Recent content by nomuse

  1. N

    Wireless Dimming LED's inside prop

    The last time I did this was in a black box and I bought a half-dozen arduino clones from Adafruit with 868 mHz radio module breakouts already on the board. I think they called it a Feather or something. Ran neopixel clusters (also from Adafruit) directly from the boards.Theatre is an off-spec...
  2. N

    Mic Check!

    Oh, been around that little circle so many times. We'd lose a mic in the middle of a number. They'd yell at me and tell me to yell at the cast and make sure they all did mic check. Me; not the SM, not anyone with pull. The cast would amble out, half of them holding the mic on with a finger...
  3. N

    Micing actors with masks

    I semi-retired before COVID hit, but I did a lot of musicals with masked characters. Try forehead; tape a B3 or similar on the skin just below the hairline. The frontal sinuses are a nice resonator and that's often a decent sound anyhow. The only difficulty with "angler fish" mics (as one of my...
  4. N

    Microphones Miking Stage for PA

    I've also used the PZM-on-board (2' x 2' was probably foam-core), and 57 on the rail. In at least one of those set-ups I picked up a handful of the RDL "Stick-on" audio tools and put compression and roll-off on the mic. Cleaned it up considerable.What I question is putting it into coms. My...
  5. N

    Poll: Mixing Musicals

    The last time I mixed was on a manual, baby-board. Only DSP it had was a one-size-fits-all compressor on each channel. Fast show, one hour run, young audience. I set the faders to starting position by eye and used the mutes to pop them in and out; meant I could do the big entrances by running a...
  6. N

    Choir microphone help

    I would upvote that a dozen times if I could. Nobody wins in volume wars.
  7. N

    Sound f/x MP3 files.....are they really that bad?

    Aaron -- exactly. It ain't the format, it is the history. Like the example that pops up on CFH and similar sites all the time; client is asked for an EPS document (aka scaleable) and sends the same over-compressed JPEG saved as a AI file. Anyone who hands me an mp3, I have no trust that they...
  8. N

    Sound f/x Gate vocals for theater?

    My experience -- most of it at a 400-seater with full wings and grade-school casts -- was that on average the sounds you didn't want from the talent were louder than the sounds you did. I mixed from script and memory and a little by eyeball, but on shows with a lot of costume changes and...
  9. N

    Headlights

    I once used a trouperette II cradled in the arms of a tech. But that was a specific case; not trying to hit the audience, trying to rake an exterior window as if a car was turning into the driveway.
  10. N

    Kitchen Scenery Help

    Making kitchens is fun. If you want real water, though, that bumps things up to a new league.Water leaks.No way around it, if you have water on stage, you will get water on the stage. Water, like animals on stage, is Murphy personified. Waterproof everything. And safeguard the actors from...
  11. N

    Microphones How to fix Countrymen Mics

    I had some luck rinsing out B3's that had gone a little cloudy with Isopropyl (on no other mic would I dare this, nor on a new mic). The best bet for sweat-outs is not to have them happen in the first place. One trick I found helpful was to wrap a tiny strip of moleskin around the head just...
  12. N

    Dimming LED Tape ???

    I just finished a show with about 300' of LED tape. Bought a pair of City Theatrical DMX units for it; they were simple to set up and worked like a charm. I've also gone the hard(er) road; stuck an Arduino clone and a power darlington with heat sink in a project box and controlled about 30' with...
  13. N

    USB "GO BUTTON"

    I used a Korg Nanokey for years. About $40 at Guitar Center. Put white board tape on five of the black keys and labeled them in tape deck format; go, step forward, step back, etc. Then double-stick taped it next to or even on the console.Nice thing about going through MIDI (once you've paid...
  14. N

    Does QLab3 support manual fade-out-and-stop?

    Which is pretty much why QLab trumps WMR or (shudder) iTunes; you can play as many overlapping cues as your CPU can handle. Not just overlapping sounds, but overlapping events; a fade cue happening while another cue is started, stopped, etc.
  15. N

    Marking Personal Cable

    Heatshrink over tape or printed label -- it will support even cheap printer paper. Downside is you have to dis-assemble at least one end in order to get it on. I still mark lighting cables to length with spike tape (red is 5', yellow 10', blue 25', green 50', make up intermediate lengths with...
Back