So my cousin sends me a text.

She admits she had no idea, it was even funnier when I had to explain the Bass and EG on “ In the air tonight “ are Darryl Strummer from Milwaukee.

And this orange, or white stuff even blue!
And brats, and now people are seeing the Frozen Pizza section of a Large Milwaukee Grocery store online, yes we are a bit crazy.

When he Became artist in residence and they changed the name of Royal to Musichead we claimed him as ours😁, I also Have a memory of him in a Packers Jersey!

He also spent some time living in Champaign IL.  I sound man I knew told me a story about a time that King Crimson was rehearsing in Champaign where he lived and mixed at a club called the Blind Pig.  Most nights Tony Levin would come in, sit at the bar, sipping Whisky, listening to the bands with no one realizing who he was. 

In the 90’s King Crimson was using our sister company Intelix’s Studio Psychologist system for personal mixing of live monitors. I spent most of my time with the band techs and wedge guy. The problem was Intelix and the studio Psychologist were designed by studio guys and has the one in house guy with monitor experience I was often the trying to explain things. What would have probably worked better would have been a bigger digitally controlled analog Matrix like the ones I Intelix built for Ohare and other giant installs with more individualized matrix so the wedge mixer could have sent more individualized stems in a mix plus situation. Don’t get me wrong everyone in King Crimson is a huge talent and was great at communication but this system and even with guys of this caliber I learned to hate personal monitors mixing systems because of level creep! Always felt the guys needed to write the software to think like my wedge mixer mantra; “more x” doesn’t mean more x it means less everything else and keep the SPL the same! Only wedge guys ever understand this .

I think Yamaha has been working on it a bit, Randy, there sales guy for most of the country was Michael Jackson’s personal Wedge Mixer for years and the development guys have always listened to him, but here is the big problem: as we have gotten more digital centric this should be easier except while we have a couple of standard protocols nobody has a protocol where the mix engine, it’s channel DSP Dynamics and the Dynamics in a driverack work together and explain to each other how they are acting or want the other to act.
As I play with Ethersound and Soundweb for live I am amazed at what we can do, but I keep learning that these things are all designed from either the perspective of Wedge mixer, FOH mixer system tech intergrator or IT. Shadow will understand this we really don’t have a sense of “system “ in our systems architecture. You throw in the fact that the $ is in the simplest MI and it gets fun.
Also riddle me this if part of the goal of all this is to make a smaller footprint at FOH and wedge mix, why do I need to fill the space once taken up by an XL4 with a bunch of different laptops so each sub- system is stable?

Yeah, The one thing I have noticed especially in live is that unfortunately the end user manufacturers tend to pick always seam to not have been in the trenches for years or are at the stage of their career is they walk in and mix, no longer involved in set up or even racking the stuff in the warehouse. I just spent 20min explaining to a guy that the custom panel in a rack design was so we could put 1/2 a ADC TT bay because on the road at some point shit happens and I can walk any idiot through re-patching on a bay in 1/8th the time of digging in back over the phone, cover the rest of the back of the rack in vent panels no worries of screwing something else up.