ProSoundWeb: The story of how I came to conquer a beast that stalks all live events, wrenching both the audience and the performers out of the moment.
There is a beast that stalks all live events, wherever they may be. It lies quietly and patiently as amplifiers are connected to loudspeakers, it sits up alert and attentive when microphones are plugged in, and it crouches, poised and ready to pounce when faders are raised.
2 comments:
This was a very fun and informative article to read! Originally I thought that this article was going to be about a harassment case, but feedback being described as a "beast" was so accurate and a fun twist. In my high school I was the main sound operator and have experienced the beast one too many times. Having this experience, the article was very relatable. I found the beast comparison to be quite an accurate representation of what it is, and how you don't always know what exactly you did to "defeat it" for that time around. I also really appreciated the section where the article went into the history of feedback. It made sense that it first occurred when people tried to amplify sound. Though I did not fully absorb the information, the "Then-to-Now" section was also an interesting read into how sound technology has developed in trying to tame the beast.
Oh feedback, what a fun challenge for the new sound engineer. Working on mostly tours for the formative years of my development as a sound engineer, I quickly had to learn how to manage this beast in time-sensitive situations where feedback would shatter the art being created on stage. So, how did I do it? Well there were a couple different ways. I would try and ring the system out a bit, as the author of the article discovered, but with only a couple minutes of tech time I really didn’t have much time to figure this out. Instead, I learned that well-trained actors and good speaker placement were critical in such a dynamic sound environment. First, with the actors, most of them were kids who had probably never been trained on how to correctly hold and use a microphone, and I had to teach them that they have to keep the mics pointed at their face and keep them away from speakers whenever possible. This actually did a lot to reduce feedback, but combined with proper speaker placement I was able to almost eliminate feedback from any of these tour performances.
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