Fade from black to long shot of old-school Hollywood Western street. Cut to close-up of saloon door slowly swinging as audio fades in with the crunch of cowboy boots on crusty dirt amid a clang of spurs.
Go to ground level boot shot as the bad guy appears in the distance, and then cut to close-up of our steely-eyed hero’s eyes as the faux Morricone music with the 100 millisecond-one repeat delay on the guitar comes up to 0 dB…
Da de da de da, duh duh duh… Oops, sorry, been watching too many Westerns lately. Or perhaps always. One could view this as a North American problem, but the Cowboy myth has been disseminated to the whole planet through every possible media conduit, with the possible exception of the original Basque cave paintings.
I will avoid the political angle on this (“Bring it on…”, etc.), but our various cultures are suffused with “mano-a-mano” interactions between competitors in all known arenas, from the gladiators to the knights of Arthurian legend to CNN vs. Fox News. And our humble little business is not immune.
Originally, the only way to do some sound work was to be a physical scientist – you pretty much had to make the stuff yourself, or at least have the tech chops to modify someone else’s kit into a new solution, with your name on it.
Time passed and products appeared that allowed artistes (like me, and many of you) to concentrate on the subjective side (making stuff sound musically appropriate) of live sound work, without having deep physical science chops. This offended the physical science types, who view(ed) the artists as unschooled carpetbaggers unfairly cutting in on their action.
They haven’t given up, nor have we, so the industry is left with a deep analytical divide between objectivists and muso/subjectivists. To drag out my old cooking analogy again, some folks would assess a salad dressing by chemical measurement, while arty types would taste it and throw a little more salt or whatever in until it tasted right.
Yeah, I know, oversimplified as usual. But one of the jobs of the live sound operator is product assessment, as in, which of these competing items is right for me, and my application? Well, you could measure something or other, but even the lab coats know that isn’t enough to close a deal.
You could drag the prospect into the open field behind the shop and turn the stuff up to arc weld, but that would not allay doubts about the possible advantages of competing products. What is a sales manager to do?
Of course, (out of the mists that Western street scene forms before his eyes – John Wayne, Randolph Scott, Clint Eastwood smile at him from wherever and the epiphany hits) we’ll have a shootout!
I don’t know the date of the first product shoot-out in our beloved industry, but I pretty much made my living doing the silly things for quite a few years.
The question of shoot-out methodology came up in an email from one of my associates, which has now triggered the temporary displacement of the promised reference vocal mic article with a few war stories and a bit of method for those interested in this odd ritual.
