Part Four: Jumping the Fence

I always thought live sound was a thing that I had managed to put behind me in those years, where I was doing “something totally different”. I could not have been more wrong. No matter how much time goes by or how much your surroundings, (and maybe you self), are trying to convince you that you should do something totally different than live sound, it was always there in the back of my head and deep in my heart. Time could not keep this passion down.

My life changing moment came when I attended a festival with a co-worker. I went as a fan of music, sleeping in a tent and sharing living spaces with thousands of other festival goers. It was the first time since my teen-years that I was going to be on that side of the fence, and I was going to spend the next four days with about 50,000 other people. Well, it lasted about two hours. Then I literally jumped the fence. Frankly I don’t remember how I got there, but I found myself at my friend Tarek’s office at one of the main stages. Tarek was stage managing one of the main stages and as I was complaining about how I couldn’t survive the festival as a fan, and how much I missed working he looked at me and said. “So why don’t you just come back?”

I will never forget that moment. It was a big decision to make and I knew that it would not be a walk in the park. Yet, I made the decision in that moment to come back to concert production. This time I was determined to be the woman behind the console.

Week Four:

We study long hours every day at Brit Row and I have had only had one day off. This week we learned about effects. It was like getting all the stuff you need to decorate a cake with, laid out in front of you. Now it should be more fun to “decorate” the sound with a better understanding of what’s happening when I do this or that to manipulate the incoming sound. I also learned how to control the mix and make sure it does not lose it’s focus with too much processing and effects. We learned what to be aware of at FOH. Where to place FOH and how to deal with dB-limiting. In regard to that: Think of how many speakers you actually need and where they will be pointing at etc.

We had an introduction to monitor-world. It was interesting and a bit surprising as well. I learned it comes in handy to test the vocal at a quiet level to start off with, so you can get rid of the proximity-effect. First, turn the volume up to a working level – where I by the way found it very difficult to find different frequencies with my own voice, (Karrie Keyes, do you have any tips for women to tune monitors with their own voices? Yes read our article on Techinques for System and Wedge Eq here). I found it mentally challenging to “crank out” my flimsy voice in front of all the guys, but I was able to move past that when I started to focus on how I wanted the monitor to sound. This was so much harder than I thought, ringing out the wedges is not as easy as it looks and I was happy I did not panic.

The week ended with a session on crossovers, controllers, and amplifiers. The heart of the system and very important to understand how to configure them to run a system properly. I need to dig deeper into understanding this process. I missed a day on speakers as I flew home to Denmark to mix a gig for a good a friend of mine. It was my first gig as a “real” sound engineer, which I’ll tell a little bit about next week.

P.S. I got to meet Michelle Sabolchick Pettinato on her recent tour stop in London with Mr. Big