How I Move Ninja Fast in Smaart When Tuning Sound Systems

When it comes to tuning sound systems efficiently, speed and accuracy are essential. My approach, often marveled at by onlookers for its swiftness and precision, involves leveraging my deep familiarity with the software’s tools and keyboard shortcuts. As someone who has spent countless hours mastering Smaart, I can assure you that achieving ninja-like speed isn’t about rushing—it’s about being effective. In this article, I’ll guide you through my streamlined process for rapid system tuning, helpful for anyone who has cleared the Smaart Level 1 course and is familiar with the basics of FFTs and software layout.

Setting Up for Speed

My typical setup is simple: a single speaker and a single microphone. No DSP, no processors, no mixing console—simplicity is key for focus and speed. My first move is ensuring the software is reset to default, with only the necessary adjustments made for my specific setup. This approach eliminates unnecessary variables and keeps my workspace uncluttered.

Kickstarting the Process with Keyboard Shortcuts

Here’s where speed really starts to pick up using Smaart’s keyboard shortcuts. Instead of navigating through menus, here are two crucial shortcuts I use:

• ‘G’ Key: This fires up the signal generator. A pro tip to increase efficiency and reduce abrupt sounds that could distract other team members is to use the gradual fade-in feature newly available in Smaart v9.

• ‘D’ Key for Delay Tracking: After getting the generator running, syncing the reference signal with the measurement signal is my next step. The delay tracker feature is efficient and snaps to sync quickly using the ‘D’ key, cutting down the time typically spent waiting on manual sync methods.

Enhancing Measurement Coherence and Speed

Once your generator and sync are set, improving measurement coherence and response time is crucial. Here’s how:

• ‘V’ Key: This flushes the averager, allowing you to dump all the existing data and commence a fresh set of data acquisition immediately after setting your delay. This is invaluable when working in real-time and under pressure.

Capturing and Analyzing Data

Now comes the phase of capturing your measurement:

• Spacebar: This final keystroke captures your measurements. Settings to stop the generator after capturing can be configured, which aids in reducing noise in the v9 of the software.

Moving the mic and capturing incremental measurements at various distances quickly can be facilitated using the aforementioned shortcuts, making real-time analysis and adjustments less of a chore.

Advanced Data Manipulation

Once you’ve got your measurements, comparing and analyzing them requires another set of actions:

• ‘Z’ Key: This allows you to cycle through the captured data to observe differences across measurements effectively.

• Shift + Click: This levels all your traces at the frequency you select, normalizing the data for easier comparison.

Using these tools allows a sound engineer to not only capture but also analyze changes in real-time, offering insights into how the sound behaves in different parts of the venue.

Additional Efficiency Tips

To further augment your efficiency during system tuning, consider setting your trace offsets to see absolute changes in decibel levels when making adjustments. Resetting these offsets can be done through command shortcuts, streamlining the process even further.

Summing It Up

By integrating these shortcuts and settings adjustments, what would typically be a slow and meticulous process becomes a swift, efficient, and precise operation. This kind of proficiency ensures that every seat in the venue experiences the best possible sound, and it allows you as a technician to work confidently under time constraints.

Remember, while these shortcuts are invaluable, deep knowledge of the underlying principles of sound measurement and system tuning, as covered in Smaart’s operator fundamentals course, is essential. Use this guide to complement that foundational knowledge, and you’ll find yourself moving at ninja speed in no time.

[h3]Watch this video for the full details:[/h3]


►► Get over 20 free audio tools: https://www.producedbymkc.com/audiotoolkit

“I have all the time in the world to tune the system.”

SAID NO ONE EVER.

In live events time is always of the essence. The truck was late, it didn’t have all the gear you needed, soundcheck got moved up, and now your tuning window magically went from one hour to 15 minutes.

We of course don’t want to rush and make mistakes, but we do want to move quickly and efficiently. True professionals operate with precision and speed and the number one way to accelerate that in Smaart (other than knowing the fundamentals backwards and forwards) is with this utterly groundbreaking concept.

Hotkeys.

That just rocked your world, right?

There’s nothing new under the sun, but it blows my mind how much they remain underutilized given how much time they save.

Today I’ll show you:

– Four ONE HANDED key commands you need to know to start and capture a measurement in less than two seconds
– Four data manipulation key commands to analyze measurements quickly

Ready to move like a ninja? Check the video out.

🔗 Links:

🏗️ System Tuning Workshop For Beginners – https://www.producedbymkc.com/systemtuningworkshop

⚒️ Audio Toolkit – https://www.producedbymkc.com/audiotoolkit

🆕 New To Sound System Design? Start Here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqLfCybtxh0HTXmXl4nKZO64yHmQP0lRi

💼 Hire Me To Design & Tune Your System – https://www.producedbymkc.com/workwithme

🔊 Subwoofer Videos – https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqLfCybtxh0H7gaGak2Gfe3ogiyogc6bX

📕 Chapters:

00:00 – Intro
02:02 – Active Tuning Shortcuts
06:23 – Data Analysis Shortcuts
10:51 – Recap

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[h3]Transcript[/h3]
one of the first things I often hear after finishing tuning a system is wow that was fast that didn’t take very long or you were flying on the keyboard and smart that was crazy it’s because I’ve done this a lot I’m comfortable with the tools and underlying Concepts but I know how to use the built-in keyboard shortcuts to my advantage to get to where I want to go quickly I’m not rushing I’m not glossing I’m officially getting to where I want to go it takes a little bit of practice but today I’m going to show you with one hand how to move like a n n within smart when actively tuning and then after capturing a little bit of data we’re going to use a few more shortcuts to actually require two hands to know how to manipulate data and compare and make decisions quickly so this is for you if you’ve probably be been through the level one course and are familiar with the layout of the software how ffts work um actually got this neat t-shirt from going up to Connecticut to hang out with the rational crew a few weeks ago had a great time but all that being said today is not explaining how smart works but how to drive the car faster and more efficiently once you’re actually in the field so my setup today is just a single speaker and a single microphone there’s no DSP no processor no console keeping it very simple but we’re going to be taking a few measurements and seeing how I would actually drive and look at and analyze the speaker in real time with the keyboard shortcuts and moves them actually making okay let’s Jump Right In so this is from factory default in the only only thing that I’ve changed is created this transfer function of my mic Channel and channel one and I’m using the loot back buil built into the interface uh for my reference so the mic is measurement the loot back is my reference right and my signal generator I’ve optimized defeat this speaker and turned it down to be a nice lowlevel but still coherent data which I can get away with in my nice quiet studio right here okay but everything else is if you just reset defaults on smart is what you would get so the first thing we need to do when we take a measurement is turn on the signal generator you could click on and that does it but you could just hit the g key again driving with one hand it’s going to be your left hand in this case because I use my mouse with my right and my uh keyboard with my left and I’m going to do that so hit G turn the generator on little Pro tip here click on Signal generator you can have it fade in now in v9 so take 1.5 seconds you can obviously change this but this is a nice default uh but I feel like it’s a nice way to not scare people so turn on G ah a nice smooth fade in and it won’t you know make the lighting department mad at you when you are tuning so that’s what we need to get a stimulus signal or a pink noise signal running through our system to get our measurement my microphone’s placed here I’ve already matched levels between my measurement and reference so again a lot of groundwork has been done this is is not a what is smart and how ises at work but how to drive the car well and efficiently so step one G for generator generator right and then we need to sync up our reference signal with our measurement signal so we do that what either with the delay finder which is pretty slow so let me do that and then I’ve inser inserted the delay and it’s fine it takes a a little bit longer time because has a longer fft to search for the impulse response Spike but you can also use the delay tracker by clicking right there and it will do it quicker and snap to it let me show you [Music] that so that was very fast for it to find it or we could just use D to define the delay tracker and in v9 it will automatically turn it off it used to be where it you would have to manually turn off the delay tracker but now it does it automatically once it’s confident that it’s found it so again these two hotkey commands G and D I’ll show you I’ve now reset the delay here by zeroing it out and I’m going to show you g then D to get a nice measurement okay so I waited for my coherence to get better for it to syn up my averaging depth is at six because it’s good to have this during tuning so more averaging Rejects noise but you saw I had to wait a while for that to get the coherence to get back to normal after I did the sync the good thing is you can flush the averager you can have it start with this brand new set of data and I can do that immediately after I have the delay tracker set so there G D then V flushes the averager so again I’ll zero out start at the beginning here we are G DV great so GDB and now I have nice coherent data against a quiet Studio I expect to see this and here is my data then I need to finally capture it so that’s gdv spacebar I got to start from the beginning here great so again that was two maybe 3 seconds to get that going and now I have a capture of my little fosc speaker right here here one more Pro tip will show you with the signal generator and then we’ll talk about capturing and uh data and comparing data not just active kind of tuning process or data Gathering uh I’m going to go back to Signal generator here I did click fade in and now I’m going to do stop gen after capture so that means I don’t have to hit G again to stop it it’s going to assume that when I hit space bar to capture a measurement that you probably don’t need the signal generator going anymore so less pink noise bothering people in the room and less fatiguing your ears and it’s even faster so one more time here gdv space bar and then the generator is automatically going to turn off I’ll hide this [Music] guy autogen there we go now I’ve got this measurement okay now let’s do this where we’re going to gather two more measurements where I’m going to move the microphone back a couple feet do the same thing capture it move it back a couple feet capture it and we’re going to see the level drop front to back and then we’ll move on to the data analysis shortcuts to start comparing those measurements so going to do this in real time here I’ve already captured our original fastex so I’m going to show him and now I’m going to move the microphone capture move the microphone capture great so just calling this position [Music] two great and as expected we’re going to see the data quality drop because it’s fairly quiet here there’s more noise more direct verber ratio going on um so but I can hit hit the Z key to cycle through all of these and so I’m moving through I see the level drop front to back data was best and most coherent with it being close I see it drop okay so that’s the Z key to cycle through data once you’re comparing it and then one of my favorite key uh kind of combinations key commands in in a click is to normalize the traces so I’m going to hide this guy and now I’m going to go to 1K I’m going to shift I’m going to click and it snaps them all together it does more or less a one octave waiting around where you clicked and normalizes all those traces so I I was looking at the the differences between them the absolute differences because I move the microphone back the level’s going to drop but if I’m just concerned like what is the tonal differences in my studio front to back I can start to see some really interesting things so here is my reference for what it was nice and close but then I see with this guy oh wow there’s a huge dip uh right here and that’s probably a room mode of sorts and there’s another one right here it could be a floor bounce there’s lots of different things that could go on and start to investigate here but that’s cool by and large I can see that the response of the speaker stays very similar in the top end as I’m moving it back because it’s not near a subject to room anomalies because of the wavelengths being much shorter and being absorbed here in the room so we’ve talked about Z to cycle through the data to see it we’ve talked about shift click to normalize the data but let’s say I want to go back and look look at the the um level drop front to back and see the absolute changes I can reset my Trace offsets because if we click here uh I see right here that it reduces by 1 DB I can click here increased it by 3.8 and then 7.3 so that gives me those offsets but if I hit command y or control y on Windows I can put those back to normal and zero those out and last lastly let’s say I want to start over capture some new measurement but I don’t want to see this anymore I want to just clear my screen it’s going to be shift command H for hide that hides all or shift control h if you’re on a Windows machine so shift control h shift command H and we have all all hidden I can click here start again do one more measurement for you and we are off to the races okay so to recap here or activ two new shortcuts after we’ve verified everything G turns the generator on D selects the delay tracker V resets the averager we’re going to hit space bar to capture and we’re going to make sure we have our signal generator options where we faded in so we don’t scare people and secondly we stop the signal generator after capture to save our ears and be less annoying while we’re tuning and then we moveed on to our data analysis shortcuts after we’ve captured it how do we manipulate it and look at it we would shift click to normalize the traces if we want to cycle through them we can hit Z and move through it and we can see those in order right here and then we have shift command H hides them and if let’s it’s still going to show this last set of data from the active measurement and I can hit V to reset my buffers and my averager and have that gone all right hope this gets you get a lot faster in smart again go take their operator fundamentals CL get really familiar with software learn about ffts but if you want to accelerate how you move it with it when you’re actually applying it in the field make sure and put these shortcuts to work I would love to let you uh love for you to let me know below what are some other uh really cool workflows you figured out in smart to move faster I know there’s a timer function so how are you using that my name is Michael Curtis want to get you the best results out of your sound system so it sounds great in every single seat I’ll catch you next time