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Hit Like A Girl And SoundGirls Team Up To Promote Music Education And Expansion.

 

Hit Like A Girl and SoundGirls, leading organizations in the effort to grow the music community for girls, women, and non-binary and trans people have announced a new collaboration that will add impact to Hit Like A Girl X, the 11th annual edition of the groundbreaking contest for women drummers and beatmakers.

Last year SoundGirls members shared educational video content about tuning, miking and recording acoustic and electronic drums on the HLAG-X website and SoundGirls members sat on judging panels for HLAG-X drumset and beat-making categories.

 

If you would like to be involved this year you can apply here

Video Content our Members Provided Last Year

 

To learn more, visit www.hitlikeagirlcontest.com and www.soundgirls.org.

Hit Like A Girl® is a celebration of female drummers, percussionists and beatmakers. The organization was founded in 2012 by Phil Hood (Drum!), David Levine (Full Circle Management) and Mindy Abovitz-Monk (Tom Tom). Now in its 10th year, the Hit Like A Girl Contest has had more than 10,000 participants from 50 countries and has reached nearly 100,000,000 online impressions. Additional HLAG Directors include Louise King (Rhythm Magazine), Sarah Hagan (Marketing & Artist Relations), Danielle Thwaites (Beats By Girlz) and Diane Downs (Louisville Leopard Percussionists). HLAG sponsors include many of today’s leading drum, percussion, electronics, accessory and media companies while its judges include many of the most popular, most respected drummers on the planet.

SoundGirls and SoundGym

Collaborate to support women in the audio industry

SoundGym and SoundGirls collaborate in order to encourage and support women and girls in the audio industry.

SoundGym members have been donating Pro subscriptions to support women in sound.

First Step Register for a free account at soundgym.co
Then in your settings use our school code CP8I4084H89
The second Step Fill out this form and we will provide you a year subscription.

Register Here

 

 

 

 

Critical Listening with Spatial Audio

When I began studying music production five years ago, I spent a lot of my hours working through critical listening techniques for records I found or ones that were recommended to me. The goal of this practice was identifying elements of arrangement, recording, programming, and mixing that made these particular records unique. At the time I was studying, I was introduced to immersive audio and music mixes in Dolby Atmos, but there was a strong emphasis on the technology’s immobility – making these mixes was pretty impractical since the listener needed to stay in one place relative to the specific arrangement of the speakers. Now that technology companies like Apple have implemented spatial audio to support Dolby Atmos, listeners with access to these products can consider how spatialization impacts production choices. Let’s explore this by breaking down spatial audio with AirPods and seeing how this technology expands what we know about existing critical listening techniques.

Apple AirPods Pro with spatial audio and noise cancellation features

It’s important to address the distinctions of spatial audio, as the listening experience depends on if the track is stereo or mixed specifically for Dolby Atmos. The result of listening to a stereo track with spatial audio settings active is called “spatial stereo,” which mimics the events of spatial audio on stereo tracks. When using the “head-tracking” function while listening to a stereo track, moving your head will adjust the positioning of the mix in relation to the location of your listening device via sensors in the AirPods.

For a simplified summary of how this works, spatial audio and Dolby Atmos are both achieved with a model known as Head-Related Transfer Function (HRTF). This is a mathematical function that accounts for how we listen binaurally. It considers aspects of psychoacoustics by measuring localization cues such as interaural level and time differences, and properties of the outer ear and shape of the head. If you are interested in diving into these localization cues, you can learn more about them in my last blog.

A simplified layout of a head-related transfer function (HRTF)

Ultimately, the listening experience of spatial stereo and Dolby Atmos mixes is different. For example, tracks that are mixed in Dolby Atmos involve different elements of the instrumentation that are placed as “objects” in a three-dimensional field and processed through a binaural renderer to create an immersive mix in headphones. Meanwhile, spatial stereo sounds like a combination of added ambience and filters and the AirPod’s sensors to form a make-shift “room” for the song. Using the head-tracking feature with spatial stereo can impact the listener’s relationship to the production of the song in a similar way to a Dolby Atmos mix, and while it doesn’t necessarily make the mix better, it does provide a lot of new information about how the record was created. I want to emphasize how we can listen differently to our favorite records in spatial audio, and not how this feature makes the mix better or worse.

An example of object-oriented mixing in Dolby Atmos for Logic Pro

 

For this critical listening exercise, I listened to a song mixed in Atmos through Apple Music with production that I’m familiar with: “You Know I’m No Good,” performed by Amy Winehouse, produced by Mark Ronson, and recorded by members of The Dap Kings. It’s always a good idea when listening in a new environment, in this case, an immersive environment, to listen to a song that you’re familiar with. This track was also recorded in a rather unique way as the instruments were, for the most part, not isolated in the studio, and very few dynamic microphones were used in true Daptone Records fashion. The song already has a “roomier” production sound, which actually works with the ambient experience of spatial audio.

The first change I noticed with spatial audio head tracking turned on is that the low-end frequencies are lost. The low-end response in AirPods is already pretty fragile because the speaker drivers cannot accurately replicate longer waveforms, and our collection of harmonic relationships helps us rebuild the low-end. With spatial audio, much of the filtering makes this auditory perception more difficult, and in this particular song, impacts the electric bass, kick drum, and tenor saxophone. Because of this distinction, I realized that a lot of the power from the drums isn’t necessarily coming from the low end. This makes sense because Mark Ronson recorded the drums for this record with very few microphones, focusing mostly on the kit sound and overheads. They cut through the ambience in the song and provide the punchiness and grit that matches Winehouse’s vocal attitude.

Since a lot of the frequency information and arrangement in many modern records comes from the low end, I think this is a great opportunity to explore how mid-range timbres are interacting in the song, particularly with the vocal, which in this record is the most important instrument. When I move my head around, the vocal moves away from the center of the mix and interacts more with some of the instruments that are spread out, and I noticed that it blends the most with a very ambient electric guitar, the trombone, and the trumpet. However, since those three instruments have a lot of movement and fill up a lot of the space where the vocal isn’t performing, there is more of a call-and-response connection to these instruments. This is emphasized by the similarity in timbres that I didn’t hear as clearly in the stereo mix.

You know I’m No Good” in Apple Music with a Dolby Atmos label

Spatial audio makes a lot of the comping instruments in this song such as the piano more discernible, so I can allocate the feeling of forward movement and progression in the production to what is happening in these specific musical parts. In the stereo mix, the piano is doing the same job, but I’m able to separate it from other comping instruments in spatial audio because of how I moved my head. I turned my head to the right and centered my attention on my left ear, so I could feel the support from the piano. Furthermore, I recognized the value of time-based effects in this song as I compared the vocal reverb and ambient electric guitar in stereo and spatial audio. A lot of the reverb blended together, but the delay automation seemed to deviate from the reverb, so I could hear how the vocal delay in the chorus of the song was working more effectively on specific lyrics. I also heard variations in the depths of the reverbs, as the ambient electric guitar part was noticeably farther away from the rest of the instruments. In the stereo mix, I can distinguish the ambient guitar in the mix, but how far it is in perceptual depth is clearer in spatial audio.

Overall, I think that spatial audio is a useful tool for critical listening because it allows us to reconsider how every element of a record is working together. There is more space to explore how instrumentation and timbres are working together or not, and what their roles are. We can consider how nuances like compression and time-based effects are working to properly support the recording. Spatial audio doesn’t necessarily make every record sound better, but it’s still a tool we can learn from.

I’m retired. What am I Doing in a Classroom?

Hi SoundGirls

I’m Francesca but you can call me Frà, as do my friends in Italy, where I live; Turin to be precise.  I refer to myself as an Experimental composer/musician with my origins in Electroacoustic composition, which is something I did over forty years ago at University in the UK.

Before I begin my first blog, I’d like to put my writing in context.  For this, I’ll draw on a saying of the French Feminist movement from the mid to late sixties:

“D’où tu parles?”

Literally, where do you speak from? Which in my case means, this writing is my viewpoint, based on who I am, my formative years and growth into adulthood, my social relationships my experiences in and around music, and nobody else’s: so…

I am a white woman who was born, grew up, and educated in England of an English father and an Italian mother, the latter being one reason I live in Italy now.  Philosophically, I am a left-leaning, liberally oriented feminist, an out, gay woman.  While this may seem unnecessary information for a blog about music production, I can honestly say that who I am and how I feel, influences my music and my attitudes towards other female composers and producers in music, and every other activity, for that matter.  I care about matters of race, class, gender, sexual and romantic orientation, the safety of women, the plight of refugees, so many, many things, as I’m sure you will be aware of too.  Each of us will have a view on these things and, on the surface, there may be a remarkable sense of collectivity of thought but each of us with their differing experiences will have a nuanced view which, in the collectivity of the whole, contributes to and affects all our joined understandings.  Does this affect the way I wish to make and perceive music?  It most certainly does.

Oh, and I almost forgot to mention my constant companion, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). She certainly influences my music; she is my creative muse or the bit of my brain that goes into overdrive during my moments of creation and enlightenment… but she can be a bitch, sometimes leaving me at the shoreline, standing on the edges of decision, crucial and alone…  It’s been like this most of this year.  However, I’d never desert her; we’ve lived dreams that defy all understanding…

Anyway, when I draw on any of my experiences in creating a piece of experimental music, it does two things: one, it’s a part of my life that has shaped that music and give it life, and while a listener may not perceive this, I feel that I have been as authentic as I can be; and being ‘authentic’ is important to me.  The second thing it does is help structure the piece.  Perhaps, related to images, shapes, rhythms, and pulse, or other musical traditions and styles, and quite often I create a narrative thread in my mind, which might include poetry.  For example, this poem by Audre Lorde, “A Litany for Survival” speaks for women of colour in particular, but also for all women.  The last few lines:

…when we are loved we are afraid 

        love will vanish

        when we are alone we are afraid

        love will never return

        and when we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard 

        nor welcomed

        but when we are silent

        we are still afraid.

        So it is better to speak

        remembering

        we were never meant to survive.

For me, this suggests music that is both tender and quiet, but at the same time with an epic soul, remembering that despite the anxiety reflected in the poem… “…it is better to speak.”

With this knowledge, I hope you might better understand the viewpoint in my writing.  So, what are the themes of my blog?   A bit of backstory to bring you up to the present day:

After having raised a family, worked as a teacher, language consultant, and Senior lecturer at two universities in the UK, I decided, at retirement, that I would go and live in Italy, with no other plan in mind than to enjoy retirement and to begin my new life as a late-blooming gay woman.

Why Italy? Well, having an Italian mother and having fond childhood memories of being there on many childhood visits, and having some facility with the language, it seemed an obvious choice. I chose Turin in Northern Italy since I had friends there and is in the same region of my mother’s birth and now sadly, her resting place; she died in 2016

I did all the usual things a gay woman might do: visited the local LGBTQIA+ centre. I also visited Nora Book and Coffee the LGBTQIA+ book shop and, as the name implies, a rather nice Café.

As a late bloomer, I went on my first Pride in Turin and got involved in activism, helping gay and lesbian refugees prepare for commission hearings as to whether they would be given refugee status and be able to remain in Italy.  And I was generally having a good time.

I met and fell in love with a South American artist; she loved me back; what more can I say? Oh yes, apart from loving each other, we talked about art, and I began to think back to my university days of studying music (and a couple of terms of art history). We discovered a mutual love of abstraction and, in conversation with her, began to dig deep into my musical experiences of forty years ago, remembering how I had discovered and nurtured a love of contemporary music.

I met Iannis Xenakis at my University there; I tried to compose like him. I tried to emulate the serial composition techniques of Schönberg, Berg, and Webern. I tried to use non-retrograde rhythms like Olivier Messiaen and most of all messing around in the recording studio with Studer tape recorders, Dolby A systems to manage tape hiss, a mixing desk which looked a bit like the controls of the Starship Enterprise, and also one of the first synthesizers in the UK: an EMS VCS 100.

The messing around often went on into the night when other undergrads were propping up the bar. The messing around got serious and under the guidance of our professor of composition, Denis Smalley, we began amassing collections of samples on tape, which we spliced and looped and recorded at different speeds, passed through filters and via oscillators, mixed with synthesized sounds, re-recorded the re-recordings until we began to realise that we were composing and that we called it, at the time, Musique Concrète.

Flash forward to conversations with my South American girlfriend artist and both of us saw the parallels in Musique Concrete and the plastic arts.  She spoke about her technique in painting of layering – a way of coming back to the work and adding another layer, not just paint but expression also.  What did she have to say on that day?  What forms of expression would those added brush marks say, and would they add to, or modify the expression that was already there?

Indeed, the parallels became strikingly obvious: every new track containing other samples, every mix down added something to the piece. Maybe extending it, or modifying a section of it, adding more complexity, as if adding another countermelody to a fugue. The possibilities were endless and were only restricted by patience, how far you could go to resolve a technical difficulty, and in the end, make an aesthetic judgment that said the work is finished.

OK, so here I was, in Turin, around October 2019, a gay woman and LGBTQIA+ activist not yet ready for complete retirement with my friends and my exotic girlfriend, wondering what’s missing from my life?

Answer…. Creating music. I didn’t want to take up the Viola da Gamba again, or the trumpet, or the guitar, or percussion; I’ve always been a rotten pianist and my voice wouldn’t behave after a surgical intervention to my throat.  Then I remembered what satisfaction I had drawn from Musique Concrète and thought that maybe, I could create, edit, review, and produce my music as I had done forty years ago.  I considered how I might do this for a while and then thought: I’ll bet you can do all this with computers; it is 2019 after all.

So, as I set out looking for a place where I might associate my ideas with new media, a serendipitous moment occurred at about one in the morning. Not being able to sleep, while listening to Italian radio, I heard the whole of the Monika Werkstatt album (link below), available on the excellent Bandcamp label. You know, it’s the one where a group of mainly Berlin-based women musicians collaborate in joyous abandon, and where credits are given to the woman who cooked and just lent a hand and kindness.

To cut a long story short and get to the important part, I found ‘my place’ in the most conservative of places, in fact, they call it the Conservatorio Giuseppe Verdi, Here I was able to ease myself into Composizione musicale elettroacustica 1 under the tutelage of a very talented and super helpful, professor. What a great year it was (Covid 19 and Zoom lessons apart). Using just one piece of software, Adobe Audition, I found that I was able to do everything I could do back in the late seventies on magnetic tape, but in real-time. By the way, there is 21st century equivalent to losing that essential tape splice on the pile on the floor; that is not labeling your samples properly or not having a workable filing system.

Anyway, I produced a piece using splices from a short recording carried out on the Turin Metro. I learned such a lot about classifying my sounds and how to process them and combine them and most importantly their significance in the musical genre of Electroacoustic composition.  Oh, and I almost managed a workable cataloguing system for my splices (.wav clips.)

So, this brings us to the present day, with me in a classroom with Generation Z.

So, in my first year, my classmates were significantly younger than me so I never got invited to go to the disco with them and sadly, in a group of about eighteen only two of us were Soundgirls.  This year, the three potential Sound girls are Polytechnic students and probably studying some form of engineering; I’ll check.

After nearly a year in South America, I’m back in Turin and ready for Composizione musicale elettroacustica 2.  This time we get to use MAX – MSP so maybe I get to build my own virtual modular synth and, hopefully, there will be opportunities for mixing live performance with live electronics

*****************************************************************************

The academic year started halfway through November, but as yet, the conservatoire has not appointed a professor of electroacoustic composition 2.  So, like the rest of the class, we’ve been attending lectures on ‘The History and Ethics of Electroacoustic Composition’ which is a good deal funkier than it sounds.  We started around 1874 looking at the developing technology of Bell and Edison and it is clear, that in the same way that we embrace what technology has to offer, art and technology inspired and pushed each other forward even then.

At the turn of the 20th century, the technology of the phonograph (record player) and possibilities for recording and distributing music inspired musicians and artists to experiment with its possibilities and to make use of sounds other than those made by conventional instruments. Still, in the first half of the century, Luigi Russolo and the Futurist movement in Milan, Italy published in 1916 “The art of noise”.  In 1932 Kurt Schwitters produced a “Sonata of primal sounds”.  Thus the idea of using sounds rather than conventional instruments was already pointing the way towards musique concrète which would really take hold in the late 40s in Paris and become established with the invention of the tape recording machine and magnetic tape, which in turn,  opened up possibilities of manipulating and combining sounds.

Whilst composers began manipulating sounds into musical experiences, some of them started researching and trying to find a language to describe and analyse these new listening experiences. Certain traits became apparent and required different ways of thinking and perceiving, culminating in Pierre Schaeffer’s “Traite des Objets Musicaux” 1966 in which he proposed a new way of listening to and perceiving music.  In a live concert, the sound object is bonded to an instrument and its performer.  Even in a studio recording, without seeing the players, depending on our experiences we can bond a sound to its source, in other words, “I recognize that sound as a Kick Drum”.  In musique concrete, now termed electroacoustic music, since the sound object may have been a noise that has been processed and inserted into a mixture of noises and mixed and recorded onto magnetic tape, which will subsequently be performed by playing the tape and moving the sound around a listening space of two, eight or more speakers to give the listener an ‘immersive’ experience, the stream of sonic objects are not bonded to their source but are free to be perceived, understood and interpreted by the listener. So, the process of this kind of sound art/music-making is termed Electroacoustic, whilst the performance and listening is described as Acousmatic.

On the subject of Acousmatics which will become a feature of my composition work at the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatorio di Musica in Turin, there is a book, published in 2018, called, ”Treatise on writing Acousmatic Music on Fixed Media” which attempts to provide a lexicon/typology of sounds for composers and analysts to work with a style of music which does not always conform to traditional ideas of musical language, for example, scales, key centres, pulse/rhythms/grooves etc.  The fixed media simply means that the piece is fixed on tape or hard drive and the only variations in performance will be the listening experience, in a large or small hall, through eight or 24 speakers, on headphones, etc.

The following is a timeline of the Paris centre where musique concrete was developed

1942 to 1948: Studio d’Essai; later the Club d’Essai

195:1 Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète (GRMC)

1958: GRM

1960; Service de la Recherche de l’ORTF  (ORTF was the French broadcasting organization)

1975 to present day INA.   Institut national de l’audiovisuel

Link to INA  https://inagrm.com/fr

Incidentally, a while ago, in one of Ableton Live’s newsletters, they provided downloadable sound sources and samples by INA composers and musicians via INAGRM.  There are also plug-ins on the site shop.

Just to finish this part of my time at the Conservatorio, we did quite a bit of listening.  The early attempts at harnessing noise as musique concrète were quite crude, although interesting.

Link to Pierre Henry’s1963 ‘Variations on a door and a sigh’.  INA recording https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dud4D6PeHqQ

The highlight of our listening was the four-track version of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s ‘Gesang der Jünglinge’ which with eight ‘Genelec’ Loudspeakers around us was an immersive experience.  This work was created between 1955 and 1956 and was originally planned as a five-track work with a fifth speaker overhead.  However, in those days, four-track analog was the best they could hope for.  Therefore, its realization as 5 track would have meant running a second tape recorder in sync with the four-track machine.  The practicalities of keeping two machines perfectly in sync for a little over 13 minutes was not feasible at the time. It’s still pretty cool as four channels.  I had this on vinyl in the mid-seventies and I have to say that listening to it again inside an eight-speaker configuration was like hearing it for the first time.

Link to a live performance of ‘Gesang der Jünglinge’ with Stockhausen himself at the mixing desk to diffuse the sound.  This Youtube video is not loud enough for my liking and the immersive experience of hearing the four-track version is much more engaging, but it has historical value.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmGIiBfWI0E

Further on next year, I hope to start composing for live performers and electronics, which will be a wholly different experience.  I also belong to an Oslo-based group dedicated to Spatial and Immersive audio which is an important feature of Acousmatic music, watch this space…

Next month; I’ll be writing about the nuts and bolts of trying to juggle working between Audition, Reaper, Max MSP, and maybe Logic Pro… or is it ‘make your mind up’ time?  See, I’m still learning!

Also, also you may have noticed a glaring omission in our history lessons: no women composers.  I’ll set that right during these blogs.  There are some great women composers and performers in Electroacoustic music, I introduce Mira Calix below and there’s a young generation of female composers working within the tradition of electroacoustic music but definitely in the 21st Century.   If you’re interested, there’s a great film about female composers in electronic music; “Sisters with Transistors”.  It’s on Vimeo and is narrated by Laurie Anderson.

Link to the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7r-3hlzpV7M

Un abbraccio da Torino

BTW. While I’ve been writing this, I’ve been listening to Mira Calix’s latest album since, as you may have gathered, I’m still in a learning phase, by which I mean getting used to the new technologies and how composers, women, in particular, have taken the musique concrète from the early fifties and transformed it for a new generation of listeners. This album is so varied, unusual, and full of welcome surprises.  I heard her speak on the radio the other day and she described her music as collage and representative of the chaos of living with a pandemic that touches so many aspects of our lives.

Bandcamp link to Absent Origin (yes, it’s really written like that).

https://miracalix.bandcamp.com/album/a-b-s-e-n-t-origin

Bandcamp link to Monika Werkstatt on

https://monikawerkstatt.bandcamp.com/album/monika-werkstatt

New Years Resolutions to Keep

If you’re seeking a promotion at work or are looking to make a job change, taking the time to enhance your skills and your qualifications will make it much easier to take the next step up the career ladder.

Individuals who continually upgrade their skills to keep pace with developments in their field will have the best chance of doing well in their career, both with their current employer and when job searching. Here are 10 ways to keep your job skills current and resume up to date

Time to Update Your Resume and Social Media

Before applying for jobs or internships – take some time to clean up your resumes and social media

Tips for resumes and social media

Industry Directories – Get Yourself Listed

Internships

Intuit QuickBooks’ Complete Guide To Filing Self-employment Taxes

Identify In-Demand Skills for Your Occupation

The first step in keeping your skills current is to identify the talents which employers value the most in your field. Review job titles for positions in your career field. Also review the top skills required by employers, both general and job-specific.

Get the Scoop

Speak with human resources staff at your current employer to gain more insight into the most preferred skills for your profession. Analyze the background of standout performers at your employer or stars from your professional associations and identify any skills that have helped them to excel.

Follow Industry Leaders on Social Media

Many corporate CEOs and industry leaders now post regularly on social media sites like LinkedIn in order to establish themselves as “thought leaders” or “influencers.” By following them on social media, you’ll be better able to identify new directions in your profession, learn about the skills employers most often seek in your field, and decide upon which skills would be the most important for you to focus upon.

Make a Professional Development Plan

Once you have identified your target skills, make a professional development plan to chart your career trajectory and then strengthen or gain the most in-demand skills for your occupation.

Attend a Workshop

Technology workshops or online tutorials are often offered by software providers and third-party groups. For example, there are free or low-cost online programming classes available.

Go to School

In addition, check with local colleges and adult education programs since they will often offer courses or seminars to help employees upgrade their knowledge and skills. Check out certificate programs and online educational courses you can take to revamp your skill set quickly.

Attend Professional Networking Events

Professional networking conferences are a great way to both build your professional conference list and to compare your skills to those of others in your career field.

Read Professional Journals

Professional journals and trade magazines are one of your best resources to keep abreast of technology developments in your industry and to track changes in best practices. By reading these regularly, you’ll be able to keep a running list of the rising areas where you might improve your knowledge.

Volunteer

Volunteer to take on projects at work or volunteer at organizations where you can develop and apply the skills you’re working on. Your ultimate goal should be to be able to document your key skills when you want to land a new job, gain a promotion, or justify a pay raise. Your volunteer work can be included on your resume just like paid work experience.

Develop Both Hard and Soft Skills

While it’s vital that you remain current on the hard skills of your profession (the job-specific skills you learned in college or in a training or certificate program), there is always room for improvement in interpersonal soft skills as well. Take a hard look at how well you communicate with others, organize your workflow or office space, or manage your time. If there are areas where you find yourself lacking, it may be time for you to focus on strengthening these soft skills.

More Tips For Updating Your Skills

Here are a couple of more tips to keep your skills updated.

Highlight Your Applicable Skills When Applying for Jobs

Be sure to reference your most relevant skills in your cover letters and resumes. It’s important that what you include in your job application materials is as close a match to the job as possible the closer a match you are, the better your chances of getting the job.

Start Over

Once you have done some or all of the above, start over. Keeping your skills current is an ongoing process. Technology is constantly changing, and your skills need to keep pace in order for you to be as marketable as possible.

If you plan on spending some time engaging in professional development on a regular basis, you’ll be able to upgrade your skills without too much effort. It’s easier to plan ahead than it is to scramble when you’re job hunting and realize that you don’t have the qualifications employers are seeking.

Danielle Lewis – Be a Sponge

Danielle M. Lewis is a FOH and Monitor Engineer and also takes on the role of production manager. She works for AEG at The Keswick Theatre in Glenside, PA. Danielle has over 18 years of experience working in live events. She attended Drexel University and graduated with a BS in Communications and Applied Technology and an MS in Arts Administration.

Early Life

When did you discover audio as a career path? 

I discovered audio as a career path in the very late 90’s/early 2000s. I was unaware of it as a kid, young person, or young adult.

How did you get interested in audio? 

I became interested in audio because I sang on a recorded gospel choir, the director of the choir decided to return to school full-time so he disbanded the choir. I loved to sing and absolutely love music but “coincidentally” I developed allergies and asthma, so I asked myself “How can I stay connected to music?” I had a science and math background and always enjoyed physics. My thought was, “Hmmm, sound is a part of music, let me research and investigate the audio aspect of music!”

Did music and audio interest you while you were growing up?

Music DEFINITELY did. I have always been drawn to music ever since I could remember. Fond memories as a child of visiting my relatives in Washington DC, one of my Aunts had an extensive record collection. She bought me my first vinyl, The Jackson 5’s first album ABC!

Career Start

How did you get your start?

I started by volunteering with a small sound company in Delaware while working full-time at Verizon. I also joined the Multimedia Ministry at my church that happened to be a 3000-seat facility.

How did your early internships or jobs help build a foundation for where you are now?

My 12-year career at Verizon helped lay my foundation in customer service and leadership. My tenure at the church, where I “cut my teeth” helped prepare me for doing audio professionally. Oftentimes things were done off the cuff and unstructured at church so when I began taking gigs outside of the church and learned there was a plan, I was more at ease because I knew what to expect.

What did you learn interning or on your early gigs?

Be early, be a sponge and ask questions. Learn the craft!

Did you have a mentor or someone that really helped you?

I did not have an official mentor, but various individuals helped me by exposing me to different gigs and trusting me with challenging gigs necessary for growth.

Career Now

Production Manager at Keswick Theatre, Freelance PM/Audio engineer

What is a typical day like?

My “typical” day varies because it depends on if it is a show day (the type of show) or a non-show day. Non-show days are less hectic for obvious reasons. Those days are spent talking to tours, reserving equipment, scheduling labor…all things involving advancing a show.

On show days, I try to arrive 60 mins ahead of the tech’s/crew call time. This enables me to print day sheets, input lists, and stage plots for the show.

Once the crew arrives and the tour is onsite, the first thing I do is COVID-19 check everyone in. This involves verifying the vaccination card of the tour. We then proceed to load-in and set up the show. I sometimes participate but am often called away to handle other things or continue advancing future shows, approving invoices, etc.

Soundcheck happens after we are all set, then there is usually dinner, the doors of the theatre open an hour before showtime. Then during the show, I am either in my office advancing other shows or some other type of paperwork or I stay stage left in case there is a problem on stage.

Then the strike happens and then load-out. This is an abbreviated run down as you are constantly answering questions, putting out fires, and doing admin stuff as the day is going. Sound easier than it is

How do you stay organized and focused?

I try to stick to methods and procedures, when and where possible. It is challenging and often you can feel all over the place but it is organized chaos often, LOL.

What do you enjoy the most about your job?

The music, getting to meet and experience different people, and the satisfaction that I am a part of bringing the arts to people’s lives.

What do you like least?

The hours, it takes a toll on your personal life. You have to miss many important days and times in your loved ones’ lives etc.

If you tour what do you like best?

When I did tour I enjoyed seeing different places, but also having to do a show in different locations and settings, helps to keep you sharp. You are placed in different scenarios thus experiencing new and different problems to solve.

What do you like least?

The hours and potential lack of showers LOL

What is your favorite day off activity?

Sleep, spending time with family & friends,

What are your long-term goals?

Long term I would love to reach more women to expose them to our industry. Also, live sound to be recognized as a respected sector of the industry by NARAS.

What if any obstacles or barriers have you faced?

I have definitely faced obstacles due to gender biases, as well as race.

How have you dealt with them?

Strive to be the best I can be in multiple areas of production. Learn various aspects of the business so that you can wear many hats. When music gigs are scarce, I have been fortunate to work on corporate gigs. Not always as exciting but it was steady work with excellent compensation!

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

If this is what you love to do, then show up believing you belong in the room! Make it a point to add value and try to leave the place better for you having been there.

Must have skills?

Effective communication and interpersonal skills

Favorite gear? 

My favorite piece of gear is the Midas Heritage 3000 console, yes, I am dating myself but it is a sweet smooth sounding board.

 

Volunteers Needed

Nothing gets done by one person alone, which means we have to band together to make the changes we want to see in the world. Volunteerism has indeed been the fuel to the fires of change both on international and local fronts. Volunteering your time, skills, and resources is one of the most powerful ways to make a difference, to help others, and as it turns out, to enhance your wellbeing.

SoundGirls is seeking volunteers to run and assist with these important programs

Webinars on Audio – Using Zoom
Scheduling Online Mentoring VIA Zoom
Working on Trade Shows (NAMM, AES, Music Expo)
Writing Feature Profiles
Organizing SoundGirls Chapters

If you are interested please fill out the volunteer application form

If you have questions about these volunteer positions please email us soundgirls@soundgirls.org

7 Benefits of Volunteering that Will Inspire You to Take Action

 

The SoundGirls Podcast and Living History Project is Seeking Volunteer Editors

 

The SoundGirls Podcast and Living History Project are volunteer-run and features interviews with audio professionals (from all walks of life) to learn how we can better support one another towards a more diversified industry. We are seeking podcast and living history editors to assist with post-production.

Editors will be responsible for:

Required skills:

Preferred skills:

If you are interested in volunteering you can apply here

The deadline is Feb. 1st

SoundGirls Podcast Producer and Host Volunteers

Want to learn how to produce and host a podcast? This opportunity might be for you

We are looking for some passionate, dynamic hosts and co-hosts volunteers that would be interested in taking the reins of the SoundGirls Podcast this coming May.

Our vision with the SoundGirls Podcast is to pass it on to inspire and empower young women and girls in our field. SoundGirls that have a desire to build the best SG podcasts possible.

Do you love to talk to people about their lives and our industry? Do you have creative ideas you would love to do with a podcast? Do you desire to interview others and find out more about them? Do you have a passion to build the SoundGirls network, through discussions about diversity, inclusion, and sharing the tools to help the next generation of women in audio? Do you have interviewing experience and abilities?

What is expected

You will be scheduling your guests (we have a growing list), interviewing guests, producing a graphic for social media, and uploading each episode (after it is edited) to our podbean account. You may possibly do some light editing of the podcast too.

Time Commitment

Each interview takes about an hour to record. Editing can take up to three hours per episode, scheduling, posting, and graphic content can take up to three hours a week. Your time commitment is approx. 10 hours a week.

Gear needed

A great audio interface like (Focusrite, M-audio air, or SSL2+), a great vocal microphone (Shure Sm7B, Rode NT1, or whatever makes your voice sound amazing), a quiet room, a good pair of headphones, a pop filter, and squadcast recording software (we use squadcast to separately multitrack record interviews and each other). A DAW (ProTools, Audacity, Audition) for editing.

What you can expect

We will help you: We have streamlined a process that has helped keep us on track. We have systems in place and won’t throw you to the wolves. An ongoing schedule of guests, a google drive account, an SG Pod email, and templates for graphics, as well as a squadcast account and a podbean account. We will train you on how to make all these things work for you.

Training dates: March 1st, 2022 through May 1st, 2023 via Zoom

Your Start date: May 1st, 2022

This is a volunteer position and you will be working with two or three other podcast hosts, under the supervision and guidance of Beckie Campbell and Susan Williams, Katie Pagacz, our current and former podcast hosts. This volunteer position is a year-long commitment and you will train 2022 volunteers. The application deadline is Feb. 1, 2022.

Apply here

You can listen to the SoundGirls Podcast here

 

 

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