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Here's a situation you might relate to... The singer gets a little too close to the floor wedge and it starts to ring with feedback. It might be a wedding reception, a church service on a Sunday morning, or a bar on a Friday night. In any case, when that mic starts ringing and you're the person running sound, everybody in the audience immediately turns around and stares. The clock is ticking. Do you mute the channel, adjust the monitor send, or notch the frequency that's feeding back with EQ? A lot of people freeze, because the only time they ever practice handling problems like this is during the event itself, with the whole room watching. That's the most stressful part of live sound. Anything can happen during the show and it's hard to prepare ahead of time for the unexpected. I wanted to give people a way to practice troubleshooting and handling feedback in a more controlled environment, where you can make mistakes and learn from them (without losing your job). That's why we built the Troubleshooting Lab. The Troubleshooting Lab is a virtual mixer that trains you on real-world live sound scenarios. It runs in your browser, nothing to install. Practice chasing down mic feedback, follow a signal from the mic to the speaker and figure out why nothing's coming through, run a soundcheck. It's a tool to sharpen your skills on your off time so you're ready when these things go wrong in a real show. Try the free version here: Troubleshooting Lab (Free) Let me know what you think. Talk soon, PS - This is one piece of something bigger I've been working on. This Thursday at 1pm Eastern, I'm going live on YouTube with Casey Hunter, the professor who taught me live sound in college, to trade stories about the shows that went wrong and how we learned to stay calm in those situations. It's free to watch, and it's the kickoff to opening our full live sound program this week. I'll send the livestream link Thursday. |
