Sydney Bolton is a freelance live sound engineer based in Seattle, Washington. She is a recent graduate of the Electrical Engineering program at University of Washington, where she specialized in digital signal processing, but plans to continue with live sound for now. When not behind a soundboard she may be found in a darkroom, skateboarding, or playing drums.
Life in the Less-Than-5%
The biggest issue I’ve run into in my career is tokenism: being paraded or held up for being a person of color as proof of diversity. It was particularly bad at my first job, whereas the only non-white sound engineer I was constantly pressured to participate in the marketing campaigns, fundraising events, tabling, and basically ...Explaining Effects: Reverb
What we perceive as reverb is a combination of two things, called early reflections and late reflections. Early reflections are the first reflections of the source sound that make it back to our ear; they are the reflections that travel out, reflect off of something once, and head back. Late reflections are the reflections that ...How I Got Started
When I was 13 or 14, I was reading the liner notes of some CD and saw that one track had been written, recorded, produced, and mixed by one of the band members. At the time I only had a loose grasp of what most of those things meant, but I knew one thing: I ...We Need Help
When discussing my situation with people, the reactions I have gotten are not exactly sensitive. Variations of “Wow, must be nice, I wish I could be on vacation like that” and “Well, now you can go and get a ‘real’ job instead of chasing your hobbies” have been a constant refrain since the pandemic began.Confronting Bad Behavior
Strategies for setting boundaries in the workplaceIntroduction to LRADs
With the recent protests over the killing of George Floyd, the Long-Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) and other acoustic weapons used by police have been making headlines once again. Since these devices are most commonly deployed against nonviolent protestors for crowd control, I thought it would be useful to give a brief overview of their development, ...Making the Transition from Wedges to In-Ear Monitors
Mixing Monitors in the strange in-between world of transitioning from wedges to IEMSA Note on Saying Thank You
I feel very strongly that it’s important to pass on these thank-you notes because it’s often underestimated how much weight a band’s attitude can have. How simply being friendly and rolling with the punches makes or breaks stressful situations, and makes all the difference between a rushed soundcheck being doable or downright miserable.The Bad Buzz: Finding and Fixing Unwanted Noise
Of all the irritating things that happen when you’re rushing to finish a soundcheck, an unwanted buzz coming through the PA system is one of the worst. There are so many possible culprits, and it seems to happen all the time. Since it’s such a common issue, I wanted to walk through the process I ...