Join Us

Empowering the Next Generation of Women in Audio

Join Us

Sound for a 48-Hour Film Project

A week ago, I joined up with a local team of videographers to take part in the famous 48-hour film project. Barring the fact that I only slept for about 6 hours over the entire weekend, it was still one of the most awesome experiences I’ve had to date, and definitely not for the faint-hearted. In this article I’ll flesh out my experience for you, the highs and lows, and what to keep in mind should you ever want to be the SoundGirl and take part in your local 48-hour film project.

Preparation

See what gear you have available: Because we only get our script on Friday night, it’s hard to know what to expect. You don’t know how many actors there will be, what your location is, or even what kind of sound you will be recording. But there are a few things you can prepare for. The first step was to see what gear our team has on hand – because it is not a paid gig, you tend to work with what you’ve got – and then you formulate how you would go about making the most of that setup.

I had access to a Zoom H4 Recorder, a Rode Go lapel, a Saramonic lapel, and (I think) an ME66 rifle mic. I had to hire a boom pole and stand. My thinking was that we’d probably have two people lav’d up with one boom ready to go where needed. We fed two mics into the H4 and one into the camera itself to have an audio track to sync to in post (essential step!).

Make sure you know exactly how to operate the gear

Watch the tutorial in the week leading up if you must. There’s nothing worse than not knowing how to find the menu button on your field recorder hee-hee)

Have access to a sound library (I used Artlist)

Every piece of music or audio you use has to either be licensed or original, so make sure you don’t grab songs off YouTube or anything like that! On the first evening, start downloading possible SFX you might need to add in case you don’t have time to create them, as well as reference tracks for the music.

Make sure you have enough batteries for your recorder/mics

We ran out of batteries about 8 times and nearly had one of our lavs lose power during a take. Luckily, I had a bag of semi-used batteries we then cycled through throughout the weekend. On that note – also remember to switch all of your inputs ON (sounds simple, but so easy to miss!)

During the Recording:

Don’t Forget your Clapper Board

We started off using a clapper board to note takes and such, however, being in such a rush all the time and surviving on McNab energy shots alone, I must admit I took slack and stopped enforcing it. Huge mistake, as we then struggled to find the correct audio takes for the picture and spent precious time in post trying to align audio waveforms up with mouth movements. This easily added a good 3 hours onto our process which is a lot of time when you only have 48hours.

Make sure you have everything in the correct frame rate

For some reason (who knows what happened) I set the frame rate on one scene to 60fps. Gosh… I am so fortunate that I had elastic audio handy to match the dialogue up to the talent in post, otherwise, I would have been screwed. This also added a good hour or so to my edit time. Not good.

Post-Production

Clean up audio even if you’re not going to use it

I thought it would make more sense to wait for the team to send me the final cut before starting to clean up audio takes of dialogue and such, but this was a big mistake too. The final cut was given to me last minute and I had no time to do any processing on the dialogue (eeeek!). What I should have done was clean up all the audio we shot while the editor was working, regardless of whether it was being used or not, so that when we did make a selection for the final edit, I would have clean and crisp dialogue takes. If you can do this, I highly recommend it, because you may run out of time in the end.

Don’t take anything personally

Sound is almost always the last part of the filmmaking process, and no matter how much you try to convey that this process takes time, it might not always be possible for you to have the time you need to be proud of your work. You must be willing to stand firm in doing your job properly, but you must also just do the best you can with the time you’ve got (because we ALL know you have that genius inside you that can pull rabbits out of hats at the last minute to make a masterpiece). It’s okay to not feel “proud” of the final result of the sound because of mistakes, time constraints, and a misunderstanding of the process of sound by others in general. This is a learning curve for everyone so always look for ways that you can improve your workflow and get better at being awesome, but don’t for a second take anything personally

Make things up even if you don’t have the final cut

The team only gave me the final cut of the video 30 minutes before submission. Yes, you heard me right… 30 minutes… You can imagine my stress levels! But, luckily I had predicted this being a last-minute thing, so what I did, was while the team was shooting the last scenes and editing the picture, I started making up things that I thought might be used – extra foley sounds, SFX, music (with the help of my fellow soundie, Deon), so that when they gave me the final cut, it was more of a “plug-in” process rather than starting from scratch.

Lastly, HAVE FUN

There may be times when you feel a lot of pressure, or like things just aren’t working out. Perhaps you get so tired that you start making small mistakes that have a big impact – but remember that at the end of the day, you are doing this for fun. If you can keep that in mind, then everything else seems easier to manage. At the end of it, you will look back and realize that you have made lasting and strong friendships with a team of amazing people and that you did what you thought at times would be impossible. It pushes you to your limit and gets you way out of your comfort zone. It’s SO worth every single sleepless moment.

The screening of our short film will be on the 21st of October 2022, so I can’t give you the link here now, but I can show you the little behind-the-scenes video I took that encapsulates how awesome the weekend was!

Kia Shavon: The Mix Artist

Kia Shavon is an audio engineer whose extensive resume includes tracks by Foxy Brown, A$AP Rocky, Lil Pump, the NBA and NFL, and hundreds of indie artists. Professionally, she goes by The Mix Artist. She obtained her Bachelor of Science in Music Engineering Technology from Hampton University, and now lives and mixes audio in NYC.

Kia has also become an outstanding educator, offering workshops virtually through Omni Sound Project as well as private lessons. It was in this capacity that I first encountered Kia and felt compelled to reach out with some interview questions.

You are known as The Mix Artist. Tell us about how you approach mixing as an art.  

Remembering that my job is to bring you into the artists’ world — into the moment they’re sharing with you — is the first step for me. I have to understand what they want to express and know how to accurately convey that message to the listener. We’re actually painting pictures when we mix these records — mental images you may see better with your eyes closed, but pictures nonetheless.

I’m starting with the “clean up” — removing unwanted sounds with cuts, fades, subtractive eq,  de-essers, etc…, chiseling away at the mud and whatever else is clouding the beauty of the image I want to expose. I’m using additive EQ, compression, and saturation to bring out the details. Also using leveling, reverb, delays, and more EQ to create depth – every part of this composition is important, but I need to show what’s in the foreground at this moment and what’s supporting.

I’m not just monitoring LUFS and inputting outputs all day. Knowing the bulk of my job is dealing with emotions and the creative expression of such is key. Getting too technical actually hinders the process. For example, maybe your vocals need to be a little buried in the beat for this particular track. Perhaps it’s a song about being lost or consumed and that’s fitting.  Sometimes I have to just do what the song is telling me to do without thinking about what’s standard or what I may have been taught in school.

You hosted an intro course on immersive audio on October 8th. What first got you excited about this technology?  

I first paid attention to it when I watched my first film in Atmos in around 2014. I was blown away and didn’t want to experience films any other way afterward. Keep in mind, that was film sound whereas I mostly work on music so I couldn’t hop right in.

Shortly after, I noticed the rapidly increasing developments being made in the visual world with the rise of VR and knew there would be a need to understand immersive audio outside of just gaming and film. We’d been listening to stereo since the ’30s, which is wild! We were long overdue for an upgrade.

I dabbled with spatial processing using plugins like dearVRpro and Fiedler Audio Stage but didn’t go all the way in until I discovered Dolby Atmos Music — a game changer for me. The whole purpose of sound reproduction from the beginning was to recreate what we actually hear and in my opinion, Atmos Music is the closest we’ve come to that. Combine that with the ability to recreate this in headphones so just about everyone can experience it *chef’s kiss*.

Whose career do you find most inspiring? Do you try to emulate them in any way?  

It’s really difficult to choose a single person whose career I find to be the most inspiring — there are soooo many. I tend to draw the most inspiration from anyone challenging the status quo simply by being themselves unapologetically and living life in their purpose on their terms. I’m always here for that. I don’t believe I can emulate or imitate something that isn’t already within me. How they came to be whoever they are as a part of their process and their methods may not necessarily work for me. Instead, I see them as an encouragement to recognize that indomitable spirit within myself and to stay on my path, respecting my own process.

Tell us about an experience with an artist that pushed you to expand your skill set.  

Y’all are going to get really tired of me not answering these questions directly. Haha. I’m pushed almost every time an artist gives me any feedback on a mix other than “this is  perfect.” Haha.

But, an artist named Shaaye, is one in particular who helped me to get out of my comfort zone as an engineer and break rules a bit. When I started working with him, I would say 90% of my clients were hip-hop artists so it was easy for me to get stuck in a pattern of doing things.  Earlier in my career, I would take more risks, effects-wise, but quickly realized that’s not what was wanted from most artists so I learned to keep it simple. For the most part, they tend to want the same things from their mix.

Shaaye is a somewhat mellow singer/rapper and he brought the creativity back out and then some. He loves playing around with space, whether it’s through reverbs or delays or whatever.  He’ll also ask for a different “effect” on almost every track, which keeps me on my toes.  Sometimes he’d have certain ideas and my initial reaction (in my head) would be, “there’s no way that’ll work,” but lo and behold, it’ll work. He gave me the freedom to experiment and “just  try things.”

If you could mix a track for any artist in history, who would it be and why?  

… I don’t know why I’m such a glutton for punishment, but the first person who comes to mind right now is Kanye West. I just know I would learn so much from that experience. Despite whatever else comes with him, he’s a creative genius who knows what he wants. If you’re working with him, you need to be at the top of your game and you need to know how to surrender to how you think things should go and instead deliver what it is that’s being asked of you. It would not be a comfortable experience at all, but I feel that’s where most of my growth comes from. That would be a lesson in flow for me. I think it’s important to be able to get out of your own way when mixing, as well as in life in general, and just allow things to be without overthinking. Things go so much smoother that way.

What piece of advice have you received, good or bad, that you still think about today?  “Things turn out best for those who make the best of the way things turn out.”

I don’t know who originally said it, but a faculty member at my school, Hampton University,  used to say this all the time and I would hear students constantly repeating it. It didn’t mean anything to me at first, but after I lived life a little, I realized its application.

Understanding and living by that single sentence is a life-changer. It’s all about going with/ accepting the flow and not thinking that you know how things should turn out or even that there is one specific way something needs to happen. There isn’t.

Two people can be in identical situations, but one chooses to see the beauty or lesson in it and uses it to their advantage while the other chooses to turn it into a problem they need to fight against. The situation is a positive one for the first person because they chose to view it that way while the second person is in a funk because things didn’t go their way. They literally

created their own realities — their own experiences. We do that every moment. Life is so much more freeing when you know that you have that type of control over it, at least for me.

What do you hope to learn more about in the coming year?  

Oh wow, how much space do we have on this page? Haha. I’ll contain myself. I am so intrigued by immersive audio. I definitely want to learn all there is to know about it, not only by reading about it, but by working on some really creative projects and pushing limits.

I also want to learn how to become a better teacher. I’ve learned quite a bit over the decades and have about 15 years of experience as an audio engineer so I’d love to feel confident enough to share what I’ve learned with whoever I can help or inspire.

Thank you, Kia.

Kia can be found at https://www.themixartist.com/ as well as on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/themixartist/ and SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/themixartist/sets/kia-shavon-mixes

Fake It ‘till You Make It?

 

The live events industry can be hard to navigate. There isn’t a defined career pathway or educational framework that one needs to follow, no qualification that is necessary or will guarantee you a rewarding job once you have it. It can feel even more confusing if you’re a freelancer. You don’t have a boss to guide you or promotion options to pursue within a company. You are the only one who is responsible for your training and progression. When you then take into account the… creative and organic nature of live events and the current industry-wide shortage of experienced technicians caused (mainly) by the pandemic, it is quite common for people to be offered roles that don’t exactly match their skill set. Whether it’s an ad for a dream job that lists a bunch of skills or experience that you don’t have, or you’re getting offers of work that involves equipment that you’ve never touched, you may feel that there is a gap between your current skills and what potential clients are expecting of you. What should you do? The phrase “fake it ‘till you make it!” gets thrown about a lot, but is it really the solution? It is something I have struggled with throughout my whole career and I’m sorry to say I still don’t have the answer, but here are some things to consider so you can form your own conclusions.

Unfortunately, we’re a bit special

There are endless articles out there about whether you should fake it until you make it, but it is almost all aimed at employees in corporate jobs. There are definitely lessons to be learned from these sources, but there are a few things about our sector that mean the advice is not entirely applicable to us.

First of all, the proportion of workers in our field who are freelance is much higher than most. We have to advocate for ourselves and convince potential clients that we are a good choice and that our experience puts us in good stead to do the job well. This can be challenging when there isn’t an “industry standard” qualification and everyone’s experience history is unique. It is much easier to fire freelancers than employees, or simply not call them again if their work isn’t up to scratch. We are also up against untold numbers of other freelancers for each job, and in the absence of formalised, transparent hiring practises, it can be hard not to take hiring decisions personally. Paranoia and bitchiness about who gets what role can take hold in freelancer circles, similar to when there’s an opportunity for promotion in office-based sitcoms. All I can say is try to avoid questioning why this job went to that person, because it can eat you up inside, and trying to find logic, where there may be none, will drive you crazy.

Most jobs in live events, especially touring, are quite short in the grand scheme of things. Even if you land a role on a two-year global tour, that’s not much compared to potentially spending decades working for the same firm. This means we go through the stress of job hunting much more often than most people. There is also much less of an incentive for clients to invest in our professional growth or even put as much effort into recruitment as they would for a full-time position.

Lastly, our job is much more immediate than “normal” jobs. Of course, we can, and should, study and practise our craft as much as possible on our own time, but there is a lot that we can’t help but learn through experience. You can only deal with a quiet, unpredictable singer when you’re faced with one. You only find out what word clock slipping can sound like when you hear it (I’ve often thought that an audio library of what things sound like while being affected by different technical issues would be incredibly useful. If anyone has assembled one please let me know). Your live mixing will improve more with the experience of real musicians in real, crowded rooms than with any amount of practising with a multitrack. So if you are faking it until you make it and come up against something beyond your capacity, you will have to deal with that in real-time, potentially in front of thousands of booing fans and an angry client.

Keeping up with the fakers

In an ideal world, we would never have to fake it. Everyone would be offered jobs according to their abilities and everyone would be given opportunities to grow and progress along the way. Wouldn’t that be nice? Unfortunately, that is rarely how it works. If you have an employer or client who takes an active role in your professional development, please recognise them for the rare gem that they are. That’s not to say that everyone else is evil, it’s just that most companies are swamped with work and they don’t have the time or resources to dedicate to training, appraisals, mentoring, etc. At the end of the day, if you’re a freelancer, that responsibility lies squarely with you anyway.

I used to turn down jobs if I wasn’t 100% comfortable with every piece of equipment that I would need to use. I would tell them that they should choose someone else, for the good of the gig. However, it took me far too long to realise that more often than not, they didn’t find someone better, they just found someone who had the chutzpah to say yes and give it a go. Those people did a good enough job most of the time to get away with it, and so kept getting offered more opportunities. I dread to think how much putting the gig’s success before my own career has held me back, particularly because the gig probably would have succeeded anyway.

This brings me to the difficult part: none of us would have to fake anything if no one else did. We would all get exactly the level of jobs we deserved. However, there are all sorts of people in this industry, and as I just alluded to, the way things work favours people who are full of… chutzpah. It’s understandable: if you’re a busy booker who has a lot on their plate, finding a freelancer who has reassuring confidence about them and says they can do anything you ask them to is a godsend. If you’re an event organiser who’s worried because there’s been a technical difficulty, someone who uses a few select pieces of jargon but tells you it’ll all be fine shortly is exactly the kind of person you want. Never mind whether the difficulty was caused by that person in the first place; you don’t have the time or specialist knowledge to find that out, you just want your gig to happen. People like to say that chutzpah-ers get found out and don’t last in the industry, but in my experience that isn’t true, and in fact, the opposite can be the case. It can be frustrating to have to work with these people and watch their careers skyrocket, but I still don’t think you should join them if you can’t beat them. We’re all on our own journey, comparing yourself to others is a recipe for misery. The road might be longer if you don’t take the “chutzpah” shortcut, but you learn much more and can be truly confident in your own competence as you progress.

To fake or not to fake?

It’s a bit of a catch-22 that knowing when to turn something down and when to go for it comes with experience. Experience that you might need to fake a little bit to get in the first place. Now that I’m older I’ve seen more of how the industry works: I know that no one knows everything about everything. New equipment and software updates come out all the time, and you get used to reading manuals or chatting to friends who have used it to get up to speed (on that note, if any manufacturers are reading this, can you please stop replacing your PDF manuals with endless video tutorials. They are useful as supporting material, but you can’t search for a keyword in a half-hour-long video and scan through the relevant paragraph on your phone while the client isn’t looking. Or even just browse it during a slow conference). You get used to the equipment list fundamentally changing at the last minute, so whether you’ve used a certain desk before might suddenly become irrelevant anyway. You see so many people being thrown in at the deep end that you start to wonder whether there is any type of baptism that isn’t of fire. So once you see that perfection isn’t always necessary, and once you become more certain of your own abilities, it is easier to make that judgment call.

Further, it is easier to have a frank conversation with the booker when you’re more established. I still flag gaps in my knowledge with my clients. Sometimes they’re happy for me to read the manual or spend extra time in the warehouse to fill those gaps, sometimes they have a more suitable candidate for that role that they go with instead. I’m lucky enough that I don’t need to take every single gig I’m offered, and admitting to my lack of experience in certain areas doesn’t affect my long-term relationship with my clients. In fact, they usually appreciate my honesty and trust my self-assessed competence in other roles more.

So what can you do if you aren’t that experienced yet? It’s a decision you have to make yourself, but I would suggest the following:

Some day we will all be able, to be honest about our abilities and even our insecurities with everyone, and everyone will get exactly the jobs they can handle and deserve. Until then, a little bit of “faking,” insofar as you’re coming across as confident and reassuring while taking on new, reasonable, challenges, can do wonders for your career. If you know that it’s just a little bit of a stretch for you, and you are competent in the basics, some chutzpah can get you closer to the point where you won’t need to fake it because you will have genuinely made it.

Tips For Recording Podcasts Remotely

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in many people taking up podcasting for the first time while existing podcasters found themselves having to rethink their methods of recording in the absence of face-to-face interaction.

Remote recording has always been a great way of interviewing people who might not live anywhere near you, even before the pandemic (not to mention the fact that you may be working from a home studio on a tight budget), but it has arguably become a much more widespread practice over the past two years. It undoubtedly has its challenges, but recording remotely doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice audio quality. Assuming you already have the ideal setup on your end (if not, there are some great tips to be found in other SoundGirls contributors’ blogs), here are some ways you can get the most out of your guests, no matter where they may be in the world.

Equipment checklist

Ideally, your guest should have a good-quality microphone. There are plenty of affordable USB mics on the market which will do the job, but if they’ve never been on a podcast before, you may be limited to their built-in computer mic (as an editor, I’ve found that some of these can be surprisingly good). Headsets, on the other hand, can be quite hit-and-miss. Some sound great while others sound no better than a phone line, and I’ve had many an editing nightmare as far as plosives are concerned. Always check things out with the guest beforehand; you don’t want to hit ‘record’ only to find that the quality is terrible and you don’t have any other options. You should also make sure they’re using headphones or earbuds at all times.

Eliminate background noise

Just as important as the equipment your guest uses is the environment they record in. Unless you’re fortunate and they have a studio of their own, you’re probably not going to get flawless acoustics. But you can (and should) make sure they’re in a quiet room with no distractions as far as possible. Home life can be chaotic, of course; this can sometimes spill over into a recording despite our best efforts. The dog barks for attention, the kids forget that you asked them to be quiet, and your neighbor decides to start mowing their lawn outside. Fortunately, these can all be edited out if they don’t last very long and parts can be re-recorded. But try to make sure other avoidable noises are taken care of in advance: ask your guest to switch off any fans or air conditioning, have their phone on silent, and close any tabs on their computer that are likely to play notification sounds. If they’re not used to the recording process, encourage them to stay ‘on the mic’ and avoid moving around too much, shifting in their chair, or brushing against the mic and any cables.

Choose the right recording software

In the past, it was common to use Skype to record podcasts. Now a lot of people are using Zoom, which arguably gives better quality and allows you to create separate audio files for each participant. However, you still have to rely on both you and your guest having a stable internet connection. For this reason, you should consider opting for a platform like Zencastr or Riverside.fm, which allows you to set up online studios and record each track locally. So even if the internet connection drops, everything will still be recorded in high quality to your, and your guest’s, computer. Even better, all you have to do is send them a link and they can access the recording window in their browser. It’s worth noting that both platforms also have video recording capabilities.

There’s probably no perfect substitute for sitting face-to-face in a studio, but with a little preparation, you can get your remote recordings sounding top-notch.

Accepting Applications for SoundGirls Bloggers 2023

 

Blog for SoundGirls

Are you passionate about the industry, do you want to share your experience and knowledge with the SoundGirls Community?  Then you may want to become a blogger for SoundGirls in 2023.  Our bloggers volunteer for a year of blogging  and choose how often to submit blogs (once a month, every two months, or four blogs for the 2023 year)

If you are interested, please apply here

Things we are looking for in our bloggers

Although we are mainly looking for people who can write well, are organized, and are passionate.  All areas of audio & music are welcome to apply. We look forward to welcoming you to our community.

Industry Knowledge

Not only is understanding the industry from a concept/fundamental standpoint important, but having real-life experiences is essential for any great blogger.  Having real-life experiences allows you to share those experiences, learn from those experiences, build relationships, and learn things that are not taught from reading a book.

Passionate

Great bloggers must be passionate about what they are writing about.  We believe if you are writing about things you are not interested or knowledgeable in, it will show in your writing and to your readers.  People who are passionate about a topic or industry find it much easier to write about things that others with similar interests would enjoy.  Long-term, you have to LOVE what you do.

Writing Background/Experience

Of course, if you have a writing background or you have acquired good writing skills through years of experience, it will help keep your blogs to be engaging and more enjoyable.  Using proper grammar, descriptive verbiage, and compelling headlines can keep readers engaged in your content longer.  We think overall if you are naturally a good writer, it will allow you to create high-quality content much easier and more efficiently.

Organized

A great blogger should be very well organized.  It will be important to plan and manage your writing schedules.  Like running your own business or planning your week for your full-time job, blogging should be no different.  Brainstorming blog ideas and creating a writing schedule all need to be organized to maximize your work schedule.

If you fly by the seat of your pants (as many people do) and are disorganized, it will most likely lead to inefficiencies in your blogging.  You can also find yourself so consumed with daily tasks, that your content quality suffers because you are just trying to rush through the writing process to get something out.

Strong Work Ethic

Having a strong work ethic turns good bloggers into great bloggers.  Someone that is able to stick to a schedule, exceed personal goals and expectations, and push themselves, will stand out from the crowd.  Many bloggers are writing for their own blog so it is not exactly a situation where they are getting paid for each post they write.  So it takes a person with a strong work ethic to see the long-term benefits and keep pushing themselves to consistently produce great content.

Network/Industry Reach

A blogger that has a large network and is known in the industry will make it much easier to promote their content.  As we all know, even if you write great content, you still need to promote it.  If you have built personal relationships with industry veterans, it can help earn credibility personally and for your blog.  If you can shoot a few messages and e-mails to key people in the industry who you know will promote your content to their networks, that can be extremely powerful.  Essentially you are leveraging your network and industry reach to promote content, gain feedback, and even help contribute to your blog.

SEO Knowledge

Having basic SEO knowledge is a plus for any blogger.  Bloggers who understand the benefits of good keyword research, how to promote content, and maximizing the potential of each post, will gain a larger readership in a shorter amount of time.

Goes Against the Grain

To be a great blogger, you need to sometimes go against what everyone else is doing and do something that is away from “the norm”.  Coming up with unique ways to stand out from the crowd is a way that great bloggers get found.  It could be a post, design-related, new way of promotion, unique content delivery, or something that has never been done before in the industry.

Social Media

Generally, bloggers spend a good amount of time on social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin.  Being active on various social networks and engaging with people on a regular basis will help bloggers get noticed.  If you are consistently promoting other users’ content, those users will begin to notice and return the favor.  If you read other industry blogs and leave thoughtful comments or even personally contact the blog owner, this is all-important for building your network and getting noticed.

A plus for a great blogger would be being a power user on social bookmarking sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, and Reddit.  If you have the ability to promote content and others in the community, notice and promote it as well.

Enjoys Sharing and Helping

Great bloggers genuinely enjoy helping others.  Many bloggers blog because they want to showcase their knowledge in the industry.  Of course, that is part of why people blog, but it should not be the only reason.  Gaining satisfaction from helping others in your industry is a trait that all great bloggers have.  Taking the time to personally reach out to someone asking a question or thanking someone who leaves an intelligent comment on your blog is going above and beyond.  It shows that you do care about what others are saying.

I Am Prime 17

I don’t have a mathematical bone in my body, but a prime number for me signifies a certain setting apart from the regular, the symmetry and patterns of who we are and who we might be.  A couple of months ago, I talked about being in the margins musically and socially and I still hold this to be true without giving myself a sense of uniqueness.  I mean we are all unique in our own way, but I just feel that a prime number represents me.  And, feeling this way, an odd 17, a queer woman who makes music with noise, and a fascist prime minister in prospect, It’s all starting to feel just a little bit like discrimination.  Maybe not a good time to be a prime number; but I am valient.

To my guiding stars Truth and Justice, I am adding Liberty.  For example, I’m single and only attracted to women. However, here in Italy I can have a civil union with a woman but not marriage; neither could we adopt children.  I don’t want to marry in a church and wear white; I don’t particularly want to adopt children.  What I demand are the same rights in marriage as a heterosexual couple. If not, it is discrimination.

Getting back to Prime 17, it all started with some high-blown fantasy of starting my own record label: Hah! I’m not sure where the number idea came from but when it did, I knew that it was just right. And feeling ‘just right’ is all I ask of life. The rest is up to me…

That’s the personal bit done except to say that the queen of my country died on my birthday.  Where was I?  Here, writing the names of the 74 femicides (so far this year). About a dozen of us from Non Una di Meno were in Piazza Castello in the center of Turin, to commemorate the passing of these women.  One, in particular, moved me: Unknown woman found murdered, her body mutilated and stuffed in a suitcase and dumped in the river Po.  While I felt some sadness for the queen, who had been there my entire life, I really wept for this unknown woman.  Was I the only person weeping for her death at the hands of … it was a man since mutilation of the corpse is often the case in femicides.  Who was she, who will miss her?  Was she a someone’s mother, or someone’s sister, certainly someone’s daughter?  Who will weep for her?   I still think about her, and I think about the 22-year-old girl beaten to death by the morality police in Iran for not wearing her headscarf correctly; and of the two sisters 17 and 15 raped and hung from a tree in India; no one should care since they are low caste ‘untouchables’.  And yet my heart breaks with every hurt against women.  So here I am, saying, ‘Sister, you are not alone!’

In the preceding blogs, I’ve talked a lot about the kind of music I compose.  I’ve talked about experimental music, and I did a lot of experimenting and auditioning of sounds to use in this piece, based on The Book of Tea. However, I still see myself as a ‘Sound Artist’. So, as a sound artist, whose materials are mainly noises with no written score to follow, I want to explain how I work from airy ideas to Sound Art..

I generally work from a narrative that I visualize as loose situations in my mind and then sketch something down so that I have a starting point.  This was sketched at the pavement bar in front of my apartment in Turin in about half an hour, my ADHD creative surge fueled by an espresso coffee.

From this sketch, I begin to hear the kinds of sounds that will represent my narrative and my interpretation of it and so, I begin the first stage of finding and creating my sound (noise) samples.  When I was at the Turin Conservatoire, learning to use my experience of working with tape to create musique concrète, but with a computer, we worked in a systematic way of collecting sounds according to their character.  Not only that but we, had to spectrum filter them into lo; mid; mid-hi; hi as a minimum and then transpose them into all notes of the chromatic scale: I started this blog by saying that I didn’t have a mathematical bone in my body, but somehow, I worked out that I ended up with 48 .wav files for each sound sample:

 

 

However, these days I tend to create sound samples on demand.  For example, I wanted to create a sound wash, not quite a drone, for the first line: The afternoon glow is brightening the bamboos.  First of all, ‘afternoon glow’ and Debussy’s L’aprés Midi d’un Faune came to mind, and I imagined something lyrical and modal to set the scene.  I imagined bamboo growing by the roadside and the wind catching it making them rattle against each other, and that for this movement a breeze would be needed.  So, my first task was to create a ‘breeze’.

In my distant past, I’ve played Viola da gambe; Classical, Jazz and Bass guitar, orchestral percussion, trumpet, and even flirted with the ‘misery stick’ B flat clarinet for the uninitiated.  As an aside, Puccini made great use of the clarinet in his operas but then: misery, misery, most of his heroines died, Mimi in La Bohème, and Tosca in Tosca.  Not sure about the rest but great music, though I’m sure I would have hated him.  All this just to tell you that I’d never played the flute before not even the bamboo one I used to record my acoustic sound sample for the breeze.  My lack of skills was a blessing otherwise I might have played some proper notes instead of the breathiness and slight hint of pitch.  Now the latter was useful since after copying the sample five times and then reversing it and copying those five times I had ten breathy fluting sounds of about four minutes.  Unlike many reversed sound samples which have that characteristic crescendo and then a reverse attack that ends the crescendo abruptly; this reversed clip (I’ll stick with the word clip as used in Audition rather than stem) had very little pronounced attacks but had natural spaced sounds according to where I breathed when recording.  Incidentally, I don’t have a proper microphone, so I use my Zoom H6 through my interface and generally record to Audition.

I then transposed all of them to different pitches within a two-octave range so I had a chordal cluster that would not be any recognizable chord but since I deal in noise, it suits my needs perfectly.  What is my need here?  I want to suggest a breeze, but I want to suggest a hint of musicality as well.  For this, after listening to a lot of samples, I used Spitfire Audio’s Intimate strings samples, and high violin harmonics (track 1); while below, (track 12) I generated some Pink Noise which I experimented with and, once balanced within the mix, automated the volume and panning so that the sound was shifting in and out of perspective; I later did much the same with the violin harmonics.  The illustration below shows the tracks laid out and staggered entries.  Now, remember that five of the ten flute tracks have been reversed.  in this way there are no unison sounds and any one of the individual sounds within the four minutes will occur ten times at different pitches and in different places and half will be reversed and in a different position of the stereo stage since I have also automated the panning of each track.  Lastly, each clip has two or three effects added to change the nature of each sound that makes up the whole.   In this way, there is continuous movement within the drone/wash which requires ‘deep listening’ at times to perceive the changes of color within.

 

The following Image shows the same Breeze section in the mixing view, which I find useful in the later stages so that I can listen without being distracted by looking at the clips.   One thing you will notice, however, are the effects which are pitch shifter and De noise for all the tracks plus the addition of different kinds of EQ, echo/delay, notch filter, compression with the addition of a reverb unit on a bus track etc.

 

So those are the main elements of the construction of the wash which was eventually mixed down to a wav file. I mentioned violins and I also made use of the Autoharp and the dulcimer.  But since Audition does not have MIDI, I used Reaper to record these instruments.  So, the only problem is recording the instruments separately and then render them as wavs and then take them to Audition.

I prefer to ‘compose’ in Audition for various reasons.  One thing I do, as a matter of habit, is to let the current state of a particular section play on repeat while I get on with other stuff, occasionally paying more attention if I hear something I’m not sure about. For example, on one of the tracks, I applied ‘dub delay’ which sounded quite interesting.  However, over repeated listening, it became irritating and created an expectation that Bob Marley would add a vocal… not quite a Japanese afternoon in the countryside, so I changed it.

The following image is just a collection of instrumental samples on Reaper: high violins, Autoharp and Dulcimer. Of course, it would have been better if I could have added the instruments in real-time, and maybe, once I become more familiar with Reaper, I might reverse the process: use Audition to create and process my sound files and then take them into Reaper for the compositional process; watch this space!

 

So, let’s talk bamboo, mentioned at the end of the first line. As I have already suggested, I found this passage very evocative not as a faux Japanese image either.  Artistically, I imagined the bamboo canes in movement as the result of a warm afternoon breeze. So, I began to think about symbolic representations of ‘afternoon glow’ and the sound of bamboo as light percussive sounds. Therefore, using Reaper and the Spitfire Audio LAB sound samples, I recorded: Autoharp, Dulcimer, Claves, woodblock, abstract voices, and high violin harmonics.  In the following figure, the harmonics are already incorporated, along with the pink noise in the “Breeze_section_Mixdown 1”.   So, this multi-track session is really a workspace to experiment with the midi instruments, now waveforms, and treat them and place them in a time-space to create a draft mix.  So, before placing my breeze sample in its place, on track 20, I made some preliminary adjustments of balance, which in this case is just controlling volumes since the 12 tracks making up the breeze had already been manipulated regarding panning and volume.  Once the instruments had been placed at different points, I used the automated volume track to blend the breeze into the individual instrumental entries, for example dipping the volume slightly at the entry of the dulcimer in order to give it space to ‘bloom’.  On this ‘Sketch Pad’ I had two bus tracks A and B, both reverb but A slightly drier and B with More resonance; I have to say that I like the Arturia Rev Plate 140 and its pre-sets, ‘Shy Reverb’ is great for keeping things natural.  Two were enough since I had my instruments on the drier setting reserving the bouncier reverb on bus B for the claves at the end.

Anyway, my workflow, such as it is, consists of arranging all the elements roughly where they will appear in the finished piece and then: play, listen, play, listen, and them some more.  In this case, there was too much percussion; so, by using razor edit (just like the old days of tape) I select the sounds I want and place them where appropriate. Perhaps as a throwback to the days of tape, I often put similar samples on one track which means that I cannot freely use the mixer faders just because one clip goes into the red, for example.  In this case, I make panning and volume adjustments on each individual clip.  A couple of points that are important to me when using a Digital Audio Work Station as a composition tool is to make sure that each clip has any effects and processing directly on the clip and not the track.  In this way, if I copy and proliferate the clip, it will have the processing with it and, should I move a clip to another track; again, it will keep its original processing parameters.  To create my mixdown I used only tracks 1, 20, 19, and 14.  The remaining tracks, especially 2, 3, and 4 will be used in the following section which is water-based.  These three clips are spectrum edits into hi, mid and lo frequencies of water sounds and can be further treated by looping stretching, transposing, etc.

A couple of thoughts: all my mixdown or bounced clips leave a trail of intermediary sound files which at 96000 Hz and32 bit floating point take up a lot of storage.   Secondly, this kind of composition is incredibly slow, but I was unusually rather quick with this section perhaps because I aimed for a more transparent and well-spaced texture.  I comfort myself with the fact that Éliane Radigue used to spend a year on one work.

Big changes for me.  If all goes well, by early spring, I’ll be at the Centro Mexicano para la Música y las Artes Sonoras, Morelia, Michoacán, México, where I hope to find other artists that I can collaborate with.  Until then there is The Foolishness of things to finish and I need to become functional in Spanish.

What you see on the screen in fig 6 is available on Soundcloud with the link below.

https://soundcloud.com/francesca-caston/bamboo

Soundgirls te quiero 💜  Sí, también a todas las de Mèxico 🇸🇳

Eve Louise Horne founder of PeakMusicUK and We Are The Unheard

 

Eve Louise Horne is the founder of PeakMusicUK and We Are The Unheard. She has worked in professional audio for over 20 years and graduated from Gateway School of Recording validated y Kingston University with a HED.  Eve is a singer, songwriter, and producer.

Career Start

Eve got her start in the industry at age 18 when she signed to Polydor Records in a girl group. She skipped her last year at BRIT School and instead went on tour with The Backstreet Boys, Boyzone, and Peter Andre. She has also worked with Jermaine Dupri and Andrea Martin. She would eventually join and another girl group signed to EMI in Denmark, they worked with Soulshock & Karlin (who are Danish), Diane Warren wrote a song on our album and I was super lucky to sing another song on this album that was written by Andrea Martin too.

Career Now

What is a typical day like?

My days are always different and I love it that way! I will wake up, smile, and listen to some gratitude affirmations. My 3yr old daughter comes in with her teddy and we have a cuddle and play mummy’s songs.

Then I get us both fed and ready to bring her to nursery and I come back home, have a coffee, and start either having meetings via zoom, working my way through my to-do list which could be anything from editing a podcast for a client, editing my own podcast, creating video tutorials to teach production or songwriting using Ableton or Logic Pro X.

It could be recording vocals for my own tracks, writing to briefs, writing a new track, going out to teach in schools or talk on panels and then I come back, pick up my daughter, get her fed and ready for bed and then I go back to my computer and continue to send emails or finish things up. I will then read a bit or do a bit of learning. Then Repeat! Hahaha!

How do you stay organized and focused?

Lots and lots of Post-it notes, lists, calendars, and a lot of it in my head!

What do you enjoy the most about your job?

Helping people, being a role model, and raising awareness

What do you like least?

I am doing it alone so it is hard. I am very much a people person and love collaborating on everything! Especially songwriting and production! So It is hard to keep the motivation.

If you tour what do you like best?

I don’t tour anymore. But when I did, It was the tour bus and the crate of Jack Daniels, films and games, and the feeling of being free and traveling to amazing places. But the BEST part was getting on stage and performing to the crowd!!

What do you like least?

Being constantly tired!!

What is your favorite day off activity? 

I love spending time with my daughter and going to the gym

What are your long-term goals?

It depends on the discipline.  I want to start my Academy to teach women and gender minorities production using Ableton and make sure long term that participants can be supported from beginner to career, I want to help improve the percentage of women producers so we can get closer to 50% I feel it is my responsibility to raise awareness for the younger generation so that they know that production and engineering are career options and make sure they feel comfortable applying for college/university without worrying about being a minority.

What if any obstacles or barriers have you faced?

I feel that the barriers or obstacles have been silent ones if that makes sense.  The industry is very much about who you know; if you are not willing to act in uncertain ways, doors aren’t opened.  I also feel being a gay woman was hard. When I came out to the people around me that I thought I could trust and that they would maybe understand how I was feeling,  they used it against me and parry (pretty) much shamed me to other industry people.  This was in the early ’90s so it wasn’t as easy as it is now.

How have you dealt with them?

I continued being myself through the pain and hard times and learned to get rid of any guilt and be proud of who I am, be proud of what I have achieved, be proud of what I stand for, and speak out!!

Advice you have for other women and young women who wish to enter the field?

Believe in yourself and make sure you surround yourself with people who are doing better than you so you can always learn and grow. Be curious and never afraid to ask questions. Help others out if you get into a position where you can. Make sure you are brave and speak out if something is not right (don’t let the fear of losing your job/position stop you from doing what is right by you). Listen to your gut ALWAYS and don’t be ashamed to ask for help. oooh and don’t man hate – educate with love 🙂

Must have skills?

Self-belief is a must!  You have to be able to communicate effectively

More on The Unheard Academy

We Are Unheard Academy is launching a funded programme! 

We are so excited to be launching the online Academy that was born from the We Are The Unheard Campaign. The Academy is funded by The Arts Council and supported by leading music industry software and hardware company Ableton, Musicians Union, Help Musicians and Why Not Her.

The aim of WATUA is to be accessible to gender minorities and those from disadvantaged backgrounds. To offer training and support from beginner to career and help improve the percentages of female-identifying producers and songwriters in the Music Industry.

The programme is completely funded. All participants are required to do it purchase a WATUA hoodie and promote it on socials to pay it forward.

Women make up around 20% of all musical artists, yet only 2% of women are music producers. Even though there are plenty of talented female producers creating amazing work, male producers and artists continue to increase and dominate the music industry.

WATUA aims to address this disparity by delivering an 8-week Introduction to Ableton online program.  During this program, participants have the opportunity to attend 3 in-person masterclasses/events where they can network, collaborate and connect with industry professionals.

WATUA have partnered with Veva Collect who will provide participants with a free 1yr membership, MPG  who will promote the programmes to their members and extended industry, Raw Material who are providing the space for the events and ongoing support and Flare Audio who are gifting their amazing products.

“I am so proud and grateful to be able to deliver this program to female-identifying producers. It is important  to me that I do everything within my power to help change these abysmal statistics so we can finally focus  on the beauty of creating.” – Eve Horne: Founder We Are The Unheard & PeakMusicUK

All participants attending in-person events will have childcare costs covered and those traveling from outside of London with have travel costs covered.

2hrs a week 

8 weeks via zoom 

3 in-person networking events with masterclasses with industry professionals.  

Who can apply? 

If you identify as a female, non-binary, or trans woman. Age 18+

About the Founder: 

WATUA was founded by Eve Horne. Eve is an Award-Winning Creative Mentor and Advisor. She has over 20 years’ experience in the Music Industry as a Singer, Songwriter, and Producer. She is the founder of PeakMusicUK and the UNHEARD Campaign which demands equality for women in the Music Industry.

Want more info? 

www.wearetheunheard.com

support@wearetheunheard.com

We Are The Unheard Podcast

The intention behind the We Are The Unheard podcast is to provide a platform for everybody who has ever felt unheard. Each week Eve Horne will be bringing you unapologetic, open-hearted, honest conversations and stories. Eve aims to educate the world with love, to change perspectives, and to change lives. To bring people together through the power of audio so that they can understand the life journeys others have had, listen with empathy, and be less judgmental. We underestimate the power of kindness and their ability to help others. If we all try to understand someone else’s path or their journey or their experiences, we would learn so much more about ourselves along the way and become more compassionate and have more empathy. It is Eve’s mission to help people get their stories heard and share their experiences so that we can all learn a little more and become better human beings.

 

 

New Venues

 

We all like the allure of a shiny new thing. On tour, there’s something initially exciting about being the first theatrical show in a theatre, but then you get there and realize you’re not getting to test drive a slick new theatre with all the bells and whistles. Instead, you’ve become a beta tester for a building and you’re going to find all the kinks the venue staff will have to eventually work out.

Walking into that load-in asks you for patience and to accept that things will not be happening according to the usual plan. On Phantom, we opened a venue in Orlando and it took four, maybe five, times longer than usual to do our FOH runs (cable bundles that go from the racks onstage to the console in the house), simply because the local crew didn’t know the path yet. Thankfully, we scheduled extra time for load-in because the building was brand new, so a 45-minute project turning into 4 hours didn’t completely derail things like it would have if we’d been on a normal time frame for load-in.

New construction is particularly difficult for theatrical shows because Broadway shows will test the limits of any theatre, new or old. A 30-40 person show with 2-ton scenic pieces, an 80’ wide show deck, 16 box center cluster, video walls, and mother truss structures (these are made to hold up heavy or oddly shaped pieces that need extra support, like the curved section of our video wall on Mean Girls), multiple electric trusses, automation, etc. will ask more of a local crew and space than a talking head, a stand-up comedian, a graduation ceremony, or a symphony. When you start loading into a brand new space you’re going to learn the limits of the building and the crew very quickly.

The building usually presents the largest challenge. Constructing a new venue is a huge undertaking that takes years to complete and the project may pass to multiple contractors during its progress. This can easily create a lack of cohesion across the space, especially if one contractor started a project, but another one had to jump in mid-way through to complete it or didn’t even realize it wasn’t finished when they joined the job. Maybe the first person on the project in Orlando had a plan for that FOH cable path, but someone else took over who didn’t finish that project. Either because they didn’t know what touring shows entail, or didn’t even realize that people would be running cables other than the permanent conduit.

As shows load in and out of a venue, the staff learns what the problems are and can start to solve them. The core holes in the walls so the cable doesn’t have to block open doorways, or they install motors to get cases up several levels where there’s no elevator access. When we opened the venue in Orlando, we had to carry cases up a half flight of stairs to get to FOH, but when I returned a few years later, they’d thankfully found they could use the handicapped accessible chair lift to do that heavy lifting instead. Mean Girls was in Greensboro at a fairly new venue and we were the first show that got the benefit of a removable railing and a ramp to get racks and cases down to the FOH position. Previously, shows had to lift everything over a short wall (including consoles that can easily weigh 400lbs) and the house head told his management repeatedly that it was not ideal and borderline dangerous. Even in that case, it took management coming by to watch what the local crew had to do to move the cases for them to decide that they did indeed need to make that change.

If the building isn’t enough of a challenge, personnel can also add to the complications of your load. As the road crew, you rely on the house staff to know where things go. I frame it as “I’ll tell you what needs to happen, you tell me how you do it in your theatre,” so when I say we need to get cables from one side of the stage to the other, the house head will tell me that they either run them around the pit rail, drop down through holes to run across the basement, or some other path they have to work out. When the house head is almost as new to the building as you are, they’re learning right alongside you and don’t have all those answers yet.

In some cases, the entire crew is brand new to everything: to the venue, to the job, and sometimes even to the theatre itself. When Dirty Dancing opened a venue in Sugarland, the majority of the local crew had never done a load in for a Broadway tour and didn’t know how to set up com in the spot booth. I went up, found the patch bay, and walked them through setting up headsets and belt packs and how things plugged in. Also during that load-in, I asked the crew to drop in a rope to make a cable pick for our center cluster cable (this pulls it up and out of the way so it’s out of the frame of the proscenium. One of the locals tied it off to the fly rail backstage and I had to explain that they couldn’t do that because that pulled the cable across the fire pocket, which would impede the fire curtain if it had to come in. (Fire Marshals will sometimes do walkthroughs of venues and look for things like that which violate fire code and have to be redone. So running the cable correctly at the beginning of the day means we won’t have to change it later.) Later on, during that same day, our road head electrician had to help teach the building staff how to program their house light system.

It’s worth noting that you’ll have green crew members even in older, established venues. However, on those crews, there might be one or two people who are new with the other four or so who are more experienced stagehands and can help show them the ropes. In a new theatre, especially in smaller towns, it’s more likely that a larger percentage of the crew will also be new or less knowledgeable.

So, in addition to doing your normal load in, you’re having to learn the architecture of a new building and oftentimes teaching a crew what future Broadway tours are going to expect from them. It is exciting to be the first show in a new theatre, but it also requires understanding and a willingness to teach where you can and help solve problems when you’re able. You’ll get the show in, it always happens, you just end up learning even more about what makes venues efficient (or not) in the process.

Small Venue Survival Guide – Not Even the Gig Yet

 

Small venues are everywhere and unless you are doing arena tours there is a good chance you will spend quite a few hours in these. They come in all forms and shapes, and from relatively well-kept to complete car crash establishments. One thing that will always be the same though: you will always be there alone in the middle of the afternoon, with nobody else around, faced with technology that does not always do what it says on the tin, an owner/manager that is nowhere to be found, and a phone line for emergencies that was supposed to be working that isn’t. So, in a nutshell, it’s up to you. As you move up the sound engineer ladder you will be faced with many different challenges but in a way the small venue is the litmus test for people starting out as sound techs with its way of throwing everything at you just to test you out to see if you are actually cut for this or not. It can often be a painful experience and one that is especially daunting because it is often thrown at you right at the start of your journey into sound engineering (which is pretty unfair I think). So here are a few tips that will hopefully help you own the small venue gig rather than the small venue gig owning you.

More often than not the small venue gig will appear out of nowhere. Someone is ill, can’t make it, or has double booked themselves. Oftentimes what has really happened is that they have found a better gig for themselves and are all too pleased to offload the small venue gig onto someone else (that’s you). The good thing about this is that there is a good chance that the small venue gig will turn into a repeat gig. And while not a fanciful location, it will give you lots of opportunities to hone your trade. Provided you are prepared. So, fear not! The following few simple steps should help you live up to the challenge.

In a way, your preparation for this starts long before you find yourself in a dingy basement behind a half-working mixer trying to mix a band. So even if you get called at short notice try to go to the venue a few days before your gig, and try to aim for a night when another gig is on. This may seem like a big-time investment, but it really pays off to not find out about all the things that don’t work when you are there all by yourself. Go there and talk to the sound tech that is there. Look what gear, mixing desk, etc. they have, and where things – mics, stands, cables, DI boxes, etc –  are stowed away. Ask the important questions: what is broken, what is unusual, what do you need to take particular care about. Know the channel count in that venue. Find out which ones do not work (there will always be some) or those permanently used by the DJ / bar staff to play their music over the PA. Take pictures of everything and take notes. Get that sound tech’s phone number if they agree. Spot any kit that is unfamiliar? Make a note. Look it up. Download the manual. And save it on your phone, print it, whatever – you may not have a reception in the venue. Ask if there is a decent start-up scene on the desk you can use. If you can stay for a bit of the gig do so. Take a mental note of what the venue sounds like, walk around, and see if the mix position sounds very different from the audience bit. Have a drink, make friends with the bar people, tell them you’ll be there next, and go home. If you really can’t go there physically try to get as much info beforehand anyway.

Next thing: Get the riders, load in times, stage plots, and backline requirements (and if they share backline or not) for as many bands as you can – email the promoter/venue manager, etc. yourself if you didn’t get any. Still no luck? Try the band’s Facebook/ social media. More often than not bands send the riders and they “get lost” somewhere in translation and they don’t mind the sound engineer getting in touch with them. And while you are in touch with them clarify all other points as above (backline, load in, etc.). And if you spot anything that the band wants that you are not sure the venue has (keyboard stand, special mic….) ask the venue if they provide it, or have at least discussed it with the band….. You may think it’s not your job to sort this out, and you are right, it isn’t. However, if the stuff is missing it will be your fault. Because you will be the only one there anyway. It will also cause unnecessary delays as you – yes that will be up to you as well – try to chase up enough empty beer crates to fashion a synth stand out of. You will run late and the band will be pissed off way before sound check even starts. You may email the venue and try to clarify and you still get no answer. But at least there will be an email trail to show you tried.

After that: Listen to the bands’ music. That fancy vocal effect? Can you do that on your desk? What kind of mix is it? A metal band with heavy guitars and double kick? Or a jazz combo with a harmonium? Think about what mixing these genres involves, in terms of mics you’ll use, how you place them and what effects you need to have dialed in on your desk.

Lastly? Do you have more than two bands? Make a festival input list. Make sure all inputs of all bands can fit somewhere on your mixer. Got five bands and a 16-channel mixer of which two are not working at all and one is not passing phantom? Plan ahead how you’ll squeeze them all in. And how to easiest bring it all together. Print the list with a number of copies (you’ll lose one immediately), take a pen to amend (the riders will be wrong). And put the vocals at the end, starting from your last channel (as the riders will be wrong). You may end up with a gap between your last instrument and the vocals but at least you won’t have vocals and then more bongos, keys and some violin after that when every band turns up with an extra musician (or two).

Ok so, the day of the gig is there. Go to the venue early and I mean early. 2 hours before the first band rocks up is no luxury as you have a lot of work to do before they arrive, as we’ll see below.

Step 1: Make sure the PA works. This may sound like a given but in small venues, it, unfortunately, isn’t. A working PA means: both sides of speakers work (usually, in some form or other), all drivers in the speakers work (sometimes), sound roughly the same (rarely), both subs work (sometimes), and the PA is plugged in the right way round meaning L is L and R is R (not always). You do this by either sending pink noise into each of your buses in turn or by plugging your phone (but be careful with phones and mixing desks, see below) into a line input and sending it to all buses in turn (L / R and matrices or delays if there are any).

Step 2: Make sure your monitors work using the same technique. Don’t be alarmed if none of them sound the same. That will usually be the case, unfortunately. I’ve often pondered if this is an issue but have decided that since each musician only hears their own, it isn’t.

Step 3: Make sure the desk does what you want it to. That show file you were advised to use? Make sure there are no fancy leftovers from others. Plug in your phone or a mic and send the signal to the FX, to the mons, to the mains. If weird stuff happens, reset the desk and rebuild your own scene. If you have an analogue desk, zero whatever can be zeroed and check all routing is correct, outboard works, etc.

Step 4: Make sure all your stage inputs work (almost never). The way I do this is I raise all faders, raise masters, put all settings (gain, EQ, etc.) at the same levels, unmute, and plug in either a signal generator, a mic, or the phone into each channel (and check channel after channel). This way I can hear from the stage if it all works/sounds roughly the same. Make absolutely sure your phantom power is off though as the 48 volts will fry audio outputs of phones etc. in a second. That’s why I do not really recommend using the phone for that. A cheap cable tester that also does test signal is the trick here.

Worse than the completely non-working channel though is the one-legged channel. It will seem like it passes audio fine (although a little quieter) but a one-legged channel will, depending on which pin is not working either pass no phantom, or no phantom and only half the audio. So how do we find out about this? This time you mute all the channels but put phantom on. Plug an active DI with a light into each channel (channel after channel) and if the light does not come on, you’ve got a one-legged channel. That does not mean you can’t absolutely use it. Oftentimes you will have to use every channel you can find. But you should not use it on very quiet sources, or anything that requires phantom, like a condenser mic, or an active DI.

Step 5: Make sure all cables work. This is where the humble cable tester is the small venue engineer’s best friend. Take 10 mins to go through all the ones you’ll use. Because if one doesn’t work it absolutely will end up being the one for the main vocal and not that second rack tom or bottom snare.

Step 6: Ring out your system: Set up your vocal mics where they will be. Don’t know how many input lines? Put them at the end (or very beginning) of your input list. EQ both FOH and monitors to remove feedback. If you have an iPad that is where it will be really useful as you can position yourself right on stage and do your ringing out from there.

Step 7: Set up most other mics before the band arrives. Get the stands out, put the mics into the clips, and cable them up. If you don’t know where on your input list the vocals get plugged in, or how many lines you’ll end up with, plug them in at the end (or the beginning). Prepare DIs with cables etc.….

And so, when the band finally arrives you’ll have a working system, that is rung out, and all your mics will already be ready to go. And most importantly you’ll have that confidence that you’ve checked it all and normally everything should work.

Next: Small venue survival guide – Part 2: The gig, and what’s in my bag

Gertie Steinacker started out in live sound, after working in production for a number of festivals, about 15 years ago in Switzerland, attending a 2-year course then working in local venues. Later on, music production became the priority but a few years ago she got sucked back into being behind a mixer again. Her time is now split between live sound, translation work, trying to finish a Ph.D., and music production.

You can currently find her at FOH or on monitors in various venues around London and Sheffield such as the 100 Club and the Foundry as well as working with a number of independent and underground promoters.

 

X