially in an industry facing the spectre of a summer of half-filled stadiums and cancelled dates. There are some other issues to work out, such as parking—particularly in areas that offer “free” parking (it’s actually built in as a surcharge in the ticket price), but the notion of selling merch has kept a lot of bands (small and large) alive for years.
The whole concept is either the smartest or dumbest idea in years. Maybe by the time OzzFest kicks off on July 7th in L.A., we’ll have that answer, but in these days of ticket pricing insanity, at least somebody’s trying something new.
When not working on Mix stuff, George Petersen records and performs with the SF Bay Area-based rock band ARIEL. Check ‘em out at www.jenpet.com.
Superbowl week is always a little strange, with the entire country focused around some semi-meaningless game (you can tell that MY two fave teams didn’t make it this year). But the thing that amazes me about the Superbowl is the audio and the nearly impossible job of coordinating all those simultaneous frequencies of wireless from not only the network, security, caterers, and every other service working the event, in addition to the sea of local, national and international press that descended on Miami for the event. THAT—by far—has got to be the toughest job in audio.
Doing the halftime show is no picnic either, with hundreds of performers, his purple majesty himself and a unpronounceably-shaped stage platform moved to the 50 yard line for the 12-minute extravaganza. With rain coming down by the boatload, it’s times like this that a certain amount of lip-sync (like 100%) makes every bit of sense. If I want to hear Prince perform live, it should at least be in some kind of controlled environment where his purple Strat doesn’t have water pouring out of it and the horn throats of the stage wedges aren’t filled with water.
But there are some tricks for dealing with inclement weather. In fact, I used to work with Ron Rivera when he played with the Bears—actually the California Golden Bears of “THE Play” UC Berkeley fame. [This was way back before he was with the Chicago Bears …er… Dallas Cowboys.] I was moonlighting for Don Neilsen of Oakland’s Swanson Sound, doing the audio for the (UC) Bears home games. These weren’t exactly podunk events—the stadium seats 75,000, but the real irony was that we got the gig at all. Evidently, we were the only sound contractor that walked through the site that didn’t freak out at the vintage Western Electric tube amps that were housed in field boxes below the horn covering each stadium section. These things had been hard wired into their AC feeds sometime back in the 1940s and stay on 24/365 and still keep working. [The university also has several lecture halls with similar can’t-shut-them-off amp setups that are still in service].
The job was great when the sun shined and it really sucked when it rained, especially having to clean thousands of feet of cables and snakes that were completely caked with mud, Gatorade, spit, snot, blood, grass and who knows what else. Ugh! [Did I mention that audio is a glamorous profession?]
Anyway, back to our story… Every once in a while (meaning almost every game) there was some kind of halftime event—hardly a Prince performance–but usually somebody getting an award presentation or a “regular-Joe-customer-gets-a-chance-to-try-kicking-a-field-goal” type competition for a radio station or used car lot promotion. This usually meant running about 250 feet of mic cable out to the center of the field—rain or shine. Fortunately, we weren’t using condenser mics (not that the contractor owned any, back in the 1980s) but the venerable–and sadly now discontinued–Shure SM56, which essentially is an SM57 with a swivel pistolgrip and an on-off switch.
You could literally pound nails with these (sometimes we did) and they’d keep on ticking, but even they didn’t like being underwater. The ever-resourceful Don showed me a cool trick of putting a Baggie plastic bag over the mic and duct taping the bag so it didn’t blow away. I asked him if he taped it too tightly, because there was no way the announcer could pull the bag off briefly to make an announcement. Don just looked at me like I was crazy and said “don’t take it off, just talk into the mic.” So I gave it that classic “testing 1-2” and it boomed crystal-clear (at least crystal-mic clear) through the stadium. I was amazed. There’s no way I would have ever guessed that you’d have any sound at all—much less intelligibility—from speaking into a mic in a plastic bag, but it’s a great bad-weather trick that still amazes even the most grizzled old audio pros. So the next time you wonder if a studio stocking filter or foam screen is REALLY transparent…
SIDE NOTE: With its convenient swivel mount, the SM56 is the perfect mic for snare, guitar amps and almost everything else. So Shure, give some consideration into reviving this much-needed classic. Please?
When not working on Mix stuff, George Petersen records and performs with the SF Bay Area-based rock band ARIEL. Check ‘em out at www.jenpet.com.
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