More than just the performance

Many of us remember a time in our childhood where our elementary school class put on a small-scale theatrical production of some sort. As you may know, most schools don’t have the budget to give the show the slick production values inherent to even a high-level amateur or entry-level professional production. The audience therefore expects there to be--and accepts that there is--only enough complexity in lighting design, set piece construction and costuming to sell the basic ideas that the script calls for. As a result, for such productions setup and tear-down are so much a real breeze as to be almost negligible.

However, because of this, only a very few people, even of those who are interested in performing only on an amateur level and not professionally, learn early on in life how important it is to help setup and tear down for a low-budget production. I mean, if you were involved in such productions, how often were you asked to help set up and/or tear down? And then, of course, the higher a show climbs the production values ladder, be it due to higher budgets or a more technically sophisticated venue or a higher level of talent and/or professionalism on the part of the cast and crew or whatever, the less the actors are expected to help set up and tear down--it’s all the more likely that the production has tech guys for that.

So this makes me wonder to what degree some amateur and entry-level professional performers consider themselves responsible for helping to set up and tear down for their gigs, because I’ve encountered many examples where the ensemble did a sloppy job at it in that they failed to take into consideration the ramifications that some of their actions--or, in some cases, their failure to act--might have on other people.

Now, don’t get me wrong--most musicians I’ve worked with are very good at setup and tear-down, but there are a few not-so-good apples out there. The pros know a gig doesn’t start from the time the band walks on stage or end when it has played its final note. Setup and tear-down are part of the gig too. Moreover, the band members are as much guests at the venue they’re playing at as they are employees of it.

Most of the time it’s been in churches that I’ve seen substandard setups and tear-downs, but they could occur just about anywhere. Here are some rules of thumb that are worth keeping in mind when setting up your gear for a gig:

• Get to the venue EARLY. I can’t stress this enough. The earlier you get there, the better. You may be thinking, “Well, if we finish setting up early, we’re going to have time between then and showtime with nothing to do.” So what? Not every setup is going to go smoothly. At some point, the unexpected will happen. You don’t want to be caught in a situation where there’s a major technical issue that needs to be addressed two minutes before showtime.
  
  
• This brings me to my next point: If you have your own PA, bring it. Remember the guitarist I talked about here at the end of December? If you use someone else’s PA system, you need to coordinate with its owner, or one of his representatives, in setting it up for your show, and that may well cut into whatever pre-show duties he might have. If you have your own PA, you know that system better than anyone else at your venue. Because of that, you’re going to want to be the one to set it up so that you sound just the way you want to. In that case, the only thing about which you’d have to confer with anyone from the venue is where you can plug in your gear into the AC in such a way that you don’t overload any of their breakers. Granted, not all of us can afford a multichannel board, a big amp, two speaker bins and one or two monitors. But for small solo gigs, even a four-channel board and a keyboard amp might do. There are some places that will even let you rent PA equipment--for example, I know of one place that will rent an eight-channel amp and two speaker bins for something like $40-50 for a weekend.
  
  
• If your venue has a PA system but no sound engineer, and you intend to use that PA, or if you’re renting a PA system, know it and its limitations, and be prepared to adapt if necessary. I can’t stress this enough either. Time and time again I encounter the occasional performer who comes into a venue to perform and doesn’t know how to use or set up its PA system properly. Every model of microphone, for example, is different–many parishes, for example, have microphones that are so much more sensitive than people give them credit for that when people use those microphones for the first time, they choke up to them as if they were SM-58s. The result? Distortion City.
  
  While it goes without saying that you should never point a microphone in the general direction of its own speaker, audio feedback is still a problem that can arise in the setup process, even for professionals. There’s one technique that I use to minimize this, but you need a good musical ear for it, and anyway it can be tricky depending on how sophisticated your mixing console is or whether you have a separate EQ plugged into it. If you set your EQ for a good overall tone and then hear some feedback, you need to be able to identify not only the note associated with that feedback, but the octave it’s in, and from those you need to be able to determine the hertz value, or a good approximation anyway, that the feedback is sounding at.
  
  For example, let’s say you’re hearing feedback at 335 Hz, just slightly sharper than the E above middle C. Your EQ might have, for example, faders for the 100 Hz and 400 Hz bands, with no fader in between. All you would need to do is lower the fader for the 400 Hz band, since it’s the closest fader you have to 335 Hz. If all your venue has is a board with three-band EQ labelled simply “high”, “medium” and “low”, there is, of course, a bit of guesswork involved, but not much, simply because you don’t always know exactly what frequency ranges each of the three bands covers.
  
  
• If other people will be using the venue while your gear is set up, find out what they intend to do for their gig and place your equipment accordingly. A few years ago a Christian rock artist had a change of venue and ended up playing at one of the churches where I play the organ. They had one of their speaker bin tripods set up in such a way that it was difficult for me to sit down at the organ without worrying if I was going to accidentally knock the speaker bin over. I had to be conscious of its presence behind me during the entire mass, and this resulted in me having to adjust my playing stance and the way in which I set up my own gear. I would have been more comfortable if the speaker had been moved over just a few inches further behind me.
  
  In 1987 the theatre company I worked for was doing two shows back-to-back. Between the runs of each of the shows at one of our venues, the theatre had a solo music act doing a matinee performance (our own performances were during the evening). Our set piece, which was designed as a single unit with a show-specific design on each side, was still on stage, and the singer didn’t mind it being there. She could as easily have done so, though, and if she had, it would have made better sense to lower a curtain in front of the set piece than to take the extra manpower and time necessary to strike the set and then later dress it up again.
  
  
• If you’re a band playing a gig at a venue that has a little or no pre-existing dance floor, anticipate where the makeshift dance floor is going to be and set up your equipment as far away as possible from where they will be dancing. Set up boundaries if you have to. I once did a gig with one of my bands in a large tent, where the dance floor had been converted out of the eating area, and the crowd got too close to one of the speaker bin tripods and almost knocked it over. Someone grabbed it to keep it from falling over all the way--I would have been injured, and my strap-on keyboard smashed, if they hadn’t.
  
  On another gig, at which we didn’t even have a set of risers to perform on, one of the bar patrons danced too closely to my keyboard, and bumped into my sustain pedal cable connection, knocking the jack out of its moorings within the keyboard. I had to take the keyboard in for repairs three times before we could find a repair arrangement that stuck.
  

Now, on to the rules of thumb about tearing down. These are just as important as, if not more important than, setting up.

• Tear down all the way. All too often, particularly in churches, I see situations where other musicians haven’t done that. You want to leave your venue in exactly the condition it was when you set up in it. When the producers of Cats put on their show, they painted the stage in a motif that was appropriate for the setting--they wanted to create the illusion that the actors and dancers were the same proportionate size as real cats. I’m sure they would have included in the budget enough money to restore the stage to its original appearance at the close of the show. It isn’t professional to expect the next person or group to do that restoration themselves, primarily because it cuts into their setup time.
  
  I don’t always have a proper amount of setup time available to me. I could have a gig in Hull on a Saturday evening where I have to set up in the afternoon and I might have difficulty getting to the church on time to play the 4:30 mass. In one such scenario a few years ago I arrived at St. Augustine’s running so late that I literally walked into the church proper while the opening hymn was being announced, and I ended up playing the opening hymn while still in my winter jacket. This is an extreme example--obviously, you want to try to minimize being caught in situations like that, and for the most part I do--but then you don’t want to tear down in such a way that it creates more of a difficulty in that regard than necessary for other musicians who might find themselves in just such a situation.
  
  
• If other people are using the venue after you, and the venue owns the gear you’re using, anticipate their needs and store that gear accordingly. This may seem an offshoot of my first point, but it’s really important in and of itself. A good example is at St. Augustine’s, where our organ has a series of digital pipe stops and a relay to the existing pipes. Because the existing pipes can easily get out of tune, and are expensive to maintain, I use the digital stops all the time. The stops in the lower range come out of large speaker cabinets that sit on the floor on either side of the pipe chamber. Unfortunately, sometimes one or more metal music stands were intermittently left on top of one of the cabinets. If I didn’t check to see if the speaker cabinet is clear, then the metal stand would rattle on top of the cabinet when I played the organ pedals, and the rattling would be distracting to both me and the congregation. This is an example of the kind of sounds you don’t want your audience to hear. (Thankfully, the cabinets are kept clear now.)
  

Above all, don’t be afraid to seek advice from people who are more experienced in setting up and tearing down than you are. They may have ideas to offer you that you might not have thought of. Too many cooks might spoil the broth, but too few inexperienced cooks might spoil the broth too. As I’ve said in the masthead to this blog, it’s not just what you want the people to hear that will make
a difference--it’s keeping them from hearing what they’re not supposed to hear that is just as important. And the greater the degree to which people can help you set up that combination of elements, the better.

Remember, the gig is more than just the performance--it starts when you arrive to set up and ends when you leave after tearing down. All the world’s a stage, wrote Shakespeare, and we all must do our part. The degree to which you demonstrate your professionalism in all aspects of the gig at a given venue could well make or break whether you play another one at that venue. It will make an impact on at least your future marketability--and not just right now either, because if you make these kinds of mistakes now and bring them into some professional band you join later, the band is not going to want to keep you. But the more you avoid these mistakes, the greater your marketability factor will become and the more gigs you will get. And in the end, isn’t this what being a performer in the music industry is all about?

They may well be working

Remember the portable audio technology of yesteryear? Years ago the only way we could listen to music on the road was if we brought portable cassette recorders or 8-track playback machines with us--which, as you may recall, were bulky, cumbersome and comparatively battery-guzzling by today’s standards. Back then, most portable playback systems played back in mono only, so for the most part we were content in those days to use an earphone designed for only one ear. Then Sony changed all that in the early 1980s with the Walkman. For the first time people could bring their music with them in a more compact format--and hear it in stereo. Nowadays, we have digital technology in the form of iPods and MP3-playing Palm Pilots.

Headphone technology since the birth of the Walkman, however, needed several refinements to get to the point where it is today. The early stereo headphones were, of course, of the larger, bulky type still used today in professional recording studios, and Sony wisely decided to come up with a much more compact design. Unfortunately, those early compact designs had a tendency to leak sound, much to the chagrin of those people in the immediate vicinity of the average listener who were not listening to Walkmans themselves. And bass response in these early compact headsets was poor. As a result, compact headset technology has now reached the point where people can hear the music at the same volume as before, with a far more faithful equalization curve to the recording artists’ intent than before, while at the same time imposing the music on others at so much lower a volume that the others can barely hear it, if at all.

This stage of development in portable headset technology is both good and bad for musicians who use Walkmans, iPods and so on to review the material they learn for performance. It’s good in that it allows them to review the material and not disturb others in the process. But the degree to which it is bad depends on the music market they happen to be in. And I believe the reason it is bad has to do with the non-performer.

In large entertainment markets such as Toronto or New York, people are used to the presence of an entertainment industry right in their own back yard, and I submit that when they see someone listening to their portable audio device, they assume the person in question might be a performer reviewing their material--a musician reviewing his repertoire, an actress going over her lines and cues, a broadcasting student studying the nuances of vocal delivery inherent to that field, or what have you--and so they leave that person alone. In all the time I lived in Toronto and in all the times I have been visiting there since, I don’t ever recall anyone looking at me listening to my Walkman or MP3 player and assuming I could hear them or was willing to turn my focus over to them.

Let’s take Ottawa as an example of the opposite extreme. Ottawa has become so government- and high-tech-saturated a city that it doesn’t know how to make room for an entertainment industry. In recent years, every time someone has brought forward a proposal to build another concert hall or performing arts venue, someone at City Hall has balked at the idea and said, "No, we have more important things to spend our money on." And when a major film production with a big-name star shoots in Ottawa, sometimes people flock to the set, wanting to see that star.

Such a scenario played out during the filming of Undercover Angel, which stars Yasmine Bleeth. One of the scenes was filmed at a Chapters store at Pinecrest Mall here in Ottawa, and a casting call went out for extras for that scene. More people showed up to try to meet Bleeth than to become an extra. The producers finally had to put their foot down and say, "Hey, we can’t afford this downtime--we’ve got a movie to shoot!" And the reason it went this far is that people in Ottawa don’t know any better. And the reason they don’t know any better is that Ottawa doesn’t have an entertainment industry to begin with.

Oh yes, there are musicians in Ottawa, and there are Ottawans who end up becoming internationally known--the National Arts Centre Orchestra and Alanis Morissette are prime examples. And we do have the occasional entertainment venue such as the NAC, the Ottawa Little Theatre and the Corel Centre. But a whole entertainment industry? Nope. If it exists, it’s of a marginal size at best when compared to larger markets.

This is why musicians here in Ottawa, particularly those playing in bands, tend to take on multiple projects, particularly if they’re viewing music as a means to make a living. (I would imagine this also applies to musicians in other markets that are similarly small.) Many musicians work in cover bands, and most cover band musicians don’t work from charts--it would be too time-consuming to set up for an entire band’s repertoire, even with modern music arranging software, and anyway not every musician can read standard music notation (witness, for example, the Bee Gees and Yanni). So these musicians learn from original recordings, being expected to pick out their own parts from them.

However, there is more that a self-employed musician has to worry about than just keeping his playing in tip-top shape--there is also the administrative side of the music business, such as negotiating gigs, keeping accounting records, going to the bank to deposit revenue monies, shopping for office and computer supplies, producing promo kits, updating web sites and so on. For the most part, big-name musicians have other people take care of that stuff for them, but small-name musicians have to do that themselves. This is doubtless true of performers in other areas of the performing arts.

So in this fast-paced world, in which our cities have become busier, noisier and faster, you must be wondering how a self-employed musician taking on multiple projects--or any performer, for that matter--can possibly have the time to review all the material for each project. Enter, as one possible solution, the portable audio technology I mentioned at the outset. In my case, for example, many of my administrative and personal errands involve taking the bus, and I take advantage of the commuting time by listening to a compilation of some 170 MP3s that I’ve created. These files consist of my three bands’ combined repertoires and a huge sampling of German pop music, much of the latter of which I’m currently developing for performance in my solo career.

However, I feel that the smaller the entertainment market, and thus the larger the degree to which the general public is used to there not being much, if at all, of an entertainment industry in that market, the greater a danger such a review approach poses. If a member of the general public in such a small entertainment market sees someone listening to music, particularly with headphones designed not to leak out any sound, what’s the likelihood that the person is going to anticipate that the listener is an entertainer reviewing his material? I’d say slim and none. In fact, the person may erroneously think the listener has his headset on at such a low volume that he can hear people around him. So how do you think the listener is going to feel if he is a performer reviewing his material and the person tries to talk to him?

Right. His momentum is going to be disturbed.

Now, can the listener afford that? Not if he’s working in multiple ensembles! If he does a sloppy job at preparation, be it through force of circumstance or his own neglect, it’s going to show through in his performance and thus affect his future marketability as a performer. And today’s entertainment-seekers want the best--they expect polished performances from the professionals. Would you go see a play if you knew in advance that one of its actors was going to flub up his lines big time for lack of preparation? Or a musical performance if you knew in advance the lead singer was going to stumble throughout the show, again for lack of preparation? Of course not. How would you feel if you saw a performer stumbling in his performance and you subsequently learned you were responsible, in whole or in part, for his lack of preparation? Not too good, I would imagine.

Many people listen to music just for pleasure, but performers listen to their material as a condition of their job as a performer. So if you live in an area where there’s not much, if at all, of a music market and you want to talk to someone who is listening to music, please do them a favor and don’t assume they’re just listening for pleasure. They may well be working.