Sometimes I’ll be driving in my car, messing with the bass and treble adjustments on the stereo, and I’ll think to myself you know, if someone really applied themselves and made these so that they warped stuff just right, I could probably solve most of my EQ problems at a show with just two knobs like this.
If somebody would make me a console that had them oh, and include a high-pass filter!
Four bands of parametric EQ is a wonderful thing to have, but when you glance at someone’s channel strip and every band is radically hacked, something is wrong with the picture as far as I’m concerned.
Sometimes people need to look past the console, no matter how nice it is, and check out how the system is tuned or maybe think about switching out a microphone.
I believe and sorry if this sounds insulting
I could stand behind a mix position that had pipe and drape around it so that people walking into the room would not be able to see the console, and cheerfully mix a demonstration event that the attendees were told featured the latest super-duper whiz-bang possibly-digital definitely-big-bucks desk.
And I think 80 to 90 percent of the people would nod knowingly, and ask questions and never guess that I was really using a much lower priced, clean, reasonably modern console that bore no relation to what they thought they were hearing.
I would be scared of guys like Don Pearson, or Dave Lawler. But, my honest opinion is that the great majority of working audio folk and I include myself in this group would never in a million years want to risk a serious wager on the nature of what was truly behind that curtain.
The phrase “rider-friendly” when was that coined, exactly? I loved the old Clair clamshell console when I mixed on it. Before that thing was invented, what else existed? What did the riders of that time say
“No Bogen?”
In the last 10 years, I think there is only one time that I have run into a sound company whose owners actually stepped out on a limb and put their money where their ears were, and did not take the far easier “rider-friendly” road.
All the rest either buy what they know is going to be rent-able, or and this is far more often the case what they can afford.
Chris Kathman is a veteran mixer and production manager, and he also served as an editor in the formative days of ProSoundWeb.