Wednesday 25 May 2016

Busking: A Way to Help Reinvigourate Our Town Centres and High Streets Spaces ?


'Buskers and street artists are often to be found in our cathedral cities and historic towns but much less so in our perhaps less celebrated urban locations where their presence may be more profoundly felt and enjoyed.'




I love busking (or street music to use perhaps a more modern term). I love its immediacy, it's simplicity and the ability of it's practitioners to brighten your day. The idea of an instant street level hit of musical culture delivered in it's most basic and simple form with minimal amplification is one of the best ideas anyone has ever had. 
So here's the first in a series of posts talking about and paying homage to the wonderful art of street music and it's brave and talented artists. 
  
On a recent trip to Grays town centre to visit my local supermarket and stock up on frozen ready meals, I came across a couple of guys strumming guitars and singing. They were using a small Roland busker amp. The level was very sensible and a rather excellent rendition of Whisky in the Jar could be heard. No real crowd at this point. I stayed and watched and listened for a while. I dropped a couple of 20ps into their case and went to do my shopping.  As I entered the supermarket the first mournful bars of Stairway To Heaven could be faintly heard. 

Now grocery shopping is not really my thing. In fact I hate it. Food really is not my thing. I know lovers of DIY gastronomy and keen cooks probably love it. But not me. Shopping for food and eating is a chore I take part in reluctantly, knowing I could be doing something more interesting and productive. But as I entered the supermarket it kinda struck me how much better I felt about it having stopped and had a short little burst of musical culture. A little blast of art. Definitely a small but not insignificant serotonin hit.

After shopping, I wandered outside and a small crowd had gathered around our intrepid entertainers. They'd been joined by a couple of girls who were now singing, clapping and encouraging the small audience to join in. The song, on this occasion, I didn't recognise. Some indie anthem I wasn't familiar with. But what a great atmosphere. Friendly, fun and really rather enlivening.

Anyone who knows Grays town centre will probably tell you that it's a little bit uninspiring. If they're being polite. It has suffered somewhat from being just down the road from that monument to the consumer society, Lakeside Shopping Centre, although it does have an outdoor market on weekends. These guys had managed to transform a rather humdrum, everyday shopping centre space into a little microcosm of entertainment, music and culture. Everybody enjoyed it, nobody was inconvenienced and, to be fair, there was no sign of any body interfering or attempting to stop the fun. More power to them. 

As the day progressed it occurred to me that maybe street music and street entertainment could play a significant part in reinvigourating perhaps our more forgotten and less illustrious town centres and commercial spaces. That councils and authorities should really be encouraging these little artistic injections into our lives, rather than repressing them and legislating against them. Buskers and street artists are often to be found in our cathedral cities and historic towns but not so much in our perhaps less celebrated urban locations where their presence may be more profoundly felt and enjoyed. The contrast of the commercial, the everyday, the sometimes struggling, and the aesthetic, the artistic and the cultivation of the artistic pursuit. 
The perfect addition to the pound shops and charity emporiums that have already done a great deal to preserve these precincts.  

Perhaps more could be done to help and encourage our heroic street warriors. Busking pitches where they know they won't be hassled, busking 'days' on special weekends were busking is positively encouraged, and maybe even some kind of busking pop-up 'festivals' once or twice a year. The organisation and managing of busking may go slightly against the whole principal of the artform but I'm sure that these additional ideas could be implemented alongside the current basic rights and freedoms we all have to express ourselves.

To me, busking and street entertainment is an all round 'win-win' situation. Street merriment can increase shopping footfall and commercial viability, improve the overall environment and atmosphere of our urban spaces, enrich our lives culturally as well as providing artistic satisfaction and a modest stream of income for it's practitioners. And it doesn't need masses of expensive, specialist equipment and/or technology. 

Street musicians........we salute you. 


Useful links:

Developed for London, but can be applied to just about anywhere.

Resources and information for buskers worldwide.

More famous and established artists doing a bit of busking around London.

Australian busking festival. 






  


Tuesday 24 May 2016

Special Projects: The Noizeworks Great Sounding Speaker Project. Part One. Background/Introduction.




GSS1 250 Watt 12" Self Build Loudspeaker Project.












Background: The Noizeworks 300 and 500 Series PA Speakers.

When I founded The Noizeworks in 2002, one of our core product groups was a range of in house-built PA loudspeakers. We felt we could design, build and supply a range of products direct to end users that would out perform anything available at a similar price on the market at the time. Not many far Eastern products were available, and the more established European/US manufacturers usually had many distribution levels which meant the final end user price had been through many distributor margins, delivering in my view, poor price/performance. I had some background in speaker design and manufacture from my involvement with a company in the 1990s, and I thought we could do better. 
I'd spent years building a collection of components, testing combinations, listening and eventually getting some artists and acts to test the products at gigs and let me know how they got on. 
The results were extremely encouraging and we felt we had some really great products and designs, the component manufacturers were enthusiastic and crucially we had an excellent relationship with a company that could build the enclosures and do the woodwork for a suitable price. So we proceeded with our project and started production.
We built two ranges, a lower powered (250-300w) budget range based on Volt pressed steel chassis drive units with Eminence compression drivers, and a higher powered range (400-500w) employing Eminence Kappa series drivers alongside BMS HF compression drivers.
Sales wise they were quite successful, we had lots of great feedback from customers and the units proved totally reliable without a single drive unit failure that I can remember. They were pretty basic looking. Carpet finished, black boxes. Nothing much to look at, but they were great tools and we know that many are still out there doing sterling service. 
Unfortunately the company supplying the woodwork and enclosures ceased trading and we were unable to find a suitable replacement firm that could supply the woodwork at anything like the price and in the relatively small quantities we were looking for. So regretfully, and despite having potential clients asking for the product, we had to shelve our brave little project.  





The Birth of The GSS1:

Despite not being involved in manufacturing loudspeakers anymore, I have kept up to date with component developments and continued to assemble a collection of devices and experiment with designs. 
Developing a growing dissatisfaction with most of the budget far Eastern passive PA speaker designs, I thought it would be fun to set quite a rigorous budget and see if I could come up with a product that would out perform and sound better than the established market designs. 
The product would need to be within the reach of the most budget conscious musicians and bands, schools and churches, be able to be used with a range of mixer amps and power amps without additional processing, be very reliable, capable of sound pressure levels that can cover audience sizes of 100-150 people, and sound much better than products from established manufacturers and speakers costing many times more.
I also thought it would be fun and maybe educational to go through the design process with everybody. To be completely transparent and provide a commentary on the development. Why I'd chosen certain components, the design priorities and the compromises made.  
I set a target 'out the door' price including tax and labour of £300 a pair for the product (shipping would be extra), so the budget was pretty tight. But it would be interesting to see what could be achieved. 
Some 'off the shelf' budget priced enclosures had become available so manufacturing the product was and is a possibility, but I thought it might be useful to publish the design for people to use. To build some great speakers from scratch if they like, but I also thought the design might be useful for clients looking to 'resurrect' some broken/blown speakers. Use the cabinets and possibly the horns and fit the new woofers, HF driver and, of course, the crossover.
It might also be a useful basis for schools/colleges to use as a little educational project. 
So the next blog posts in this series will go through the development and outline the design of the GSS1 and we will end up with the completed design that clients can use for their own self build projects. We've built a pair, so clients are welcome to check them out before commiting to the purchase of the components and the time and labour. 
I'll also publish the design in a single pdf sheet that can be downloaded. 




The Noizeworks Self Build Speaker Projects:

In addition to the GSS1, I'll also go back and publish the designs for some of our earlier products and maybe look at developing some other higher powered systems, so it will build into a library of speaker projects for a range of applications. All delivering sound and performance far in excess of anything commercially available at a similar cost. 
Of course, there will be a commitment of time and some labour, but I'm sure the projects could be assembled in literally an hour or two, although if you're actually going to do the woodwork from scratch and build your own cabinets, this will become somewhat longer.

So check back/subscribe or follow me on the usual social media platforms for the latest updates. It'll all take place over the coming days and weeks (not months/years). 
Even if you don't decide to build any of the projects, you hopefully may find the process and development of the projects interesting and educational. 

All the best, talk to you soon. Simon. Noizeworks.  











Disclaimer:
As with all my blog posts, the information contained within is presented on an informal basis for readers to use and apply at their discretion. I accept no reponsibility for any circumstances arising from this information or the inability to interpret it correctly. This includes injury and loss of income. 


Simon Thompson is the founder, owner and director of The Noizeworks. Salesman, front-of house and monitor sound man, pianist/keyboard player, equipment designer, writer/blogger and even an occasional DJ. 


Tuesday 17 May 2016

Opinion: When Technology and Jargon Get A Little Out Of Hand.





A truly amazing thing happened at London's iconic 100 Club recently when a 'sound engineer' managed to 'do the sound' for a 4 piece punk band in a 350 capacity venue armed only with:

- 128 input channels and 64 returns, 
- full 'Dante' networking,
- an 'XCVI 160 x 64 processing core',
- a dual redundant 'GigaACE gigabit link to Surface',
- virtually infinite mix headroom (thanks to the digital stagebox's 96bit accumulator),
- a dedicated ME-1 48kHz port,
- 2x redundant 'DX links' for I/O expansion,
- six parallel mixing engines within 'a Core' that calculates over 10,000 cross points per sample,
- a configurable 64 bus 'architecture',
- an array of 'bespoke algorithms' including Graphic EQs and compressor models that can be inserted on the fly without burning FX slots and 'without unacceptable setup and latency'.
- compressor models that capture the audio nuances and 'non-linear ballistics' of industry classics, ranging from a Slow-Opto model, various RMS detection and soft knee circuits, through to super-fast peak and RMS based compression/limiting devices,
- hugely potent 'DSP kernels',
- a proven library of reverb, delay and modulator 'algorithms' with 16 FX slots.
- 3 pages of 6 assignable 'rotaries' per screen.
- only 26 assignable 'SoftKeys'
Although, in fairness, he did have 'fast and transparent workflows' that allowed him to 'focus on the mix, not the mixer'
In fact, he didn't use a mixer at all, a fully developed 'ecosystem' was employed to carry out this staggering achievement.
Our intrepid sound man was greatly assisted by the fact that 'building a basic template showfile and then putting things together as he moved was so 'super easy''. This presumably assisted 'the workflow' for a 'chaotic sold out pub gig'!
The 100 Club, the iconic London venue proves that the punk/DIY ethos, that it was such an iconic part of, is not dead.



Monday 16 May 2016

Product News: Trantec S4.4 / Proel Discreet Headset Wireless Systems.

So you need a discreet, lightweight headset wireless system for vocals, business or education presentations, or drama applications, but can't run to esoteric DPA/Countryman type products. We've got the solution. 

We've taken the excellent Trantec S4.4 wireless system and combined it with a couple of great sounding Proel HCM Series discreet headset wireless mic systems to make two great sounding discreet wireless headset system at affordable prices. 

And you also get the the Trantec lapel microphone, so you can use the system for either headset or lapel applications.