DR Blog - Hannover and Frankfurt

So the initial shock and disgust of facing the election results is slowly fading into accepting what I already knew about human nature. And not unlike nature nature, Trump is reminiscent of an invasive species like kudzu for which our political system has not yet developed a defence mechanism.

Personally to help me sleep and do my part, I have arranged monthly donations to the ACLU to help fend off Trump’s stated attacks on civil liberties as well as other organizations that he states his policies intend to undermine. Join me, let’s try and minimize the collateral damage and reverse the process into a better direction.

Moving over to sound world, let’s take a look at the RTA I use to see the sound that the audience hears during the show.

So for me, this photo from the show in Hannover is pretty darn close to what I am looking for. What I seek is a very smooth falling response losing 3 to 5 db per octave as you go up in frequency.

In smaller rooms, the slope is more gentle and in big rooms when I am far away from the PA I look for a steeper slope.

Please note that this is not the response using pink noise. The is the response of the actual band playing measured from a mic at FOH and the RTA is set to “infinity” time averaging. I then allow it to average over the course of half a song or even several songs.

My goal is to look at the averaged frequency response of the sonic energy that I am exposing the audience to, over time. I really want to avoid exposure to narrow band peaks over any thing beyond short time frames.

There is a bit of a bump in the 1k to 5k region, this is not ideal but since it happens smoothly over several octaves and is just a few db, it is not a major concern.

One of the challenges is that this curve will constantly change with venue temperature, audience size and location. so if you ever watch me mix, you will see me trying to lock in the curve as the show starts and then chase EQ gremlins as they show up throughout the night.

Doing winter shows means we can experience some pretty drastic temp changes, very quickly depending on the roof design and entry and exit door usage.

Did my first and second bus ride of this tour leg getting in and out of Herning Denmark. The train schedules were just too cumbersome.

I’ve been train to take candidate shots of everyone on the tour and at some point put some posts on each department. What seemed a reasonable plan is proving quite the challenge though.