A Sound and Video Production Company
Readers of this blog know how much we at Rocktzar love the odd, esoteric parts of live production – every tutorial even has a section named as such. Our love for Qlab is also pretty obvious. Which is why we are able to share a month’s worth of posts about house music – because there …
As our blog here on Rocktzar.com grows, we are happy to announce that we will start organizing our content into monthly themes, as appropriate. We don’t foresee every month being thematic, but as we get more content we will try to organize it to make sharing – and learning – more convenient, and help the flow …
Continue reading “July was Live Mixing Month! New blog themes are coming”
TL;DR: Work smarter and cleaner with multiple Cue Lists – re-use your work, and get all of that house music out of your main design. The Story: Design is a messy process. There are so many elements to consider and plan, and the brain often jumps about, tackling one part and then another, possibly in …
Continue reading “Qlab organization – Multiple Cue Lists and House Music”
TL;DR: Parallel compression is a common studio mixing technique. Why I use it live. Latency and digital mixers. The Story: Parallel compression was introduced to me when I was mixing a project in Protools (thanks to Greg Giorgio, the same guy who taught me about versioning (https://www.rocktzar.com/visions-for-your-versions/). For those who need to google that, it’s …
Continue reading “Parallel Compression in Live Mixing (Compression Part 2)”
TL;DR: How to use multiple compressors in a live mix, when your digital desk only has one compression plugin per channel. The Story: A lot of starting live engineers work vertically, adding EQ and compression on each channel individually, and then use groups/bussing for mixing and routing control. This is fine, but I often rely …
Continue reading “Multiple Compressors in Live Audio (Compression Part 1)”
TL;DR: A look into DCAs and VCAs – seemingly strange and esoteric acronyms – how they can help you mix, and how they differ from groups. The Story: As audio mixers got bigger, it made sense to have the controls for outputs, submixes, and other master knobs and faders in the center of the desk. …
Continue reading “Audio Acronyms: DCA, VCA, Groups, and why the nuances matter”
TL;DR: Qlab is not just a tool for theatre. And it isn’t just for playing back media cues! The Story: I have been the North American sound engineer for Pain of Salvation (https://painofsalvation.com) for a few tours. I could go on at length how awesome that job is. One of of the issues we deal with …
Continue reading “Rock & Roll tours with Qlab (and help from Evernote)”
TL;DR: Use Qlab to control every application on your Mac, so you can focus on your show. Also, ToneGenerator is great for soundcheck and room tuning. The Story: By now, you know that I am a big fan of using Qlab for everything. Part of that is the unified interface with the shows I work …
Continue reading “Let Qlab run other applications with Applescript (with ToneGenerator as example)”
TL;DR: Sync your computer with the rest of your team when you receive a Google Drive share. The Story: As I will cover elsewhere, Google Drive is king of all of the sync services out there – plenty of space for free, everyone has a Google account, and the Apps for word processing, spreadsheets, etc …
Continue reading “Google Drive and syncing your show with Backup and Sync software”
TL;DR: Clean out your Google Drive of old, orphaned files you didn’t realize you still have – and close up a potential privacy hole. The Story: I am working on a longer, detailed article on how I use Google Drive, and how it has transformed how I work on live productions. In researching what might …
