Episode 41: CLEVETOBERFEST

Organizing a Live Music Event: Insights from CLEVETOBERFEST

In this episode of the Face Your Ears podcast, hosts Rich Bozic and Justin Hochella share their experience organizing and executing a live music event, CLEVETOBERFEST. They discuss essential aspects such as planning, obtaining permits, securing locations, organizing equipment, setting up audio routing schematics, and managing live sound. They also touch on the importance of rehearsals, using DI boxes, and getting the most out of audio mixers. An emphasis is placed on the value of meticulous preparation and the sense of community inherent in live performances. Additionally, they announce their feature on Mark Matthews' Inside the Mix podcast [listen here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-36-marc-matthews/id1633675100?i=1000714296293 ] and encourage listeners to explore their YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@FaceYourEarsPodcast/shorts

00:00 Welcome to Face Your Ears Podcast
00:54 YouTube Presence and Exciting News
01:25 Special Feature on Inside the Mix Podcast
02:19 Diving into Live Sound
03:09 Planning and Setting Up a Live Event
04:21 Technical Details and Equipment Setup
08:10 Challenges and Solutions During the Event
23:28 Final Thoughts and Recap

For Production Services, Coaching and Lessons, visit:

www.rjbmusicproduction.com

For help prepping your songs/voice for the studio:

www.bozicvoicestudio.com

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Transcript

Rich 0:09

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Face Your Ears podcast. I'm Rich Bozic and I am joined today with manmade random Justin H.

Justin 0:25

That is I. Hello, how are you, rich?

Rich 0:28

Doing well, keeping it going here. The machine is rolling along.

Justin 0:32

Excellent, If you're listening to this podcast and you're not watching a YouTube short I just wanna make mention of Rich's clean shaven look here. He looks about good 10 to 15 years younger as a young man. So if you, catch him in the YouTube clip, don't be surprised.

Rich 0:49

Yeah, we'll see. We'll see.

Justin 0:50

Looking good.

Rich 0:51

I wanted to let everyone know in case you didn't know. Justin kind of mentioned it, we have a YouTube presence. Face your ears podcast. On YouTube. You could see some shorts. You could even listen through YouTube if that's what you prefer to do. What do you think about that, Justin? I.

Justin 1:06

I think it's fantastic. people should definitely check out the YouTube channel. I love the shorts that are there. It gives you a little more insight into who we are and what we do. But yeah, I think it's it's terrific and we've gotten a lot of really good. Traction there and people seem to really like it, so definitely check it out.

Rich 1:25

so we have some other news for you guys. One of our episodes the one about AI and vocals will be featured on Mark Matthews inside the Mix podcast. Coming up soon, he reached out to us and asked us if we wanted to have one of our episodes featured. We gladly accepted, so stay tuned for that. And I wanted to also mention that we did interview Mark Matthews on a previous episode 36. check that out.

Justin 1:57

Yeah, we'll link it in the show notes if you wanna check it out. It's a really good one. He's a really knowledgeable, skilled producer, mixer engineer, so definitely check that out. we're really excited to have Mark feature our. Episode on AI vocals. We loved having him on the podcast. Hopefully we can have him on again some time in the future. But for today we're gonna pivot into something a little bit different, which is in regards to live sound. we recently had quite, quite an experience with this Rich, right? And so do you want to tell the listeners how we came up with this topic and why we're gonna be delving into it?

Rich 2:36

Sure. So it's time to get out of the studio and step out into the

Justin 2:40

Ah, the real world.

Rich 2:43

Yes. Yes. There is sound happening out there. Folks sound outside the studio. So Justin mentioned we had an event, We've talked about it in the past, a little event called Cleve Tober Fest that we had over here in New Jersey. And it went wonderfully. We had a great occasion, a great day with a lot of different performers. And it also had some local brew involved. it was truly a good experience, but we wanted to talk a little bit about the details of the sound and how to get a gig like this up and running, perhaps in your neck of the woods. we're gonna break things down a little bit and talk about. Some of the, details, and if I could just jump right in.

Justin 3:27

Sure.

Rich 3:27

so the first thing you want is to nail down the details of your event. We did an outdoor block party style event, so we need to get a permit from the town. we got all the necessary insurance and everything for that and. once we had the location secured and the date secured with permission from the higher ups, then conscripted performers for the event. a lot of the performers were from my studio. We also had a few outside performers come in and

Justin 4:01

Yeah, in including me.

Rich 4:03

Yes, absolutely. Yeah. Justin came down and you and Jay did a set, which was great. And once that's set,

Justin 4:10

Okay.

Rich 4:10

I got the rehearsals going. And the rehearsals are important on many levels, not just to practice the songs themselves, but on a sound level, which we'll get into in a little bit. The thing I sat down and did that was very helpful was I made a schematic of the equipment and how I was gonna arrange it, on the stage which was very helpful.

Justin 4:32

just to go into that a little bit more, I think the schematic was so helpful because of the sheer amount of equipment. And so just to tick it off real quick, you've got a mixer, you've got monitors for the performers, you've got speakers for the audience, you have. Countless cables connecting everything. You've got microphones many, many microphones. You've got a virtual drum kit. You've got all the different instruments to consider. You've got, we even had lights and electrical. So it becomes so. Dense and complex that you need to be able to like, have some sort of a map and plan in place before you, you go out and execute. So I think, it at first blush seems oh, it's just a little local block party, you know, couldn't be that difficult. And it's oh, contrare.

Rich 5:22

Yeah.

Justin 5:22

was extremely complex. And so like on a technical level, one of the things that caught my attention in this process was that you really dove into your mixer functionality quite a bit. Can you talk a little bit more about that and like why you did that and what you learned and so forth.

Rich 5:40

Oh yeah. What was very helpful was. Getting a spreadsheet set up for the mixer. So what I did was I took my mixer, I mapped out all of the channels, the inputs and the outputs that I was gonna use. I went through and mapped out the needs for each performer. So how many guitars are we having, how many singers I went through set by set. And so then I knew whether I had enough channels on my board How I was going to arrange things on the board so that it made sense when we sat down behind the mixer to adjust things on the fly. I did a Two zone monitors set up. So I had monitors in the front for mainly the singers who stood out front. And then I had monitors in a back section for the backing band. So I had to plan out the sentence for that and how that was gonna work. And I had my setup, I have two mains and a sub. and then I also. Borrowed two other like four by 10 mains to add to the, front of house setup to fill it out a little more.'cause we were outside, which was plenty. It was more than enough. So going through basically planning out what were the needs in each band performer project, what instruments. Planning it out on the board putting it into a spreadsheet, and then having that all ready on the day of. So when we set things up, we could, so we weren't lost basically.

Justin 7:19

you used the return channels for the monitors, right? That's how you ended up using the mixer, is that right?

Rich 7:25

I have on my mixer, I have an aux send, Section. I think there are four sends. So each channel has its own individual aux send knob, so I was able to, for each channel, assign it either to the front monitor group or the back monitor group. So if the drummer wanted more drums, but we didn't want the singers necessarily to have more drums in the front, we could do that.

Justin 7:52

Yeah, that was a really creative use of the mixer functionality. Generally, those are used for effects and not as often with, a monitoring kind of situation like that. So I thought that was a really creative sort of use of that feature, that function on the mixer. So Rich, I noticed that you had redundancies with cables and certain equipment, and can you talk more about that?

Rich 8:18

Sure. So on the board itself, I always make sure I have a spare channel or two just in case something goes wrong. During the live situation sometimes things happen, right? So you want to have that wiggle room in your board. with regard to cables, obviously always bring extra cables. Just in case of varying sizes. I did plan that out in advance, like what size cables I would use, where and everything. But I had some extras and I asked people to have a few extras with regard to, getting the guitars and the bass into into the setup. We didn't run the bass into the mixer. We let the bass be just free standing.'cause of the bass carries pretty well. You just gotta

Justin 9:03

Mm-hmm.

Rich 9:03

the bass player in, make sure no, random turning up of the volume happening, which didn't happen luckily. And then with regard to the guitars, we ran into one issue. I don't know if you recall this, Justin. We had an issue with the guitar making a lot of noise when we

Justin 9:19

Oh yeah. Yeah.

Rich 9:22

So what we did was we had an extra mic and we micd up the amp. And that seemed to help the situation. Now obviously we didn't have as much control at the board because of that, but it minimized some of that noise. It was funny'cause even with the DI box, it didn't I thought the DI box would help reduce some of that noise. But there was just something that day the audio gods weren't having it.

Justin 9:46

you mentioned DI Box. for people that don't know what that is? Can you elaborate

Rich 9:50

Sure.

Justin 9:51

more? I.

Rich 9:51

DI box what it is, it's a little box that you run an XLR cable out of your board, and then. You could have various inputs into the box. So you could have quarter inch inputs. The ones I had quarter inch inputs, RCA left and right inputs and eighth inch input, uh, and even XLR inputs. And what this does is it allows you to basically extend a signal with minimal noise. So if you have, something that you gotta run a long distance. Sometimes if you use just like a quarter inch cable to run something along distance, you could get some line loss or some noise because of that, and the DI box helps to extend that signal. also found that the DI box is good to be able to get instruments that don't have an XLR out into the snake. The stage snake and the stage snake is like a box up on the stage that has a bunch of inputs that correspond to channels on the mixing board. And it's a way to extend the inputs of the mixing board to the stage so you don't have to run everything to the mixing board. and the di box allows you to convert different kinds of audio signals to XLR to be able to plug into the board easily.

Justin 11:07

Yeah, I, I thought it was direct input but I just looked it up. It's direct injection.

Rich 11:12

Oh,

Justin 11:13

Whatever,

Rich 11:13

wow. Okay.

Justin 11:15

why, whatever the difference is. Injection just sounds more important I guess. I dunno. But yes, thank you for explaining that. I was less familiar with it because they're generally speaking live sound tool. They're not that you can't use them in a studio, but they're just predominantly used in live settings, I think. So it was a new. Experience for me and it was cool to learn about those.

Rich 11:38

do have a DI box set up in my studio what I do is I, the way my studio is set up is I have. I could have a live band rehearsal down here, and sometimes I wanna record that rehearsal. So

Justin 11:51

Yep.

Rich 11:52

the signal split from the di box for the guitarists one to go into the mixing board, or one that goes directly into my daw. So Record, I can easily just fire it up and record the same signal.

Justin 12:04

Awesome. I love how you had all of those different cables labeled. Like it was so easy for us to just sift through'em and know what was what, everything was labeled very clearly and the redundancy of things like the extra, yeah,

Rich 12:20

my cable labeling. It's

Justin 12:23

it's important. It is important. Oh my gosh. It will save you so much time. because oh, okay, I need at least 20 feet. Let me grab this 25 foot cable. Have a little slack, like that kind of thing. It was great. And just having, so there were so many cables and like having an extra snake was great. Can you explain what a snake is real quick? If somebody out there doesn't know what a snake is, it's a wonderful invention

Rich 12:48

the one I have, has 16. Inputs and four outputs. And what it is, it's a box that sits on the ground on the stage, and it has a long cable extending out of it. The cable on mine is 50 feet, so you can set up your mixing board about 50 feet away from the center of where the. S the snake on the stage sits, so you could have some distance between the stage and the mixing board so you can get a better mix. And then what happens is in that cable, there are a bunch of little cables inside of it on the other end all plug into the mixing board. So the inputs on the stage would then you'd plug your instruments and mics into that on stage and then input one on the snake with the correspond to input one on the mixer. Et cetera. And so you get all, you could plug in match it all up to where you wanted in the mixing board, and then the outputs. Are from the mixing board. On the other end of the snake with the cable, you'd plug it into your outputs on your board, and then that sends it to the outputs on the snake. So then you could then run that to the speakers so you can output the sound to the speakers.

Justin 13:56

Yeah.

Rich 13:56

I had four and I use two, two of them for the left and right house, left and right. And then two of them for the monitors front and back.

Justin 14:05

like a, very clean, fancy version of extensions, like extension cables for the audio,

Rich 14:11

If you had to use On every cable that we were running that day,

Justin 14:15

It would've been insane. Yeah, it just makes it like instead of having to plug everybody directly into the mixer, they just plug into the snake, which is far more convenient, far more clean and orderly. And then the snake is what plugs into the mixer. So very handy little accessory for live sound. And, you know, I was talking about how great it was having all those labels and everything organized. That makes me think about how we had a very short amount of time for setup. And I think the equipment organization was a huge help in that regard, especially when it came to delegating the tasks for setting up the stage.

Rich 14:50

what I did was. Leading up to the event, I took inventory of all the equipment I needed based on my schematic, made sure I had all the right number of cables for everything labeled the lengths on everything. So it was easy to find what we needed. And then when we got to the. Location on the day of the performance. Then it was easy to be like, this cable goes here, this cable goes here, so that we could be up and running faster.'cause as always, no matter how much time you delegate towards setup, there's never enough time. It just never feels like enough time.

Justin 15:25

stuff crops up like the guitar thing, right? Like the unexpected. You should expect the unexpected, like the guitar being really noisy and us having to pivot and figure out, how to incorporate that in a way where it was sounding okay and sitting in with everything. But what other considerations come to your mind when you think about doing something like this, a live music event like this?

Rich 15:48

one of the big considerations was the electrical component. So we had, our main power for the setup came from my buddy Mike's house who we set up in front of. So we were just gonna run one extension, but with the. Amount of speakers and instruments amps, things like that. We had plugged into the system. We decided to play it safe and run from two different circuits in his house. So I think one came from the garage and one came from his living room. Actually, we ran two separate. Extension cables to split up the load on the circuit in the house so we don't randomly blow the circuit. So that was one consideration. Another consideration is, something that we didn't do, but something to consider for future is some wireless setup for some of the microphones. We did all wired mics because the snake was there, and that's all I had in my setup. I know if our buddy Burak who was in RJB with us was there, he would've insisted that I use wireless microphones for the. Lead vocals. And I could see why'cause it allows a, the singer to be able to move around a little more. if you're gonna do that, have some extra battery packs on hand.'Cause those microphones can eat up batteries.

Justin 17:04

that would've been nice. But yeah, even for us, it was like a, how long were we there? Eight or nine hours.

Rich 17:09

were there a long time. The show itself was, I think close to what, five hours or so? Five,

Justin 17:14

Yeah.

Rich 17:15

five hours. Yeah. We had, we filled it with music. There was there were a lot of acts and a lot of bands so that was cool.

Justin 17:21

Yeah.

Rich 17:22

Another thing to consider also is to really nail down before the gig. Who's bringing what with regard to outside equipment, because sometimes people get very particular about, we don't want to use the amp that you have there for the guitarist. We want our own amp or our own pedalboard. And to be able to better accommodate that kind of stuff. It's good to know what they're bringing and what kind of outputs it has, so you know how to run it into the board. So that was a, that's a big consideration. Justin, you were running the sound at times that night. What kind of things did you notice?

Justin 17:58

It was fairly hands off. Overall, I would say I would say there were like minor adjustments between sets. Some performers were more particular than others about adjusting their sound. I think that one of the challenges, just thinking back on it, that comes to mind for me is how loud the monitors were compared to the house speakers. And so it, it was almost as if we didn't need the main speakers because they were so loud and, that was a challenge, I guess in a way to balance that so that the performers could hear, but also the audience could hear well enough. And I think we accomplished it. There I don't think there were any complaints or anything. It just goes. To show like how loud that stuff is. Like they're really powerful. Like the equipment we had wasn't huge or anything either, but it was so powerful. It was so loud. So I think that was just an interesting observation. I don't think it. Created any sort of negative experience for anybody. But it was just interesting to, to think about that. I think yeah, the guitar that we mentioned was definitely a challenge. I. I think we, we weren't afraid to run up'cause it was a very like, casual affair to run up and like actually turn things down, like the bass amp or the Guitar Amp. In mid performance if we needed to, that kind of thing. one thing I found really helpful in running the board was just how we had the mixer itself labeled, and so just having a really clear line of sight of which singer was on which mic, and like how that corresponded to the board itself. I think that was something we, we planned on beforehand and it made it really easy to adjust things in the moment. For different singers and performers and so forth. So that was great,

Rich 19:49

Yeah I

Justin 19:50

to have that.

Rich 19:51

when I was planning the layout for the board to try to group things in a way that made sense. So I put all of the vocal mics in one section on the board that were corresponding to the way you would look at the stage from left to right, and you'd have it on the board from left to right as well,

Justin 20:07

Yeah.

Rich 20:07

Putting the guitars together and then. All of the other instruments that were add-ons throughout the show. Yeah. So I'm glad you found that helpful.

Justin 20:18

Absolutely. But other than that, just stay hydrated. Have a good time. It was so much fun to, to be a part of that and to also be a performer in that. So I, I performed with Same, not same, my Music Duo project I do with my friend Jay. And he and I were able to. Incorporate into the mix of things pretty easily. We had a very different kind of set for our music. It was more electronic in nature it was easy for us though. We just plugged into the di boxes and. It went from there, but, overall, what an incredible experience for all of us. Live music is so exciting and unpredictable and energetic and so on, and so it was amazing to be a part of something so diverse just,

Rich 21:04

had stuff ranging from Broadway all the way to electronic industrial,

Justin 21:09

yeah,

Rich 21:10

that day. So

Justin 21:11

it was awesome.

Rich 21:11

And we had

Justin 21:12

Awesome.

Rich 21:13

too. I think at its peak we had probably close to 200

Justin 21:15

Oh, easily. Easily. Yeah. It was awesome. And what a beautiful day too, right? Like it was,

Rich 21:21

i.

Justin 21:21

it was just like a summer day and just all kinds of great food and so yeah. I highly endorse and recommend coordinating a block party for your neck of the woods, wherever you are.

Rich 21:33

Yeah, and I gotta give my buddy Mike a shout out. This started off as just a little get together in his backyard years back where he would have, he's a brewer, a local brewer, he would just make a few beers, invite friends over, and then eventually. We started playing a little bit of live music on some acoustic guitars and then eventually we started kicking it up a notch and playing longer sets. And then eventually he's you know what, I'm gonna take it outside to the front make it into an official kind of block party. And he, asked if I would together the music. I ran with it. I was like, hell, hell's yeah. And I just got all of the awesome performers that I get to work with all the time to be featured and friends as well, who I know who do music.

Justin 22:28

Yeah.

Rich 22:28

there we go.

Justin 22:30

Yeah, like we we had John Hildreth, who's been on this podcast, he came up from Virginia. I, of course, was there from Michigan. And my friend Jay, who coincidentally lives in that neck of the woods. Came out. So yeah, it was just a wonderful community event. I loved being a part of it, so it's it's something that I think like AI can never replicate, right? Like this actual human beings coming together and like making music live. It's just really special and I'm really grateful for it.

Rich 23:04

Yeah, it'll be a long ways off until That.

Justin 23:09

Yeah. There's these humanoid robots sitting in the market, so you never know. You never know.

Rich 23:14

you'll never have to invite anyone ever again to your gigs. You could just,

Justin 23:18

Yeah.

Rich 23:19

just get all of the robots to come. They're program to come to your gig. Yes. Anyways we we are glad to be able to share a little bit about our experience of this event. And just to recap a little bit, so basically planning is key. Make sure you have, if you're gonna do this kind of event, you get permission from the higher ups. You secure a date you get your personnel who are gonna perform. Obviously you gotta advertise it and put the word out a little bit and then you must rehearse. When you are in the rehearsal stage, you could start to take heed of what is needed with regard to the live sound component, and then gather your equipment. Make sure you have everything you need to fulfill the needs for the event. Make sure you plan thoroughly where you're plugging everything in, and that you have all of your cables ready and labeled. then, have a good time and execute the performance and make sure that you have people on board who are there to help out. So if you're on stage singing I was at, some points and playing piano and whatnot, Justin and even John ran the board at

Justin 24:36

Yeah. Thank you so much, rich for recapping this great experience with me. I'm so glad I was able to be a part of it. And with that, we'll wrap it up and we'll catch you in the next episode. Bye for now. Thanks for listening.

Rich 24:51

Bye.