Travel, Training & New Gear

I’m writing this post from a gate at the airport in Minneapolis. This is a pretty rare occurrence for me. Air travel isn’t in the normal scope of work for a guy whose gig is decidedly stationary and vacations are usually of the “stuff the family and belongings into the car and drive for days” variety.
This isn’t a vacation though so the occasion is even rarer. I’ve been away for a couple days to attend some training on the Yamaha PM5D digital mixing system. Yamaha put on these training events around the country and even in Canada as a customer service/marketing service. Yamaha has a pretty good crew running these shows and they really know their products. The best part of the whole deal is that these trainings are free of charge. No purchase necessary!
I was able to attend one in Atlanta a year or so back that was focused on their then-relatively new M7CL console. This was my first real experience with a digital console of any sort and I really liked the flexibility offered by the latest crop. The very idea of storing and recalling all the parameters of something as complex as a multi-channel mixer is a thing of beauty. Add to that the compressors, gates, effects, and patching are all right there in a box I could pick up and carry to the car and you can make a sound guy pretty happy indeed.
Of course, there are trade-offs. All your eggs are there in one basket. There’s that touch screen to contend with. There’s also a pretty scary paradigm shift. You have to change your thinking. You have to look at the pages and menus on the screen to see how things are set. What’s the threshold on that compressor? I duno, let me find it on the screen.
As with everything else though, digital is the future.
The M7 is a great piece of kit for the market it’s aimed at. Churches and sound companies have been snatching them up at a pretty good clip since they were introduced. We even thought it would probably work well as a replacement for the PM4000 in the Dome’s control room. We liked the fact that the all the faders were available on the surface and it seemed to have enough inputs and outputs to contend with our usual requirements.
As it turned out, there was more money available for the mixer upgrade than we had been planning on so I set out on a search for the “right” digital mixer for our needs. Our set-up isn’t really what the system designers are thinking about when they’re chalking up the next big thing. We’re not really like a theater, rock show, corporate stage show, theme park, or even a television production. We’re a little of all those things, of course, but if you were going to design the perfect console for any of them, it would have bits that we don’t need and maybe it’d be missing stuff we would really like. We use a lot of outputs, for instance, but I’ve got no time for your fancy reverbs. Before we bought the 01v last year, we didn’t even have any “wet” effects at all and to be honest, I haven’t even tried the ones in that box.
I spent a lot of time online looking at several different mixing platforms from the likes of Digidesign, Allen & Heath, Soundcraft, and a few others. I reached out to friends and colleagues who were likely more wise than I am. We even went to see a couple different mixers at local churches. In the end I ended-up where I thought I’d be from the beginning. We put out an RFQ for a PM5D last week. If all goes well it will be installed by mid July and we’ll be rocking the Dome with a digital desk this season.
I knew from the get-go that the 5D had specs enough to satisfy our requirements. The thing is, it’s been out for almost five years. In today’s digital world, a five year old piece of electronics has certainly been superseded, if not rendered totally obsolete. For some markets, the same could be said for the 5D. In the five or six years since it’s design several others have had their shot at making something better. The competition has done a good job too as many of the newer consoles are gaining market share to be sure. The 5D has been the benchmark during this time and it has weathered the storm of competition very well. With the recent major software revision, Yamaha has included many new features and changed the way some other things work. It seems that they’ve been listening to the thousands of customers that have been attending these training seminars around the country year after year.
One of the things I learned from having one of their products for several years and from the M7 class I took is that Yamaha has a well thought out customer service department. I haven’t had to take advantage of their 24/7 emergency number, but it’s good to know it’s there. And one of their two national service centers is at CTG, right there in Atlanta. I know those things can change, but it’s another piece of mind when your making a big purchase like this.
This week’s training sessions were as good as the one I attended last year. Jose and Shawn are very informed about their products and they never hesitate to delve deep into any questions you might have during their presentations. Jose stopped his talk several times to attempt to recreate the hypothetical situations we came up with and see what the mixer would do. He’s still curious when he doesn’t know the answer to a question and he wants to figure it out as much as we do.
The first day was mostly stuff that I figured out by watching the videos that are available online and during a couple days of playing with a rental mixer that was loaned to me a few weeks ago (thanks HiTech!). Of course there were a few tips and deeper-level things that I hadn’t picked up before so it was worth it.
Today’s session consisted of file management and expanded-system configurations. The file management stuff was VERY helpful since it’s something that I have not had to deal with before. It’s pretty darned complicated too. I think I have a pretty good understanding now and I’m pretty sure that I would not have gotten this far without some human instruction. There is only so much one can discern from a PDF file on the internet.
I’ll post more about this project as it goes along. There are a few different phases of the installation and I’m sure there will be some interesting stories that come from us climbing the learning curve.

Just to put your mind at ease, I did make it home safe and sound. The weather had us hanging around at the gate for a while and we were late getting home, but I made it to work on time the next day. :)