April 11, 2015 editorial: comments

Don’t Turn That Knob!

If you were a fan of The Far Side, the brilliant cartoons by Gary Larsen, you might remember one with the caption, “Raymond’s last day as the band’s sound technician.” It showed a guy at a mixing board at a live show, turning up a knob labeled “Suck.”

I could be snarky and speculate about how many bands there are that don’t even need a knob like that, but actually I bring it up because thinking of that cartoon triggered another memory — a story I heard from a sound engineer who worked a lot on sessions for advertising music. In the course of those sessions, he had to work with a lot ad agency people, some of whom were “know it all” types who thought they had lots of great ideas about how to improve the mix, but frequently had no idea what they were talking about — and thus made terrible suggestions. Since they were clients, the engineer couldn’t just say “no,” so instead, he used something he called “the placebo knob.”

He would go over to a knob or fader on the console on an unused channel, and make show of turning or moving it, so that the person who asked for the change could see him do it. Then he’s say something like, “How’s that?” The agency person, fooled by the power of suggestion, would invariably say something like, “That’s much better, thanks.”

Recalling that story brought another to mind, of a conversation overhead in the control room between an engineer and another clueless advertising client, as the music played back:

Client: What’s that horrible banging sound?

Engineer: Uh, that’s the snare drum.

Oops.

So what’s my point here? Nothing in particular, I just thought I’d pass on some humorous recording-related tidbits (and if you have some funny studio stories, I’d love to hear them).

Actually, I do have one important thing to mention this week: Next Wednesday through Saturday (April 15 through 18th) is Musikmesse, the massive music trade show that takes place annually in Frankfurt, Germany. Audiofanzine will be covering it from beginning to end. We’ve already started posting product announcements from the show in our news section, and we’ll be posting videos during the show.

Hopefully, there will be some surprise announcements of new and cool gear, although so much stuff was announced at NAMM that one wonders what the manufacturers have left. We shall see. Stay tuned.

Have a great week.