Editors' Blogs

In his novel Dune, Frank Herbert created the Litany Against Fear. It went on to become perhaps the most famous quote from this great novel, and has somewhat entered into pop culture here and there, even turning up in random places like the Earthworm Jim cartoon series. It goes as follows, and I quote:

"I must not fear. 
Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain."

Seems trite, maybe even a little silly... until you put it into practice. Facing and conquering fear, not by trying to bully it into submission but by calmly recognizing it and letting it leave on its own, is the basis of reliable and confident action in the face of stress. Children haven't learned to do it at all yet, which is why they have nightmares or panic attacks about seemingly inocuous things like being left alone in the toy aisle at the store for a minute or two; adults understand the principle of it, and many learn to apply it in various parts of their lives; certain mental illnesses can manifest themselves as the inability to do it effectively, although we all have lapses from time to time when we're tired, distracted, or sick.

We all know the feeling of fear getting out of control—the tightening of the guts, the sudden sweats, the shakes, and that amazing blank-out that empties our minds of coherent thought and makes it impossible to do even the simplest tasks effectively. One of the hallmarks of a really good recording engineer is that no matter how crazy things get in the studio, he or she is always thinking a step ahead, coming up with solutions, making it work... performing effectively with no time for fear.

The other night, I got into a situation where my fear got away from me, and it was embarrassing for all concerned. I was doing a live radio broadcast in which several musicians were set to play online together using a program called NINJAM. The program was advertised widely before it was to take place, and there was a fairly big audience in place as we came up on showtime. I had spent the evening working on my musical part for the collaboration, and it was only about half an hour before showtime that I turned to the details of the actual broadcast. I had assumed that it would be easy, as another DJ on Stillstream had done it successfully with almost no prep time a week or so before my show.

Well, I was wrong. The other DJ had a very different studio setup than mine, one that made it very easy for him to broadcast a NINJAM session. I didn't find out ahead of time what he did that worked, I didn't think through what was involved in getting it to work for me, and I didn't have a game plan for what hardware was necessary to make everything come together. That was a recipe for disaster.

Here's how it's supposed to work. The various players in the NINJAM session play their audio and send it over the Internet to the NINJAM server, which redistributes the audio to the other players. One player (that would be me) gets the other parts sent in by the NINJAM server, adds his own parts on his own rig, and sends the mix to the radio station server for the audience, in my case using the Nicecast streaming software for the Mac. He adds tag data so the stream is correctly identified to the audience, and has to be able to add voiceovers.

That's not a difficult setup, if you think it through and test it properly without a deadline breathing down your neck. In the face of an expectant audience and the clock ticking down, however, that simple task became an impossible nightmare.

My NINJAM setup was working fine. I use the same computer to relay NINJAM audio as I do to stream my radio shows using Nicecast. It has a small 2-in/2-out audio interface that's connected to my studio's main console; it takes the console's main mix buss output, which includes my instruments and DJ mic, and sends it to the computer to be digitized and streamed. It takes the NINJAM stream with the other players' music back from the server, turns it into audio, and sends it to the console... to one set of stereo Aux returns that's routed to only go to the control room monitor/headphone buss rather than the main mix, so as to prevent a feedback loop. I can hear what others play, and only what I play is relayed to the stream. Okay so far?

Now, as it turns out, the studio console also has its own FireWire I/O. All of the inputs can be routed to a DAW application, as well as a digital copy of the stereo main mix buss if you wish; and a stereo output stream can be returned from the computer and monitored on the control room buss... again, not the main mix, so as to avoid a feedback loop. Very neat.

So my mental network was: run NINJAM on one computer, route audio to and from my mixer as usual; send audio to and from the second computer hooked up to the console and running Nicecast, and use that to stream audio to the outside world. Sensible, straightforward, and clean.

The only problem was, it didn't work. No audio was getting streamed out to the internet, and I couldn't tell why. I couldn't get Nicecast to understand which of the console's inputs it was supposed to be looking for audio from. 18 choices, and no menu to figure out which two to send to the server!

Now, having hit this realization with ten minutes until showtime, the sensible thing would have been to pop open a manual and quickly find out how to do this—either the mixer's manual, or Nciecast's manual, or both. It would have been even better to sit down with a piece of paper and a pencil and sketch out the audio feeds so that I understood what was going on... (If you've been paying attention so far, you'll already have spotted the glaring error in my hookup and will be laughing at me. If not, read on, I'll point it out in a minute.)

Instead, I gave way to fear. I panicked. A full-on panic attack, running around the studio, cursing and tearing at my already thinning hair, which must have been terribly amusing to the other players in the NINJAM session, who were listening to me screaming over the voiceover mic I'd accidentally left on. My wife was asking if I was having a heart attack, the kids were hiding in their rooms, and somehow, in the midst of it all, I seized on a solution to the problem that involved a single piece of hardware that I couldn't find, and I poured all my effort into tearing my studio apart looking for it in vain. If I only had one more spare stereo audio interface, I reasoned, I could disconnect the studio console's FireWire and replace it with that second interface, Nicecast would recognize it, and all would be well.

I had two new interfaces waiting to be reviewed. One after another I tore open the boxes, wired them up, realized they needed specialized driver downloads, and discarded them in mounting frenzy. I couldn't find the spare audio interface I needed. I couldn't find it! The deadline was past, we were supposed to be on air, and nothing!

I got one of the other DJs to spin some tracks and cover for me. I piled into the car and bombed down the highway to Recording's offices, convinced that my spare interface was there. I burst into the office in the middle of the night, tore apart the audio equipment storeroom, and found—not my usual spare interface, but another one that I knew had worked in the past. I dragged it into the car and bombed home at ludicrous speed, panic still clamping my innards shut... and as I got downstairs, hooked up the new interface and saw it was up and working, weeping in relief... I suddenly realized something awful.

Remember that basic conceptual error I hinted at? Did you spot it? I couldn't route the audio from the other musicians to the stream, because my monitor mix from the NINJAM was only going to the control room buss! If I were somehow to route it to the main mix, I'd have created a feedback loop! So even adding another interface that worked wasn't going to solve my problem. I was absolutely and completely screwed, and had thrown away a long drive and nearly gotten myself killed accomplishing absolutely nothing.

As I slumped into my seat, my mind now the absolute blank of a rabbit staring at an oncoming weasel, a comment made by the DJ who'd gotten everything working last week popped into my head... a seemingly random comment that suddenly explained everything in crystal clarity. All I had to do was run NINJAM and Nicecast on the same computer, and have Nicecast pull the audio directly from NINJAM. All the monitoring would be done outside the computer, NINJAM would take care of adding my audio appropriately, and the only thing I couldn't do without my usual streaming setup was to put a nice name tag on the audio stream, a problem quickly solved from outside by the guy running the server. Two mouse clicks and we were up and running in 10 seconds, flawlessly.

Needless to say, when the jam finally started a few minutes later, I didn't play my best. I was emotionally and physically wrung out from my 90 minutes of flailing and panic, and could barely relax enough to play. Fortunately, the other four guys covered for me nicely and the audience loved the resulting concert. But I learned a lesson that night, and I wanted to share it with you.

Know what your gear can and can't do; know what needs to be done and think it all the way through as carefully as can be, well before the faders go up; and above all, don't give in to fear. You'll live longer.

[Many thanks to my fellow players Greg Hurley, Harry Sklar, and David Herpich, and especially to Allen Goodman, who covered for me and gave me the hint that got us up and running at last. Hopefully next time it won't be quite as stressful.]

Oh, and by the way, in the "adding insult to injury" department: five minutes after going off the air, as I desultorily cleaned up the piles of detritus I'd flung around the studio in my frantic searches... I found my missing interface, right where I'd left it after the last time I'd needed it. Sigh....