Tuesday, February 19, 2013




Have you ever been to Miami?  A lot of people have.  Ponce De Leon was one of them.  Kim Kardashian and We Are Scientist's Keith Murray are two others.  And now I, Kenneth Wilfred Cook*, can be added to that prestigious list.  Okay, in truth, I've been to Miami a bunch of times, but on those trips I mostly spent my time wondering when I would be allowed to leave Miami and I can honestly say that until this trip I had never slept within the confines of Miami-Dade County.  The simple fact is that I've just never found Miami that interesting of a destination.  However, after recently spending a little over two weeks there, I have learned to...well, let's not say "like" Miami, as that would be a little less than accurate, but I can confidently say that I don't dislike Miami.  It has it's perks in the form of great weather and aesthetic pleasantries, but I still have this suspicion that Miami Beach and South Beach are pretty much what Los Angeles would be like if Los Angeles was only West Hollywood.  But with alligator-sized mosquitoes.  Oh, and alligators, as well.  Those sea cow things are pretty cool, though, and I've heard that they taste exquisite.  Anyway, let's get to the meat of this South Beach diet...

THE LEGALITIES OF PRODUCTION...

Without any joking around, I'll say that the show I was working on in Miami was actually pretty dope and I look forward to it airing in, oh, I don't know...within the next year or so.  Here, let me tell you all about it.  It's called...


Ruh-roh!!!  No, that's not the name of the show.  I can't tell you the name of the show**.  You see, when you work on a TV show, especially a competition show, you have to sign this little document called a Non-Disclosure Agreement.  It basically says that if you talk to anyone not directly related to the production of the show about any content aspect of the show, you'll get the living shit sued out of you.  The fact that this show had an impressively large purse of prize money makes it even trickier, legally, to talk about it at all.  There's a list of rules that production companies legally have to follow in competition shows with prize money to a) protect themselves from any lawsuits alleging impropriety, and b) avoid angering the feds.  So, sorry, dudes.  When the show airs I'll write about it episode by episode.  I will be able to do that due to the fact that while the show itself is cool, some of the work days involved in making it have significantly and permanently scarred my brain.  So, when was the last time you worked a 105 hour work week?

Here's a few things I can tell you about this trip:

-Miami exists in a strange, alternate timeline in which rock and roll never happened.  Honestly, I'm totally cool with that, as guitar music has been absolute garbage for the past decade or so and finally needs to be stomped out by a giant boot.

-Kid Capri is super cool and his birthday party was a shit-ton of fun.

-If you go to Miami, I highly recommend visiting the beach.  I've heard it's nice, although I have zero first hand proof of that, as I never got a chance to go.

-Just because a sushi place has a five star review rating on Yelp doesn't mean that it's actually good.

-Miami defies one of the oldest constants in the physical universe.  Allow me to explain...

THE LAW OF HOTEL ROOM CONSISTENCY...

Here, let me show you a few pictures.







What we have here are three different pictures of three different hotel rooms in two different hotel chains.  Notice anything?  If you have your acute observation cap snuggly secure upon your mellon you've probably noticed that they LOOK EXACTLY THE FUCKING SAME.  Brown carpet, comforters with fake throw blankets sown into them, wheeled office chair in a space to small to wheel around, etc.  Sure, sometimes there are two beds and sometimes there's one big bed, but that's pretty much all the variation you're going to find in hotel rooms.  And that's the way hotel chains want it to be.  It's done for consumer reasons.  Something about guests feeling more at home if there is minimal variation in hotel rooms, or some such horse shit.  Regardless, this is how it is all across America.  But wait!  Check this out...


What?!!!  Hardwood floors?  Beds that look like they were made in the past few years?  Real curtains and no wheely chair?  Dear, Aqua Hotel of Miami Beach, you are a renegade among sheep.  Okay, the lack of a pool was a bummer, but thank you for a few nights of variety.

So, I know how much you all love it when I go on long tangents about sound equipment, but I'd like to point out that this is supposed to at least kind of be an audio blog, so I'm going to take this moment to talk gear.  If you want to get a snack this would be a good time to do it, but don't take too long, as this is going to be short.

In brief, I'm not a fan of Audio Technica wireless systems.  They work fine when you have a sharkfin up (it's basically just a funny looking antenna that boosts the signal of a wireless system), but without one they have a range of roughly...oh, let's say...four feet.  If you're lucky.  Complete garbage.  Also, while you're all aware of my intense love of the Sound Devices 788T, let me introduce you to a machine that makes me literally (figuratively) want to kill whoever designed it.  Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the Tascam HS-P82...



The "P" in the name of the recorder stands for "Portable," but if you look closely you may notice that this absolute piece of shit, heavy as fuck, brick of a machine has table feet.  If your product has table feet you probably shouldn't refer to it as being portable (which in the production world means "it goes in a bag and you strap it to yourself as you run around chasing stuff).  To top it off, it constantly drifts timecode, only has one set of balanced LR outs, no dedicated outs, and is fucking touch screen.  TOUCH SCREEN.  Do have any idea how easy that makes it to accidentally arm/disarm/mute a track or, oh I don't know, accidentally turn the machine off mid-recording?!!!!!!  Total garbage.  Tascam should be embarrassed to have this monstrosity in its line.  After being stuck with one of these for over two weeks I seriously hope Tascam goes out of business.

Oh yeah, I lied about the gear part of this being short, btw...

Here it is...


The Sound Devices 664 field mixer/recorder.  It's the balls...but sadly, there are some drawbacks.  There's not a whole lot that I can say about it that hasn't been said in other reviews (that's my nice way of saving all of you that don't care about my gear reviews some time and me the effort), but I can confirm that this type of system is definitely the way forward for ENG/reality/documentary.  I've used it about four times this week and have only run into a couple of trouble spots with its menu interface.  The most annoying one is that I can't seem to assign names to the individual tracks, which the manual says is an easy thing to do.  Also, the scene/shot names don't seem to be taking, which is actually a huge deal.  I was working a pretty hectic shoot, so it could be something as simple as an additional "OK" prompt, or the fact that I changed my mind and switched my recording media at the last second.  I'm sure there's a simple fix for those, even if it's a firmware update.  SUPER HUGE BUMMER is that there is no option in file management for recording to mono.wav files.  This actually sucks super hard in my opinion and I find it oddly sneaky that the generally awesome Sound Devices company just kind of skipped over that little tidbit in all of the product literature.  The simple fact is that most editors are idiots and every time I can record my tracks mono.wav it saves me getting this phone call: "Uh...hey.  It's [Name] from [Show].  So, um...I'm looking at the audio tracks and there's only, like, one of them.  I thought there were, like, 8 or something..."  They're interleaved, bro!!!!  Anyway...

I found a really neat new app for Lectrosonic wireless systems that works as a remote control.  It's super practical, but also hilarious due to the fact that a) it works by sending a tone through the lav mic that the transmitter is attached to, b) that tone sounds like an old dial-up modem, and c) you have to hold your phone, while it's making the dial-up noise, right up to the chest of whomever the wireless system is on...and it fucking freaks people out, man.  Love it!

So...I showed up to a shoot the other day to find this...



Yep.  It earned the nickname Rape Ape over the course of the day simply due to how damn creepy the thing was.

So, that's about it for now.  I'll try, and probably fail, to update this thing more often.  Or whatever.

Peace in the AL East, y'all.

*Wait...that's not my middle name
**Let's just say that it's a DJ battle show