SR: Chamber Musicians Plugged and Unplugged

O  ur string quartet is planning to acquire some sound reinforcement (SR) gear, to enable us to better control the sound levels and acoustics in some of the venues where we perform. I feel like the sales guys are genuinely trying to help us, but the fact that we’re classical musicians leads them to try to recommend all sorts of exotic things that they think would please us, like really low total harmonic distortion (THD) specs and so on. Invariably, these seem to us to be over-spec’ed and over-priced. We’re a classical string quartet and, yes, of course the SR requirements are different from what they’d sell to a rock band or to a symphony. But this is after all just a commercial sound system, right? Aren’t there engineering equations that determine what’s really necessary? I feel like the fact that we are acoustic musicians and classically trained and somewhat finicky ... brings out the worst ad hocness in the salesmen’s nature.”
  —  Anonymous.

I  wrap a piece of masking tape around the top three strings (most violinists don’t seem to mind) and clip the mic with a windscreen on the high side between the bridge and tailpiece to that tape.”
  —  Brian Frost, 15-MAR-2007, SR Forum.

W  here precisely do you wrap that tape? I have one young charge who is the keeper of an incalculably expensive Guarneri. I may not touch it.”
  —  Tony Tissot, 15-MAR-2007, SR Forum.

I  f you have four condenser mikes, just position one each on a tall boom above each violin and the viola and another in front of the cello on a short stand with a boom. If the quartet has decent instruments you do not need to have the mikes right on top of the instruments. A distance instrument-to-mike of 25 to 50 cm usually works for me. If you don’t have four condensers, use a dynamic on the cello. If you don’t have three but do have two, try one over the mid-point between the two violins, and one on the viola. "Open up the gain" on the violin pair 3 to 6 dB more than the viola mic.”
  —  Lee Brenkman, 24-FEB-2007, SR Forum.

It does seem that there’s a shortage of reliable guidance for sound engineering for small classical ensembles. Yes, there’s plenty of information on SR for symphonies, and there are quite a few acoustics engineering and architect firms out there that take on those large and well-paying civic projects. But there are not many resources that have detailed information or services for string quartets or other small groups. Some links provided below may be of interest, though.


It is true that commercial sound work for a full symphony orchestra in an air-conditioned hall imposes fewer demands on an SR system than a commercial sound system for a small ensemble. After all, the peak sound pressure levels (SPL) for an orchestral fortissimo at the conductor’s podium are equivalent to 10 W of power or higher. A single violin’s peak SPL is less than 1/100th of that.


Let’s assume that your SR loudspeakers can deliver a level L_p = 110 dB at the ears of listener who is at the furthest distance from the stage—equivalent to the fortissimo for a full orchestra at the conductor’s podium. If the diffuse ambient noise level from a typical concert hall’s air-conditioning system is 32 dB at such a listener’s seat, then L_pdiff = L_p2 – L_p1 = (110 – 32) = 78 dB. If you add 6 dB to avoid undesired addition of levels, you get 84 dB. So you calculate that the THD target for the hall and those peak SPLs is 100 x 10 ^{( -84 / 20 )} = 0.006%. You can confer with an acoustics engineer or a sound designer at an architect firm for a more expert and precise answer than the crude suggestion I’m making here, but you can imagine from the calculation above that you probably won’t be needing amplifier gear whose THD specs are better than about 0.01%.


If the air-handling HVAC is turned off, though, and if the audience is really attentive and really quiet and if there’s zero street noise coming in through the concert hall walls and roof, then the diffuse ambient noise level will typically be closer to about 18 dB instead of 32 dB, in which case L_pdiff = 92 dB, or, with an extra margin of 6 dB, make that 98 dB. With that you get is 100 x 10 ^{( -98 / 20 )} = 0.001% THD, about an order of magnitude better than the figure we calculated before. So you naturally wonder whether a sound system could be that good, to take advantage of such a quiet space to provide those dynamics, with a sound so clean that it’s indistinguishable from unreinforced acoustics.

Part of the answer to this question is that you need to think about every element in the audio chain—from the mics, to mixer, to amplifiers, to loudspeakers. The loudspeakers that are available for practical SR systems are, at best, not better than about 1% THD. And, in general, carefully thought-out designs for contemporary commercial sound work (including symphonic venues) have THD around 0.8%. And a THD of 0.8% represents 20 log₁₀ (0.8 / 100) = –42 dB in terms of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR).

For a harmonic to equal this amplitude, you’d have 42 + 32 = 74 dB with the air conditioning “on”, or 42 + 18 = 60 dB with the air conditioning “off”.


In other words, if you’re buying SR gear with fabulously better THD specs (lower than, say, 0.8%) then you wouldn’t actually be deriving any benefit from those specs unless (a) your venues are tremendously quiet and (b) the musical passages include delicate pianissimos below 70 dB SPL.

Incidentally, one of the venues where I’ve witnessed heavy-duty SR and mixing gear deployed pretty unsuccessfully was the Oude Muziek Festival in Utrecht in 2007. The Sampson-Bezuidenhout concert was held in the CentralStudios facility, in Studio-1. There were about 3,000 persons packed into that cavernous 1,000 m² (volume = 10,000 m³) hall, which is about twice as deep as it is wide. The miking of the performers was scanty. The reverb from front-of-house to rear was far too large, and the delays and phasing of the reinforcement loudspeaker arrays were wrong. Much of the ensemble’s sound was never captured by the mics and what was captured was piped and amplified in such a way that confusing delayed reflections arrived at your ears hundreds of milliseconds after the reinforced sound. The vocal parts tolerated this somewhat better than Kristian Bezuidenhout’s fortepiano.


According to Ahnert’s and Frank’s book (p. 285) the required amp power in Watts is a function of the ratio of the volume of the room and the mean reverberation time:

           P = 0.10 x V / T,

where V is in m³ and T is in sec. (See also top graph, above, the one at the very top of this post.)


CentralStudios’ equipment has the requisite power. But on this occasion the power available was under-utilized. Possibly the sound-check with the empty hall was not subsequently amended when the hall filled with people.


Even in Row 11 where I sat, the sound was weak—it was difficult to hear the direct sound from the performers on-stage, and it was difficult to make sense of the disparate SR and reflected sounds impinging on us from further to the rear.

• Oude Muziek Utrecht
  
• CentralStudios Utrecht
  
• Audio Engineering Society
  
• Sound reinforcement page at Wikipedia
  
• LiveSoundInternational magazine
  
• ProSoundWeb SR/Live page
  
• LiveAudioBoard (LAB) forum at ProSoundWeb.com
  
• Sound and Video Contractor magazine
  
• Intl Symposium on Room Acoustics ISRA 2007, Seville
  
• Acoustics '08, Paris
  
• ARUP Acoustics
  
• MeyerSound, Carnegie Hall, Stern project, 2001
  
• Yamaha, Carnegie Hall, Zankel project, 2003
  
• Yamaha Commercial Audio
  
• Ahnert W, Steffen F. Sound Reinforcement Engineering. Taylor & Francis, 1999.
  
• Ballou G. Handbook for Sound Engineers. 3e. Focal, 2005.
  
• Davis D, Patronis E. Sound System Engineering. 3e. Focal, 2006.
  
• Davis G, Jones R. Sound Reinforcement Handbook. Yamaha, 1988.
  
• Duncan B. The Live Sound Manual: Getting Great Sound at Every Gig. Backbeat, 2002.
  
• Jackson B. Orchestral recording. Mix, 01-JAN-2006. (interviews w/ Lawrence Rock, engineer w/ New York Philharmonic, and others)
  
• McCarthy B. Sound Systems: Design and Optimization: Modern Techniques and Tools for Sound System Design and Alignment. Focal, 2007.
  
• Moscal T. Sound Check: The Basics of Sound and Sound Systems. Hal Leonard, 1994.
  
• Nousaine T. Wishful thinking. Boston Audio Society Speaker 1990; 19:1-4. (article about variable abilities to discriminate acoustics)
  
• Sokol M. The Acoustic Musician's Guide to Sound Reinforcement. Prentice-Hall, 1997.
  
• Stark S. Live Sound Reinforcement. Artistpro, 2004.
  
• Talbot-Smith M. Sound Engineer's Pocket Book. 2e. Focal, 2000.
  
• Yakabuski J. Professional Sound Reinforcement Techniques: Tips and Tricks of a Concert Sound Engineer. Mix, 2001.
  
• Young C. Crank It Up: Live Sound Secrets of the Top Tour Engineers. Backbeat, 2004.
  
• DSM. Dave Moulton: Golden Ears and Just-in-Time Spectral Management for Chamber Musicians. CMT blog, 27-MAR-2008.

Dave Moulton: Golden Ears and Just-in-Time Spectral Management for Chamber Musicians

M  astering [engineering recordings] is an art, not a science. It involves a lot of technical craft and control, plus practice.”
  —  Dave Moulton.

Your plane is delayed by bad weather, and you land in late afternoon at the airport of the city where your performance tonight is to occur. The taxi whisks you to the performance hall where you greet the presenter and observe the production people busily getting the stage ready. You have less than 2 hours before the performance begins. You should be focusing, centering, warming up, getting your game-face on. You should be taking deep breaths.

But wait! The house has a much taller ceiling than you thought it would have. The acoustic reflective panels on-stage are adjustable, but at the moment they seem to be in a perverse flat configuration that lets a lot of sound leak out into the wings. What was the last gig played in here anyway, some break-away faction from Cirque du Soleil? The whole acoustic ‘feel’ of the place is horrifically drier than your ensemble is used to. And there’s an odd acoustic ‘sweet spot’ slightly to the left of center-stage. What the hell! Where in this catastrophe of a venue is the best location for the harpsichord? Precisely where should the other ensemble members be placed, so that the solo passages of each will be heard and so that the balance of the group will have some hope of realizing your artistic vision?

Very few musicians receive any formal training in how to cope with this part of performance. As a result, it’s an incredibly stressful and agonizing thing for most ensembles and individual musicians. And yet it’s possible for you to systematically acquire skills that will help you make accurate acoustics decisions confidently and quickly. How do you train your ears to immediately recognize what you and your ensemble members need to do to deliver your best?

Golden Ears is one way—Dave Moulton’s CD-based audio ear-training course. It’s not perfect pitch or interval training. Instead, it aims to teach your ears to hear the frequencies, the signal processing, the compression, the left-right stereo imaging, the distortion, and the amplitudes in acoustic media. The course is self-paced and available as a set of eight audio CDs. To use it properly, you’ll need a set of good speakers or headphones. I use the Bose noise-cancelling headphones, to make sure that ambient noise around my house doesn’t confuse my ears when I’m practicing with the Golden Ears CDs.


Moulton basically puts forty years of his recording studio, performance and teaching experience on these CDs. There are hundreds of exercises on the CDs that systematically take you through different dimensions of acoustic spectrum and timbre and electronic equalization (EQ) and processing of sound. While the main purpose of the course is to help recording engineers and producers to understand and be able to describe the elements that recorded tracks contain—their spectrum, dynamics, reverb and other audio qualities—with the goal of insightfully adjusting them in recording gigs or in post-production, the course is just as relevant for sound-reinforcement engineering in live performances and for classical musicians and presenters who work in traditional non-reinforced acoustic settings.

In a way, Moulton’s educational process is a little like a culinary course for chefs—helping them to quickly assess deficiencies in a dish, and equipping them with the ability to know instantly how to salvage a dish that suffers from imbalances in flavor.

Once you get a feel for the acoustic ‘ingredients’, you can take better control of the weird performance hall you find yourself in, take control of the hall’s sound-reinforcement control board, take charge with the presenter’s or the hall’s sound engineering staff, or take control and better utilize your own recording gear and approach the process of tracking, mixing and engineering with more confidence and less time consumed in trial-and-error. You can consistently ‘cook’ a better ‘dish’.


How does the course work? There are four volumes, with two CDs per volume, each covering different components of the recording process. In Volume 2, after you’ve followed instructions for optimizing your listening set-up, you go through a series of A/B drills using excerpts of recorded music. The first recording (A) is the reference piece and the second (B) is a clone of the first with an applied amount of as-yet-undisclosed signal processing, frequency boost, delays, etc. Your task is to learn to identify the difference between the two recordings. To assist you, Moulton limits the number of options and groups them into six families of effects: amplitude change, distortion, compression, equalization, stereophony, time-delay, and reverberation. The drills are progressively more difficult. After you’ve completed your first pass through them, you can do the drills in random order to practice and improve your skills. The course materials are automatically randomized so you can’t identify any drill until it’s over. Golden Ears teaches you:

• to recognize the effects of compression on a various music signals;
  
• to identify fast and slow compressor attack and release times;
  
• to correctly identify musically important EQ problems;
  
• to recognize when loudness is the only difference between two signals;
  
• to distinguish ranges of 1 - 10% and 10 - 30% Total Harmonic Distortion (THD) in recorded music or in sound reinforcement rigs used for live performances in larger chamber music venues;
  
• to recognize abnormalities in stereo imaging (reverse image, mono summation, polarity reversal, pseudo-stereo, etc.) ;
  
• to identify channel-to-channel time differences over a 1 to 50 msec range; and
  
• to correctly recognize and manage gated and ungated reverb.

Moulton is a pro engineer and producer. He holds degrees from Bard College and The Juilliard School of Music. In the 1960s and 70s, he owned and operated his own commercial recording studio in New York. Previously at SUNY and the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, he was in the 1980s and early 1990s Chairman of the Music Production and Engineering Dept. at Berklee College of Music in Boston. He is now teaching privately and at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. He has worked as a studio designer and has designed playback room configurations for recording studios and wide-dispersion acoustic lens arrays for performance venues. In 2000 he (with Curt Wittig) received a Grammy nomination for the CD recording of music by George Crumb performed by the Philadelphia-based ensemble, Orchestra 2001. Dave wrote and produced Golden Ears in 1994, based on traditional music school ear-training techniques.


The first two CDs each have a series of 14 EQ drills, each drill consisting of ten short bursts of sound with EQ applied and cancelled as you listen. First there is a warm-up for each drill, where Moulton describes what’s coming. Then the drill begins. For example, drillset_1/example_1 has ten seconds of pink noise, and for a few seconds an octave band centered around 500 Hz is boosted by 12 dB. Drillset_1/example_2 does the same thing to an octave centered around 63 Hz, and so on, until all of the octaves of the human hearing range from 31 Hz to 16 KHz have been covered—all ten octaves in random order. The manual is well-written. The comprehensiveness of the drills enables you to discover and make note of your own hearing deficits in a systematic way. If you do this with other members of your ensemble, you can identify certain aspects where one or another ensemble member has particular strengths. More likely, doing this together will confirm in an objective way which one of you is actually the most skillful and accurate acoustician (for purposes of reconnoitering with venue engineers and production people), rather than who merely has the strongest opinions and the most insistent expression of them.

After the pink noise drills, Moulton conducts more exercises involving applications of EQ, except this time they are done to musical excerpts. Next, there are more reps of EQ apps, this time with octaves being cut instead of boosted. Vol. 2 also has two CDs, this time with a wide variety of signal processing applied to a vast number of musical selections and styles. You can assess and practice your perceptions of things like amplitude changes, distortion, compression (including recognizing slow and quick attack and release times), some different examples of EQ, stereo/mono/pseudo-mono switching, time delays (including time differences over a 1 – 50 msec range), and reverbs. Vols. 3 and 4 extend the skillset into progressively more detailed and exotic effects that are important for performance and for recording/engineering.

Some effects are simple and easy to recognize, like a 3 dB amplitude boost. Yet, depending on the texture and timbre of the music, even something so simple as this may be difficult to hear. It may be even more difficult in high or low registers. Other effects are more obvious—clipping distortion, long reberbs, etc. But most are somewhere in the middling range of subtlety, like ‘left channel mids (1 KHz) boosted by 6 dB while right channel highs (10 KHz) cut by 6 dB.’ You can refine your ears to hear subtle EQ cuts and boosts within narrow intervals of a fourth or a fifth, and to readily hear multiple frequency bands at once. After 20 or so hours with these CDs, you’ll be able to quickly diagnose what’s going on acoustically in any performance venue and intelligently strategize what to do about it—to make the best of the situation you’re in.

In summary, all the hundreds of drills on these CDs train you to hear and to recognize problems in all these areas and across the whole span of registers—before you go on-stage or before you exit the recording studio. By revisiting the CDs before you travel to give a concert in an unfamiliar hall, or by revisiting the CDs a few days before you start a recording gig, you can refresh your familiarity and refresh your confidence to be able to quickly amend and improve the acoustics that will affect the music you make.

In effect, for those of us who are not recording engineers or conductors in our day-jobs, rehearsing our ears to recognize and thoughtfully manage these ‘macro’ acoustics effects is a very important yet under-recognized aspect of our art. The Moulton CDs are an efficient way to establish and maintain a mastery of this.

• Moulton D. Golden Ears Audio Eartraining. Vols. 1-4. KIQ Productions, 1994.
  
• Moulton Labs website
  
• iZotope Boston
  
• Orchestra 2001, Barone M, Martin B-A. Crumb: Ancient Voices of Children. (Composers, 1999.)
  
• Prosser S. Essential Ear Training for the Contemporary Musician. Berklee, 2000.
  
• Mix magazine
  
• MusicTech magazine
  
• Berklee College of Music, Boston
  
• Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Chiara String Quartet: Club Scene at ‘The Brick’

N  o holds barred! Chamber music in ANY chamber! The Chiara Quartet is forging a new path for the string quartet. The Chiara transforms the audience experience from mere listening to active engagement with the music.”
  — poster for Chiara String Quartet gig at The Brick, KCMO music bar

CMT: Look at this SRO crowd, 120 people in this 1,600 square-foot downtown bar! The Chiaras are packing them in!


DSM: [ . . . listens; . . . orders another drink; looks at wrist watch: it’s 10:15 p.m. ] Okay, let’s examine this first set. How was it put together? Here’s some of the playlist that the Chiara just did.

• JEFFERSON FRIEDMAN, String Quartet No. 3, First Movement (rhythmic)
  
• BÉLA BARTÓK, String Quartet No. 4, Last Movement (aggressive, fast)
  
• PIERRE JALBERT, “Icefield Sonnets,” Second Movement (austere, cold, slow)
  
• GABRIELA LENA FRANK, “Leyendas” and “Tarqueada” (South American folk)
  
• W. A. MOZART, Quartet K. 590, Fourth Movement (joyous and syncopated)
  
• PAUL HINDEMITH, Quartet No. 3, Slow Movement (mesmerized, detached)
  
• JOHANNES BRAHMS, Adagio in B-flat (romantic, warm, reverent)
  
• ZHOU LONG, Song of the Ch'in (emphatic, plucked, wavered, scooped emulation of Pipa-like/Sanxian-like sounds on normal viols)
  
• LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN, Große Fuge (edgy, huge, 200 years later still feels avant-garde)
  
• PRINCE, “Let’s Go Crazy”

CMT: This is lyrical, really inspired playing. And Chiara members were “feeding” on the excitement they transmitted into this packed club, which comes back 10X bigger from the crowd to the tiny stage. No inhibitions. And yet nice control. It’s not common to see artists this physical, so palpably enthusiastic in conventional classical music performance settings. The flow of energy from the ensemble to the audience is like a “Noreaster” or a tropical depression—it picks up more energy as the storm moves out over the warm sea of people, and moves back onto the stage even stronger, a “Category 5”!

DSM: Yes, the Chiara Quartet members are very responsive. And the club audience here is very appreciative. The publicity in advance of the Chiara’s gig had been good: local music critic, Paul Horsley, had a 1,000 word piece on them in last Sunday’s paper. One thousand words is a huge amount of space for a single article on classical music performance in a U.S. daily paper. But the crowd here is not just turning out to hear something unusual they read about. This is not a ‘curious’ crowd hoping to be amused. It’s a ‘hungry’ crowd, expecting their ears and minds to be nourished!

CMT: The piece by Zhou Long, Visiting Professor of Composition at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, was fantastic! Very warmly accepted by these springjacketed and bluejeaned people. I think the Ying Quartet also does this piece regularly, as part of their ‘Musical Dim Sum’ program.

DSM: The Zhou Long is totally accessible, and anyone wary of Chinese music need have no fears. Complex but approachable work, this Chinese and Western music fusion.

CMT: Did you notice? During the playing, this bar audience is respectfully quiet. Not totally or obsessively quiet. Yes, drinks rising to meet lips; the occasional icecube sound against highball glass. But quietude during the playing, borne out of fascination, not decorum. Quietude, out of “What happens next?”; out of “I’ve never heard anything like this! Ever!” amazement; out of rapt absorption in experiencing music played in this way.

DSM: They’re getting thousands and thousands of ‘plays’ of their MP3s on the Chiara MySpace page.

CMT: Well, what do you need to carry this chamber-music-in-bars thing off? How can other quartets or chamber artists do club gigs like this, and be reasonably assured of a success?

DSM: First, you need programming and acoustical engineering savvy about the club venues. That’s something that the artists/ensembles tend not to have, unless they've gone to school at Berklee or places like that.

CMT: You need the sense of a re-mix DJ. You need a producer. You need a brilliant engineer. A chamber ensemble can’t afford to hire those. So, ideally, at least one of the musicians needs to be serious and experienced in those aspects. You need all of these skills, rolled into one person. Not to say that’s impossible. But it’s going to be pretty unusual. A virtuoso musician is rare enough. A virtuoso musician who’s a recording engineer and technical geek is rare as hens’ teeth.

DSM: Yup. But there are crazed geek polymaths in all walks of life, geekish renaissance persons of all ages. This is no different. And, what if this new-music, new-venue thing takes off in the next few years? If it does, if it’s really successful and chamber music ensembles and the classical establishment all see it being successful, then you’ll see more Berklee-type programs in other schools’ music departments and conservatories—to grow these skills in their students. They only hire faculties and build new programs when there’s an unmet need to fill, when there’s clear-and-present demand.

CMT: What else do you need? You need really decent monitors and miking and amps. You don’t want to suffer with any old junk that your garden-variety rock group puts up with. You’ve got to have sound equipment that’s capable of picking up every tiny, subtle sound and ornament clearly. What do you see up there on the stage where Chiara’s sitting? A $1,000 boom mic next to each player, plus dual Shure SM7B mics on the stand in the center between them . . .

DSM: You need rock-solid music stands and chairs with rubber feet that aren’t going to slip off the edge of a tiny stage. You need high-intensity LED micro goose-neck lamps on your music stand—ones that aren’t depending on house AC power to shine enough light on your music.

CMT: You need jazzband type music folders that can stand up to hard use on the road. You need to put plastic tabs on the edges of your music, to enable you to confidently turn pages—dog-earing the page corners as you would do for conventional concert-hall performance won’t cut it. You need to have some approach for preventing the draft—coming from the club’s A/C system or overhead ceiling fans that the bar may have spinning at high RPMs—keep it from blowing your music or flipping your pages.

DSM: You need to choose a wardrobe that’s flexible and designed for insuring your comfort—with pieces you can put on if the A/C is cranked down really cold, and with pieces you can take off if the crowd is packed in and the place is really hot. If you’re a pianist, you need to get there early-early, to check out and, if possible, fix whatever funkiness may be plaguing the instrument up there, if it’s not your own. Jazz musicians are used to dealing with these contingencies, taking them in stride without a fuss.

CMT: To return to the earlier comment, you want a house-music artist. If no member of the ensemble has a knack for this, doesn’t have an innate sense for this, then you need to enlist the help of a friend or collaborator who does have this gift and expertise. You want highly crafted playlists/mixes. The mixes mustn’t pander to the “obvious” next chart if a more exotic alternative is the one that’s capable of generating mass-bliss or excitement on a club-wide level.

DSM: You need to innovate radically. You need the mix to stay faithful to clubbing ideals – awe-inspiring breakdowns, huge rushes of energy, frenzy-inducing sonatas. You want to emulate the Ministry of Sound in London but with a pure chamber music repertoire. You want some familiar pieces, but you want radical new music, and you want “Ah ha!” pairings of disparate pieces, where you draw parallels that nobody’s heard before and that the composers would never have acknowledged, even if they lived concurrently.

CMT: Is Chen Yi here?

DSM: Haven’t seen her yet. Did you know that the Chiara Quartet was recently awarded the Guarneri Quartet Residency Award for artistic excellence by Chamber Music America. They are only the second group to receive this honor.

CMT: What else? You need a very good console surface, a front-of-house (FOH) rack housing the system's mix engine. You need a Stage Rack with recallable, remote-controlled preamps, and a multichannel digital snake.

DSM: Your engineer needs to keep a clean house. If your console has plug-ins installed that you know you definitely won’t need, disable them from the Options/Plug-ins list, so you won't get any “surprises” during a set. You want to keep your input faders around the unity-gain (0 dB) mark to prevent clipping.

CMT: The P.A. does not automatically or magically manage the room’s sound and, as such, sound system designers must include the room’s characteristics in their audio equation. Does the space have an echo? Does it sound boomy? The Brick is box-like, boomy. Do you remember what it was like at 09:00 p.m., before the place filled up? The engineer behind us was tremendously busy fixing that. He was back and forth to the stage 6 times before he was satisfied with the mic placements.

DSM: Does the sound system envelop the audience member as if the gallery is actually in the second row of tables? For acoustical and sound system consultants, matching the right rig with a venue’s sonic signature—and the playlist that will be played in that space on that night—is imperative. Otherwise, the audience will never hear the music in the way it was intended.

CMT: It’s no different, really, than a studio engineer’s craft. The studio mix must render okay in whatever playback medium the consumer listens on. So the studio engineer must choose the gear and the settings and effects and the acoustical design so that the energy generated onstage renders adequately in the room and musically meets the needs of the crowd.

DSM: Are there issues with maintaining sight lines in a place like this? The Brick has that little stage up there and the engineer raised up on a deck behind our booth here. Does the room exhibit a long reverberation time? There’s this little dog-leg in the back of The Brick, the path to the toilets. There’s also the “neighbor factor.” Is the club venue located in an urban or suburban environment where the sound from passing city buses or subways is intruding? You don’t want to be a string quartet and arrive and discover that fact 20 minutes before you go on! I don’t care if you’ve got a kilowatt of amps and monitors all over the place. You do not want that.

CMT: You may want a trellis to suspend the loudspeakers. A string quartet may want to talk with their local studio people, to get advice on this. A very small club—like Munchies in Houston used to be with their string quartets every Friday and Saturday 25 years ago—they didn’t need it. But in this black box that is The Brick, it’d be nice if they had a trellis—for visual as well as acoustic reasons.

DSM: You want a sound system that delivers lingering, enveloping sound characteristics with supplemental loudspeakers—one that can simulate reflections and reverberation using digital delay-line effects. Something like an Electro-Voice X-Array as part of a distributed reinforcement system, which provides direct or frontal sound, delivering clarity to everybody in the audience. A rock audience wouldn’t give a care. But a chamber music audience in a club would care. You want them to be thrilled, blown away!

CMT: You want to fire the acoustic energy at the listener and not outside the area. The violinists in Chiara are doing fine. I’d like to hear a bit more viola, more cello. Maybe they’ll tweak with that in the second set.

DSM: In addition, the geometry of the tables seating arrangement here isn’t as conducive to the horizontal coverage pattern of the monitor array they have, such as it is. I think I’d want to visit with the club owner ahead of time to adjust the tables a bit, if I were the engineer.

CMT: Hardly matters, though, with this packed-in, standing-up crowd, does it!? Whatever they did an hour ago has long since been undone and redone by the pumped-up club-goers shifting chairs and tables around.

DSM: I was thinking more of the musicians’ needs, not the audience. The front row of tables is too close for comfort, if it were me. The bar’s got a standard 8-foot ceiling, and the stage they’re on is a riser about 12 inches off the floor—and you can’t do anything about that. But the resulting low ceiling height on the stage has a detrimental impact on the acoustic environment onstage from the performers’ point of view/hearing. You need to give ‘em a bit more space in front of them. And you ought to have at least a couple of small monitors pointed back at them so they can hear each other better, given that the ceiling above them is so low.

CMT: You don’t want an excessive amount of sound being held onstage that would reduce the clarity of sound as picked up by microphones either. Actually, the Chiara’s engineer has achieved a nice, clean signal in his mics. Ideally, you’d like orchestra-type risers that allow the musicians to feel the vibrations created by cellos and bass instruments. A floating floor with rigid interconnections and resilient materials to maximize cross-stage vibrations. But no bar can afford that. Not even Sculler’s in Boston.

DSM: Chiara—if they do this routinely in NYC—maybe could get their favorite club to install a Yamaha Active Field Control [AFC] system to control acoustical conditions based on the ambient room properties by using the system’s acoustical feedback to balance the room. You want to tune the room to be as neutral and quiet as possible—get your reverb time down below 2 milliseconds—knowing that you can increase it to whatever setting you want—for the Zhou Long or other atmospheric pieces. If you need to damp it, you know you can damp it with a vengeance, once you’ve quieted the room down with AFC.

CMT: What if you were building a brand new club? What would you say to your architect, knowing that you want to book amplified chamber music gigs in your club?

DSM: First, make sure your architect has an acoustic engineer on-staff or available. Get Johns Manville ceiling treatments for their acoustical value. Put Johns Manville soundboard or other studio-grade stuff on all the walls. Soften the floors with some industrial-grade cork or rubber—something acoustically good that’s durable and that can be swabbed clean night after night.

CMT: The wall and ceiling shapes allow sound to be reflected across the stage, providing musicians with cross-stage communication. I’d ask the architect to put inlay, raised-panel things on some of the walls. Plan ahead so that you can swap out acoustic baffling in some pocket-door-like wall recesses if you need to—you could motorize those, like you would conference-room projection screens.

DSM: No trees or water features or free-standing partitions or other visual fluff. None of that velvety stage draping, sheesh. Techno cloth-backed seating with quiet Teflon slides on the chair legs.

CMT: You gonna buy one of Chiara’s “New Voice Singles” label CDs over there?

DSM: Sure! What else? You know why this thing is cooking tonight?

• Every number has a “story” to help the audience get into it.
  
• Each piece announced from the stage. Jonah and his colleagues are really personable!
  
• When playing two sets, the second set could get away with a complete 4-movement string quartet piece, but with applause between movements entirely okay. I have to admit I prefer instead this eclectic playlist like the first set we just heard.
  
• The playlist is altered dynamically, based on intensity and strength of audience feeling or artist mood.

CMT: Who else could do this most readily do you think? Manny Ax? Jeremy Denk? Eric Kim? Susan Graham?

DSM: Orion String Quartet? Miró String Quartet? Turtle Island String Quartet? Kronos Quartet? Jupiter Quartet? Parker Quartet?

CMT: In Italy, there’s Pierrot Lunaire’s Gudrun. There’s Opus Avantra. In Germany, you have Krautrock bearing the marks of Stockhausen’s composing techniques leading to many adventures, not all of them very listenable. The ensemble, Bartock, and some others have chamber music roots, although their members would not be thought of as first-rank virtuosic by any means.

DSM: Well—wherever the opportunity arises, whenever we get a chance—this bears repeating! The audience is loving it. And the Chiara’s, too. More, please! Thank you, Brick! Thank you, Chiara!

• Chiara String Quartet website
  
• Chiara agent's website
  
• Chiara MySpace page
  
• Zhou Long website
  
• Jefferson Friedman website
  
• Mix magazine online version
  
• MusicProductionToolbox magazine
  
• SoundOnSound magazine
  
• Berklee College of Music MPE website
  
• Berklee College of Music CWP website
  
• The Brick, Kansas City
  
• Extreme Chamber Music, Ithaca College, Ford Hall, 20-MAR-2007
  
• Opus1 website
  
• Parker String Quartet website
  
• Jupiter String Quartet page
  
• Jupiter String Quartet website
  
• Miró String Quartet website
  
• Turtle Island String Quartet website
  
• Orion String Quartet website (see Gardner Museum [Boston] and other alternative venues)
  
• Kronos String Quartet website
  
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T  his idea of a string quartet in a club: Is it working?” [SRO crowd roars ‘Yes’; exuberant clapping continues]
  —  Jonah Sirota, Violist, Chiara String Quartet gig at The Brick, KCMO music bar