ON THE ROAD!
By Brian Wise
What do you need to produce a radio show and a magazine while travelling? Lots of useful gear!
Many people ask me about the gear I use when I’m broadcasting from overseas and also updating the magazine’s website. I usually travel to the United States twice a year. In April/May I head off for JazzFest in New Orleans which takes place over two weekends. In September I attend the Americana Music Festival and Conference in Nashville. Usually both travels involve some side trips. In April it was to Austin for a couple of nights on the way, later in the year I stayed in Oxford, MS and visited Clarksdale, home of the blues.
During my travels I usually broadcast Off The Record, the weekly 3-hour programme I present for Triple R-FM in Melbourne, along with a one-hour version for the community radio network. As well as that I am also posting on the Rhythms website, keeping up to date with the Rhythms Facebook page and other socials and, when necessary, preparing material from the next print edition of Rhythms. (Just reading that back it seems like a lot of work!). My check-in bag weighed 15.3kg. My carry on with MacBook Air, two iPads (a Mini and 11” Pro), two microphones, two cameras and a book, weighed 12kg! Luckily, no one checked the weight. Strangely, this presented no problems going through security but I kept being body searched because of a knee replacement!
I was in New Orleans for two weeks, staying in the French Quarter on Ursulines Avenue, where I stayed for a decade before I was persuaded to run tours to JazzFest for listeners. The ground floor two-bed apartment was in the former slave quarters of an 1835 Creole townhouse built by a wealthy refugee from Haiti. It now has a French landlady who spends four months a year back in Paris. Our room was basic (no TV) but spacious, opening onto a courtyard with a fountain and adjacent to the kitchen/laundry. It was a few blocks walk to the bus stop, in a quiet part of the Quarter and handy to several good cafes. Most important of all it had good WIFI!
Des Cowley remembers the days when I stayed upstairs there and ran a 50-metre phone line to the lobby so that I could connect my laptop’s modem (remember the high-pitched squeal?) and send editorial back to the graphic artist. Nowadays with Wi-Fi, I can connect directly to the Triple R studio and go live to air!
I managed to devise a schedule that enabled me to not only fulfil commitments but also enjoy the music at the festival and gigs at night. I would usually get up around 6.00am, grab my laptop and phone, and walk around the corner to CC’s Coffee House, which opens early, or to the Croissant D’Or café which opens at 7.00am. It helps if you are travelling with others who are tolerant of your schedule and this year I was incredibly lucky. In New Orleans I was initially worried that I might wake up my travelling companion Graham, but luckily he slept like a top. With three hours early work done I would return to the apartment just as he was waking and could enjoy the rest of the day. Later in the year, in Nashville, I would also get up early and do some work before my friend Carl woke up and we walked to a local café for breakfast. Hint: find travelling companions who are sound sleepers!
THE GEAR
The Laptop
My laptop of choice over the many years of travel has been the Apple MacBook in all its many variations, including the PowerBook. I have been using Apple desktops since the mid-1980’s and laptops from at least 1991. (I still have them all somewhere in the back shed). Nothing against PCs and Windows but I have always found the Mac OS to be more intuitive. The fact that we used Macs from the very first issue of the magazine almost guaranteed that we would stick with Apple. In fact, it was the Macintosh that started the desktop publishing revolution. (If you prefer Windows then the good news is that you can still run it on the Mac using a program such as Parallels).
One of my favourite ever Mac laptops was the PowerBook G3 (1997-2001) also known as The Blackbird. In a beautiful clamshell like case with a 14.1” screen it was Apple’s fastest laptop to date with a 333MHz processor (= slow), a 4.5GB hard drive (= small) and weighed in at 3.5kg (=heavy). Specs that now seem like a Model T Ford in comparison with the latest machines. It must have cost me at least A$3000 which these days would buy me something that is a Ferrari in comparison. But it looked gorgeous, worked well and still starts up like new more than 25 years later!
Once during JazzFest I accidentally spilt some water on the keyboard which immediately fizzled out. I can still recall the drops that emerged from the bottle as I placed it on the table and watched them in slow motion swan dive onto the keys. Panic. I rang the Mac help line. ‘Should I just buy a new laptop?’ I asked. ‘Are you kidding?’ said the tech guy. ‘You’ve got The Blackbird. We had someone who had theirs fall off the back of their motorbike and it was run over by a truck and still worked!’ Solution? Just get the keyboard replaced for US$120. Dropped it in on Friday and had it back on Monday as good as new.
Fast forward 25 years. Many PowerBooks and MacBooks later. I had two trips to the USA this year, trying to use up all my miles before they expire or I do. I travelled with the Apple MacBook Air 13” courtesy of Apple. It was Midnight black, so I named it the Blackbird. It came with the latest M3 silicon chip (now with M4), has an 8-core/10-core CPU, 16GB of RAM and 512 SSD storage. As for the battery, it will last at least a full day, which is a huge bonus. It also weighs only 1.24 kg, which makes it so light that sometimes you forget it is in your bag.
If you are not computer literate ignore all the numbers. You can easily get bamboozled. There is only one thing you need to know. In buying a desktop or laptop we must be guided by the wisdom of my travelling companion Graham Harrison who had wanted a Mustang ever since he saw Steve McQueen driving one in Bullitt. (I always wanted the Triumph Bonneville that he rode in the same movie).
Eventually, little Graham grew up to live his dream and purchased the V8 model Pony Car as a retirement present. When I suggested that he could have got a cheaper 4-cylinder model he said, ‘Are you crazy? Why would anyone buy a 4-cylinder model when you can get a V8?’ This is an excellent question but how does it relate to computers? Simple. In layman’s terms, the larger the donk the faster you can go.
The rule is that you buy the model with the largest capacity: not just that you can afford but the one that you need. Don’t even think about getting a laptop with less than 512GB storage. Similarly, 8Gb of RAM is okay but 16Gb is better, 24GB is nice and 32GB is excellent. It all depends on your workload. Reminds me of the Bell Helmet slogan in the ‘70s: If you’ve got a $10 head buy a $10 helmet.
I did a lot of research on the MacBook Air, especially in comparison to the MacBook Pro 14”. Some pundits suggested that the Air could possibly run a little hot and ‘throttle’ (slow down) when pushed hard, whereas the Pro has fans for cooling. However, I think those who suggested this must have been using the machine for video editing, coding or doing something highly suspect because I never encountered this problem at all, despite the fact that at any one time I would be using Adobe Audition, Cubase, Djay Pro, Microsoft Word and also have Safari open.
To be fair, not everybody likes being tied to the Apple ecosystem. Some liken it to being a prisoner. My main complaint concerns Apple Music which I really don’t like using. Not only is it erratic, it is actually much more complicated than iTunes which it replaced (after they broke up its functions into separate parts such as Podcasts and TV). At least it works on DJay Pro, which you can use as a music mixer. Luckily, I was somehow able to install an old version of iTunes on the Sonoma OS. (When I returned home after the Americana Conference in September, I made the mistake of upgrading the OS and found that iTunes no longer worked).
At around A$1999, as configured for my use, the MacBook Air 13” is easily the best laptop I have ever used and as soon as I had to return the loan machine I made plans to buy my own. The 14” Pro also now has the M5 chip and has a few more ports – HDMI and SD Card – which could be handy for the extra money depending on your needs. But the Air should be enough for almost all my needs.
As you can see, I set the MacBook up as the centrepiece of my production ‘studio’. In addition, I connected a Shure MV7 microphone which gave almost studio quality sound. This is a great little USB/XLR microphone that is the smaller sister of the SM7B, one of the great studio mics. I have one set up at home connected to a MacMini and it sounds superb. The Shure mics are expensive but I think they are worth it. However, I am also assured that Rode mics are also excellent. The advantage of the Rode mics is that they also have a handy desktop app for recording and mixing. I carried a spare MV7+ on both trips in case I wanted to set up to do an interview using the laptop.
The MV7+ could also be connected to my iPhone 14 Pro Max which amazingly has a program that allowed me to connect directly into the Triple R studio to go to air. This saved me from bringing a large laptop sized piece of equipment called a ViA that would have doubled as a mixer but also connected me to the studio. To use both the phone app and the ViA you need very good WIFI, which we were lucky to have.
For field interviews I used a Zoom H2 which produces excellent results. I first heard one of these devices on ABC RN when Michael Mackenzie, who now helps on Off The Record, used one on his program Life Matters. I was teaching at the time, and I immediately ordered 20 for my media students to use. The AA batteries on the Zoom last for months and the SD card can store many interviews, usually recorded as high-quality MP3s. (.wav files take up a lot more room). I am tempted to buy one of the more advanced Zooms but the Zoom H2 works really well, its only drawback being a plastic case which means you need to be careful handling it while recording. You can connect it directly to a laptop and transfer audio or use the SD card. You will need headphones or earphones with a lead because it doesn’t come with Bluetooth.
In Nashville, I was able to supplement the interviews I did with a session in the East Iris Studios which was arranged by the Americana Music Association. The studio provided an engineer and two assistants! The session involved five artists coming in on the Friday afternoon of the festival for a chat and performance of about 20 minutes each. Anne McCue & The Cubists, Hunter Pinkston and Caleb Boese from The Pink Stones, The Watson Twins, Lilly Hiatt and Josh Hedley. Each session started and ended with a song, so it was self-contained with intro and outro. Immediately after the session, Trent, the engineer, gave me the .wav files. I chose three to send straight back to the station and all I had to do was to use the MacBook to adjust the levels and save them as MP3s. They were put to air in the final hour of the program. Cutting it a little fine but a tribute to Trent and his helpers who did an amazing job.
On the final day of our trip to Nashville I caught up with Ron Sexsmith who was in town for an early show at the City Winery. On his way to soundcheck he dropped off at the Russell Hotel which has a podcast studio that I was able to book and we had a great interview. Recorded directly from the mic into the MacBook. I could have used the Rode Podcaster they had but couldn’t get the levels right. Ron’s solo show a few hours later featured 28 songs in 100 minutes and was superb. I look forward top seeing him next year in Australia.
Of course, the ultimate aim is to travel with as little gear as possible, and it is a work in progress. Next year’s projected outside broadcasts should entail Austin, New Orleans and Nashville and I look forward to seeing how I can refine the process; and I look forward to sharing those refinements with you” and I look forward to sharing those refinements with you”