Great Mistakes #12

I had to put Late Night Live to air a couple of nights this week and I remembered the time I won the prize for being the only person to turn up for a live radio program.  Or should have won it anyway.

I was very new at the ABC, I had only been there about 3 weeks and got put on the transmission shift for Late Light Nive. Which is late at night when there is no one there.  Except for us.  And on one night, only me.

Because I was new to the ABC I didn't know what was normal yet, and had never worked in broadcasting before, so couldn't work out what was normal.  It was only my 4th night on the shift and when i had arrived at work about 6pm the LNL office was open and buzzing with activity.  I did a few other things and went back at about 7:30 to say hi and see what was on the books for the night, but the office door was shut and locked.  Not knowing that that is not normal, I presumed they were out for dinner and would be back, not to worry.  But by 9:30 they still hadn't turned up and I was starting to worry.  It was cutting things a bit fine since we go on air at 10.  So I rang my boss.  

Me...."Ummmm Late Night Live is on tonight isn't it?".   

Him..."yes"

Me..."then why am I the only one here?"

Him..."I don't know"

Bit of panic.

No phone numbers could be found to call anyone to find out what was going on.

So my boss started talking me through looking for a program that maybe was supposed to be broadcast that night or a standby program.

Me being new still wasn't very good at working out what a badly labelled program might look like.

Anyway, I couldn't find a program that looked like it should be played that night.

But I did find a generic standby program.

The minutes ticked away and I played this standby program and sat in the studio waiting for the phone to ring.

It took about 1 minute for the executive producer to ring up and find out why the wrong program was being played.

The story was they had pre recorded the program, but forgotten to tell anyone that we weren't going live - including me, my boss, master control where the switching to the studios is done, plus other people who needed to know.

The phone call was a major understatement...

Me..."Where the hell is everyone?''

EP..."It's not your fault.."

Me..."I know it's not my fault....Why didn't anyone tell me?"

Oud

Last week I went to St Stephen's Newtown to record oud with jazz piano. Jo Tawadros was playing with Matt McMahon on piano, plus some percussion and clarinet.
We had our new Sadie LRX to record with. It's great because it's tiny and lets us record 48 channels via USB to a laptop. No more lugging around huge mixing desks or racks of preamps and huge hard disk recorder.

On the oud I had a Schoeps CMC5-U cardioid mic.

Piano had DPA 4021 piano kit mics.

Percussion and clarinet had Sennheiser MKH40s.

No free food.


That's the oud with the percussionist behind.

el cheapo el crappo

Well the cheap set top box I bought the other day got taken back to the shop. After 1 week it started going a bit mental. The channels would all scramble together and I would have to reboot to fix it. Then the remote stopped working. Oh well, the Tour de France is over now - I don't need it anymore.

buggy hoon

I nearly got taken out by one of those motorised 4 wheel buggies that old people ride in today. I was in the shopping centre and had to duck out of the way of this guy who was speeding around a corner way way fast. Then he went up on 2 wheels on the side. I thought he was going to tip over, then he kept riding along on two wheels like the Dukes of Hazard. He was doing it on purpose! Too bad if he kills a few people in the process.

Great Mistakes #11

RF reminded me recently of the time when I was working at Jupiters and I managed to drop the realllly expensive TV camera just when the curtain was about to go up on the show. This caused a little bit of mayhem, because having the camera was an integral part of the show. It was used in the magic show for the filming of all the close up hand magic that got projected up on screens. And I dropped it. Well not really. I just didn’t put on the bench very well and it fell off. And the transmitter broke off. So we had to quickly run a cable to where the magician was going to do his hand magic so we could still project the pictures. It was a bit messy. The curtain went up late.

You know very few things would warrant the late start of a show. Even when someone had a heart attack in the audience 5 minutes before the show they didn’t postone. Curtain went up on time and the ambulance officers wheeled her out on a stretcher in the dark.

The only other time I remember the curtain going up late was the night of Princess Di’s funeral which was being broadcast at the same time. We had one minutes silence before the show.

le tour

I have become a tragic follower of the tour de france.  I've liked riding bikes for a long time, but never followed bike races.  Last year after meeting someone who was sitting up every night watching the tour de france, I was really intrigued as to why someone would put themself through this.  So I watched the race one night and I was hooked.  The problem was I had missed all of the critical stages of the race that really set up the race leaders.  So I decided that this year I was going to watch as much as could to really see how the race is won.  But much to my horror, SBS who are the race broadcasters also won the rights to Ashes this year, so instead of showing bicycles, they are showing cricket players.   AAAAhhhggggg.   But the cycling is on the SBS digital channel and I don't have digital.  And my internet is not good enough to stream it.  I'm just not one of those people that needs to buy all the latest stuff, so I haven't bought a set top box.  I'm still using our family's original colour telly we got in 1979 and it works a wonder.

But today I splurged.  I'm so annoyed at SBS not showing the tour on regular analogue TV.  I went out looking for the cheapest set top box I could find so I could watch SBS digital and get the tour.  Tonight I'll be settling to watch the cycling.  Yay.  The cheapest box I found was an SD one for $80.  But there an HD for $100, so I got the HD.  I'm really glad I understand inputs and outputs.  I had it all hooked up and working within 10 minutes.  It looks great.

Goldfish

I’m a little concerned with my housemate TR’s pet little fish. I was away on holidays and so was she, so she asked our other housemate TJ to feed them. She nearly killed them by overfeeding them. I came home from holidays and the fish tank was a murky brown. I said to TR “what’s going on with the fish tank” so she cleaned it out and found all this uneaten rotting food in the tank. TJ said they didn’t look like they were eating so she kept putting more food in. Honestly, what sort of logic is that?
Anyway they haven’t been their energetic selves since. They used to always dance for me when they saw me. Now they just sit there. Except for when they go a bit crazy. This morning one of them was darting around the tank and hitting the edges so hard you could hear his skull banging the glass. And then he ran into another fishy and pushed him into a corner under a shell so he was stuck there for a while. I think they’ve gone a bit mental.

My brother had goldfish years ago. He had about 8 because he had quite a big tank. He managed to kill them all in one afternoon. He changed the water and didn’t know you need to dechlorinate the water. Poor fishies all died from chemical poisoning. I came home one afternoon and he had bowls of water everywhere with sick fish in them, plus the dead ones lined up on a tea towel. I came in and he said “all my fish are dying”. “Why?" "I changed the water and they are all dying now”. “Did you dechlorinate the water?” ”No.” Before long all 8 were lined up on the tea towel.

Great Mistakes #10

One of the great rules we have at our work place is “always check it in mono”. Because as much as I hate to admit it, we broadcast in mono. Yes we go to all sorts of effort to make programs with the highest quality of audio possible and we make a lot of effort to do beautiful music mixes and it all ends up in glorious mono on AM. HOWEVER, we now have digital radio in STEREO. YAY.

Anyway, I once was responsible for Sarah Blasko going to air out of phase. Now what happens when something is out of phase? All of the mono information cancels itself out when you mono the signal so all you get left with is the stereo information. So for speech, this means you get zilch. For music it means everything that you had panned centre get cancelled out. So you get no voice, just the reverb. This is what happened with Sarah Blasko. She sounded like she was singing out the back in a very large bathroom.

I had prerecorded her in the studio doing a couple of songs for the music show. We usually go live to air with these things, but for some reason we pre recorded the day before. And because it was pre recorded she made mistakes and had to redo things which meant I had to do some editing in wavelab. That’s why going live is so much better – no chance to do things again so people make sure they don’t stuff up.

Anyway I edited it up and rendered the session and by some freak thing, it rendered out of phase. I know this wasn’t my fault because I checked the edit session later on and it was in phase. So wavelab had stuffed up. I was sitting in the studio when it was being played to air and it sounded ok because we were listening in stereo, and weren't paying too much attention to it - if we'd been listening properly we would have noticed it sounding out of phase. But the Melbourne producer who was listening off air in mono came on line saying “what’s going on with the sound, she sounds really distant and echoey?” The other engineer and I immediately knew what this meant – it was out of phase. Poor Sarah Blasko. She got fixed before the song finished but for a while there she was just a wash of reverb with some guitar. Excellent

SWF live to air

On two mornings of the Sydney Writer’s Festival we went live to air for the Book Show. This was the first time I have organized a live to air outside broadcast. So much can go wrong with these things, so it can be a rather daunting task.
The first thing I had to make sure of was getting Telstra to install a line at the venue for the ISDN hook up back to Master Control in Ultimo. We were broadcasting from an unused pier at Walsh Bay in an old wharf building right down the end of the pier. So Telstra had to tap in to their junction box and basically just run a long cable down the length of the pier to where we were going to be.
Then we take our ISDN codec and plug in to this line and dial up the number to connect us to a similar machine back at master control and then go to air.
We split all channels coming from stage so we could do our own mix. Then mixed the program with our mixer output going into the ISDN codec. Simple as that. We also had so signal coming back to us from master control so we could play the news through the PA. So I had a line out from my mixer going to the PA system of my mix post fade, plus a pre fade send of the return line from master control also going to the PA. It was pre fade so it didn’t go out my mixer back down the line. That’s called mix minus. One of our favourite terms in broadcasting.
As a backup to the ISDN line, we had a 3g wireless dial up thing, but it didn’t work. So if the ISDN had fallen over, we had no back up. It didn’t fall over. The 3g thing just couldn’t get enough bandwidth to maintain a connection. We had heaps of signal, but being right in the middle of Sydney, there was just too much traffic on the network for us to get on. Bad idea.

Anyway here’s some pics, thanks to Jen.
That’s me mixing away.
Gear wise I’m using –

Allen and Heath 16ch mix wizard
Denon CD player
Then in the rack on the right –
On top is a Sound Devices Hard Disk recorder.
Then some compressors
The thing in the middle roadcase of the rack with the digital display is the base station for the GPS clocks. Being live to air we have to be right on time. This clock picks us a signal from the GPS network and the transmits the time for the satellite clocks like the one at my feet to lock to.
The bottom roadcase is the ISDN codec.
One the floor behind the clock is the splitter rack. The red thing is my back pack.
Everything else is the PA system.
The orange thing on the right is a residual current detector power box. Like a power board, but it is extremely sensitive to current surges and will trip before we have a chance to be electrocuted.
Also on the right you will see coffee and chocolate brownie – all important things when you have literally had no sleep and you are live at 10am.


That’s me looking very smug.



They are the GPS clocks which hadn’t locked into the proper time yet and we wanted them to really badly.

Sydney Writer's Festival

I know this is a bit behind time, but I thought I’d write a little bit about the Sydney Writer’s Festival in May. This was a really big event for me because I had to co-ordinate 24 recordings, plus organize 2 live to air broadcasts.
Most of the recordings happened over a 4 day period and involved 7 different engineers, 4 PA companies, 9 venues, and it all took quite a bit of work ensuring everything was going to be OK.
The big thing with my network, Radio National is we don’t like to just take splits from the front of house mix. Sometimes it can be hard to convince PA companies that this isn’t good enough for us, because it seems to be good enough for every other media network. But we at RN are more interested in top audio quality than anywhere else, so we don’t just do what everyone else does. So why is a split from front of house not good enough? Often the mix that sounds ok in the room on the sound system does not sound good as a recording, for these reasons -
1. The balance between different mics may sound fine in the room, but record it and the levels are often all over the place.
2. If the room is not very big, you hear a lot acoustically anyway, so the PA levels can be a little bit wonky without affecting how well people can hear what’s going on on stage, but recordings can be really rotten.
3. PA operators often love to mix with mute buttons – this sounds awful on a recording – we like smooth fade ins and outs.
4. PA operators cut everything as soon as the last words are spoken, so you don’t get any applause or ambience for your recording – things which make for a nice radio program.
5. If the room acoustics are out of control, you get PA operators doing harsh EQs on voices to try and stop feedback, so you get thin, awful sounding voices on your recording.
6. If you have several mics open at once you can get a very echoey recording. This might be fine through the PA but not for us. We like to mix out any mics which aren’t being used at the time. PA operators often just turn everything up and leave them up.

So therefore, what we need to do is put splitters in so that we have control over the level of every mic coming off stage, independent of what the PA mixer is doing. We split all channels and then have our own mixer and mix our own wonderful recordings and then it doesn’t matter how bad the front of house mix is, ours will still be OK. That’s as long as they don’t have heaps of feedback and crazy noises as they will still go on our recording.

So I had lots of equipment to organize, lots of PA companies to liaise with, lots of discussions with Festival people etc. I was flat out for over 3 weeks on this. You wouldn’t think there was that much to do but there was. Plus I had to look after all the risk assessments for OH&S and this took ages with all the site inspections and paperwork.

I’ll talk about the live to airs in another post.