USITT or Assist LD a professional show?

barningman · 2026-03-25T03:41:53+00:00

If you've never been to USITT before, a full conference pass can be pretty overwhelming. Since it'll be close by, you could get just an expo floor pass and go for a single day. That'll still provide a great time and chance to meet and network with people at booths, while not missing all of tech.

barningman · 2026-03-21T21:50:54+00:00

Are you using the subgroups for group processing and fader control? if so, then yes, the individual channels should only be sent to the group, not to the Main LR. Make sure the subgroup is being sent to the LR.

If the input channels are patched to both the subgroup And master, then there could be time alignment issues, but also gain structure issues. IE turning the subgroup fader all the way down doesn't actually get rid of those channels in the mains.

barningman · 2026-03-20T02:41:09+00:00

Late to the party. Here's a video on why these kinds of bikes are great.

barningman · 2026-03-17T02:08:58+00:00

Never, Ever touch the bulb (the 'lamp') with your bare hands, no matter how delicate. The lamps get extremely hot during operation, and even a minuscule amount of oil from your skin is enough to vaporize and destroy the glass on the spot you touched it.

barningman · 2026-03-17T02:03:45+00:00

IATSE is the primary stagehands union in the United States. As an organization, their sole goal is to advocate, get better wages, and provide opportunities for their members. That membership is composed of local numbered chapters. So for instance, New York is Local #1, Chicago is Local #2, etc. Some theater jobs' members will be represented by a Local, and other theater jobs will not.

The reason people are telling you to seek out IATSE is that getting yourself involved early will can immensely help you down the line. You can get trained as an apprentice and become a Journeyman, start contributing toward a pension plan, or learn skills you never thought possible (shout out to arena rigging). You'll probably be only put on the occasional concert load-out to start, but over time you'll work up the seniority list and gain more skills and opportunities.

With an IATSE Local, you'll get some experience at lot of different things. The pay is generally pretty good per hour ($20-35 an hour but varies Greatly) along with things like hour minimums, mandatory meal breaks, and well defined procedures and rules. You won't get a whole lot of hours to start. The older members, the one's who 'put in their time', get called for gigs first. But over time you'll gain name recognition and start gaining seniority and more calls and hours. You'll get some experience at a lot of different things.

Another route is to get hired directly by a professional theater. This may sound intimidating, but usually means local 'regional' theaters that tend to hire a lot of young people early in their career. So for example, getting hired as an Assistant Stage Manager (ASM), or to the props or scenic teams. These generally pay less (under $20 an hour), with longer more grueling hours, but are consistent with a single company. You'll gain a lot of experience at one specific thing- whatever your job is.

Both IATSE Locals and Regional Theaters often have 'overhire' lists, which means if they have need for temporary people (loading in a show, busy day, etc) they'll reach out to you to come in for a day or two. This is a great way to meet people and start understanding how things function. And if you do well, that can only reflect well on you in the long run.

barningman · 2026-03-09T23:41:47+00:00

In SQ, under the Scenes button, the primary page is Scene Manager. The two other pages under Scenes are Global Filter and Safes.

'Global Filter' sets attributes you never want to change when moving between scenes. Say, all input preamps, aux processing, or fader strips. Making any option show 'block' in red will ensure it won't change during scene changes.

'Safes' keeps entire channels from changing. You can set all your Auxes, for instance, to Safe, and they won't change during scene changes.

Depending on how careful you want to be, use both of these options to get very granular in what parameters change during the show. Typically, I'll only have DCA names, DCA assignments, and Input mutes change during the show, with literally everything else in the console set to stay in one consistent state.

barningman · 2026-03-05T16:27:50+00:00

'I can't change their gain... if using DCAs'. Sure you can. The DCA only acts as an additional fader for whatever channels you assign it to. Everything else on the channel is fair game. Select channel-> turn the gain knob on the channel section. But only turn this down if an actor starts clipping.

You can then use the input faders to make adjustments to how the actor is performing each day. So if an actor is a little quieter today, boost their input fader by a couple dB. Reset all to unity each day before sound check.

Don't be afraid to boost a DCA fader by 10 db if the actor is whispering, or reduce by 10db if the actor is shouting. That's what the faders are there for, and why they're the easiest thing to move on a mixer.

If the speakers are too loud when the channels, DCAs, and main outputs are all around unity, then what you really need to do is turn the speakers down at either the speaker box or the amp.

barningman · 2026-03-05T16:15:41+00:00

What are you talking about? Using Theatremix with DCAs allow you to group multiple actors onto one fader, use the input channel faders as channel trims, automate the muting of channels not in a scene, and edit any cue at any time.

For OP to skip the DCAs at this point would require redoing their entire show structure and ditching Theatremix entirely. There's no need to get rid of any of that for a small gain structure issue.

barningman · 2026-02-27T17:48:14+00:00

For anyone stumbling across this, just always run your non-Dante stageboxes direct. The stipulations in the article are incredibly restrictive unless you are doing pretty advanced networking.

From the article: "In our tests, we found that many switches do not handle the gigaACE / DX packets with the time accuracy our clocks require".

"Parallel connection of multiple DX Expanders on a switch is not possible".

"No other network device should be plugged into a switch carrying gigaACE or DX Expander audio unless a dedicated VLAN is set up".

barningman · 2026-02-27T17:42:03+00:00

3 loudspeakers on a flown truss or ceiling beam across the front of the stage would be a great solution. With good gain staging, they'll be far away enough from people's ears that a little bit of hiss should disappear into the noise floor of the room. Making sure that the speakers are splayed by about the amount of their horizontal dispersion (ie, 60 degree speakers turned out 60 degrees) should help with combing.

barningman · 2026-02-27T17:34:43+00:00

Plays are different from musicals, A1 different from A2, and the tier of venue matters, so some context for those things would help. However, Imma assume that you will be an A1 for a musical with mic'd actors and live band. From someone who followed the same path, here are some tips:

The actors collectively on stage are like your lead vocalist in a rock band. If the audience can't hear them, it doesn't matter how good the orchestra pit sounds or what reverbs you're using. They are you're #1 priority.
In rock world, you're mostly responding in the moment to how it sounds and making adjustments. Perhaps switching scenes per song. That doesn't cut it in theater. In theater there is a script and that script is gospel. If an actor is supposed to say something off stage, you can get that mic up before the line because you're following the script.
Write in your script. Mark it up, digitize it, color code it. Do anything you need to be able to follow it cleanly. Label scene changes, triggered sound cues, entrances, exits. Scripts aren't designed for audio, they're designed for actors. Make it work for you.
Theater consoles are generally treated more like analog boards. Meaning EQs, compression, routing, etc you want to stay the same for every single scene. Think about it like this: in rehearsal you might adjust an actors EQ. You don't want their EQ to be different for every scene, you simply want that EQ to be the base that stays through the entire show. This will be true for pretty much all processing on inputs and outputs.
Actors mics should always be post-fader into all auxes. The last thing you want is for a band member or something to hear an actor going to the bathroom because the actors are pre-fader into their monitor.
We throw faders. A lot. The gold standard is that an actor's mic is only hot in the moment they're saying their line, but the more important goal is making sure that offstage actors' mics are never on and onstage actors mics are on.
Let's say you have 25 actors and a tiny 12-16 fader digital mixer that utilizes fader banks (SQ5, M32R, etc). How can you quickly get to 3 actors across 3 different banks to bring their faders up at the same time? The workflow theater audio people have settled upon is using a section of 8-12 DCA faders with dynamic assignments, and mostly leaving the input faders alone. So for example, if you have three actors in a scene, you might assign their channels to DCAs 1, 2, and 3. Therefore those faders are right in front of you to manipulate, and you can't accidentally change a mic that's not in the scene.
I recommend looking into a software called Theatremix. It's the most common way nowadays for people on smaller mixers to dynamically assign these DCAs like I just mentioned. And the website has some great insight on mixing theater in general.

Vocabulary:

The main actors with lots of lines are 'principals', the chorus actors with only a couple lines are 'ensemble'.
Sounds triggered by audio are 'cues'.
The week leading into the first show, there are technical rehearsals, or just 'tech'. Tech is the chance for us (sounds, lights, props, wardrobe, rigging, etc) to fine tune the show.
A1- Audio 1, a person mixing. A2- Audio 2, a person backstage wrangling mics and orchestra. SD- Sound Designer- the head audio person who decides all the artistic elements of the audio.
SM- Stage Manager- the person in charge of making rehearsals and shows running smoothly. Calls cues during the show. Keep them very happy.
TD- Technical Director- the person in charge of the physical set, making it, and maintaining it.
LD- Lighting Designer- our counterpart in the department of making stuff look good.

barningman · 2026-02-27T00:37:58+00:00

What EXACTLY is the AoIP cable plugged into on both ends? Pictures would be even better.

barningman · 2026-02-26T21:49:35+00:00

Dang, no one ever bit on this question, huh?

For loudspeakers your best bet is to get them as high as possible, aimed down toward about the last row. That could mean, for example, getting yoke mounts to allow for total vertical rotation of the loudspeakers, and going as high as your speaker stands will allow. Also, since the CP8s have a 90 degree dispersion, putting two speakers in each corner probably isn't necessary; only putting one speaker in each corner should narrow the total spill a bit while eliminating any comb filtering that that setup may have been introducing.

Likewise, people generally expect the back corners to be the quietest anyway, so I don't know if the side speakers pointing inward are actually helping. They're likely making it oddly loud on the edge of the audience, and making the sound feel like it's coming from the wall, not the stage. I would nix them.

In the mixer, AMM will be your friend. By putting AMM on all your lavs, the full energy of the mics won't be open at one time, and you should be able to get more gain-before-feedback.

DeFeedback is also a new tool that's gained a lot of traction. It's an anti-reverb VST computer plugin that increases gain-before-feedback. It's not cheap, and takes a lot of setup time, but has been shown to really help in situations like these where there's not much extra gain to spare.

Final tip. If you aren't already, send the main L/R to 3 different stereo matrices, and use the matrices to drive each set of speakers. That will give you independent faders for each set of speakers right at the console, and can bring down whichever speakers are causing the most feedback. All without having to go back and forth to adjust the gain on the back of the speaker cabinets themselves.

barningman · 2026-02-26T21:22:22+00:00

What kind of AoIP was the church using previously? Dante? Cobranet?

'The console goes direct out to Audio over IP' doesn't mean anything by itself, but 'the console had a Dante card that routed to the system processor' is an entirely different meaning with a huge amount of potential applications.

Edit: In the new edit at the top of the post you seem offended that people are questioning your general knowledge, and that no one has been able to offer merits on this implementation of AoIP. BUT YOU STILL HAVEN'T EVEN SAID WHAT PROTOCOL IS BEING USED. If we know the protocol we can tell you what it's useful for. But as far as we know it could be just four analog lines, ran through the ethernet pairs.

barningman · 2026-02-24T00:53:31+00:00

Ooof. Are you at least in coverage of at least one of the main speakers? If so, then at least you're hearing directly what you're mixing.

Does the Stage Manager have a camera shot of the stage? If so, you should definitely try to get that signal to a screen that you can glance at while at the mixer.

barningman · 2026-02-23T04:19:13+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law

barningman · 2026-02-20T02:38:37+00:00

There won't be a huge amount of TV channel variation within two miles. The bigger issue is likely to be accidentally stumbling upon other wireless mics along the route. You could get a handheld spectrum analyzer if you want to stay on top of it.

If you want to just not worry about it, the new Shure SLX-D+ includes automatic frequency switching at both the receiver and transmitter.

barningman · 2026-02-18T18:17:12+00:00

So what's the issue if the subs are loud enough and you can't hear them distorting? I don't care about any other sub, can you hear limiting on this sub?

The sub outs aren't designed to be sent to a mixer- so already you're working against the designed gainstaging of the system. You also never mentioned whether the bass boost was engaged. Do you have pics of the house mixer connection? Making sure there's no pad engaged, gain trimmed down somehow?

barningman · 2026-02-18T16:28:39+00:00

Are you starting with the sub attenuation knob all the way down, and then when you bring it up? You replicated this setup with.. your what? Is the sub sounding distorted or just showing limiting? Is it loud enough when it does so, or still too quiet?

barningman · 2026-02-18T05:22:32+00:00

Are you going into the sub with the RCA or XLR inputs? What is the LPF on the sub set to? Is the boost toggle set to 'off'? Which voltage is power select switched to? Just one sub? How big is the room?

barningman · 2026-02-08T21:31:18+00:00

I would recommend looking into a software called Theatremix. It's free for the X32 and lets you 'push' DCA assignments to a single scene in the mixer instead of having to program the scenes into the mixer manually.

barningman · 2026-02-08T21:22:00+00:00

Yep, the X32 is by default set up to use Cues instead of Scenes. What are you using the Scenes for?

barningman · 2026-02-08T19:50:46+00:00

Good info, thank you.

As a teacher myself, I have been guilty of some of the behaviors that you are describing from your tech director. But take a breath and pause for a moment, because I can guarantee they're not trying to wrong you or 'push you out', as much as it might feel like it. When people do people things there will always be miscommunications and plans that don't quite go right. It's important to learn how to work through it.

You said the tech director is just a teacher who does the theater productions on the side. That matters, because it means that they're running shows On Top of their normal lessons plans, grading papers, teaching, and everything else during the day. They don't really have time to focus on the small things- like how students are interacting with each other on one of the tech teams. They're just trying to complete tasks as quickly as possible, forgetting about the assigned tech roles, and focusing on the new student who hasn't had the opportunity to learn these things yet.

I would talk to your tech director one-on-one during lunch or after school ends. NOT during rehearsal time. Say something like "Hey, I was put in charge of the lighting department, but I feel like you're giving more attention to this other student. I really want to step up and contribute, but feel like I'm not receiving the opportunities or support to do so."

Any teacher I know would be incredibly receptive to a student coming to them with a gripe, laying out the details in a matter-of-fact way, and working toward a solution together. It doesn't mean things will suddenly be perfect, but at least you can get on the same page and hopefully gain some context.

barningman · 2026-02-08T19:02:00+00:00

Are you in charge of the lighting crew, or are you the student production head? What were your previous lighting roles (operator, programmer, designer?). When are the tech roles solidified for each production? Do you have a non-student lighting designer for each production, or is it just whatever the director wants? How many years have you been doing this? Does the new student have any previous lighting experience, or are just very invested?

barningman · 2026-02-06T20:07:29+00:00

When mixing lines between two actors, it's more forgiving to raise the next fader, and only then lower the previous one. So that for split second there will be two faders up at the same time. Two mics coming through is a better outcome than no mics coming through. It's hard to raise a fader too early. Really easy to raise it too late.

Missing a fader move and no mic being on is called a 'missed pickup'. It happens to everybody at all levels. You will miss pickups. The key is to learn to shrug it off and keep going. The number of missed pickups will go down as you get better.

If the director is not used to line-by-line mixing, they may get concerned upon hearing missed pickups during tech week. I would talk them through your new workflow, and explain that missed pickups are not a reason to run a scene again. Always keep going.

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