AVLAdmin, Author at AVL Designs, Inc.

What is The Difference Between a Consultant, a Contractor and a Tech?

The best way to define what a consultant is is to begin with defining what it is NOT.

Over the years, I have functioned in all three positions – consultant, contractor and tech – so, from experience, I am able to describe the differences for you. (Currently, by the way, I am a consultant.) First, let’s look at what a theater technician does …

THE THEATER TECHNICIAN

A theater tech is skilled in operating a particular aspect of a production. The areas of specialization include: sound engineer, sound designer, lighting tech, lighting designer, scene designer, software programmer, etc.

Typically, as a theater technician, you are in control of your environment. That means that you take care of emergencies yourself. You can plan the show the way you or your theatrical director want it to be and you get blamed for anything that goes wrong. You are usually using equipment that you have asked for or, in some instances, what the venue supplies. In the latter case, the theater tech assesses and determines whether that existing setup is adequate to do the job.

If the system is a permanently installed system, as the theater technician you will customize it for yourself. You are responsible for labeling, groupings, storage, and locations for gear. You determine stock levels for spare cables, parts, and accessories. It all falls on you.

CONTRACTOR

A contractor is someone who either designs and builds their own work or they submit a bid to complete work that has been designed by others.

When you are a contractor, you are limited to the product lines that your firm is authorized to purchase. In some cases, there are manufacturers that give you special deals, such as extra discounts, or where they give you incentives such as “free stuff for buying other stuff.” There are also minimum purchases you are expected to make each year from each manufacturer to keep your franchise. Being eligible to receive perks can influence what the contractor offers on a project.

On “design-and-build” work, the contractor has to decide how much time to spend on the “design” aspect. Will they spend time building CAD models, testing products they have not used, arranging demos, learning software and so forth? The best contractors are thorough, and they charge for it in their price. Some, on the other hand, let the manufacturers do the design work for them. Hmmm, I wonder what products that manufacturer will use ……?

Most contractors have product lines that will fill many needs, but they may not have the best solution for a specific project or task. On each job, they must decide whether to shoehorn in what they have on hand (or need to use to meet quota) or get what they need from a secondary source.

Many contracting firms have personnel who are installers, not technicians. They are good at running wires. They are good at hanging things. They are good at connecting things, but they are not skilled theater technicians. They are not the people you want doing final setup or training on systems, which takes specialized know-how.

The better contractors have system finishers and trainers on staff but, first and foremost, know that contractors are about getting work done.

It is hard for them to justify freeing their people up to learn new skills or learn a specific console or device, etc. The best contractors realize that, to assure excellent results, training is a must. Many contracting firms do not take the time to do it.

CONSULTANT

Consulting is a hard concept for some people to understand.

The end user says to himself: “I want new gear, right ? I saw this list on the internet. I just need to buy the stuff. Why should I pay someone for help when they don’t sell anything?”

The architect or engineer may say – “Why should I pay a consultant when a vendor* will write me a free spec and one of our drafters can do rough drawings? Free is good, right?”

*The vendor (who is not being paid) creates a bill of materials, possibly a sketch, and hands it over to the engineering firm. They do not spend much time on it because it is FREE. The engineering firm does not necessarily understand what they are looking at and cannot tell if they are the correct selections for this specific job. With no real way to evaluate them, they still go ahead and transfer it to drawings. Oddly enough, the engineers get paid for the work even though they did not do it. FYI same thing happened with lighting, kitchen equipment and other aspects of projects …….

When I worked in contracting, we provided free specs for engineering firms but when the project bid, (we were not always low-bid) we lost about 75% of the jobs that we specified. When other contractors won the work that we designed, we were never asked by the architect or engineer about the qualifications of the low bidder, or substitutes they offered. They typically just accepted substitutes. At that time we stopped doing vendor specs which, from a business point of view, made no sense as it was unpaid work. To this day I do not understand why some contractors continue this practice.

In public bids, whoever wins the bid gets the job based on price alone. If there is any other arrangement between the vendor and the design firm to get a vendor the job, it is known as “collusion” which is illegal in most states.

There are a couple of problems we have found with vendor-based specifications. In most states, if the vendor who wrote the specs also bids the job they cannot have been paid for their input. Knowing that, the vendor’s input is minimal.

When the job goes to bid and someone other than the vendor is the low bidder, the engineering firm that had the vendor’s work on their drawings must determine whether to accept substitutes. The vendor, having lost the job, now has extraordinarily little interest in spending time reviewing substitutes. They will usually just say, “oh no, that’s not equal”. Or they may just say nothing at all. It is a flawed process.

And who decides if the final install is done properly? The unpaid vendor reviewing the work of the people to whom he lost the job? Certainly, that will go well.

WHY A CONSULTANT?

Most consultants have knowledge that goes way beyond the list on the internet.

Things like:

How it all works as a system
Whose equipment is reliable
Which manufacturers have good tech support and backup
And the integration required to get the tech into an actual facility

The consultant takes a wish list from an owner and turns it into design criteria. They plan a budget early on to see if the budget assigned supports the vision. If it does not, the consultant helps to adjust the vision, balancing the needs and wants to the money available. If you don’t follow this process and find out after bid that the money wasn’t there, the bid will get tossed.

During the bid phase, contractors may make site visits and questions arise. The consultant is involved in the entire project and can resolve issues that come up during bid and during construction.

And if the consultants do not know something, they are paid to find out. Research is part of the work.

WHOLE BALL OF WAX

The consultant should be multi-discipline and therefore able to take on all of the conflicting requirements for each system and come up with resolutions during design. Many things like to occupy the same spaces : Lights, Speakers, Stage Rigging, HVAC, AV, Screens, etc…… The consultant ensures that placement of specific items is coordinated to accommodate the technical systems and their requirements.

Consultants also provide electrical, thermal, EMF, structural loading, and other information to the other designers on the team. The consultant must flesh out the systems and coordinate with all other design team members – architect, engineers, etc. The consultant makes assessments about ergonomic issues, operational issues, and discusses the owner’s specific requirements in light of their experience.

Professional consultants must take all that knowledge and put it in a form that can be bid by a contractor.

In public bids, the contractors that bid may or may not have all the skill sets required to fully implement the designed work. In these cases, it is important that consultants create specs and drawings that spell out the work in a way that requires the bidder to procure outside people with those qualifications.

This necessitates that the consultant set the parameters for what is to be used, where it goes, how it is to be installed, how it is to be set up, how it will be programmed, and how the owner will be trained on the equipment. The consultant also must review any substitutes a contractor may offer up, to determine if the change will compromise the design.

It’s kind of like teaching someone how to play an instrument by remote control. To do that, you have to know how to play the instrument in the first place. Some consultants allow manufacturers to do the design work for them. In other words, they are allowing salespeople to determine outcome, which seldom leads to a win for the owner.

The best consultants take the time to research and even try out all of the technology they are going to use for their design. They do not leave the decisions to others who may have bottom-line as the defining factor.

Consultants take responsibility for the entire design and outcome. They are worth the investment if you get a good one.

A Story of Audio … and Taxes

So, let’s talk about audio and taxes. It doesn’t seem like they go together, does it? Hang in there and you will soon see what we mean.

Our team specs a variety of audio consoles used in theaters, high schools, and colleges. Without dispute, the single biggest mistake we come across, after these consoles have been in place for months, is that there still is no saved content.

No Content? That is a problem.

We find, over and over again, there are no templates being used. There are no libraries saved . (If you are drawing a blank on what those are we will explain.) This scenario is all too familiar. Your typical digital console has an input channel and there are all sorts of things you can do with it. You can turn gates on and off. You can turn compressors on and off. You can play with EQ’s. Yes, there are all kinds of things you can do with it. And that is the rub. What should you be doing with it?

Taxes

So, let’s get back to this “taxes” thing. When you think about your console, you have a lot of different things you do with it in a year.

You do theatrical productions.

You do lectures.

You do concerts.

You host lectures.

And, with every undertaking, you have two choices. You can save the settings to start your next performance out right, or you can start from scratch again and again and again.

Save The File. Do It Now.

Now, here is the income tax analogy. Every year you have to calculate and pay your taxes, or the government will come after you. There are a number of online platforms you can use that will do the work for you. Just go to their app, type in all your stuff, it then tells you that you owe a million dollars so that you can simply write a check and all is well. Or go to jail.

Or, there is another choice. If you know how to use Excel, you can build a complete tax calculating program yourself on a spreadsheet.

That option is likely to take a painfully long time but you could do it. You would just have to take all the formulas and all the required information and build your own tax filing program. So, would you want to go through that tedious process from scratch year after year? Is that the best use of your time?

Should You Start From Scratch EVERY Time????

Well, just as it is smarter to let an expert create a tax filing program for you, the console designers have built in ways to create and save settings so that the technician does not have to construct it over and over again.

You can save a show to the hard drive of the console and bring it up to be tweaked and reused again and again. A template can be made to use for the next show, with custom adjustments made for that particular event, and saved for use again and again. Imagine the time it saves!

With little effort, a new version of the event can be fashioned, instead of starting from “square one.” When it comes to consoles in high school and college auditoriums, this is virtually what we see happening. The audio engineer creates a show that works well and never saves that content to the library or scene libraries. He also fails to make a template from the start when it is time to design the next show. Nothing is saved. Absolutely, nothing!

This is not unusual. It is what we see people doing in all sorts of venues.

What They Should Do.

Every venue has various microphones, all of which need specific EQ and settings to use on the sound system in that particular room. For this discussion, let’s talk headsets for theater.

Pick a channel, get the gain set, and EQ the mic to taste and to avoid feedback. Add compressors, gates etc.….. to get the sound and dynamics you want on that mic.

Once you get a channel set up and sounding good, save it in a library file.

Set the file save so you are saving the gate, EQ, the compressor and all of these features to that particular channel library. Now, if you had a dozen of these headsets and were going to be doing a theater production with them, you could go back and populate a bunch of channels by just pasting the library channel in. Every channel would then start out sounding exactly like the one you saved.

Now, that may not seem like a big deal, when you think about bringing a channel up from scratch. It’s not as huge a deal in a studio environment but in a live environment, where you’ve got gain before feedback and room acoustics to deal with, it is. It is important to be sure any channel you make live is safe and sounding at least OK (i.e. neutral.)

Then you ( or someone less skilled than you) want to create a show and be sure that when you start out with each actor in your tech rehearsal, you’re not creating feedback and having problems start out with by using a preset for the headset.

There are some other things you have to think about. Make sure your belt pack gain structure is the same. It’s the same type of headset, all of that stuff, but you then can take a dozen people, throw them on stage at a tech rehearsal, and you will be able to turn all of their mics on and off without any potential for sudden feedback or gross errors.

And then you can work on tweaking their individual voice sounds.

So that’s the real purpose of a digital console is to take the skill set of somebody else and use it to bring up what you want to work on.

So let’s talk about some of the options you have for these kinds of things.

So what we’re going to do is switch from a headset to an SM 58, which is set up with no EQ it’s just flat at a 6” working distance. You can also save one with EQ for a 12” working distance. You can also save it for “lips on mic” with appropriate EQ and gain changes for each.

Then set up a chorus with AKG C414’s or whatever mic you like, and do the same.

These become starting points for various mic types and uses.

So as you create libraries, when you get ready to do an event, you can say, okay, I need these mics for choir. So I’m going to bring up the, AKG C414, put those into some channels.

And they’ve all been preset to be safe for what you’re trying to do.

So the thing I would recommend, and this is for anybody who has a digital console, is you need to find a way to rehearse scenarios with live sources, create presets for channel libraries, whole console templates, etc…..

Define whatever types of events you may do repeatedly and create these preset scenes and libraries. Get them set up so that when you’re preparing for your next event, it’s not a matter of starting from scratch.

Kind of like doing your taxes, the easy way is to start with a template someone else has made.

Williamsville Central School District Reno’s In Review

Early in 2019, Williamsville Central School District issued a request for proposal for renovations in 7 of their schools.

These renovations were to include:

auditoriums
new large rehearsal spaces added for orchestra, band and choral programs
renovation of smaller rehearsal spaces
new sound systems for all the auditoriums
new sound systems for all of the rehearsal spaces and
replacement of stage rigging at four of the schools

AVL has been contracted by Kideney Architects as the acoustical, sound, and stage rigging consultants for each project. The construction phase will be an ongoing process for many months to come.

As various spaces approach completion, we will be posting images of the progress of the projects in the Williamsville schools. We hope you will come back on occasion for updates!

OVERVIEW: The overall venture encompasses 7 auditoriums, 9 large rehearsal spaces (band, choral, orchestra), 12 medium rehearsal spaces and multiple individual practice spaces, as well as sound systems in all 7 auditoriums and stage rigging at 4 of the schools.

One of the key elements performed early-on was a field evaluation of all existing spaces. This included measurements of reverberation, echo, clarity and other acoustical metrics. We also assessed each sound system in all of the auditoriums, providing Williamsville with the assessment of these spaces.

We then held extensive meetings with the music department staffs at each school to get their input on how things sound, how the spaces currently perform and what they would like to see corrected.

The new rehearsal spaces were to be designed to have a high level of performance. With that in mind, we needed to develop a baseline for what the district thought was a good sounding, large rehearsal space. As a premise for this, we asked them if they had ever been to Fredonia College’s Mason Hall, each of which we at AVL Designs Inc. designed a number of years ago. All of them had performed in that space and they all agreed that Mason Hall was what they considered to be a great sounding space.

So, we utilized the basic acoustical characteristics of that room as the basis for the new rehearsal spaces adjusted for cubic volume and for the specific uses. Smaller spaces cannot sustain the reverb time of the larger spaces, but they can have similar frequency balance. We are approximating that reverberation characteristic and overhead diffusion on a smaller scale.

As each area nears completion, we will be updating this post with added photos. The reports that we have been getting back from the district about the ones that they are already using are great! And there will be more to come as we continue with this large-scale project, closing out over the next 12 months.

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Williamsville Central School District

Williamsville Central School District in upstate New York has extensive music programs at all seven of its middle and high schools. A district-wide renovation is underway with varying scopes at each school.

East High School auditorium after renovations.

Williamsville’s East High School Auditorium

AVL Designs Inc. has been contracted for acoustical design, audio, AV, stage rigging and curtains for each school.

Music classrooms are being renovated and many new, large rehearsal spaces are being built. AVL tested existing schools and, based on meetings with their music teachers, developed preferred conditions.

Auditoriums are being renovated to varying degrees. Acoustic improvements and sound system enhancements are being rendered for all of the auditoriums. Some are even getting new stage shells and stage rigging.

Williamsville’s Heim Middle School

As various parts of the work come to completion, we will post details and pictures of the work in progress.

Williamsville’s South High School Auditorium

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Central Square High School

Central Square High School, located in Central Square, New York City, contracted King & King Architects to head up the renovation of their auditorium. AVL Designs Inc. was hired by King & King to assess the performance systems and design a new system for the school.

Audio and acoustics were the top need for the district. The school has a wide-ranging music and theatrical program, and the space is used for many events each year.

First: Fix the Acoustics

AVL Designs Inc. dealt with the acoustics first, as many acoustic concerts are held in the room. So, in the design, the side walls are canted in segments to provide lateral energy distribution into the seating area. Overhead clouds are curved, to provide a measure of diffusion to overhead reflections. The under-balcony ceiling has diffusive elements, as well, and the rear wall is absorptive to minimize echoes to the stage.

Next: Audio and Lighting

The main sound is built around Danley Sound Labs’ audio main speakers, chosen for their fidelity, pattern control, and frequency range. Drive electronics and amplification are provided by Ashly audio products, and the man house console is an Allen and Heat SQ7. An Ashly Audio NE 800MM is used as a day to day automixer, fully automating small functions. Wireless microphones were selected from Shure using the QLX D series.

The AV system includes a Crestron control system, 298” Diagonal 16:9 screen, and Christie DHD Series projector. Two touchscreens allow control of the video system as well as audio selection between automated and manual controls.

The lighting system is a hybrid using both incandescent dimming and LED fixtures. ETC Source Four, Color Source, Fresnel, and Philips SL bar and Punch Light fixtures were used in the design. The dimming and control are Strand with a Strand Neo Console.

Due to COVID-19, the system has not seen much use, as of yet, but the performance use in the future looks bright.

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Cortland High School

Cortland High School produces many music and theater arts performances each year. They are home to a Concert Band, Jazz Band, Orchestra, Chamber Orchestra, Chorus, Modern Band, Dance, Cultural Music, and performance theater.

The high school auditorium was aged, and not well suited acoustically for most of the program. Top priority for this project was to improve the acoustics, and next in line, was developing the technical: audio, AV and lighting.

AVL Designs Inc. provided the district with a primer on electronic acoustics, which we offered as a solution for the needs of their multipurpose space.

AVL Designs Inc. is a LEADER in the application of electronic acoustics in the US, with over 30 systems deployed.

Electronic acoustics allows a room to take on entirely different acoustical character for varied performances. The system enhances the stage and the seating area, provides extended reverberation time and adds early reflection energy to the seating area. Physical acoustics were designed to work with this system. The panels, which look like they are all the same wood, are, in actuality, multiple types of acoustical products.

The base condition of the room is a warm neutral frequency balcony with a low noise floor. This makes the room ideal for theater, lectures, and other uses. When music is involved, by use of electronic acoustics, the room can change on the fly.

One key item that was added was a highly accessible catwalk for front-of-house lighting access. Stage rigging was replaced with new Brickhouse™ arbors, for added safety, and extensive stage electrics.

An existing dimmer rack was refurbished to provide continuing use of ETC S4 fixtures, all other lighting is LED based utilizing fixtures from ETC and Varulite. Control for lighting is provided by ETC paradigm and Ion ZE 2K consoles.

Audio consists of an extensive new system designed around Danley Audio main speakers, Ashly Audio® DSP and amplification, Allen & Heath SQ series consoles, and Sennheiser wireless systems. The system is Dante connected to a second console in the video control booth on a lower level.

Video presentation and green room systems are controlled via Crestron and utilize Christie®, Panasonic, and Crestron display products.

Author: AVLAdmin

No Content? That is a problem.

Taxes

Save The File. Do It Now.

Should You Start From Scratch EVERY Time????

What They Should Do.