You have got to check this one out.
My head is going to explode I think.
I just went to audio college here with Bob McCarthy.
What a smart dude. Oh my God.
He has been working with or for Meyer Sound for over 40 years
now. He's done many, many things with
Metallica. Lots and lots of things with
lots of other bands. Super smart guy when it comes to
designing engineering audio systems and really, really big
loud audio systems too. I, I saw Metallica last year
with a system that he helped design and, and put together for
them. So yeah, take a listen, hope you
like it, have fun and don't forget to like, subscribe and
share. Hello and thank you for joining
me today on Geez of Gear. Today's podcast is brought to
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I will keep trying to deliver really great podcasts to you.
Today we have a brand new sponsor on board, which is
Artistry in Motion. They are a confetti and special
effects company based out of California, and just reading
about them, they've just done the Super Bowl, which was pretty
incredible. You always see just a ton of
confetti coming in and it's pretty interesting because they
need to load it up and be prepared for whichever team
wins. This year it was either
Philadelphia or Kansas City, who I don't like to say out loud.
And of course, Philadelphia won. And so boom, they're putting in
green and white Philadelphia Super Bowl, little Super Bowl
trophies. And if it would have been Kansas
City, it would have been red and white Super Bowl trophies.
So they do really great work. They did not only the Super
Bowl, but they also did the national championship game for
football, for college football, which is a pretty big deal.
So they do a lot of really cool stuff.
It's so fun to have, you know, unusual or different or sort of
out of the normal lighting sound manufacturers or video
manufacturers. And so we're really happy to
have them on board. Thank you guys very much for
being a sponsor of Geezer Gear and I look forward to
representing you. So two days guest is actually
someone I don't know. And so I'm really looking
forward to along with you, I'm going to learn about this guy
too. Bob McCarthy is a leading expert
in sound system design and optimization.
He's got over 40 years in the industry.
He pioneered Source Independent Measurement Measurement for SIM
in 1984 and has worked on major productions including Metallica,
Cirque du Soleil, and Broadway hits like Wicked and Les
Miserables. His book Sound Systems Design
and Optimization is a go to resource for audio professional
professionals worldwide. A sought after educator and
consultant, Bob continues to shape the future of live sound
through his work, seminars, and ongoing projects with top
artists and venues. So please join me and let's
welcome and say hello to Mr. Bob McCarthy.
Hello Bob. Hello, how are you I'm.
Good, Marcel. Bob has colorful glasses and a
very colorful shirt. And I'm jealous.
I'm a little bit jealous. I'm a little dark and black and
you know, I'm, I'm the Metallica version right now, I guess.
Yeah, all in black and no color at all.
And you've, you've got a lot of stuff going on, so I appreciate
that. So I've been, I've been looking
forward to this. I am admittedly a lighting guy
for the most part, and so I apologize in advance if I talk
like an idiot when it comes to some of my stupid questions or
whatever. You know, I used to I grew up
playing in bands and and you know, I could go up to a sound
craft, you know, whatever it was called SR24, the 24 channel, you
know, really flat, boxy looking sound craft console and make a
band sound pretty good. But it was a whole different
thing back then. You know, it's, it's, you've
come through all of these different steps, which is so
cool. That's one of the things I
really want to talk about is really that, that evolution of,
of not just live sound, but all sound, you know, from all
versions of analog to all kinds of different digital stuff.
And, and you've been there for all of it, which is cool.
So where, where did you start? How did you start?
What? What got you into sound?
Well, it really starts with The Beatles on Ed Sullivan.
I mean, either literally. No, no, on Ed Sullivan you could
at the at. When they came, when they came.
When they came to town, they came to my city, which was Saint
Louis, and my brother went and, and my wife also went by future
wife. And they, they can tell you that
they they saw The Beatles. They're very careful in the
choice of words. So what?
What was that system back then? Well, it was a.
It was basically just what they would pick up locally and then
they would pipe into the existing house like.
The horns. The house horns, Yes.
And at at at at Golden Gate Park.
Not not Golden Gate Park. At Candlestick Park.
It was McEwen Sound that provided it.
And. Some all tech horns and it, you
know, stuff stacked up on the ground and it was it was just a
just a mess, just a mess. It's going to make you cringe
thinking of what they had to try to do in a stadium show.
Like these aren't little theaters or something.
These are stadiums. It's hard enough today with the
with the, you know, the stuff we have today, let alone going back
there. I've actually done a
presentation on audio failure and that is the star of the
show. And I'm not blaming the sound
company. What you, what the what the deal
is, is that the promoters and they were ready to book
stadiums, but nothing else was ready.
Yeah. The lighting wasn't ready, the
sound wasn't ready. The staging wasn't ready.
Like Ringo Starr will tell you, he just would look and read lips
because he couldn't tell us. Wow.
We couldn't hear a single thing that anybody was singing or
playing and. So even stage monitors didn't
exist? Wow.
It's incredible that like the need, the the demand happened
before the supply in that. Situation.
It is really interesting. Wow, it just exploded just
overnight. All of a sudden stadiums boom
and nobody was ready for it. Yeah, so you saw The Beatles on
Ed Sullivan and and that inspired you to get involved
somehow? That inspired me to music to
like really dig in because I was I'm a I'm a member of a
construction company family, McCarthy Construction, which is
like the 7th largest construction company in the USA.
It's a big company. Wow, good for you.
And I was all everybody had it all figured out.
I was going to go into the company and then I started my
life of crime on that particular day.
Went went and got a guitar the the next the next day.
Forgot to mention to anybody that I was left-handed.
Yes. So did you just flip it over
like Hendrix style? No, I didn't.
It didn't even occur to me. I just took my lessons like a
right-handed person, and I still play guitar and I still play it
right-handed. You know what's so friggin
bizarre? Like when we were talking
beforehand, you told me, you know, you spell your name six O
6 because it's Bob and it's backwards like us left-handed
people basically. And, and I'm left-handed.
Well, same thing. I learned to play guitar
right-handed. I play, I play hockey
right-handed. I pretty much do, I play tennis
right-handed, but I have a left-handed forehand in tennis
as well. And I've I've just automatically
learned everything right-handed for some reason, but I right and
eat left-handed. Oh, funny, for for me it's
pretty much everything left-handed except for a
trackball, which is the bane of my existence.
I can't do it either handed, but I have to default to
right-handed on that. Yeah, yeah.
Oh, but you said you play guitar right-handed.
Or did you switch and that? Well I use both hands but yes IA
100% I'm a. I'm a normal you.
You would never know I'm left-handed by watching me play
guitar. Really.
But all other things, like if you were to pick up a a tennis
racket, you'd hold it left-handed a. 100% I'm left
weird, left eyed, left footing, left-handed.
Interesting. See, I'm pretty ambidextrous on
most things, like my feet. My, you know, I can't even like
I figure I keep trying to think if I was a boxer, would I, you
know, would I be that way or that way?
And, and I just, you know, they both feel pretty natural to me.
So I don't know, it's it's weird.
I don't know why. Have you ever researched why
some people just kind of do different things with different?
Yes, there's a really good book. It's called The Causes and
Consequences of left hand of of left Sidedness.
And it goes through left ear, left eye, left foot and left
hand. And it's hard.
Fascinating. Of and consequences.
Of left sidedness or or maybe it's just of sightedness?
Cool, I'm gonna get that because I I've always wondered, but I've
never wondered to a point of actually pursuing it, but I'm
going to get it. I love reading books.
So it'll be it'll be on my list. So that's very cool.
So that is bizarre. So your father probably kind of
went, huh. We're not going to stay in our
family business and, you know, take that path that leads to,
you know, pretty much guaranteed success and you're going to go
down this other Rd. with a bunch of crazy gypsies and go do
sound. Was it immediately sound?
No, it was not sound. Of course I wanted to be on the
stage that was. Pursuing music at this point.
You wanted to be wanted to be a star.
But I went then to Indiana University, which had the
largest music school in America. And once again I can go to a
single moment. And on my first night arriving,
I went down to the common room and watched as one person after
another played musical instruments of various sorts.
And I went, OK, you're not going to be a musician.
Why? They were just too good.
Oh, it was just like holy God. You and I followed each other's
paths really well because except for the fact that I never took
it seriously enough to go to school or anything.
I, I got into it because of girls and fun and, and, you
know, like I was 12 years old and I started as a professional
singer and went out with a rock band and made no money until I
was about 18 and finally said, OK, you know, at like 18 or 19,
my bar tabs were more than my wages.
And I just went, this isn't going to work for me.
You know, I got to figure something else out.
And I went sort of behind the stage as well.
So it's funny, we followed some pretty similar paths in life.
So the, the interesting twist on it now is this is 19 7675 is
when this is happening 75 and, and there is no audio program,
but I but I knew now I wanted to be in, in music, but I was
really actually a pretty technical and very, I had a lot
of scientific methodology baked into my brain because we had an
engineering and a medical family.
My father was a doctor and his two brothers ran the
construction company. So it's a, it's a, it's a very
grounded environment. And except you.
Well, but it turns out it's me too, because, because I, you
know, when I got into sound, I got into the scientific side of
it and that's where I've really lived pretty much all my career.
But so they, what I did was I went and talked to the music
school people and they needed people to do sound for the jazz
band and for recordings for the Symphony and all that.
And so I started to volunteer there.
And then they told me that they were thinking of a new thing
where they could do a program that you self design and you can
make your own custom program in whatever you want.
I see so. So you, so I went to this
independent learning program and then and said I want to make a
degree in audio engineering. And we cobbled together pieces
out of all the different departments and made a degree.
And that's that's where it starts.
And that was at what school? At Indiana University OK in
Bloomington IN Wow and of course they now have a a full program
now and. But you were there when it
started. I was there when it started
exactly. That's very cool.
Yeah. So how long was the program?
Well, for me to. Get this degree.
For me, it was a full 4 year Bachelor of Science.
For now, I believe it's a they have a two year program and I
think they might have a three-year program also, but.
Interesting. And so you got out of that and
immediately got a job wrapping cable in a shop for someone?
Well, no, they, they, I did a, they arranged an internship for
me to go to a studio in Dallas, TX.
And so I started at this studio and I knew in my career that I
wanted to do recording and I wanted to do live work because I
wanted to do all the work. Of course, at that time people
did a lot of cross pollination. Now it's a very specialized
world. You don't you don't get a lot of
people moving between disciplines.
But at that time that's what it was.
And I'm sitting in this studio and realizing I've got to wait
for someone to die before I going to move to the next
position in the studio. It's going to be a long time and
I'm 23 years old. The right thing to do now is to
do the the live sound part. And there was a company
literally like 1/4 mile down the road called Shoko.
Of course, yeah. So I went to Shoko and showed
him my resume, which included a degree in audio engineering, and
I'll never forget what BJ Shiller's response to that was.
He says a degree in audio? I never seen that.
Yeah, that's funny. We and I have been one of the
first. Literally.
Yeah. Yes, we get our best guys out of
laundromats. Yeah, well, he wasn't wrong.
OK, Yeah, exactly. And so he says, you know, are
you going to be asking a lot of questions and stirring things up
and said, you know, I'm work with, I'm a team player.
I work with the group. After a week in this shop
painting boxes, I got called out to a show.
And the first thing they did is like, hey, you're the guy with
the audio degree fix the home in the system.
It's like. Wow, and you're brand?
New. That's wild.
It's like, OK, here we go. Was this a big show or just a?
Oh, it was arena tour. Arena tour with the Ojs.
Jesus, And they got this green guy straight out of school and
they're counting on you to fix the problem.
Exactly. That's incredible.
And it's like, it's cool. Let's.
Go. Did you get it?
Yeah. Yeah, so.
I'll never forget the the life. Lesson.
No, the life lesson that day, which I carry forward to me was
Randy Barner, who was the crew chief for audio, brought me out
to the to the to the truck. And I'll after you get
everything sound checked. And now you're at that like
quiet time, dinner before the show.
He's like, OK, I need to know what kind of person you are
because there's two kind of people in the world.
Are you Mr. Make it Happen? I'm like, there's two kinds.
There's people that make it happen, or they're people that
tell you all the reasons why they can't make it happen.
I am so with that. I said I am Mr. Make it Happen
and that construct has informed my whole career.
I always gravitate towards towards partnering up with
people that identify as the make it happen people.
Yeah, that's, that's such an amazing point and I love it so
much. Like I, you know, I don't think
I've ever defined it quite as well as you just did, you know,
Mr. Make it happen or, or all the reasons you can't.
But I, I have employees, I have friends, I have even family
members who are like that. And it drives me crazy because
it's like, you know, well, I could never lose 50 lbs because,
you know, it's not just work, It's anything in life, you know,
exactly all the reasons why I can't do things.
And I'm always Uber focused on there's, there's something out
there, there's a solution. I just haven't found it yet, you
know? And so I love that.
Yeah. That's cool.
Yeah. So how long did you stay at
Shoko then? It wasn't that long, it was
about a year and a half, and Shoko had a major contraction
because this band that they were heavily invested, broke up the
band's name. I can't remember something about
Genesis or something like that. Yeah, plus they were distracted
by all these wiggly things. Yeah, on the lighting.
Side yes, that was exactly starting at that time.
And so they they had a big and I was young, you know, I was new,
fairly new at the company. So I, they trimmed everybody
down and I could have stayed and, and, you know, weathered it
out. But I came to California and
joined FM Productions. Oh, OK, another good company.
And because I had, I had one, I'd seen their work as a person
attending shows and I their work, they were doing the
Grateful Dead sound at that time.
And I could tell the quality of their work was super high.
And I wanted to gravitate towards that.
And that's what brings me out to California and it brings me out
to meeting John Meyer. And that was gigantic, my
career. Yeah, yeah.
I mean, you still work with Meyer stuff today, right?
Yeah, I'm an employee of Meyer Sound, Yes.
Yeah, yeah. So no, I mean, that's obviously
an incredible run with Meyer, 40 years or whatever, right?
That's wild. That's wild.
That is so amazing. So so at FM you met Meyer, but
were you now touring or were you just basically shop and going
out and fixing problems when you needed to or?
The I was, I was touring, but FM productions didn't have a lot of
long good, good longs tours. I did, I did heart around the
around the country in North America and a couple of other
things, some Todd Rundgren's. But what they did was they they
would pick up dates where somebody was out with another
company, but they had like 3 California dates.
So instead of bringing their stuff over the Rockies, we would
pick up their San Francisco, LA, San Diego and then say goodbye.
So in the early days, were you were you attacked or were you
front a house right away or how? Did it?
No, I was took a while stage station and I was not.
AI was not a big shot by any means.
Yeah, yeah, No, I, I wasn't even insinuating that that meant you
were a big shot or anything. It's just some people walked
straight in and went to the console and that was it.
That was their gig, right? And but I think the smarter
people work their way through the system 1st and really
understood everything that was going on and how it went
together and everything. Which do you know?
Ethan Weber from the Stones, the lighting director for the
Stones. I do not never worked with the
stones. He was he was on the podcast
yesterday and we talked to him about that because same sort of
thing. You know, it's like not everyone
needs to or wants to be the lighting designer.
And as the director, you know, I have all the pinch me moments.
I get to sit there when the house lights go out and and make
things happen. And you know, it's that's what I
do and I do it really well. And I have a collaboration with
the designer and I don't feel slighted that I'm not the guy
listed as the lighting designer, for example.
So, so yeah. Cool.
So how did it, how did it all progress?
So like once you met John, did, did it immediately click that he
wanted you to come work for Meyer or did that happen much
later in life? How did how did that happen?
Meyer Sound was not yet a company when I.
Met. And so he had come back to the
United States after his adventures in Switzerland and,
and he was starting to do, he was basically freelancing out
design work for FM productions. He, he designed a system and
then then the company started and they did their first
products which were a subwoofer for Apocalypse Now and then the
Ultra monitor, which is a stage monitor.
And so I was working for FM when we took hold of both of those
products that the subwoofers did their cinema run.
And then what are you going to do with them?
So, so they came to FM and we started doing Grateful Dead
shows with them and then we did the pardon me, then we did the
then we did the first shows with this, this new technology, the
ultra monitor. And it was a new technology
because it was the first case where somebody was taking a
complete system, a speaker, the crossover and electronics
dedicated and the speaker protection all in one.
There's no way you could not buy it as a parts.
And, and we all laughed at it was like, huh, what is this
little thing? And then we talked into the mic
and we went, what just happened? And that was on that day that I
knew. It's like, OK, I need to be
involved with this. Yeah, and that was when.
That was the end of 1979, start of 1980.
And so that's when then the company officially started.
And then I got a, A, a design gig for a small club.
And I said, they said we want the highest quality speaker you
can get. And I said, I know where it is.
And so that became the first installation of Meyer Sound.
So it was the place where they could send clients to, to hear
the system. And that began my partnership
with them. Wow.
As a really first as a client? Yeah, they're serial number
0007. That is crazy.
I love that. That's not that picture you sent
me, is it? That is that that is that that
picture. Oh, I want to share that now.
Is that OK? Yeah.
I'm going to hang on a second. Let me just pop this up here.
Is that it there? Yep.
So this is a tiny little club in Berkeley, CA.
It's called the Berkeley Square and there was now this is what
you see on there is the is the subwoofers.
Those were the original subwoofers from Apocalypse Now
and then that is the UPA. The original installation was
the Ultra monitor. It was the stage monitor which I
rigged up there. But then the UPA became
available a year later and we changed it out.
Interesting. That's wild.
And people would come in and they would see this PA and this
is a punk rock nightclub. We had, you know, a bunch of
people who would become later famous, the go Go's X and a
bunch of Black Flag and flipper and icons in the in the in the
punk community. And they would look at it and
they would go that there's no way we.
Need and this is this. It's the first ever Meyer sound
install. Yeah, I think there was a small
club called Bimbo's over in San Francisco that was doing, you
know, kind of cabaret kind of stuff.
But this was the place where it was really put to to the test.
And and so they would, they would all, they would laugh at
it. And then I'd say, well, do you
want to just hear it first? And I would turn it on.
And it was the mouse that roared.
And there's fun, OK? Yeah, that's incredible.
I love it. Yeah.
So, so then what? Like how did, how did things
just kept progressing from there and.
So Meyerstalm was a small company and it was out by
Oakland airport. And then they moved to Berkeley
in 1983. And I said, well, if you're
moving to Berkeley, which is where I lived, then you must be
expanding. What do you say?
Let's what did you say? I joined the company and they
said let's do it. So that's where it began.
In 80. Three, yeah.
So it's 40 years, Jesus. And you still work for them
today? Yeah.
And you've worked for them non-stop for 40 years?
No. No, I, I, I did a freelance
period between 19 seventy, 1997 and 2014, but I always stayed
affiliated. They, they, they were a big part
of my business. So I did a lot of consulting
work and still did trainings for them and was still involved with
development of the, of the same analyzer next generation and
these kind of things. So my my bond is a is a lifetime
bond with with the company. And so your role has always been
sort of on the user slash design side, or?
Yes. Well, where my, my thing was
that I came to the company with a knowledge of touring because I
had touring experience, but I was young and so I was able to
still be mobile. I could get out in the fields
and and do customer assistance. I wasn't running the company so
I could get out there. I mean, John of course had Rd.
experience and others, but they were vital to keep the
engineering going and production going.
They had to sign payroll checks. You didn't.
Yeah, exactly. So I could get out there and I
had then developed, you know, methodologies for using the gear
and I began to write and started writing user manual kind of
things on on how to apply the stuff and that led them to later
writing entire books on on the subject.
Yeah, how many books have you written?
I've written three different books and the my then my main
book is in its third edition now.
Wow. Yeah, Cool.
And they're all on sound theory. Whatever.
Yeah. Yeah, they're all on
application. They are essentially they're
books. Cause what happened was in 1984
I got John and I started what with what's called the SIM
analysis program. And if you go to that next
picture, you're going to see the early primordial version of
that. I will give me one second here.
It's a, it's an analyzer that is able to look at the music that's
leaving the mix console. There we are the IT compares the
music leaving the mix console with what's actually arriving
out there with the audience. So it's a, it's what's it
called, a dual channel fast Fourier transform or FFT
analyzer. What you see on this picture is
and that's. This thing right here.
Exactly. So that's a piece of Hewlett
Packard laboratory gear and that is what we use for R&D and for
production testing at the company.
But we took it off of, out of the company and brought it out
into the field and, and that's began what is now 100% standard
operating procedure at every show.
The, the, the, the smart system, SMAART is the direct descendant
and owns that market. Now it's a $600.00 program and,
and a sound card or a, or a little sound device.
Now what it, you know, at that time it was a, that's a $12,000
analyzer in 1984 dollars plus a whole pile of outboard gear.
It grew to 600 lbs. Yeah, jeez.
For the full multi channel version with that could do 8
microphones and eight equalizers and and all that kind of stuff.
And that's doing what again? Well, it's analyzing the system
so that you can see it's like, OK, I've got my speakers up.
What's what's happening to the speakers now that they are
interacting with each other, now that they're interacting with
the room, You know, basically all, all of the reflections or,
or straight paths. Anytime you have two speakers,
you, they, they cross pollinate and they create a change in the
spectrum, essentially blending colors.
If you look at it in light terms.
So that, so that we end up then with all the these scatter plots
of, of, of where the sound goes. You know, the, the, the thing
that separates light and sound is everybody can see where the
light goes. If somebody if a light gets
diffracted and and sprays off to the wrong direction, everybody
can see it. But if something causes the
sound to bend to the wrong place, you just know it doesn't
sound good where you are. Right.
You don't realize that it's, it's aimed itself into the
ceiling because you can't see it go up there.
And so these analysis tools, we can place microphones all out of
the room and we can find where it's gone.
And that's really what it's about.
It's about turning us from blind people into, you know, assisted.
And we obviously have similar devices today that are that are
a little more, maybe a little more high tech, but you know,
obviously it's advanced a lot now.
Oh, yeah, it's now, it's now so common.
You can have this, You can have what's inside of that Hewlett
Packard device that's can fit on a phone app.
Yeah. Yeah, OK.
I mean that's it's changed. The math.
The math has now been condensed and it's a world of computers.
I mean literally that thing is transistors and diodes.
Yeah, yeah. So.
That's wild. Yeah.
So you know when so I mean, obviously back then we're
talking about stacks of speakers, right?
It's all point. Source Stacks of speakers.
Yes. When when did the first line
array creep in? The late 90s is when the, the V
DOS, which is the the innovator in that field.
And by the early 2000's the line array has become the dominant
species. And it's, you know, there was a
there was a period where line arrays were called on to do
everything, even when they were really not the right tool.
It's like sometimes a screwdriver is better than a
wrench. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
But a hammer always works. Exactly.
Yeah. No, I, you know, like the way
that I explain it in my idiot words is, is usually that, you
know, stacks of speakers were usually sort of brute force.
If you needed to hit a different part of the arena or the
building, you just turned it up louder or added more stacks of
speakers or whatever. But, you know, this is a much
more mathematical approach where things are directed exactly in
every part of the room where they need to be, you know,
smaller sources, more of them directed to very specific parts
of the room. Right.
Is that sort of truthful? Very truthful.
We'll think about think about having, you know, as a lighting
person, think if you have just a big Bank of, of a par lamps that
are just, you know, completely splashing wide.
And but then you're given the, the opportunity to go and, and
get something with the Super tight beam.
Now that affords you a whole different opportunity.
And in our case, the, the, the, the thing that people don't
realize that was that had to happen before this move happened
was that you had to get speakers ready to fly.
Because at the time I started in the industry, sound design is
basically how high can you go before it's going to tip over.
Yeah, yeah, it's so true. OK.
And the you know or. People's ears bleed, you know,
in the 1st 10 rows or whatever. They do and it was just
horrendous. It's just horrendous when you
have wanted to a stadium and you have to go through the 1st row
to get, you know, to get to 100 yards away.
And it was really brutal. And I can remember the the first
time that we flew a system at Choco, it was like holy God,
what an amazing difference to have front to back uniformity.
Of course, what was it? It was one of those construction
trays, like they used to take up a whole bunch of painters or
something. So we just ground, stacked and
then raised the tray up. Yeah.
So it was the same stuff. It was just you were separating
the mid highs from the from the Subs or whatever.
Exactly. And so up it went.
But at least it got us to where nobody was a foot in away from.
The speakers, yeah. You weren't being screamed at
all night. Yeah, Yeah.
So, so the idea with a line array, when, when so you're
saying VDV DOS came out with it, L acoustics came out with with
line array. And so that whole concept, was
it immediately accepted? Like did everyone just go, Oh my
God, finally? Or, or was it like, no I don't
really like it? Well, it it started and and it
took time. They were very protective of the
product to to how it was handled.
They wanted to make sure that it was always handled in their, you
know, in their manner, which is something that we could relate
to because Meyer sounded by making its systems captive was
also used that philosophy. But they, they, they held, held
out and they explained their theory and then it just kept
delivering results. And the industry said, well,
we're going to have to do this. So then it became accepted.
And then other manufacturers had to answer to that.
And that's funny. That's then.
Then you get a, you know, Then it becomes a Stampede.
Yeah, yeah, it just became a wave of of everyone and you
know, like what? I know I'm jumping way ahead
here and I'll go backwards again in a second, but I've always
been curious. Like every year I see a new, you
know, J series, K series, L series, M series, you know, they
just keep coming out with these new series and everybody's
unloading their old ones. This is how I learned about them
because I own a used equipment website.
And so people unload the J to get the K or the KSL or whatever
it is, right? And So what is advancing like
what are the, what are the OR are they little micro
advancements now or are there still big leaps being taken on
the speaker side of of sound technology right now?
It's incremental. Yeah.
It's incremental, but it's but it's, it's, it's absolutely, you
know, knowable and hearable. You know, there's a there's a
number of things happening. 1 is that our our our materials
technology is improving and the. Lighter, lighter, stronger, more
reliable, that kind of thing. Yes.
And, and the key things is that we have, our industry is, is
robust enough now to that people are upping the level of research
and development. There's there's, you know,
people that, you know, specialize in, in these
materials that are bringing a whole lot of brain power to, to
these, you know, special specialized metals and, and
carbon fiber and, and adapted things.
And then additionally, there's there's a lot of brains going at
horn math now. Really.
Yeah, because I mean horns were developed, you know, a lot in
some cases with with the math of the day back in the in on the
40s or whatnot and files and Bondo.
Yeah. OK.
And some of them were made just like just by somebody's hunches.
But we're, you know, there's, there's really big powerful math
models now that can, that can see what's going on in a horn
over its range. You know, one of the things
that's difficult about audio, that's, that's a good way to
contrast to lighting. Lighting, to use our terms, the
whole spectrum of lighting is less than an octave.
OK. And so you don't need a totally
different lamp to, to, to, to do The Color Purple than red at
your opposite sides of the spectrum.
Whereas we do, because, you know, from 30 Hertz to 18
kilohertz is 600 to one range. And so, so to control, you know,
30 Hertz, you need a rudder 6 * 600 times bigger than what it
takes to control 18 kilohertz. And the thing about horns is, is
that it's the classic Goldilocks thing.
Some frequencies are too big, some are too small, and some are
just right and OK. If they're too big, the horn
doesn't control them, the rudder doesn't work.
If they're too small, they bounce side to side inside the
horn and get stray pass and ping off the wrong way.
If they're just right, they fit in there and they follow the
shape of the horn. So and.
So what are the big advancements being made in horns then?
Is it the materials or is it just actually the shape, the
design? It's mostly shaping.
Yeah, yeah, interesting, huh. I wouldn't have thought that I
would have thought there's always more technology going
into bass, you know, like I, I was a bass player growing up, by
the way. So, so yeah, that's, that's
really interesting. So you know, they are they are
you also now getting to a point where sound system design is
starting to focus a little bit on, I wouldn't say efficiency
because you're always focused on efficiency, but like being able
to deliver the SPLS with less power, with less actual
electricity, less weight, so lower transport costs and all of
those things. Is that all happening as?
Well, that is huge, yeah, absolutely, hugely important
when you look at touring packages.
Now, when you go into competition on touring packages,
it's absolutely factored in what your, what your weight is, how,
how, how many trucks does it take another half a truck?
Boom, you're out. If it takes more electricity,
then you've got to have more generator power, these kind of
things. Oh, these are hugely important
factors, Yeah. So we, we work everything we can
to shave Oz off of these products.
Yes. See, we're starting to see that
in the lighting world and in video as well, you know, where
you're looking at more of the infrastructure stuff, not just
hay, bigger, louder, brighter, whatever.
You're starting to look at the fact that, hey, you know, these
tours in the world is looking to, you know, not necessarily
become greener, but certainly yes, if we can cut less
electricity, less weight, smaller trucks, whatever it is
less trucks and it seems to be. But what about the other one is
whether like our our systems, I don't even know.
This is is a line array system IP rated.
Yes. Oh, they are.
Absolutely. So they can, it's IP65 or
something. I'm not good with those numbers,
but, but the they can be that that depends on, well, different
companies have different levels of, of weather, weather ability.
But but yes, that is a that is an important factor.
You can't have your show stopped because of rain.
Yeah, yeah, of course. And you can't put big plastic
bags over your your line arrays either.
The age of the age of the show goes behind Viz Queen is yeah.
So for you, for a a engineer, designer, all of the things that
you do, how complicated was that switch between, you know, what
do we call it point source versus line array or stacks
versus line array or whatever, but.
It's, it's, it's point source versus line array and that and
and it's worth, it's worth taking a moment to geek out and
explain what what the difference is.
Yeah, please. Please, because I don't know
that I've ever heard it. So if you, if you think about a,
what we call a point source speaker, it has a, a constant
beam with you give it, you say it's a 90° speaker.
So you, you say that at 10K, at 4K, at 2K, at 1K it's it's 90°
or as close to that as possible. So if you want to partner it
with another speaker, you're going to, you're going to have
this one cover this 90 and another one cover that 90.
Or if it's 90 by 40, you might have another speaker under it
that covers the next part. And you think about it like
extensions of the shape and you build it like blocks a a line
array in its horizontal might was exactly like that.
It might be 90°, it might be 60, it might be 110.
It's it's also constant cute, but in it's vertical, that's
where the difference is. In the vertical, the coverage
angle is yes. Right, right, because you're
curving it. No, it's not that it's curving,
it's that it it changes purposefully with frequency.
Explain that. I will explain that at the at
the at the highest frequency, it's razor razor narrow.
OK. OK, so like let's say it's 5°.
OK. But an octave lower it's 10° and
an octave lower it's 20° and it keeps, keeps widening.
It's what we call proportional QQ is a, is a term for, for
width of, of the, of the beam. OK, so as you, as you, as you go
down in frequency, it gets wider.
And so now here's what you're going to get.
You look at that set of 12 speakers and they have a small
angle of maybe 5°. Let's just put them all at 5°.
That means that you have 5 * 1260° of 10 kilohertz provided
by you. Do the first part, then I hand
it off to the second and each one shares.
Interesting. But by an octave lower.
It's a 10° speaker, but it still has an angle of five, so it's
overlapping by half of its pattern.
Yeah. So the so the so I'm going to
hear one box at 10K and I'm going to hear two boxes at 4K,
and I'm going to hear four boxes at 2K.
And on it goes. By the time you reach 250 Hertz,
it's already, you know, 100 or 200° wide.
I'm hearing a community project. OK.
Interesting. So.
So the low end starts off super directional and becomes
controlled by the community because the more speakers you
add, the narrower it gets in the low end.
Why? Which is a counterintuitive
because they overlap and they add in phase.
Think of it like like a. Pyramid.
OK, OK. Got it.
Yeah, OK. So.
So any time that that that 2 audio signals are overlapping,
if they're equal in level, their timing, which is the phase
decides where the sound goes. And that goes back to the thing
I said. Sound can steer itself in
strange places. That's how it steers it because
the phase will steer it. But whereas at up in there at
the very high end, you're saying I'm going to fire my beam super
tight so that the if the top box were to turn off, the people at
the bottom would never know it. Yeah.
And the only way they would know if they heard anything would be
a slight change in the low frequencies because one out of
12 boxes stopped transmitting in the low end.
But they would they never knew about the high end.
And likewise, people at the bottom don't know anything about
the top boxes. But it's a community effort that
then goes away as you rise in frequency to individual.
So what we do now is we we shape the display angles in that thing
to shape the highest frequencies, to precisely sculpt
them to where they need to go. Yeah.
And then the low frequencies go as a big project.
And and every box basically has mid high and then the the Subs
obviously are are in a separate box.
And so it's interesting. I never, I never realized that
that's how that worked. And so when you're when you're
changing the curvature of an array, is that based on the size
of the room, the coverage, basically the how far the
speaker needs to fire sound out and then based on that target
point, that's where you're setting your angles?
Yes, it's a, it's a, it's a thing.
I call the the range ratio, the ratio between the farthest that
CC you have to cover and the nearest C.
So let's say that it's 200 feet to the farthest seats and it's
50 feet to the nearest seats. That's a four to one ratio.
That's translates in audio to 12 DB.
So I need to do 12 DB of shaping or 4 to one my my I need 4 boxes
to cover up there where one box covers down there.
Right. Interesting.
Yeah. And so does that become more
complicated or less complicated in a larger space like a
stadium? It it becomes the the
complication level is, is about if there's wrinkles in the shape
a state, a stadium could have a nice easy, steady drop easy
money, or it could OK, right, right, right, right.
And now you're in trouble. Yeah, I mean, some of those
examples came from, I remember the what were they that
obnoxious Spice Girls when the Spice Girls did the the football
stadium tour? And I remember after the first
show, the sound company was just slaughtered in the press, like
the sound, we could hardly even hear the band.
And the band complained and everyone complained and, and,
but I mean, these football places were not made for music.
They were made to to basically amplify the crowd screaming at
the, you know, away team. So it just seemed to be a mess,
like a bad place to try and put a sound system.
But it's a it's a bad place. But now you're going back to
Shea Stadium and The Beatles. Yeah, yeah.
That's true. They're they're going to book
those stadiums. That's that's what, that's the
economic model that we live in. So you have to.
You have to make it work. And, and there's really no
excuse for production not to be able to cover the full room
because the technology is there. That all those seats I saw, I
saw the pictures of the the people and they're, you know,
they were, they had seats that were had good visibility to the
stage. And yeah, no, nobody was giving
them the sound. So, yeah, so.
You're thinking that was like operator error, basically or or
system design error, or somewhere along the line they
just didn't get it right. I'm I'm.
I can't say conclusively, but my suspicion is the the dreaded 2
letters VE. Yeah, yeah, they cut costs.
Yeah, engineering too. And it's like, OK, so, so they,
they, you know, they, they sorted out on the, the side,
upper, upper side hang. And yes, that's those people
paid their money. I, as I often say, there's,
there's no cheap seats anymore. There's expensive seats and
there's extortion seats and there's sell the House seats.
Right, right. Yeah, that's great.
Yeah, Well, I mean, now like, I don't know it, it's just so
crazy right now, all of it. But so I was at, I know that
we're going to get to it at some point.
So I'm going to mention Metallica now.
So what has been your collaboration role, whatever you
want to call it, with Metallica over the last however many
years? Starting at the end of 2016, I
became involved in Metallica when they began working with the
the VLFC, which is a special subwoofer that goes below normal
subwoofers down to 13 Hertz, which they added to their system
because they wanted to have the feeling of pyro without the risk
of pyro. Well, having just watched
Metallica in, in Canada last summer in that stadium show that
they're doing, I can tell you, you ain't wrong.
Like I, I was like, what is that?
And I just happened to be standing probably 20 feet in
front of the, in front of the Subs or whatever, away from the
Subs. And yeah, it was, it was your
stomach was moving. You know, that's that's base
that I hadn't heard in a while. Yeah, and the, the this tour
uses the, you know, originally they just use it for effects.
It only worked, you know, one minute a day, but now it works
the full show. And it's really very musical and
really wonderful because what it does for the kick drum, for
example, is it it, it puts, it gets to kick drum, the energy
that makes it actually like a real kick drum.
It's a real kick drum does go down there.
We're just used to a world that starts at 30 Hertz, but it's
there in the original source material.
Can you hear 18 Hertz or you can just feel it?
Absolutely you can hear it. OK.
And what, what a proof of this. And this was a classic John
Myers. I, I, I came to the, you know,
like, OK, it's, you know, seems like we can hear down to 13
years. Someone was able to tell when
the pitch was wrong. He says, well, hello, Bach had
a, a pipe organ that had a 16 Hertz pipe.
It's like. Really interesting I.
Was like, OK, I didn't know that piece of history.
Now I. Do me neither, yeah.
So yes is the answer. Yeah, because we had an effect
once where we, he, the the assistant engineer, wellied up a
A tone for the finish of a song and and he just put a tone in as
the guitars were finishing the song.
And he was and it was, it was sour.
And Rob Koenig pointed out, he says, you know, like I think
that you've got the wrong note there.
And the argument begins like, is there a note?
It's just 13 Hertz that nobody can hear the note there.
It's like, so then I asked what was the, what chord were the
guitars playing, which started a discussion, is D sharp or E
flat? And somebody was convinced
there's a difference. Me.
Yeah. But we we found and we tuned the
oscillator just changed it by 1 Hertz and now boom it was in
tune. So interesting you can.
Hear that? Amazing.
Well, it's amazing that a drummer would pick it up because
I, I believe Rob's a drummer if I remember.
Correctly, he's a He's a smart guy, he's a smart guy.
Rob's a smart dude. And as I often say, everybody's
got two jobs. There's and sound.
Nah, that's kind of true, ain't it?
Yeah, that's funny. So when you started, so you said
2016, So what really was your role?
You were just like a representative of of Meyer and
helping them change their. Well, I'm, I'm the applications
guy. And so then, then they asked me
to come to come to Copenhagen where they were starting a tour
and to design the the system for that.
And I did and, and Dan gave his vision to me.
He says. I want, you know, I want every
person to have a near field experience.
Dan Brown. Dan Brown Yes, and I really
wants everybody to be listening to a pair of AMI studio
monitors. You know, that's the experience
I want. And I was like, OK, and I
incrementally pushed them in that direction was more hangs,
but we we brought speakers out closer to the people cover the
cover the upper areas with sisters speakers that were
closer in to them and brought some intimacy to the things.
And people don't think that you should separate out systems if
you're doing a metal band. And maybe that was true in the
olden days, but now we have the technology.
To you mean like delay towers and stuff like that or?
Or what what what we call a, what we call a, a distributed
system. OK, OK, so that's a, you know,
you think of Rock'n'roll and you think of everything compact and
all super tight together. And the last thing you think
about it is all exploded out. And well, it turns out that with
the technology that we have now, because we have such good
controlled systems that we can explode the systems and now give
people that near field experience.
And if you bring up there's a picture of the of the world
wired, a world wired world wired tour, which is almost impossible
to say. Yes, that's fine.
And you'll see a picture of what evolved.
There it is. Yeah, that's it right there.
I just got lucky. Yeah, so this is the next thing
that happened was this tour. Well, actually we did a we did a
standard stadium tour, but then instead of 2017.
But this is the, this was a really big innovation because
the, the area where you normally want to put PA was completely
occupied by those lights, which are these cubes of video with
lights inside of them. And they are on hoist so that
they can come up and down. So they're a dynamic load.
So they were really, we had to bring the PA out.
And you can see all that, all the PA that you see there is
over the audience. Jesus, if if nothing, if it
fell, not one speaker would hurt the band.
It would all fall on the audience.
And you can see subwoofers at the top of the picture, like a
like a, like a dancing set of three subwoofers coming at you.
That's a steered subwoofer array to bring the sound down, even
though it's over the audience, you have to clear down.
Yeah, right. Up here, yeah.
No, yeah, to the right. There.
My, my, my, my mouth's just split into.
That's pretty wild. I have two cursors on my side
so. Oh, funny, so you're saying.
So that's what's covering. That's the subwoofers.
Now go straight down from there and you'll see there's a little
array. It's kind of hidden here.
That's it. So that's what I call a belly
flop array. That array is facing almost
straight down, and that covers to the people, to the crash
barrier. And then they intersect with the
bottom of the curved arrays that you see spinning out of that
picture. Yeah.
Wow. And so was this the first time
that they used Meijer or had they already been a Meijer
customer before that? They had been a Meijer customer
for long, long before that. They for for a long time they've
been a great customer for us and we we actually innovative some
stage monitors just for them and they yeah, so we've had a long
and good relationship. I think there's one more picture
of this on the next slide. There you go.
Now you can see and now you can see the belly flop array and the
subwoofers that with that stagger that steered them down.
Yeah, here, yeah. There's another one to your to
the left on your picture you can see it how I would face it
straight. Down there, yeah.
OK, so it goes together like, like a really amazing little
puzzle of pieces, but everything can be timed and put together in
pretty much a similar way each night.
And this is using, of course, the technology that I showed you
in that ancient picture of me at the Grateful Dead show.
Yeah. With my with the Hewlett
Packard. So you're basically putting
something into A and you know, again, I'm going to show how
dumb I really am. But you're putting, you're
putting some information into a piece of software that says,
here's how many people are going to be in the room.
Here's roughly where they're going to be.
What's the best position to to play speakers in this strange
shape? Is what it came up with.
Well, what we have modeling that, that you put in the shape
of the room and the shape of the stage and the permissible, you
put speakers at the locations within the range that you've
been given as permissible, which was outside of that perimeter of
those cubes. And then you have to start
working from there. And then you, you know, then we
then we get into how much weight is on these points near the
lighting and all those kind of contingencies.
But basically from a sound point of view, I'm I'm going to work
on a thing that looks like a weather map.
It's gonna, I'm gonna fire down and and light up a heat map to
show you where the coverage is. Coverage, Yeah.
Yeah, that makes sense. I think you had a picture of
that somewhere. Yeah, as I recall.
Now there you can go back. Go back and you'll see.
First we'll talk to this. Now you can see the the cubes in
action. Yeah, I remember this show.
Yeah, this was great. This is very cool.
And then the next picture is Big Mick, big Mick Hughes, the mixer
who's now retired but makes them for 35 plus years.
Great guy, Super super super wonderful and just a just a real
wizard. So you were a couple years
younger then? Yes.
Yeah, but still the colored glasses.
Has this been your trademark for a while?
Colored glasses, yeah. Yes, yes.
Ever since I tried and tried every different version of
contacts and once the contacts were not a thing I said I'm
going to go full on and we're going to have fun with glasses.
I'm OK, I'll do it, but I'm not being normal.
Exactly I. Get it?
Yeah, perfect. Good for you.
Cool. Is there more that we need to
see here or do you? Want to just keep going?
On the pictures. Or yeah, let's just keep going
on the pictures. Sure.
I think we're right now this is really going back to a different
time now. This is 2001.
This is Tokyo Disney Sea. And I don't just is this a
Disney theme park. That way I did the sound design
for this and you're seeing a system that would come out out
of that, out of that bunker, do it show and then go go back into
the bunker. So it just does a, it does a
show in the daytime and another show in the night time around
this on the perimeter of this lagoon that does a, you know, a
boat show. Yeah.
And. And when it goes away and
doesn't impact sight lines and all of that kind of stuff like?
A big. Ugly.
A big ugly speaker tower that doesn't.
It takes away from the look of the scene, I guess, that you're
meant to be in. Exactly.
Yeah. And it, and at night it, it
sneaks up. You don't even know it's, you
know, it's already gotten dark and it sneaks up and then all of
a sudden it turns on and it's got lighting on it and sound and
it's quite spectacular. And the volcano erupts and all
sorts of. Yeah, that's very cool.
That's very cool. And is this the same thing or?
That's the that's the lagoon where the where the show.
And these are some of the floats and some of the other parts of
it. But we basically had 44
different locations around this lagoon.
It's the it's the closing show. And so you, you know, everybody
gathers around and, and that's your big event.
Yeah, this is. We're all over the place here.
Yeah, this is Tony Meola. He's the sound designer of
Wicked and he also did many, many things, Les Miserables and
countless, countless musicals. He's just one of the greats.
He would have 5 Tony Awards except for he all of his work
was in the era before they gave Tony Awards for sound.
Interesting. Yeah.
And this is Outside Lands. This is a, a festival in Golden
Gate Park in, in San Francisco. It's it's it's AI got involved
with this because we, we needed to keep the sound levels down in
the neighborhoods. So I evaluated the the situation
there and redesigned the system to, to keep the sound on the on
the people and not into the not into Yelp.
Of course that cost money. They had to get more delay
towers, but you know, that's what you had to do.
You have to. You have to bring the sound
further and aim the sound down. Yeah, that's that basically the
the distributed sound sort of philosophy, I guess, right.
Yes, yes, we brought more. More speakers, less SPL per
speaker basically. Exactly, we brought the front of
house was moved in closer so that they could get happiness at
a closer distance and they we brought in instead of one delay
tower, we we made it into two sets of two delay towers.
So it was a. Big change, but that gave us the
ability to really bring the sound under control.
OK, cool. This is back, going back to oh,
this is the new Metallica tour, the the M72 tour, the one you
saw in Edmonton and this is one of my heat maps.
I've got the, this happens to be there, the Ajax Arena in
Amsterdam where the you can see it on Ted Lasso if you watch
that TV show. The the blue space there is
there's a, there's a stage is a circle and then there's a little
tiny spot in the center called the snake Pit where there's
audience. I don't have the snake pit
speakers turned on in this simulation.
Yeah. But you can see every place else
is covered. How is it covered?
There are left and right hangs on each of those eight towers
and there is a web of speakers with another inter set of eight
hanging over the stage that cover the area inside of the
tower. So it's basically speakers going
backwards into the snake pit, going forwards under the towers,
and then the towers take it on from there.
Yeah, yeah, that's and then as I recall, this is like all Subs,
isn't it pretty? Much Well, there's Subs.
Originally the Subs were up on the towers but we had a
challenge and that is that the the video panels could not
sustain life with Subs in the. Name right?
I remember hearing about that. I remember hearing that you were
blowing out video panels with the with the sound coming out of
those Subs. Yes, and so the Subs who who the
video fails, so who gets grounded?
Yeah, it's funny. Well, and you know, from what I
understand anyways, is the panels just maybe didn't have
the right wind rating or something like they were too,
they went for a very high resolution like 1.9mm pitch on
the panels so that LE DS are so close together.
But then the problem is the sound can't go through it, so it
just hammers on the panel and was causing them to fall apart.
So yeah, I heard, I heard some stories about that.
Suffice to say, we hope someday that they can resolve it.
We our understanding is it's a connector issue, but yeah.
I, I had heard that it was just a, a resolution issue on the
panels cause the LE DS are so close to, you know, it's like, I
mean a mesh basically. And if you have the mesh with
the spaces, bigger wind can blow through it without the mesh
moving like this. But if the spaces are smaller in
the mesh, the, the wind actually moves it and you'll tear the
mesh or whatever. And that's sort of what was
happening with the panels. That's the story I heard from.
I don't remember if it was one of the video techs out there or
something, but somebody had told me that story.
So what are we looking at now? So this is a a plot from the
smart Analyzer, which is of course the descendant of the
analyzer shown in that ancient history picture, right?
And you can see the little blue line that the bottom is the
frequency response. And you can see energy all the
way down to 16 Hertz. You see it there if you.
Look. Wow.
Yeah. OK.
And then the the color thing that you see up there is that's
a that's updating with time. Time zero time is at the bottom
and past history is at the top. So it's scrolling along as the
music changes. I see where where the energy is
in the system. That's cool.
And here's those towers. Yeah, so.
Here is here is a tower and you can see this was when we still
had Subs inside the tower and you can see they're behind the,
there's an opening between, you know, there's, there's two slots
for us to put sound in. And so there's openings there
and but the Subs being behind them was enough to vibrate them
and and damage them. They didn't like it.
Yep. And so you can see there's a
left and right hang. And this is this is the first
implementation of a complete stereo system in a stadium.
It's the first time that anybody's ever done it.
I mean, I know it's the age of immersive sound, but let's get
we get to all our immersive sound.
We never, nobody ever got stereo until.
Now, yeah, yeah. OK.
And this is stereo in the stadium, in the round, so it's a
remarkable thing. It is and.
I remember having a conversation with Greg Price, who is the
mixer for the for the band. And it's like, so you know,
what's the story on stereo? I said.
I said you must mix stereo because literally I have every
seat covered twice. Jesus.
So those James's guitar is in the left and Kirk's guitar is in
the right. The drums move all the way
across as he as he as he does a drum sequence.
So across the Toms, literally it's moving.
Now then somebody says, well, but wait a minute.
Well, for some people that left is on the right and some people
right is on the left said yeah, it's an in the round stage,
Yeah. And they're running around in
circles. Yes, they are.
Yeah, yeah. So on the the drum kit just pops
up in different areas. Exactly.
Yeah, it was really cool how they handled it.
I mean, I, I thought to be perfectly honest, it it was
probably one of the better in the round shows I've ever seen,
if if not the best as far as how it was handled from a sound
standpoint, video, lighting, the band, everything.
It was just really, really well done.
You. You didn't feel left out no
matter where you were seated. Well, that's what I love about
the show is that is that the people everybody has nobody is
is like so close. They have the mother of all
giant screens and other people are looking at an iPhone.
Screen, OK, yeah, yeah. OK, every everybody is is close
to some tower and nobody is in any tower.
So even the people up front are seeing the tower that's across
the stage. Right.
So yeah, that makes sense.
So it's it's very even that way. And I, I always felt that if it
felt like an arena ale show in a stadium.
Yeah. You felt it was arena kind of
distances or even closer than that, and yet you look around
and suddenly realize I'm in a stadium.
Yeah, yeah, it was weirdly intimate for a stadium show.
And you know, granted, we could walk wherever we wanted, but you
know, it was, it was weirdly intimate.
And by the way, it was the first time, like I again, I don't tour
with bands or anything, but I had never seen the monitors done
under the seats in the stadium like they are, you know, with
the whole remote monitor set up. Oh yeah.
I had never seen that before. Like I for me, monitor consoles
were always on the side of the stage, you know, so that was
interesting too. You know how they and, and then
I guess every member of the band has a has a video camera on them
and they can, you know, you know, this up whatever my guitar
up and somebody's watching the video camera and responding to
it as if they were on the side of the stage, which obviously is
hard to do when you've got in the round like that.
Yeah, and it's more than just responding to that.
Literally, James, they're all wild variables and they can turn
up on any mic at any time. Yeah.
So you're so you're watching them and you're making sure that
to turn on that mic and for the monitor guys, they have to bring
James's monitor mix to the monitors that he just moved to.
And then he runs, he runs away and Kirk shows up there and they
got to bring Kirk's monitor mix to that location.
So it's it's, it's a real job. It's a these guys are like air
traffic controllers. It's that level of they're.
Using stage monitors not not in here they use.
Both. Interesting.
They have they have in ears, but they supplement with that and
they like to be able to still they to to keep they're they're
really into contact with the audience.
Yeah. They are.
They are fanatical about that. Which shows, you know, it's
shows. And it also probably has to
their longevity. You know, if you would have told
me in 1985 or whatever that Metallica, it'd still be gigging
in 2025, I would have thought you were an idiot.
But here we are. You know, there's there's a
bunch of those the stones. I mean, you know, again, talking
to Ethan about that yesterday, like they've been playing 60
years, you know, that's insane. That's like unbelievable.
And and they haven't stopped yet.
So that's pretty cool. Do I keep going here?
Yeah. Cool.
OK, this is this is Walt Disney Concert Hall.
And I brought put this in just to sort of just as a this is the
kind of challenges that we have in our lives of doing concerts
in rooms that had total blatant disregard for speakers.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, look at those surfaces
and how am I going to cover that seat right next to the iceberg
and not hit the iceberg? I mean, if you look at these,
OK, I mean, literally it's like these, these, these, these
things that are going to just do horrendously bad echoes for me
are parked right next to seats that I need to cover.
And I, I, I, I use this as an example of of of like, OK, you
know, this then lands in our lap for us to short, short out.
Yeah, solution for this and. So how bad can it get Example.
It's it's a real challenge and this was a really good case of,
of what I call architects gone wild.
Did you did you end up getting it to sound OK except for a few
seats probably. Yes.
Like there's some seats. You just can't do anything to
help in this place, obviously. Well, and you have to you have
to you know, then it becomes gets on the booking agents to
book artists that are reverberation friendly.
Yeah. OK, do not put in a, a hip hop,
a rap contest, OK? Yeah, yeah, OK.
Because you're you're just going to lose it.
But if you want to put in, bring in Audra McDonald and you know
that you can, you can totally work in that, but you have to be
mindful of what you book in these, in these kind of things.
Yeah, yeah, that's wild. Jesus, what a weird room, huh?
Yep, there's the famous chopsticks pipe organ.
Where's that? That's that's the other.
That's in that same place, yeah. That's so, you know, you have to
even cover seats behind the stage as well.
Yeah, Jesus. Yeah.
So I mean, it's wow. Huh.
So now we're back to Metallica and this is a good on this
picture, you can see of course, the towers, but what they're Jay
Day is at the bottom of the picture.
He's the assistant mixer and he's looking at a video screen
that is that is an overhead picture and he follows wherever
James goes and his job like a a part of his job.
He has many jobs, but one of his things is he he's basically like
a video editor. He switches on the correct mic
so that Greg over there that's mixing just has one fader for
James's mic. Wow, that's crazy.
There are 12 possible positions where James can turn up and Jay
has to be alert all the time for where he's going to go.
Wow, that's cool. Yeah, I think I watched it like
right up here. Yeah, it was it was pretty
crazy. I again, it was sub that I don't
know that I've ever felt before at A at a rock show.
Well, for those keeping score at home, it's a it's a six deep end
fire array. So it's two boxes high, 6 deep.
So it's each one is delayed to the next, to the next, to the
next six. And then it has the two VLF CS,
3 high stacks of those, which are the guys that go down to 13
Hertz. So it's so basically it's a
cannon that's 8 levels deep. Jesus.
So it makes a very, very controlled directionality and
it's so quiet behind them that we we have Subs, 16 Subs around
the stage in order to get sound close in.
Otherwise otherwise it would be completely there'd be no no low
end up near the barrier. Yeah, Huh.
Interesting. Oh, we're back there.
OK, that's the Tokyo Disney Sea again.
Yeah, you can see one of those towers.
Sorry. OK, so this next picture, this
is in I'm, I'm in Helsinki. I don't, I don't know what Turva
Tolowa means, but I hope it means welcome or something like
that or nerd alert. But this is this is a picture
before one of my training seminars and going back to 1984
when we started doing SIM work, we immediately started doing
trainings and they really started in earnest in 1987 when
we released the first official product of the of the analyzer.
And because our feeling was always, we need to, we, we, we
don't want to take this technology and sort of hold it
in our chest. We need to evangelize this.
And, and, and, and it does two things.
One, we teach people and also people teach us because the only
way you're going to find out if your ideas are solid is put them
out there. And sometimes I get brilliant
students who, who would tell me, you know, ask questions and be
like, good question, let's find out.
And so I've been teaching and learning this stuff since 1987.
That's led to whole seminars all around the world.
I'm very grateful to all the all the people that have come to my
training. That's.
Cool. Yeah, I mean, obviously training
is hugely important when technology's advancing this
quickly. Like sound, I mean sound, I
don't know what moves faster, sound or lighting it.
I used to think that sound never moved, but lighting was
constantly evolving and evolving and evolving.
But I don't know, I think sounds made pretty big leaps and
bounds, jumps, you know, digital consoles and all this Dante
stuff. Like I like I said earlier, I
remember, you know, an analog console with a rack of outboard
stuff and you know, and point source speakers like it was
pretty straightforward and and Anprax, you know, it was, it was
all it was all pretty straightforward stuff.
You could troubleshoot a A signal path because it went from
A to B. It didn't.
It didn't go into a network and then just become numbers.
Holy God. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's true.
Never thought of that problem, but that's a big problem.
Oh, I think we're at the end of the pictures.
No, we're not. Oh, this is back to that rig.
That's that guy in its test form.
We were just going, you know, this was the early, earliest
version of that. Do you remember where this was?
This is in. This is in the Royal Arena in
Copenhagen. Oh OK, start of the tour.
Look at how young you were. Exactly, folks.
So let. Me, read this Berkeley Square.
This is that first sound system that you put in.
Yeah. Huh.
So this is 19. Console.
Wow. A biant console?
Yep. So it's all analog and you can
see the graphic EQ. That's a white graphic EQ Yeah,
it's the white is the brand name.
Black is the actual color, but then something I think you'll
find interesting is you can see an oscilloscope above in the
middle of that rack, and that oscilloscope is connected up to
a switching system. That brought back the output of
every amplifier so that I could see on that oscilloscope what
every amplifier was doing. That was something that we did
at FM Productions and I incorporated it here.
And of course that technology is now done.
You know, it's, it's read back on the network all the diagnosis
and status for your temperature and your waveforms and things.
But that's how that's how I monitored the system, just to
make sure that it wasn't overloaded.
And you never had like, you know, the desire or whatever to
to be standing here and be in the front of house guy.
Oh, I did originally and I was front of house at this at this
level, but once I once I moved into once I joined Meijer sound
and became an aid to this, to the to the systems and I what
happened? I'm it's a real simple little
progression. I'm at Meijer Sound.
We start the SIM program, I start to go out and I start to
tune systems. And now I'm jumping in and
tuning really important systems. I'm tuning Broadway musicals,
West End musicals, I'm tuning touring shows, I'm tuning
Grateful Dead shows, all of this kind of work.
And I'm on these shows. This is on a level and I have
found a whole new specialty of expertise and I'm not, I'm not
turning back from that. There is no going back.
I walked through that door. There was no going back.
And then from there, what happens is that by virtue of
tuning these systems, I learned what works in this design and
what doesn't. So that's how I become a system
designer. I say I learned how the body
works by being the coroner. Yeah, that's.
Funny. So like Metallica for example.
From what I understand, I think they own their Meyer sound
system and so how often are they upgrading that?
Like I know they probably upgrade components along the
way, but like if Meyer comes out with the, you know, the next
version, the next cat name after this one, will they
automatically go to that new system or?
They won't automatically, but they will.
They are have been very conscious of when we develop new
technology to move, they're ready to move to the next level.
And for example, I'll be going out in April and joining them in
Syracuse because we're we're taking the speakers that cover
that snake pit, that little center area.
And we are replacing those with the new Model X-80, which has
you know, 3-D2DB more power and a better coverage pattern and
lower distortion. And so that's an innovation that
we'll add and we're and we're upgrading the the the last of
the suburbs from the old model. To the new model and your your
boxes. I don't know they have the power
in them or their integrated power.
All of all of our boxes are self powered.
OK, OK, cool. Yeah, that's interesting.
All right, next. Let's see what we got.
Oh, are we running out? I think we ran out.
Yeah, we're done. That's it.
That's all your pictures finally.
Yeah, those are great pictures, man.
Really, really good. Yeah.
What a story. So you know, I was saying
earlier that you know, you've had like you've literally kind
of been there since the beginning of sound.
Your inspiration was the worst sound we've ever seen in a live
situation Which? Is you know.
Arguably the biggest band in the world.
No, my inspiration was the television show Ah.
Yes. Which was fine.
Yeah, I meant yeah. I meant an era where live sound
it wasn't as bad as yeah. And I saw many great band on
terrible sound systems. Yeah, Yeah, So did I, And I
wasn't a sound guy, but I saw the bands and I, I played in
bands that had terrible sound systems back then as well.
Like I, I remember we had my very first band that played live
shows for, you know, I don't know, 2-3 hundred people, 400
people every, every weekend. We had these sun speaker stacks.
I think we had two per side of the sun speaker stacks.
No Subs or anything. It was just these, I think they
had probably like 410 inch speakers and A and a horn or
something in them and they were terrible.
They were just completely terrible.
It was just a little louder than us just yelling at the audience,
you know, and but certainly, no, there was no sound coming out of
those. Like they weren't mixing us at
all. It was just whatever was coming
off stage a little bit louder. And so you know, aside from the
obvious going from analog to digital consoles, going from
stacked speakers to line arrays, what are the other massive
advancements in your tenure? Oh, in my time.
Yeah, in your time. Oh my gosh, it's so many things.
It's it when I start the manufacturers of loud speakers
are still basically in They are not mobile.
They are, they've been making speakers for the cinema and for
permanent installation to, to do a, a, a talking head or our, you
know, ladies and gentlemen kind of thing.
A public address system A. Public address system.
And so and so when I come in, I'm in the era where the the
Turing systems are using the the baskets and the cones and the
drivers of JBL and Altech and Electrovoice and these
companies, but nobody is using their boxes.
Every. All the companies, Clare
Brothers builds their S4 stuff with that stuff.
Marilyn Salm builds their whatever.
Everybody's everybody's makes a thing.
OK, Show call was even was even building their own monitor
boards because nobody made a monitor board.
OK, it's hard to think about these things, but the the
industry was not ready for us. So it was being, you can call it
a garage, but the garages were the laboratories.
That was the place where, where, where the the most important
work was being done. And eventually you get into the,
you know, into the 80s, and the manufacturers wake up and get
it. Yeah.
OK, And and you and it starts to turn where I saw before that
year, I call it. This is the era where custom is
king. The last thing anybody wants to
do is have you show up with a JBL cabaret speaker that you
bought at the music store. They want you.
They'd rather have your homemade thing.
OK, Yeah. Then the thing turns around
where now nobody wants to hear about your homemade speaker.
Yeah, yeah. No, thank you or your great
theory of this. It's like we've matured as an
industry and speakers are now and not only it's not the
speaker and you choose this AM, but you choose this crossover
frequency. It's like you just expect that
this speaker is that speaker and it's whether I'm in Australia or
Antarctica or Japan, that speaker model is going to
perform exactly the same. Yeah, yeah.
I mean, for me that evolution was that lousy Sun speaker
system that I told you about. And then, you know, my next band
we moved all the way up to like JBLW bins with 45 Sixties and
then Altech Horns. That was like, whoa, this is
incredible. And then all of a sudden we
started seeing some of the bands going around to these bigger
clubs and stuff and they had these weird European things, the
Phase plug design, Martin stuff. Norton and Turbosound, yeah.
Yeah. And I never saw any Turbosound
stuff. This was in Canada, but Martin
became quite prevalent and then all the bands were using the the
15 inch, you know, Martin Bin and the phase plug mid and and
that just really took off and that kind of owned at least the
club market in Canada, the club touring market in Canada for for
quite some time. So yeah, that was sort of my
evolution from the beginning. But you're right, like every one
of these guys that I talked to who were there in the beginning,
whether it's Community or Turbo Sound or whoever JBL, you know,
they went from building, you know, homemade boxes in their
garage to to, you know, something much more mass
produced. And, and like you said, you
could get it in any continent, country, whatever.
And they were all the same. So I think as systems grew, that
became quite important because, you know, you needed to kind of
get the same thing on the next stop or the next stop because
originally touring companies didn't typically go across the
entire US either. Like they'd hand it off to the
next regional company. So, yeah, yeah.
But the other big evolution to me in terms of the the work is,
is the specialization. So when I, when I started, I, an
audio engineer, knew everything like you, you, you know, you
know how to solder. Yeah, you know, you ran cable.
Pack a truck. Exactly.
How to get it all back in? But but you could, you would
troubleshoot and then then you'd mix.
But that what's happened now is that we really have worked,
moved into a specialized world. There are the people that are
that, that are get the systems up and running.
People that are gravity, I call them the gravity people.
People that get everything flown.
That's a whole giant skill level to do that.
Then there's the network specialists.
Then there's the. Networking's another big change,
I guess, yeah. Massive.
Change. Yeah.
Like you said, you used to go from here to here, and if
something was wrong, it was one of those connectors on either
end of that cable, or somebody pinched the middle of the cable
but replaced the cable and you're good.
Exactly. Now just figuring out where the
problem is is is a whole different thing.
Exactly. I mean, Wiresh, Wireshark was
not a a tool in my in my audio computer.
It is now and the then, then you have people that are, you know,
the system engineer now has to keep track of not just keeping
the a system running, but the world of outboard gear has blown
up into all of these plugins and.
Which I don't understand at all. All, all all this stuff which
can be just an unbelievable rat's nest of of it's like the
ultimate. You can see people whose systems
whose whose whole mix has become the ultimate Rd. with the 5
million potholes plugged in. Right.
Yeah. OK.
It's like, I just wanted to peel all that stuff out.
Yeah, just like, Oh my God. Yeah.
But that's that's I'm not young. That's not my thing.
Nobody asked me to help on that. But it's, it's, it's interesting
because it's, it's just, you know, you have, you have a, a
lot of, there's a lot of different fields of expertise
and nobody can really become an expert in all of them now.
It's just too wide of a The breath is too wide.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I guess if you're, if
you're, you know, taking a small system down to the to a
conference room or something for a meeting or whatever, like
that's one thing. But when you're talking about
the average arena tour or, or certainly stadium tour, yeah,
you got you've got experts in all sorts of like even just
having basically a a front of house engineer and then an
assistant front of house house engineer, like you just said
with Metallica. Yes.
And like I said, it blew my mind when I saw their monitor world,
you know, under the seats in the in the stadium.
I was like, what is going on here?
And he said, oh, that's monitors and.
Exactly. I'd never seen anything like
that and there were like 4 guys I think in on the consoles
sitting there in monitor world. I was like, what so?
Then there's people. There's people whose entire line
of work is radio frequencies. Yeah.
And you know, they're, they've got to monitor their
frequencies, they've got to get them all cleared when you get to
this city, make sure there's no traffic on there, reassign if
they need it, then they've got to monitor anything that
happens. They're, I mean, that's a whole
specialty in and of itself. Yeah, yeah.
People wonder how you end up with, you know, 150 people on a
tour or whatever. Well, guess what?
You know, that's how, Yeah. So, yeah, I know.
That's incredible. That's incredible.
So you you mentioned something in your notes called Polarity
Gate. What's that?
Oh, you had you had said something about like formative,
you know, events or, yeah, memorable things.
Yeah. And this is a this is a funny
little story and it's way back in 1984.
And it was, We are in the earliest days of doing the
Grateful Dead with this SIM analyzer.
So, so we're, we're really just kind of proving to them that
this is that this worked. We had taken this technology to
to rush the Canadian band we had.
And they said, oh, that's really cool.
It seems to work, but we don't do experiments.
So, you know, you can look at our thing, but don't do
anything. OK, so we did.
And then on they go. Frank Zappa.
Same thing. You'd think Frank Zappa would be
all experimental. Yeah.
Nope. Nope.
Absolutely not. Weird.
Yeah, that was amazing to me. And then I watched him rehearse
and the guy, I've never seen a more disciplined band.
What I'm hearing is sounds like total complete chaos and then he
stops bar 127. You played an E flat that's
supposed to be E natural. Yeah.
Probably amongst this things are, yeah.
That sounds like a typical Frank Zappa song.
Exactly. Yeah.
So, so Grateful Dead, when we brought it to them and said, you
know, well, you know, we've been turned out twice, but we have
this experimental thing. We think it's going to be really
important. We can analyze the system with
music as the source, and it's really exciting, but that's
where we get they're like, hmm, experiment right there on the
front of house on the console while the show is going on.
Yeah, bring it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So on we go and we're doing our second or third show and I get
asked John Myers there, Don Pearson, the head of ultrasound,
who's a really important person who who left us too, too early,
and Dan Healy, the mixer, they're all there.
And they commissioned me to to to try out to measure the thing
and during the song, after this song finishes, swap the polarity
of the subwoofers and see what happens.
And I swap it and I watch and I see a hole at 100 Hertz comes
and reverse and just fill in perfectly.
Huh. So.
And I say boom, play the reversal now.
Now the Subs are no longer fighting the mains because they
both working at 100 Hertz and they were fighting because they
were 180° apart. Yeah.
And I go, yes, and I get this, this look and everybody looks at
everybody. And Dan Healy, the mix was like,
and Pearson's like and John Meyer's like, yeah, so, So what
I found out was I got put into a years long argument between Dan
Healy and Don Pearson about whether the Subs should be
played reversed or not, which is which is better.
And I solved it and I proved the client.
Wrong. Oh, Ouch.
How? How'd that go?
How'd that end up? It all it all ended up fine at
the AN because of course it was, you know, I I'm just calling I'm
just the umpire here. I'm just I'm I don't have a dog
in this fight that that is adding.
The other way is subtracting. Yeah, OK.
Did you have to buy somebody a steak later or something?
No, I, I just, I just got, I just got told, you know, I was
like, it's like you just don't celebrate, you know, but I
didn't know that there was emotions involved at this.
I celebrate because like, holy crap, it works, you know.
Well, you did it and it solved it.
How cool is that? Yeah, yeah.
So that's a tough one. That's a tough one because what
are you supposed to do? Lie and say no, no, there was no
problem, right? You know?
They. Just to stroke somebody's ego.
They well, the, the lesson learned was is be mindful when,
when someone you know every, when you're, when you're making
a proof of something, be mindful that you might be stepping into
somebody's ego. Doesn't mean change doesn't mean
change The you don't modify the reality, but but take it, make
it carefully. And I learned, you know, from
then on, it's like when I when I can, when I would walk into a
place and I'd go like, OK, this design is totally wrong.
We're going to have to the PA. It's got to come down.
We've got to rehang this Papa. It's like, and I know it's going
to be, it's going to make the consultant look like an idiot or
the designer look like bad. So you have to really do this
carefully. So what I have to do is like, I
don't just say bring it down. I said, OK, so I, I stage up and
get it and I place the mic in a way that shows the problem and I
bring them over and say, wow, I'm observing this and it looks
like this over on the, you know, on the on in the center and now
over on this seat over to the side, it's 10 DB down.
I think that we need to angle it out.
I would try, I think it's 10 DB down and you know, then I'll
look up there and of course, and I'll say so, so I don't know.
What do you, what do you think we should do?
I let them say, oh, that's the smart way to do it.
And they say, wow, I'm not sure what do you think?
Wow, brilliant. I think we need to bring it
down. We're going to have to open up
the slay angle between those. Give him the answer, but let
him. Let him deliver it.
You know what I mean? Exactly, Yeah.
That's. Keep everybody you.
Must have been married for a while because that's the same
technique. Yes dear, does this need?
Salt, you know, does this meal, does this meal need salt?
Does this pair, does this dress make my butt look big?
You know? Yeah.
These are all very, very touchy answers that you need to give.
You have to be very careful. Yeah.
No, that's brilliant. So you mentioned a charity that
you're you support pretty heavily, which I believe is the
Southern Poverty Poverty Law Center.
Southern Poverty Law Center, Easy for me to say.
So what's the story there? Do you have a some sort of a
connection to that or is it just something meaningful for some?
Reason I've been a supporter of their work for 25, maybe 30
years. Morris Dees was the founder.
It's based out of Montgomery, AL And it was what they, what they
started with was was representing people in,
especially in racial prejudice cases, giving them
representation and what they were.
Their real breakthrough was figuring out that they could go
after the Ku Klux Klan after horrible things that they would
do and sue them, get them involved in litigation.
And they broke the Klan in numerous cases, forcing them to
sell the all their assets to the people that they had who burned
crosses on their lawns in these years.
They couldn't, they couldn't put people in jail.
They couldn't convict them on that level, but they could show
a level of, of criminal conspiracy that was, that was
civilly liable and that the organization was a criminal
organization. I mean, it, you know, was a, you
know, injurious entity. So that they basically were able
to bleed these things out and take their assets.
And and so they've been, they've done tremendous work.
And you'll if you know that names, look for them.
Anytime you see a big racial case break, you're going to see
something. They're.
Interesting at the microphone they're involved.
Yeah, that's interesting. You know, there's a guy that's
always on Joe Rogan, who I've heard a couple of times on Joe
Rogan, who works very hard on like wrongful prosecution cases
and stuff. And quite often, quite often
racially, you know, inspired or driven or whatever you want to
call it. You know, hey, you're a brown
guy. You must have committed this
murder because you were in the same county.
And, and he goes and gets them off and some of them are on, you
know, death row and, and some of them are serving life sentences
and stuff. And he gets them off.
And it's, it's a really interesting story because it's
disgusting to think that that actually goes on, that people
are just, you know, thrown in jail because of their skin color
or because of their, you know, financial standing or whatever
it is like it's, it's disgusting.
It really is disgusting. And, you know, maybe that's the
Canadian in me. You know, I got a little, a
little bit of liberal Canadian in me and, and I don't love that
concept. So that's a that's a really cool
charity to support, you know, I think it's meaningful.
So what do you got going on this year?
What's What's big in 25 for Mr. Bob?
I will. We're supporting Metallica's new
those changes and they're, they could have some shows in
Australia that would do an end stage, not the full tower stage.
OK. And so that's a new design for
that. Then I have the Rascilda
Festival, which is a large festival in Denmark.
It's in it's 54th year. Yeah, I do a.
Full festival. Yeah.
So we we're involved in all the stages for that.
So there's seven stages that need to be designed and seven
days of music. It's it's it's our big team we
send over there to take care of that.
It's super good. And then I'll probably do
Outside Lands again and I've got some, I've got some we're we're
breaking, breaking the ice in in the world of NHL.
We've got three NHL arenas that we did in the last two years and
we're. We're.
Stranded we did. First was Excel Arena in
Minnesota, then Amelie in Tampa Bay, and then the latest was
Rogers Center in Toronto, OH. OK, Yeah, it's amazing.
That's, it's so funny because I just went to a game on Saturday
with my friend in, I'm down in South Florida, so the Florida
Panthers and I was listening to the system before the game
started. They were playing some music and
things were going on and I was like, I can't believe how much
better sound is in arenas now than it used to be because I've
provided lots of lighting systems and I've gone to, I'm a
Canadian, so I'm a huge hockey fan and so I've been to lots of
hockey games, but they used to just blast music through public
address systems. Exactly.
Yeah. Oh, it was just so bad.
And now they've got like loads of Subs and it just great
sounding systems in some of these arenas.
Certainly not as good as those 3, but but yeah.
So that's that's a new market for you guys then, right?
Or an emerging market? Let's say that, yeah, it's been,
we've, we've had things there, but we had a really nice winning
streak here with the Panther and it's really made an impact.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's cool.
That's very cool. What else?
That's it. That's your whole year.
I heard you're getting a new guitar.
I am getting a new guitar. Yeah.
What's that? Yeah.
It is. It is a replica of Jerry
Garcia's Tiger guitar by Scarlet Fires Guitar.
OK, don't know anything about that.
I was never a dead fan so. Yeah, well.
So who makes it? Scarlet Fire.
OK. And they're, they're in Northern
California or something. They're they're in Dallas.
OK. But the Leo Elliott, the guitar
maker was was worked with the full recipe.
It's a it's a really super high end custom guitar.
It's it's, it's crazy. It's got it's, it's a beautiful
piece of work, but it's also highly evolved electronics.
I'm looking at it right now. That is a beautiful guitar.
Yeah. Wow, does it have that that
whatever it is, what is it? A tiger or something, Some kind
of animal on it? Yeah.
That's wild. The tiger was just put on
yesterday. I'm he's sending me I'm getting
daily updates. He's finally I've I ordered this
thing in February of last year. Wow, yeah, I'm looking at it
right now. It's.
Becoming real now. Yeah, that is cool.
Well, congratulations on that. That's probably pretty exciting.
So you still play then? I do thanks to the pandemic.
I have a band that's fine. How is that?
Because I never I, I, I've always played, but I, I can only
ever play with pickups, you know, like a little like a
little informal pickup jam session because I can never, I
can never be counted on to show up because I'm always out.
But the pandemic grounded me and I got together with a group of
people and we we play all, all around the most terrible clubs
in in in Manhattan and it's quite fun.
But we did play the bitter end, which was quite beautiful.
Yes, that's that's my. Guitar.
Yeah, Yeah, that's interesting. What kind of wit is that?
That's called Coco bolo. It's an exotic.
I believe it's a Amazon. It's a beautiful grains to it.
How close of a replica is it? It's it's as close as they can
make it. I mean if I if you saw the real
1 you would you would not be able to really tell.
Really. Huh.
Yeah, I have AI have a Eric Clapton Blackie replica and you
know, not the same as as this, not quite as crazy and
spectacular and wonderful as this one.
A little bit different, but but it's just a really cool Strat.
Like the story was basically that Blackie, I don't know if
you're familiar with Blackie, that Eric Clapton recorded all
of all of his hits, cocaine and all the big songs he recorded on
Blackie. And they sold it in an auction
in like 2005, I think, or 4 for $1,000,000 to Guitar Center.
And Guitar Center went to Fender and said we want you to make the
best reissue you've ever made. Like we want identical reissue.
Like we want this guitar. You can't a, a scientist
couldn't tell the difference between the real one and the
replica. And they made 230 of them, I
think. And I have one of those and I've
I've never actually played it because I'm afraid to basically.
You. You must be from Spinal Tap
then. Yeah, no, yeah, yeah.
No, don't even look at it. Look at it.
Yeah, no, it's kind of like that.
And I had a friend of mine from Calgary, guitar player his whole
life. He's, he's still playing
professionally today and he was visiting his brother very close
to my house and we got together and, and he said bring, bring
the blackie guitar over with you.
And I brought it and he kept it for the whole week and was just
playing on it and cleaning it up and really making it pretty and
all kinds of stuff. And he was like, man, I like
that guitar. And I'm like, hey, you know, it
could be arranged and it wasn't cheap.
Yeah, it wasn't cheap. I actually bought it.
I bought 2 of them because I had a good friend at Guitar Center
at the time and they were all sold but he was like hey if you
want I can get you in there but you got to tell me now.
And I said OK I'll take two and he goes 2 I can only get you one
And I said I need 2. And so my whole plan was I'll
flip one right away, which I did.
I so they were $20,000 each and I flipped the first one for
30,000 almost instantly. And and then 2008 happened and
the whole like expensive guitar thing just crashed to the ground
quickly. And so I still have it.
I haven't been in a rush to sell it or anything.
So it's just cool to have, you know, it's something cool to
have, I guess. Although every time I want to
buy something else, I go, I should just sell the blackie and
buy that instead or whatever. But yeah, well, I'll tell you
what, Bob, that was freaking interesting as hell.
I I got an education in in lots and lots of things related to
sound and you have quite a story.
I had no idea. It's fantastic.
Really, really cool. So I appreciate you doing this.
Well, thanks for having me. It's really a pleasure.
One last question, how can people like, if people want to
buy your book or reach out to you somehow, what's the best way
to reach you? Well, the book is.
It's published by Taylor and Francis.
You can buy it directly from them or it's up there on
Amazon.com. And it's called what?
Sound systems design and optimization.
OK, perfect. Yeah.
And then to reach you just LinkedIn or something?
LinkedIn. I I, yeah, yeah, I guess.
I'm on LinkedIn. I'm listed as Shipbuilder in
LinkedIn. Shipbuilder.
That's not my, my name is Bob McCarthy, but yeah, what my
profession is. And I I, I, you know, if you
look deep enough, you'll find that my profession is
shipbuilding. What's that story?
Now you got to tell me just because it's like there was
nothing that there was no category that was, that was
correct. So I was like Pine then
shipbuilding. That's.
Hilarious, and so far one person has noticed in all the years.
It doesn't surprise me, you know, having spent the last
almost two hours talking with you, it doesn't surprise me that
you're called shipbuilder. Cool.
Well, I appreciate you man. And, and maybe I'll run into you
on one of these Metallica shows or something.
I, I, I really like Dan Brown and, and Rob as well.
So it's nice to go out and see them.
Cool. Well, have an amazing rest of
your week. OK.
Thanks a million. Thank you.
None.