The SamePage MIX

Over the past couple of months I have been muddling my way through setting up a social media marketing “strategy” (both personally and corporately) here at SamePage. Currently, my strategy resembles the equivalent of a bunch of “digital post-it notes”:various bookmarks, URLs, links what-have-you scattered across my desk(top), browser, iPhone, etc. How do you scrape all this together into a coherent, useable, package? RSS, Twitter, tehnorati, ning, FB….a couple of times I have literally deactivated my FB account because I felt a responsibility to maintain it even though I found most of the content completely irrevelant.

I have read numerous books and blogs but I get the feeling that NOONE else really knows either and that there is a very fine line between an expert and a novice. (He who Tweets loudest…)

Anyway – I ran across this blog entry by Anthony Coppedge and found it relevant.

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Just downloaded the WordPress app for iPhone. Looking forward to trying it out from WFX in Charlotte this week..

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Insanity of using paper sheet music

Here’s a fun look at the insanity of using paper sheet music.  Even if you download DIGITAL SHEET MUSIC do you still print it out? This video suggests that maybe there’s a better way to view it, distribute it and store it.

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There are a lot of advantages to using a Personal Monitor Mix system for live performance. The two I like to emphasize in my clinics are 1) pitch and 2) timing. Having accurate pitch and timing references are everything in a live performance. And if timing is everything….how does latency in a digital system factor into the equation?

Makers of digital audio systems like to talk about “latency”.
Latency can be roughly described as “delay” – basically we are talking about the amount of time it takes to convert an analog signal to digital, move that signal through the system, and then convert it back to analog at the other end. The premise is that lower latency is always better. While it is true that you want latency to be low – there is practically no difference to the musician in 1ms and 3ms. Let’s put it into perspective this way:

Sound travels through air at approximately 1131 ft. per second / 1.13 ft. per millisecond. (For purposes of this discussion let’s call that 1 ft. per millisecond.) So, sound traveling from a typical monitor “wedge’ on a stage to a musician’s ear over a distance of 6 ft will take approximately 6ms. No one seems to complain about the latency of sound through air….
Where latency on a stage becomes problematic is with sound from multiple sources having different latencies. If you are 6 ft from your wedge and you hear drums in your monitor at 6ms PLUS the sound from drum kit which is 15 ft away (15ms) plus slap back from the rear wall at 50 or 75 ms. – you get the picture – then this can create audible echoes resulting in a “smear” of sound. Considering that each musician is in a unique location and is dealing with different distances from all of these sound sources then each is “hearing” those sounds at a different time thus resulting in a different set of latencies for EACH musician.

An advantage to using a Personal Monitor Mix system (such as SamePage MIX) is that by using headphones or IEM’s each musician is hearing everything at the same time with all sounds aligned perfectly regardless of stage position or distance at a much LOWER latency than they with a monitor wedge. This creates a “tighter” performance with cleaner sound for everyone. Of course, another advantage is lower stage volumes but we’ll talk about this in future posts.

If there is anything YOU would like to talk about please drop us a line. We want to hear from you.

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Overview

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We created this blog to provide a forum to talk about the latest tools for making better live music. A lot has happened in the last few years that make it easier to plan live music programs and to make them sound better than ever before. If you are interested in this, start a discussion theme by posting. We’ll be posting  our thoughts regularly. Thanks for visiting us and happy posting!

FULL DISCLOSURE: this blog site is maintained by employees of Corevalus Systems, LLC, a developer and manufacturer of hardware and software for planning, playing and mixing live performances.

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