How Weird Street Faire 2013

Many thanks go out to everyone that helped pull together the Opel / Opulent Temple & Urge Productions stage at How Weird this past Sunday.

The sound system consisted of four Funktion One Resolution-4 tops, and six F-221 sub enclosures.
All this sounds great running off the Funktion One signature E series amplifiers.

Contact us at 415-881-7468 to spec out a Funktion One rental system for your next event.
There are configurations available that can handle crowds of 500 to 2,500+ people.

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Best of reel, captured Feburary 14th, 2013 at Union Square, San Francisco for the BlackJet launch event.

Photography and Video Production by
Jeff Steinmetz
urgeproductions.com

Event Produced by
ABCey Events
abcey.com

‘Balance’
Performed by: That Noise
thatnoisemusic.com

Client:
BlackJet.com

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Urge Productions loaded up and ready for BlackJet launch event

Urge Productions will be shooting and capturing HD motion for BlackJet’s San Francisco Launch Event, celebrating their new direct service route connecting San Francisco with Los Angeles, New York, and Las Vegas.  The event will be produced by ABCey Events, a long time client of ours.

BlackJet

BlackJet, already dubbed the “Uber for Private Jets” is an online service and phone app that connects travelers with the reliability and convenience of a private jet experience  at prices commensurate with premium commercial carriers. Recently featured in TechCrunch, BlackJet aims to revolutionize private and charter air travel to become “the world’s cheapest, easiest way to book private jet service.” The startup is backed by Garrett Camp, founding CEO of StumbleUpon and co-founder of Uber, and has an all-star list of investors including Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, First Round Capital, Shervin Pishevar, SV Angel, Ashton Kutcher, Guy Oseary, Tim Ferriss, Steve Jang and more.

BlackJet Flyer

Thursday’s launch will feature a $6M Giveaway including 1,000 comped memberships (first 1,000 to arrive) with a complimentary companion seat to any BlackJet destination. One lucky Grand Prize winner will receive Roundtrip Private Jet Seat Service to Las Vegas for two leaving just post contest on Thursday and returning on Sunday. The winners will also be comped a 3 nights stay at the acclaimed Bellagio hotel along with $1000 in cash. How’s that for a Valentine’s Day gift for your special someone? Local SF fave dj David Carvalho will playing some lunchtime beats, so come on down and get your free membership along with your photo taken in our aviation themed digital photobooth!

BlackJet is currently invite-only, but we have a VIP code for you –  you can login to their site with the code forbesvip300. Hope to see you at the launch.

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This prince video was released without much fanfare.

“Screwdriver,” a straight up 4 piece rock tune that follows last year’s “Rock and Roll Love Affair,” made it to the internet late on Monday.

The lyric video (available above) features Prince and his band performing the song. If you pay close attention, you can catch a few frames with Prince wearing a spirit hood, almost indistinguishable. A preview of the clip was previously updated to a seemingly random YouTube account.

Just goes to show, the music industry is changing and the concept of waiting to release an entire album is no longer required.

Prince also released a new web site at: 20pr1nc3.com.  If you dig around a bit, fans will find a variety of links showing up from 3rdeyegirl – a mysterious web persona most likely driven by the Prince marketing team.  Start your journey down the internet rabbit hole on the 3rdeyegirl Twitter account.

Prince is currently on the cover of Billboard, and the magazine will honor the singer at this year’s Billboard Music Awards. He’s also the subject of an upcoming tribute concert at New York’s Carnegie Hall.

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Funktion One at What The Festival

If you’re just starting out in sound engineering, there are a few basic concepts that are helpful starting points. For almost a decade I’ve been jumping back and forth between large scale sound system design, and hi-fi studio design and studio mixing.  I felt it would be good to shed some light on exactly what “tuning” a sound system really means.  In the case of a home stereo system during a recent visit to a friends house, it was a mere 5 minutes of basic equalization on his Mac Mini using Apples AU Lab, and some improvements in speaker placement.

When it comes to large stadium arrays, dance stacks and live venues things get a little more hairy.  My favorite environment is an outdoor stack where there is little or no reverberant surfaces or “room bounce” to deal with.  Outside I can let the system breath fully, with all frequencies nicely uniform.

In the studio, I use two different near field monitors for mixing.  On the mix desk reside a pair of two-way Focal CMS 65s and the single cone Avantone Mixcube.

How does this relate to tuning a live sound system?  Let me break it down into the following four categories: Flat Frequency Response, Crossover, Time Alignment & Power Handling

Flat Frequency Response

Pink noise, when heard over a speaker sounds like static.  Beyond just being an annoying sound, it’s actually a useful sound tuning test tone where all frequencies are played at an equal sound pressure level.  If you look at a spectrograph of pink noise, you should see a fairly flat line or slope with minimal peaks and valleys for any given frequency.

Pink Noise Spectrum

When you play pink noise through a loudspeaker, you can use real time analysis tools and a microphone to see how accurately all frequencies are represented. Bass heavy systems will have a bump in the low end while systems that are poorly crossed over will have dips or peaks.  If the transducers in your speaker just can’t handle a certain frequency, or the cabinet causes unwanted resonance, you may also see other anomoles.  Companies like Funktion One, Turbo Sound, EAW and Meyer spend countless hours in R&D figuring out how to get high performance drivers to deliver smooth frequency responses over their operational range.  Touring sound engineers that operate these systems have been provided reference EQ and crossover settings from the manufacturer.  These settings are based on the manufacturers in depth understanding of how their speaker were designed.

These recommended settings only gets you part way.  The rest is having good ears and/or good measurement equipment like SMAART.

Crossover

Back to the recording studio environment for a moment…  Earlier I mentioned the single cone Avantone mixcube.  These speakers have one cone, and intentionally sound a little crappy.  They have no tweeter, no subwoofer, no sizzle, which is exactly what I want when I am doing mixing and mastering for clients, they are my “alternate” speakers used for comparison with my main monitors.  The masses don’t listen to your latest release on $2000 pro studio near fields.  They listen in their car, on their iPod, their bose home stereo, in the club, or on a portable boom box.  They also don’t always sit exactly in the middle of the speakers, so they might be hearing a more “mono” sound.

What’s so special about these minature Avatone speakers? The mixcubes have no crossover which means all frequencies are trying to come out of a single cone.  This gives you the opportunity to hear how your mix will translate across a variety of crossover points.  Not every speaker is designed the same.  The Focal CMS 65 crossover their tweeter around 2K (they are bi-amped).  A Funktion One Resolution 4 Touring horn is Tri-Amped and has 2 crossover points – at 445Hz and 5.77Khz.

Whether you are tuning sound for a live concert or setting up in-studio near-field monitors, getting the crossover points right is key.  The goal is to avoid dips in frequency response or causing overlapping frequencies which lead to a “smearing” sound.

Time Alignment

There are two general areas of alignment to focus on: transducer alignment and placement alignment.  You’ve likely heard time mis-alignment, but not sure “why” you don’t like how it sounds.  If the high frequencies, mid frequencies and low frequencies hit you at different times, it’s a bit slappy feeling.  An extreme example is a drummer sitting on stage thwacking the kick drum.  If you’re sitting in the audience, you hear the thud of the kick drum coming from the loudspeaker, then a split second later you hear actual sound coming from the drummer.  This is more about placement alignment, which is a system wide adjustment versus transducer alignment.  We need to get two alignments correct – the speakers stack in relation to all the drivers, and the front of house in relation to the band (although less important for DJ sets, unless their on stage monitors are bleeding into the audience).

Have you ever been to an event where the organizer decided that dumping a bunch of mismatched speakers on the stage was the answer to their volume and sound quality problems?  Not only does it look like a mess, it certainly sounds like a mess too.  They are likely not time or phase aligned, and are canceling out frequencies all over the place.

The Mackie SRM450 has done a decent job trying to get nicely timed speakers to the masses (although its easy to argue we have all cursed the overdriven distorted Mackie SRM speakers found out in the wild).  They describe it as achieving simultaneous arrival of the High Frequency and Low Frequency.

Mackie SRM450

We want this in “all” our systems, whether in the studio, at home or on large stadium array systems.  If you are setting up a surround sound system at home, don’t put your center channel speaker 10 feet behind the TV, and the subwoofer 20 feet off to the side of the room, it will sound a mess.

When I tune touring grade sound systems, I usually have a starting point from the manufacturer.  This includes time delay compensation and polarity settings.  Polarity is another type of time alignment, or more specifically “phase” alignment.  If you take two sine waves, and invert one of them – played back together they would cancel each other out.  This can happen at any frequency, with any driver for a multitude of reasons (this is where the art of sound engineering comes in – it takes time to learn how to suss all these issues out).

The Funktion One Resolution 4 has a recommended list of time delays and crossover adjustments as a starting point.

Much like the home stereo surround sound comment above, this also applies to any satellite subwoofer stacks.  The goal is to get the HF, MF, LF and Sub to all be in alignment, regardless of where they are stacked.

When I go to general admission live events, you will likely see me standing near the mix engineer tent.  It’s almost always the “sweet spot” in terms of time alignment.

Power Handling

I admit it, I’m the engineer that helped Burning Man craft their “sound policy” for mutant vehicles.  It got to the point that everyone wanted to be a superstar DJ and turn up their sound system as loud as technically possible.  This lead to either blown out ear drums of participants trying to look at art or crappy sound.  Louder does not equal better sounding.

A rule of thumb I use when designing speaker stacks is to have 1.5 to 2 times the power needed to drive all transducers powered by the amp channel.  This means if you have a 1000 watt subwoofer, you need a 1500 or 2000 watt amp to run it.  If you run two subs off the same amp channel (usually in bridge mono), you need 3000 to 4000 watts.  This give you headroom!  You can run the amps full, and keep your levels low on the mixer or digital signal processor.  When you have headroom (more power than you need), the amps just crank along without complaining (i.e. distorting).  Keep everything out of the red throughout your input chain (on stage mixer, artist gear, front of house mixer, crossover, limiters and amps) and it will sound amazing!

What hurts peoples ears is distortion and high sound pressure levels.  You can talk to the person next to you because the sound is “clean” and only run at a level required to allow you to “feel” the music in your chest, while not destroying your hearing (I still recommend ear plugs!).

- Posted by Jeff Steinmetz, Voting Grammy Member // Producer, Engineer & Founder of Urge Productions

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I don’t normally shoot and edit wedding videos (not our focus), but one of our good friends asked us to shoot a Wedding Rockumentary for them.  In the past, when I brought the video files back to the studio, I would normally re-encode them to Apple ProRes if we were going to use Final Cut or an intermediate codec for Adobe Premiere.  Final Cut Pro has a terrible time with media that comes straight off of the Canon 5D Mark II. Philip Bloom posts exhaustive write ups on this, so no need to re-hash it here.

Adobe Premiere on the other hand – I love it.  It means one less step in the work flow for me.  I went straight into editing – no intermediate files.  You certainly need a beefy machine to keep up with the video previews, but if you render the working area occasionally, any sluggishness becomes a non issue.  There is a noticeable richness to the look of the video when presented as close to the raw footage source as possible.

The editing came together so quickly that I give 5 out of 5 stars to Adobe Premiere.

I am not the only one that prefers to work with Premiere.

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The Mix Is Almost Perfect

I have fallen prey to the same cycle, where you feel like just “one more plug in” will make it better.  It gets to the point where you don’t even realize you are making it worse.  In generally, we suggest that our clients get their tracks as close to what they feel represents their work, and send over your current version.  The version should have about 3 to 6 db of head room, have no limiters, equalizers, compressors or saturator effects on the master, and sent as 24 bit WAV or AIFF at the projects sample rate (44.1K to 96K).

Mixing

We would be happy to listen to your current mix and provide feedback as to how we could (or could not) help.  We often find smearing in the stereo signal, poor mono placement and over hyped lows and highs in mixes done in home studios.  We are here to help.  Send us your stereo mix, and let us know what DAW you are working in.  Many mix engineers will ask that you bounce to stems, which is the safest route.  We prefer this if you know how to properly bounce tracks to stems (each track on its own bounced with all “important” effects printed.  It may also be safe to remove your EQ on tracks).   We also offer collaborative mixing where we can review your project as-is if it is in Pro Tools, Logic and even Ableton Live.

Mastering

We can give you our honest opinion as to whether we think mastering will get you where you want to be.  We listen to the track on 3 sources via two different Analog to Digital (A/D) converters to get a sense of how your music will translate to a variety of listening situations.

Step away from the mixer if you have cob webs in your ears.

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