Corporate Audio
Making the Climb:
Jim Risgin shares insights on corporate mixing, design, gear selection and "how he got here"

By Keith Clark

Using tools that are a far cry from a 16 x 4 portable mixer.

I first met Jim Risgin of On Stage Audio (OSA) about six years ago, afforded the pleasure of hanging out as he mixed on a large system for an NBA All-Star game (and its surrounding hoopla). My most lasting impression of that weekend is Jim's intercom and comm radio buzzing early, often and throughout with countless requests from a wide range of production personnel. "Sure we can do that" was his calm, measured reply to every query, and he was true to his word. We've stayed in touch since, usually when I travel to see, hear and report on the work of OSA. Headed by Mario Educate, it is one of the leading corporate/industrial companies in the business.

Corporate work is a different beast than its concert counterpart, yet it's still about sound, the quest for the best sound reinforcement for whoever the client happens to be, all the time and every time.

- Keith Clark

Like everyone else in this industry, I assume you earned an engineering degree at a top university and then waltzed into a career in the upper echelons of the audio business...

The most accurate way to say it is that I fell into the sound business out of a "school avoidance philosophy," like a lot of people in this industry. After a couple of years at Michigan State University, I went to work for Sounds Good Audio (SGA), a regional sound company in Lansing, Michigan, starting at the absolute bottom - making cables, schlepping gear, loading trucks and being "warehouse boy."

A combination of opportunity and the desire to jump in over my head, whenever possible, served me well. Whether or not I was the most qualified person for whatever came along, I was relatively vocal, the "sure, I can do that, no problem" approach.

One of the first chances I had to mix was doing monitors for Muddy Waters at Michigan State University in Lansing. I was part of a volunteer stage crew, the band was late, everyone else left, the band finally showed up, and David McPherson, who was supplying the system and doing front-of-house mix, asked me if I knew how to mix monitors.

You can guess my response to that question, so there I was - a Kelsey 16 x 4 desk and Wheatstone parametric equalizers in the hands of a guy who had no idea what mixing and equalization really was, just blundering my way through it but not making any gross mistakes. And that was it - I knew what I wanted to do with my life.

At that point you were doing entertainment work. When did you head in the corporate/ industrial direction?

SGA started getting into the corporate/industrial market, along with their core of regional entertainment. We did a lot of business meetings in Detroit, even a Ford dealer meeting in Hawaii. So pretty much from the beginning, I had my feet in both worlds.

After a few years, a great offer came from Maryland Sound (MSI) and I decided to take them up on it, and I probably system designed the majority of their industrial shows in addition to doing concerts regularly. Then SGA offered me an opportunity to really grow as project manager/technical director, so I returned to Michigan, and then about seven years ago, Mario Educate at On Stage Audio (OSA) asked me to come on board. I sure haven't regretted that decision.

I've seen and heard several OSA shows, and they certainly have to rank as one of the top corporate/industrial companies in the business. What are the defining factors?

The primary point is that OSA strives to be more than just an "audio company." We try to be whatever it is that our clients need us to be, serve them completely, and that dedication to service allows us to grow the way we have. The fact is we lose very few clients. We do whatever it takes to meet their requirements. It's all about keeping them happy so they don't even consider any other company to do this work, and you work to transcend the client-vendor relationship to one of friendship.

Some of my clients from SGA came with me when I joined OSA and they've been real happy with the change. For the first three years with the company, I worked out of my house, but we've been able to grow both Michigan and national business to the extent that we now have a full shop and warehouse in the Detroit area.

 

From “warehouse boy” to the hot seat.

How important is equipment in the corporate market? To be honest, gear isn't all that important in the big picture. It helps to have the right tools, of course, but a lot of this work comes down to customer service and relationships. OSA has never been known for picking the hottest gear of the moment anyway, but a lot of our packaging is proprietary to us alone, so we're offering something unique, in a sense. One of the most important things is to have control of every piece of equipment. We own everything we use, and will not rent.

If we need something, we buy it. We get what we need to do the job right, and work to optimize it from there. Rental systems just don't play into that approach.

We just finished a major expansion, adding 170 or so Crown MA Series amplifiers, 60 JBL VERTEC VT4889 line array boxes, 40 subs, a couple of consoles, other parts and pieces - it's a significant amount, but despite some rough economic times, we're growing and anticipate that continuing. All four OSA shops are fully stocked.

Can you contrast mix style and sound design for concert versus industrial?

I'm probably a rare exception, doing both concert and corporate mixing. Most guys don't do - or even want to understand - both sides. Concert guys don't understand the corporate mentality and all that goes into it, corporate guys don't have the feel to mix music.

Corporate mixing is nowhere near as thrilling as a concert event. Sometimes I miss the thrill of being the conduit for the musical energy, whether it's monitors or house. Mixing corporate, though, is much more challenging, because it is so stark in comparison. Generally you have one mic, two mics, video rolls - not a lot of inputs, and there are not many ways to cover up your mistakes. Throw in the time when 16 lavalier mics are open at one time for a panel discussion and you have a challenging environment. If something goes wrong, it's obvious, not at all like concert, where you can miss a reverb or an echo and often no one catches it. If you don't bring up a microphone for a CEO, you're in trouble.

What I enjoy more about corporate is working in truly challenging environments. Everything's different, every time. You don't get to walk in and go "I want my points 'X' feet off-center, at 'X' off-stage and so on." In corporate, that doesn't exist, you constantly have different and mitigating design parameters to deal with.

Generally speaking, audio for industrial shows is still the most important part of the production, the thing complained about first, but it's still last thought-of in the production design. It's a lot of "you can do whatever you want as long as we don't see your speakers", or "no problem, put it there, as long as it's 40 feet in the air."

So you have these challenges and you still have to make it sound really good, and by that I mostly mean sound that's natural. It's hard to make a human voice on a lavalier mic sound natural for 4,000 people in a convention center, in addition to having the audio image sound like it's coming from the stage or the person speaking. It's about depth, image, left, right, speaker placement, equalization, hitting your cues, and then having fun at it. It's all about overcoming difficult situations and making it look easy. That's hard.

So are you a console geek, a speaker guy...

I might be an exception, but I don't favor certain components over others. What I look at is improving total performance, the big picture. No component is perfect in every application - it's a matter of putting the right tools together at the right time and in the right place.

I've become a fan of the digital domain because of the flexibility of the routing and the power this brings. Audio guys are the last vestiges of "analog living in a digital world," and at times, we need to be able to step aside from our pre-conceived notions and be open to change. If we don't change, we'll become dinosaurs. So digital, albeit not perfect, is certainly growing by order of magnitude on a yearly basis. If we don't use it, embrace it and try to mold it into what we want, it will never be accepted. So let's get manufacturers to get it the way we want and need it.

The beauty of digital is that it's a relatively neutral palette, it doesn't add a lot of coloration or flavor to a mix, and it gives you the ability to add that as you will rather than having to work around it or having to use a certain piece of gear to get it the way you want it. So my favorite piece of gear is something that allows my through-put to be as natural as possible.

 

Risgin talking about VERTEC applications at the 2002 AES convention in Los Angeles.

OSA's been using line array systems for several years, but I always got the feeling you guys weren't totally thrilled with what you were using. Why the recent switch to VERTEC? The line array concept is attractive to us, in general, because it promises very high-Q, high-density time-coherent output. A large array of conventional PA won't ever be as coherent. But the tool that is line arrays couldn't be used correctly for the majority of our applications because the first generation was just too large. Therefore it wasn't the right tool. Then some of the smaller systems came out, but many of these appeared to be thrown-together reactions to a demand and thus were flawed both sonically and from perspectives like rigging.

In the corporate world, again, the idea is make it sound great, but no one wants to see the PA. Those two factors work hand in hand. Well, if you're in a ballroom that's only got 22-foot ceilings, and the set spans extend up 20 feet, you can't put a bigger line array where it should be located. So then the arrays have to be 150-180 feet apart, generating an image that has the people on stage appear to be talking beside the audience, rather than in front of them. That's really fatiguing and from an image perspective it's just incorrect.

The compact VERTEC VT 4888 and VT 4887 line arrays definitely help address this, because they fit into these smaller footprints while still delivering the output needed to reach the back of a ballroom. The small format allows us to place the speakers where they need to be acoustically - not where the scenic design allows them to be. And it has great sonic qualities - it brings the image fully into the room, has a very good front-to-back image, wonderful reach and excellent tonal qualities. The ideal system is something that allows me to faithfully reproduce what's being created on stage. We're in the sound reinforcement business, not the sound replacement business. Our job is to reproduce what's created, not to replace with our interpretation of what is being created.

I mentioned earlier that we recently added 60 VT4889 boxes, the largest ones, and that's because we've been so impressed with the smaller versions to the extent that we see the larger ones performing at the same level within certain applications requiring a bigger system. It took us a long time to find the right tool, and it's still not right for everything, but it's advancing in the direction it should be.

Keith Clark is editor of Live Sound International and can be reached at kclark@livesoundint.com

January 2003 Live Sound International