pounce
December 16th, 2007, 05:36 PM
one area of live sound close to home for me is theatre sound and sound design. it's got some quirks unique to it that aren't relevent to running sound for a band, for instance.
there's usually lots of wireless, lots of instruments, sound effects, lots of scene recall, specific processing effects, and then just plain old mixing the thing. computer control of mixing boards is almost a given. the big kids mostly seem to use cadac boards and software like qlab or sfx in their rig, along with smaart or spectra foo.
i recently downloaded qlab, the basic version is free and the advanced featured versions are cheap
http://figure53.com/qlab/
and sure enough i saw it in use last night at a touring broadway show that i attended. (as an audience member for a change, not a crew member this time).
i used sfx for a number of shows and it got the job done real well.
http://www.stageresearch.com/products/index.aspx
i regularly see spectra foo used live
http://www.mhlabs.com/metric_halo/products/foo/
although smaart is also used
http://www.eaw.com/products/software/EAWSmaart/
this one had looked promising, but i'm not so sure about it's developement anymore. it never seemed to get fully fleshed out...
http://www.macfoh.com/
and of course most line arrays have their own software for setting them up in the room, so there are a number of flavors of those to help set the angle of the dangle.
no doubt fairly typical DAW and editor applications are used to create the sound effects in the first place, but the above stuff has a special place at live events and i see much of the above software at pretty much every touring broadway or other theatre gig, and the analysis part of it at big rock shows. even in smaller shows.
what else are you using, or what do you like? i'll be able to have a review of qlab soon. so far it looks much nicer to use than the sfx program i'd used so often before.
there's usually lots of wireless, lots of instruments, sound effects, lots of scene recall, specific processing effects, and then just plain old mixing the thing. computer control of mixing boards is almost a given. the big kids mostly seem to use cadac boards and software like qlab or sfx in their rig, along with smaart or spectra foo.
i recently downloaded qlab, the basic version is free and the advanced featured versions are cheap
http://figure53.com/qlab/
and sure enough i saw it in use last night at a touring broadway show that i attended. (as an audience member for a change, not a crew member this time).
i used sfx for a number of shows and it got the job done real well.
http://www.stageresearch.com/products/index.aspx
i regularly see spectra foo used live
http://www.mhlabs.com/metric_halo/products/foo/
although smaart is also used
http://www.eaw.com/products/software/EAWSmaart/
this one had looked promising, but i'm not so sure about it's developement anymore. it never seemed to get fully fleshed out...
http://www.macfoh.com/
and of course most line arrays have their own software for setting them up in the room, so there are a number of flavors of those to help set the angle of the dangle.
no doubt fairly typical DAW and editor applications are used to create the sound effects in the first place, but the above stuff has a special place at live events and i see much of the above software at pretty much every touring broadway or other theatre gig, and the analysis part of it at big rock shows. even in smaller shows.
what else are you using, or what do you like? i'll be able to have a review of qlab soon. so far it looks much nicer to use than the sfx program i'd used so often before.