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[Brian Jojade]

I have a theory that we are wired to think that we understand stuff we don't really (cave man staying alert thing). When we try to write (or teach) some subject we realize the gaps in our understanding, we also get to communicate between both sides of our brains that rarely talk to each other... Teaching (writing) makes us smarter.... or at least more aware of our ignorance.

JR

100% agree.  I hate when I'm teaching someone something and you ask if they understand. They say they do. Then you ask them to tell you what it is they understand and, well, yeah, it hasn't sunk in at all to them yet.

It's easy to take in information, it's tough to get it to come back out!

[Tim McCulloch]

In a previous decade we hired a fellow who had no experience in music and car stereo/home video were his technical background.

Bill (RIP, buddy) was from Arkansas, and he'd politely let me go on and on about some concept or application.  Once I pause he'd ask "can you translate that into hillbilly?"  It was revealing in the ways we're talking about here - if you can't explain something at least a couple of different ways, you probably don't understand that thing as well as you believe you do...  and internalizing a concept isn't the same as understanding a concept well enough to explain and teach the concept.

[Jeff Lelko]

It's easy to take in information, it's tough to get it to come back out!

Yep, and that's why they say the best way to master a subject is to teach it!  Despite having no formal training in education I've been in plenty of teaching roles in the past and present, and students always have a way of finding questions to stump me with or coming up with a suggestion I hadn't thought about before.  People think and learn in lots of different ways!

Scott, about 30% serious 70% joking.  I've got a July 2nd and July 4th show this year - July 2nd is the smaller of the two and a piece of cake whereas the July 4th display is much more involved.  It's three fun days of bouncing around on barges in the Florida heat and summer storms along with shuffling trucks and splicing wires until your fingernails fall off.  The credit card boaters provide plenty of entertainment throughout the day plus the featured 22 minutes of controlled chaos keeps things interesting.  I'd definitely be down for working together at some point though - maybe on of these years I'll fly up for your marathon of stages at the zoo!

[Tom Roche]

There is a lot of science to developing effective training, but there's some art as well.  Instructional Systems Design was my passion for many years, having worked for a world-class producer of interactive multimedia when the Internet was still fairly young.

[Don T. Williams]

Worked an event last weekend for my production partners company.  Mains, subs and fills sounded great as did the acts we mixed (both mains and monitors.)  The headliner and opener before them had their on consoles and IEM rigs.  Headliner had sound-checked with no problems and was happy with our rig.  Local bands were easy,  The opener for the headlines hooked up to our racks and stacks (L,R,Fill,Subs) with no problems.  Everything worked great for 15 minutes and then the lead vocal disappeared from the mix.  Her engineer was mixing from monitor world using his rack mounted PreSonus via iPad- no control surface and didn't hear she was MIA.  We had to tell him the lead vocal was gone. After a few minutes of futzing with his iPad he called our system tech over and said it was our problem.  Huh, the only thing not working was her main vocal signal.  He showed us his iPad to prove he had signal.  We don't use or own any PreSonus mixers or know the iPad app.  To "solve" the problem we finally took his LR audio to video feed and Y-ed into the main LR racks and stacks inputs.  The vocal was back.  He turned to someone next to him and said: "See, I told you it was their problem."  Our racks and stacks can magically delete the female lead vocal mic!  Of course the headliner had zero problems with the L+R main outs from his console for their show.  I'm not sure my partner will be offered the show next year.  The event manager is good friends the the opener's engineer.

[John Roberts {JR}]

Yep, and that's why they say the best way to master a subject is to teach it!  Despite having no formal training in education I've been in plenty of teaching roles in the past and present, and students always have a way of finding questions to stump me with or coming up with a suggestion I hadn't thought about before.  People think and learn in lots of different ways!

Not to quibble but I've known some teachers (including seminar instructors) who didn't truly understand the material and tried to blind the audience with buzzwords.

Semi-amusing story... back when I was still doing the big trade show in Frankfurt every year with Peavey, they would have us meet with the EU reps first thing in the morning after flying all night. 

One year the reps hit up the digital director with some difficult questions about his products that he couldn't answer with buzz words. In distress he asked me (mixers) and the director of analog engineering for help to bail him out.  Even if we could we just shrugged our shoulders, not our area of expertise mon. 

JR

[John Fruits]

OK, this was a half century or so ago but I was in a theater lighting class and the professor decided to tell us about these newfangled QUARTZ lamps. According to him they had a glowing quartz crystal inside emitting the light.

[Riley Casey]

Many, many years ago we were doing an event for the DOD in a large convention center hall. Wide but shallow room with arrays along the long dimension  As we always did for speech centric events the entire system was in mono.  The military service ran all of the video playback from their own truck in the loading dock three floors below ( you didn't think all the defense budget went for bombs and bullets did you? ). About the third video in, the big deal intro for some general or maybe the Secretary of that service, the video rolled on cue. It was apparently hot out of the video suite at the Pentagon and had arrived moments before the cue so wasn't on hand for rehearsal. Sounded fine, big music swell and plenty of low end for the big PA to work with but about 30 seconds in the Intercom lite up with the director asking "where the vocal?" The truck replied " we hear it fine" but it wasn't in the room. I cued up the stereo input it was arriving on and had the vocal. It seems the vocal in the stereo mix was 180 degrees out of phase between the two channels and was canceling when summed to mono. By the time we sorted this out we were down to the last 30 secs of the video so I had to ask the director if I should pan the channel to one side to bring the vocal track for the last few lines but he wisely said no, it's only a screw up to the few that know it's missing, if we bring it in now its a screw up that 3000 people are aware of.  I've always wondered what that vocal sounded like on the monitors in the video truck.

...Everything worked great for 15 minutes and then the lead vocal disappeared from the mix.  ...

[brian maddox]

Worked an event last weekend for my production partners company.  Mains, subs and fills sounded great as did the acts we mixed (both mains and monitors.)  The headliner and opener before them had their on consoles and IEM rigs.  Headliner had sound-checked with no problems and was happy with our rig.  Local bands were easy,  The opener for the headlines hooked up to our racks and stacks (L,R,Fill,Subs) with no problems.  Everything worked great for 15 minutes and then the lead vocal disappeared from the mix.  Her engineer was mixing from monitor world using his rack mounted PreSonus via iPad- no control surface and didn't hear she was MIA.  We had to tell him the lead vocal was gone. After a few minutes of futzing with his iPad he called our system tech over and said it was our problem.  Huh, the only thing not working was her main vocal signal.  He showed us his iPad to prove he had signal.  We don't use or own any PreSonus mixers or know the iPad app.  To "solve" the problem we finally took his LR audio to video feed and Y-ed into the main LR racks and stacks inputs.  The vocal was back.  He turned to someone next to him and said: "See, I told you it was their problem."  Our racks and stacks can magically delete the female lead vocal mic!  Of course the headliner had zero problems with the L+R main outs from his console for their show.  I'm not sure my partner will be offered the show next year.  The event manager is good friends the the opener's engineer.

I"m sorry this happened to you but I'd consider it lesson learned. This is why I don't go to heroic efforts to solve other people's problems, even though it's my instinct to be as helpful as possible. It's a hard lesson to learn, but anyone who has been doing this long enough has a story of rendering assistance to another department, or to someone else outside our direct responsibility only to have it go sideways in some way and then find themselves blamed for the original problem or blamed for not fixing something that wasn't their problem to begin with.

Obviously hindsight is 20/20 so I'm not Monday morning quarterbacking I promise. But to anyone who is faced with this kind of "fingerpointing" issue, the best approach is first to make ABSOLUTELY SURE it isn't your problem, which in your case just required some common sense. In other circumstances you may want to break out the QBox to make sure you're sending what you think you're sending, etc. Then if you're still getting the finger pointed at you, it's time to PROVE that it IS their problem. In your case, I would have pulled the XLR coming from his mixer and feeding your system and put a QBox on it to confirm that his mix indeed had no vocal. Yes, that takes out half the PA, but whatever. you're in firefighter mode anyway. Then show them that indeed he is not sending any vocal and watch him scramble to fix his issue. Then try not to gloat, but fail and gloat at least a little bit even if only on the inside.

In full disclosure, I've been on the OTHER side of this a time or two and had to have someone prove to ME that I was the problem, which can be humbling. But the issue got fixed and no innocent party got thrown under the bus.

[Chris Hindle]

Last century I *thought* I (and the company that hired me) were going to get fired.
Rock Show on Saturday, back to the shop and add more gear, then an 8:am setup  for a corporate on Sunday.
Had an issue with a 58 on the Rock Show. e-tape on the mic "Fucked". Tossed it back in the mic box.

Part way through the Sunday gig, the Director came up to me "The senior VP is not on your schedule but she wants to say something"
No problem, At the bottom of the stage stairs, someone will hand her a mic.
I get on comms with the stage manager, and explain the change.
No problem.
We had a couple of green hands with us that day.
How tough is it to "Grab a 58 from that box over there, and put a 50 foot cable on it, plug into #43 on that box over there"?
Not difficult at all, and he did it perfectly........
She gets on stage, and lifts the mic to her mouth (I know it works, I have been cuing it since the hand plugged it in)
"Oh this microphone says something.. F-U-C-K-E... Oh my. Can everyone hear me?"
to which there was a resounding "YES" She turned red, and went on with her bit.

20 minutes later "Big Cheese" comes over with the director....  Here we go, right?

He slaps me on the back, hands me a hundred bucks, and says "Son, that was the best meeting we've ever had. How did you come up with that little stunt?"
Of course, I had nothing to say but "Thank you sir, we'll see you next year?"
I personally did them for another 3 years.

Back at the shop, that mic had a cold solder joint on the XLR.

Chris.

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