I’ve seen a lot of the Taylor Swift tour on social media recently and noticed that all the singers and musicians are playing wirelessly. Particularly the guitarists who walk around the stage. Couldn’t the signal drop out? And how does it manage to remain in sync the entire time? Especially in a large venue with a lot of interference (e.g., phones, cellular networks etc).
Is the technology just simply good enough? Because surely they wouldn’t take the risk otherwise. Unless it’s all pre recorded – but surely not right?
In: Technology
The wireless units I’ve used are basically a tiny radio station that’s set to one specific frequency. The thing that plugs into your guitar is a transmitter and it’s sending it’s signal to an antenna that’s plugged into your sound equipment. (Amplifiers and stuff.) The frequency it transmits on is what’s important. Different frequencies are set aside for different industries. Even though there’s a lot of other transmissions flying around the concert hall, none of them will be on the frequency of your particular radio station.
They “stay in sync” because it’s a radio signal traveling at the speed of light. It doesn’t take long to travel five or ten meters. Honestly, the hardest part of staying in sync at those shows is the sound itself. Those places can get so big that there’s a delay between the sound coming out of the speakers and the time it takes to hit your eardrums. It’s actually easier to not hear the sound system at all and only hear the sound in your earbuds.
And, yes, things can go wrong. Just like a lot of things can interfere with the signal in your car radio, the same stuff happens here. However, at the zillion-dollar level of a Taylor Swift tour, they have the very best equipment with backups of backups of backups. All the stuff is tested and checked before each show. And even if something does go wrong, it’s only off for a few seconds at most before it gets fixed.
That said, even at the mega-tour level, stuff goes wrong all the time. Usually, the audience doesn’t notice, or it doesn’t cause any major distraction. I’ll bet if you searched through all of the concert footage people have taken of Taylor’s tour, you would find plenty of examples of something going wrong. (Especially if you know the songs and the tour well enough to know how it’s supposed to go.)
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