Tuesday's class marked my first exposure to (or even more accurately: consideration of) audio. Professor Beyer asked us to raise our hands if we had no experience with audio. My hand went up along with only a couple of other brave souls - the class, it seems, is predominately musicians and/or Music Tech students.
A dynamic microphone was passed to me in a bag. What do you see?, he asked. What kind of cord plugs into this? I waited for a classmate to volunteer the answer, and one did. This mic uses an XLR cord. Then the mixers came out.
Meet the audio mixer. This isn't even half of it.
We briskly moved through the "basics" - where inputs and outputs live, what the heck those fancy dials do, and we learned about something called the 'master mix.' What I took away from all of the demonstration was that there are a lot of things you can accomplish with a mixer, and a lot of different places to direct the sound. One can send a unique mix to someone's headphones on stage and a different mix to the audience. This can be useful if an instrumentalist wants to hear what everyone else is doing, and hear less of their own sound.
There are also several stereo hookups in the classroom. One can direct sound to the speakers in the floorboards versus the speakers in the credenza on the side of the room or to a third location. A fancy touchpad allows one to easily make these selections.
Michelle and Garvin speak to each other over microphones and we play with the mixer controls until we can hear them speak to each other. We learn about feedback, and about wireless microphones like the one Professor Beyer is wearing. We are impressed upon to set all controls to neutral before we even approach creating an audio setup - this is the only way we'll be able to effectively troubleshoot if problems arise.
After lots of experimenting and poking around I, embarrassed, bleat "What does 'EQ' mean?" My audiophile classmates must think I'm crazy.
Before next week's class we are asked to envision possible audiovisual setups for our performance in class on October 25th. We'll be using multiple computers, projectors, audio and visual mixers. The professors suggest that we take a look at JackTrip and UltraVideo (anyone able to find this one?). There is also a software on computers on the Steinhardt building's 8th floor, whose name I didn't quite catch.
No comments:
Post a Comment