SoundGirls has not conducted or is in the position to conduct and publish studies on statistics about gender and racial diversity. It is extremely difficult to run these studies within the audio industry as it is so fragmented. For example:

• The studies that do exist are heavily biased towards music production.
• Studies conducted by The Recording Academy only reflect people working in the recording arts. 
• The AES tried to derive gender information about their members in a 2016 survey (they found 7% were women). But, their study was only within their membership and only by members that wished to contribute gender information.
• General studies of the entertainment industry (such as the film industry, game industry, etc) often do not give separate data about sound people.
• Diverse genders are often not included (studies are broken down by women/men only)

When terms like “women in audio” are used by the mainstream media, it is typically associated with music-related jobs such as live sound and music production (see “The Atlantic: Why Aren’t There More Women Working in Audio?“, NPR: “If You Want To Be Somewhere, You’ve Got To Occupy It”). However, professional audio is made up of a wide range of disciplines: music production, live sound, broadcast sound, sound for picture (production and post-production), audio books, podcasts, education, research, AV, IT, product development, and beyond. Anecdotally, some areas are stagnant, and others show a faster pace of growth towards inclusiveness.

Ideas for those interested in conducting research

• Analyze award nominees in sound categories for gender (and race) over time
• Analyze membership data of industry organizations
• Gather alumni data (by school); what percentage of students starting in a program vs graduating are not men/do not identify as men, what percentage of graduates stay in the field year after year (by gender)

Published Studies

Music production

The Annenberg Inclusion Initiative (ongoing studies)

Annenberg Inclusion Initiative: Inclusion in the Recording Studio?

Annenberg Inclusion Initiative: Gender and Race/Ethnicity of Artists, Songwriters & Producers across 800 Popular Songs from 2012-2019

Berklee Institute for Creative Entrepreneurship: “Women in the U.S. Music Industry: Obstacles and Opportunities” (2019)

Final Report of the Recording Academy Task Force on Diversity and Inclusion (2019)

A Studio Of One’s Own: Music Production, Technology And Gender – Paula Wolfe Journal on the Art of Record Production November 2012

Do We Really Want to Keep the Gate Threshold That High? Journal of the Audio Engineering Society Volume 69 Issue 4:

Gendered Experiences of Discrimination and Microaggressions in the Recording Studio (French subtitles available)

Game Audio

• In 2019, 13.6% of video game composers and sound designers surveyed by Game Sound Con were women and non-binary. 
• It was 7% in 2015

Source: Game Sound Con (they have collecting survey data yearly since 2014, which includes diverse genders)

Addendum to the Game Audio Industry Survey 2016: An Analysis of Income Differences Between Men and Women in Game Audio

Film & Television

Diversity in Post-Production Sound Roles in UK Television Production: Emma Butt (begins page 12; study from 2019)

In 2019, of the 250 top-grossing movies of the year:

• Women accounted for 9% of supervising sound editors. 92% of films had no female supervising sound editors.
• Women comprised 4% of sound designers. 97% of films had no female sound designers.
• Women comprised 6% of composers. 94% of films had no female composers
• Women accounted for 40% of music supervisors. 74% of films had no female music supervisors.

Source: Women and Hollywood 2019 Statistics

In 2008, in the top 250 domestic grossing movies of the year:

• Women accounted for 5% of supervising sound editors. 96% of films had no female supervising sound editors.
• Women comprised 5% of sound designers. 97% of films had no female sound designers.

Source: The Celluloid Ceiling II: Production Design, Production Management, Sound Design, Key Grips, and Gaffers 

Film/TV Industry stats (not specific to Sound)

The Celluloid Ceiling: Behind-the-Scenes Employment of Women on the Top U.S. Films of 2020

Blue Collar Post Collective Surveys & Studies

Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media: Research

Inequality in 1,200 Popular Films: Examining Portrayals of Gender, Race/Ethnicity, LGBTQ & Disability from 2007 to 2018 (Includes some data on composers)

Hollywood Diversity Report 2019 from UCLA College of Social Sciences

Academic Textbooks

Women in Audio (2019) Leslie Gaston-Bird; has chapters on history, advocacy groups, and individual profiles

Gender in Music Production (2020) Edited By Russ Hepworth-Sawyer, Jay Hodgson, Liesl King, Mark Marrington

Women in the Studio: Creativity, Control and Gender in Popular Music Sound Production (2021) Paula Wolfe

Academic Papers

Unlocking the Control Room: Equity Achievements in Audio AES Show Fall 2020

Women in Audio: Contributions and Challenges in Music Technology and Production September 2016, 141st Audio Engineering Society Convention

Why Diversity Programs Fail—And How to Fix Them – SMPTE Motion Imaging Journal (Volume: 127, Issue: 9, Oct. 2018)

Miscellaneous Resources

SoundGirls Profiles on Women in Audio

SoundGirls: Women in the Music Industry

The EQL Directory: A Database for Women and Gender Non-Conforming Audio Professionals (Powered by SoundGirls, made possible by Spotify)

POC in Audio Directory

POC Theatre Designers and Techs

AES Diversity and Inclusion Committee (created 2016)

As a sound designer, my sound effects library is one of my most significant resources. It is slightly insane how much time I devote to finding the perfect whoosh, drone, hit or random squishy sound for my sound design work. I can demo hundreds of versions of the same type of sound for hours, looking for one that’s got just a bit more HF or is half a second longer or is a touch more organic than electronic.

I’ve built up my sound effects library with love and care over the years and like most designers, I have my favourite places to find new sounds. Here’s a few:

Pro Sound Effects 

There are two reasons I love ProSoundEffects. One, the single-downloads library is comprehensive, well-organised and the sounds are high-quality. Two, the PSE Hybrid Sound Effects Library is one of the best investments I have ever made as a sound designer and my starting point for creation or inspiration for almost every project. The number of sounds is staggering (tens of thousands), the audio quality is excellent, and it has a good range of more specific sounds not included in a lot of other libraries, underwater, subwoofer, and surround recordings in particular. The Hybrid Library isn’t cheap but you can get a significant discount through the Freelancer Program.

Sonniss 

Sonniss is a great place to find more creative sound effects. I mainly use it to source sound design elements like hits, tones and rises and for interesting atmospheric ambiences and textures for gaming demos. You have to purchase sounds by collection, which can be a little annoying if you’re only after one or two files, but the prices are reasonable, and they do regular sales and giveaways.

A Sound Effect 

A Sound Effect offers libraries from independent sound designers, which means their content is always pretty unique, even if it’s not as comprehensive as some of the other larger websites. It’s also great as a central resource for content that’s otherwise scattered across individual websites. Keep an eye on their social media feeds for sales and free stuff, in particular, the free downloads, which are great for discovering new designers and libraries that you can then explore in more detail.

Freesound 

Freesound is a hidden treasure trove of audio recordings and created sounds. Free to join, it describes itself as a “collaborative database” and as such, although the amount of content is vast, the quality is vastly variable. I use Freesound to find the everyday and the exotic, particularly location recordings of various countries. I’ve found great recordings of medieval battles, Antarctic penguin colonies, Japanese markets and African villages all on Freesound. All sounds are available under a Creative Commons License, so be mindful of this when using the sounds and always attribute as required.

Foley It Up!

When you can’t find what you’re looking for, record it yourself! It’s fun, free (once you have the kit) and you’re adding to your own FX library. Some of my favourite sounds are ones I created myself and after hours of robotically demo-ing hundreds of sounds, you’ll probably be glad of the fresh air, or at least the blood flowing back into your legs. I created the sound of a girl drowned in a bath with me, my partner, our bathroom, a Zoom H4 out of splash range and well-rehearsed safety signals. Who says sound design isn’t edgy?

There’s a great list of suggestions to get your Foley juices flowing here 

There are tons of sound effects libraries out there, and I’m sure you have your own favourites to add to this list. Once you start building up a collection, the next step is organisation. It’s not as exciting as the sounds themselves, but just as important if you want to avoid hours of trawling to find a precise sound in your database. Expect a future blog post about my journey into audio asset management, but until then, happy whooshing.

Sound Girls Questions

NAME

AGE

PROFESSION

LENGTH OF TIME WORKING IN SOUND

What first drew you to a profession in sound? Did this stem from a love of music, or film and television?

Was your training and education in sound self-taught and/or through experience, or did you learn your field through high school and beyond?

Can you describe your respective industry (be it TV, film, music, theatre) when you first entered into it within sound engineering?

What were your first experiences like working as a sound engineer? Did you work on the road, freelance, or as a steady position?

Did you have fellow women audio engineers working with you, or were you mostly the only woman behind the scenes? Did you hold any affinities towards women musicians, or women directors or writers or actors, etc.?

Did you experience discrimination when you first started out from male peers or higher ups? Do you think there was a point that you began to be known for the work you’ve done rather than your gender?

Did you encounter male allies who believed in equality for women in the music, media and sound industry?

Were there any musical eras, genres, or acts that were female-centered that inspired you to pursue a career in sound? If you pursued a career in film or television, did any particular film or series inspire you?

Why do you think so few women pursued professions in sound engineering? Are there any gendered components of the profession that you believe hinders this specifically? The biggest issue I have found is the physicality of it, carrying heavy equipment.

For women who came up in the digital era, do you think this helps or hinders their careers? For example, a laptop can grant greater access to the technologies behind audio engineering, but the tech world is still a primarily male-dominated field?

Do you think open discussions about gender inequality in the professional fields and the rise of women aligning themselves with feminism has helped women become more determined to pursue male-dominated careers such as sound? Sound Girls for example was founded during this time of popular feminism, where Beyonce performs with an all-female band at the Super Bowl and aligns herself as a feminist at the MTV Awards, while other acts like Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift also align themselves with feminism. Is this a golden age of feminism for pop artists?

For film and television, have you seen a rise in women directors, screenwriters, and higher ups? Do you think this correlates to more open conversations about feminism and gender equality for women working in the industry?

Do you think that music subcultures outside of the mainstream have been more welcoming and open to women working as sound engineers? For film, did working with indie projects make a difference than a blockbuster, if you’ve had experience in both? Or for TV, was working in a non-traditional, non-network series different than the previous norm?

If there is a heightened awareness for gender equality, do you see an improvement for women working in sound on the horizon? What is the role of Sound Girls within this?

Coaching singers for 30 years, I found that helping an artist become the best they could be went far beyond just good vocal technique. The best singers have other skills that are often not recognized as a skill by casual observers. Even more disheartening, these skills are often not developed in singers, even those working with a great voice teacher. It’s easy to get blinded by the flashy “money notes” or crazy riffing and put all of one’s energy into achieving that bundle of skills.

Yes, healthy vocal technique is essential as is the ability to hit those money notes and do the crazy riffs when the song or moment calls for it. What I’m talking about is the importance of singers developing a deeper skill set that goes beyond this. I like to think of these skills in four different phases or dimensions.

Dimension One

Vocal Technique

Breathing (breath support and breath control), placement, laryngeal positioning, vowel shape, diction, articulation, vibrato, resonance, connection. 

Work with a great “technical” teacher who has the ear and the knowledge to help you dial in a healthy voice. This process can take one lesson or several over the course of months but make healthy vocal technique the goal without getting distracted with American Idol auditions.

Dimension Two

Musicianship

Timing, pitch, dynamics, control, aural skills (intervals, tonal center, harmony, etc.), instruments, genres and basic music production understanding.

The understanding of nuanced timing is one of the great tools that a singer has, yet most singers I work with as a recording engineer really struggle in this area. The power you have as a storyteller by pushing the beat, holding back the beat, sitting on top of the beat, etc., separates the “good singers” from the “great singers”. Next level singing comes from developing this important skill along with the ability to improvise, create harmony parts, sing as a great duet partner by listening while singing and so much more.

Dimension Three

Performance

Engaging, stamina, believable, entertaining, connecting with the audience, making the audience feel, mic technique, studio recording.

I’ll always remember an experience I had working with a young, crazy talented singer. She sounded exactly like Christina Aguilera at only 15 years old. I worked with her in the studio, had songwriting sessions with her, I even watched her get into the top 20 on American Idol one year. Yet, we watched her flop time and time again. On the surface, it was easy to scratch our heads and say “What is going on here? Can’t people hear how amazing she sounds?” The truth was that deep inside, I knew what was wrong. She was soooooooo boring! Even just sitting and having a conversation with her was like talking to a wall. It was as if she had no personality. This was nearly 15 years ago and I have no idea where she is or what level of success she has had if any at all. All I know is that her vocal chops were among the best I had ever heard, yet her lack of engagement in conversation and as a performer pretty much stifled any progression in her career. Never underestimate the importance of learning how to “perform”. Whether you are in an interview, a guest on a podcast, an opening act for a local show, performing at an open mic night, or headlining a show. Every individual you communicate with as an artist needs to know you are there for them.

Dimension Four

Mind, Heart and Soul

Vulnerability, believability, peace, rising above, taking criticism in a healthy way, taking accolades in a healthy way, maintaining balance, running a business, being a non-Diva, love yourself, love others, always bring people up, mental and emotional health, overcoming limiting beliefs, overcoming stage fright.

The word “quan” comes from one of my favorite movies, “Jerry Maguire”. If you haven’t seen this moment where Cuba Gooding Jr’s character explains the meaning of quan to Tom Cruise’s character, google it now. The word means “love, respect, community…and the dollars too.”  There is no shame in searching for success with music. None at all. However, we can get so focused on what is or isn’t happening in our careers that we fail to see others around us and what value we can add to others’ lives with our talents. I am a firm believer in this concept of giving more than you take in the music community. It will come back around. Focus more outwardly and see what changes might take place in your life and your music career.

Most importantly, seek to keep balance in your life. Make a list of your priorities, including building your music career, your job that pays the bills, your family that needs to know you love them, etc. Make sure your day-to-day activities align with what is most important to you. If it doesn’t, make some adjustments. Are you carving out time for yourself and your mental health? Are you spending too much time “scrolling” and not enough time creating a content schedule, posting, and then getting off your phone? Whatever adjustments you need to make in your life, start tomorrow and create the life that makes you happy.

We all know that music plays a huge role in our everyday lives. It helps us focus on our daily tasks and helps us relax when we are stressed out. Music helps us change our mood by changing how we perceive the world. So what happens to your brain when you listen to music?

Research shows us that it might be the secret to improving test scores, as well as our long-term well-being in life. In today’s post, we will take a look at 5 ways that science has shown music affects our brains!

Music Can Relieve Anxiety

Stress and anxiety are part of our daily lives, and we all have different methods to help calm ourselves when things get stressful at work or in our personal life. Research done by Dr. David Lewis-Hodgson of Mindlab International shows that music can help reduce anxiety and stress levels by up to 65%. A study was conducted on participants who had to solve a puzzle as quickly as possible. While solving the puzzle, the participant’s brain activity, heart rate, rate of breathing, and blood pressure were being measured.

According to Dr. David, music helped the participants to relieve anxiety and concentrate on the tasks at hand. Marconi Union’s song ‘Weightless’ resulted in a 65% reduction in participant’s anxiety and reduced their physiological resting rates by 35%. The song managed to slow the participant’s heart rate down, by lowering the levels of the stress hormone cortisol. Pretty amazing!

Music Can Boost Memory

Ever heard of the documentary Alive Inside: A Story of Music and Memory. This award-winning documentary by Michael Rossato-Bennett follows the social worker Dan Cohen. Dan is bringing music to people diagnosed with dementia in nursing homes. He creates individual playlists by asking family members to list the songs the patients once enjoyed.

The documentary shows how patients came back to life and started to feel like their former selves when listening to their individual playlists. Henry, a 94-year-old home resident diagnosed with dementia, claimed to start recalling aspects of his life which he couldn’t remember before the music therapy started.

The WWII veteran John who suffered severe dementia remained still in his wheelchair until hearing his favorite music. After the music therapy, John started singing along and dance in his wheelchair.

Music stimulates the centers of the brain that deal with concentration, organization, and information retention. These play essential roles in categorizing memories, making music therapy a critical tool for people with dementia.

Music Helps You Sleep Better

Listening to relaxing music can put the body in the same state of relaxation as when you sleep. This results in a slower heart rate, slower breathing, and lower blood pressure levels. Research shows that a pre-bedtime music listening session will help you fall and stay asleep.

Sleep has an indirect effect on our overall mood and emotional state. Depression, anxiety, stress, and other mood disorders are tightly connected to sleep problems. Insomnia also makes us more vulnerable to stress. Simply put, music has the power to activate and influence the emotional and memory centers of our brain, which is beneficial when you go to bed.

Music Can Relieve Pain

Pain and sleeping problems are closely related to each other. Pain interferes with sleep, and sleeping poorly increases our sensitivity to pain. If you improve your sleep, you’re likely to reduce physical pain (and vice-versa).

A study made by researchers from Queen Mary University of London shows that listening to music was associated with a reduction in postoperative pain. Music also decreased patient’s anxiety and reduced the use of painkillers post-surgery. So how can music relieve post-surgery pain? Your favorite music puts you in a better mood. When you’re in a good mood, the brain starts to release neurochemicals and hormones that stimulate your immune system and decrease pain.

Music Enhances Performance

In 2012, Costas Karageorghis of Brunel University in London wrote that music acts as a “type of legal performance-enhancing drug”. For many athletes around the world, music is essential for peak performance. When listening to music, people run longer, swim faster, and lift heavier – usually without realizing it. Music can elevate your mood and motivate you to push through the fatigue. Scientists don’t know exactly why music can be such a powerful tool while working out. The hypothesis is that the tempo of the music (BPM) helps us get by performing repetitive tasks.

Conclusion

As you can see, there are countless ways that music affects your brain. Music can ease pain and improve your sleep, as well as increasing your performance. Music therapy has also been proved to be effective with memory retention in people with dementia.

It’s worth mentioning that studies on how music affects our brain are relatively new, but it sure looks promising for all music lovers out there!  Who knows what science will discover in the next 10-15 years!

Martin Kristiansen is the founder of HomeStudioIdeas.com. He has been playing, recording, and producing music for the last 10 years.

A few years ago, I attended a user experience design boot camp. That course taught me that UX is so much more than designing visuals for apps and websites. UX designers conduct a lot of user research to determine how an app should function, implementing what they call a “human-centered approach” to their decision making; that is, an approach that ensures the final product serves the user.

Since then, I have been meaning to write about the similarities between sound designers and user experience (UX) designers. Sound designers use design thinking strategies all of the time! Through careful analysis and experimentation, we consider the end-user product. For us, that’s usually a film, play, video game, podcast, concert, etc. Even though the tools are very different, the process is very similar. This article will examine the crossover between design thinking and the sound design process through the five phases of design thinking.

Phase 1: Emphasize with the user

The first thing user experience designers do is evaluate and research user needs through a “discovery phase.” They will conduct interviews with users surrounding their specific needs and desires around a product. They may also send out surveys or observe users’ nonverbal interactions.  What they are looking for is a problem to solve.  This first stage is really systematic because although researchers have a specific topic to evaluate, they do not go into the discovery phase with a pre-determined issue. They find it through interacting with users. This makes for an unbiased approach because the research is being conducted objectively and no one is making assumptions about end users’ desires and needs. This academic approach allows for discovering users’ needs so that the end product will actually serve them.

If phase one for the UX designer is about gaining an understanding of the user, phase one for the sound designer is about gaining an understanding of the message, environment, and characters within an experience. The sound designer’s discovery phase involves reading the script and talking to the director about their intentions with the story’s message. They may also begin to look at the work the visual team has done to begin to gain an understanding of the environment. Before talking to the team, the sound designer should have already read the script and begun to think about the message. However, they haven’t made any sure-fire decisions about how the experience should sound until after talking to the director and the team. Even if they have ideas, the sound designer keeps an open mind and conducts objective research.

In this sound design/UX design analogy, the director is the user, at least in this first phase. Much like UX designers, the sound designer first asks non-leading questions to understand what the experience needs; goes in with an unbiased approach, and is ready to pivot if their initial interpretations of the script are not in line with the director’s vision.

Phase 2: Defining the User’s Needs

The user experience designer has a bunch of quantitative and qualitative data from user interviews and tests — now what? The next step is laying out all of the information in a way where the data can be synthesized into findings. This is usually a very hands-on approach. A common technique UX designers will use is called affinity mapping. Every answer or observation is written on a post-it note, then “like” things are grouped together. The groups with the most post-its will inform the UX team about users’ most common and important needs and expectations. Then, they will begin to write up a problem statement, which is usually phrased as a question: “How might we [accomplish X thing that users need]?” Keeping it focused on the issue at hand keeps the approach unbiased and user-centered. The problem statement is a goal, not a sentence that is proposing a solution. The problem has not been solved yet; it has just been defined.

In the same way, UX designers define the problem statement, a sound designer’s second phase involves defining the message; the overall feelings and thoughts that the audience should take away from the experience. They may combine notes from their initial script reading and the conversations they have had. They may also go through the script for sound effects that are mentioned if they did not do that during the first read-through. This is where they define the world and mood of the experience. Some sound designers might even write down their own version of a problem statement, which is the goal or message of the experience. Sometimes in my work, I have found that it is helpful to have a goal for an experience written down so I can keep referring to it and checking that my work is in line with the tone of the piece.

In both roles, keeping a main goal or statement keeps the process about the end-user or audience. While a designer in either role might end up lending their own artists’ voice to a project, maintaining an unbiased approach (starting with a problem statement or message) keeps everything that is designed about the characters and the story.

Phase 3: Ideating

 After user experience designers spend all this time cultivating data, they get to start brainstorming features! A human-centered approach is very systematic; to create a meaningful and relevant product, designers can not get here without the first two phases. Every proposition for a feature is based on user research.

Similarly, the sound designer has defined the director’s expectations and the message, mood, and physical environment in the first two phases. The ideation phase is usually about watching and listening to reference material and beginning to gather and record audio. Much like user experience designers may not implement all of the features they think of, a sound designer might gather sounds that they do not end up using at all.

For both roles, this is when people are referring to their research and brainstorming ideas just to see what sticks. During the third phase, user experience designers are constantly referring to the research and problem statement, and sound designers are referring to their script and notes.

Phase 4 & 5: Building & Prototyping, and Testing

 This is where things begin to heat up! All that data starts to become a real, tangible experience. At this point, the user experience designer has developed a few prototypes. They can exist as paper prototypes or digital mock-ups. They may have a couple of versions in order to conduct usability tests and see what is most relevant and meaningful to users. Designers will build prototypes, test them, get feedback, build a new version and test again. A cycle exists between these phases, and whatever is discovered in phase five will influence a new phase four prototype, then it is on to phase five again for more feedback…Rinse and repeat until the design is cohesive (or the project runs out of time or money). Testing and getting feedback is very important, to make sure the work continues to serve the users or audience. 

A sound designer’s prototype is often the first pass at a full design. For theater, it can be cues they send to be played in rehearsals; for other mediums, it is about inserting all the audio elements and taking notes from the director. Then, they implement different effects for a few iterations until they reach approval from the director and producers. In the sound designer’s case, the director is akin to a beta tester in UX research.

During testing, user experience designers and sound designers have similar considerations to evaluate:

• Do I have too much going on? (Too many features/too much sound.)
• How are users (or actors, or viewers) interacting with the prototype?
• Does the feel of the experience support the story/ultimate goal?
• Is the overall tone appropriate?
• Generally speaking — how does the user (or director) feel about your work thus far?

Phase 6: Iterate

Design thinking strategies are far from linear. Throughout the process, a user experience designer or sound designer refers to their initial research and notes to keep their decisions focused on the audience. They will prototype features (UX) or effects (sound), test them out, take feedback, redo, and test again.

Conclusion

A great sound design, while influenced by that artists’ voice, is unbiased and serves the story. A solid product design does the same thing; because at the end of the day, a user’s journey with a product is a story. Consciously implementing design thinking strategies also makes our approach as sound designers human-centered, resulting in stories that have a huge impact on the audience.  A solid, well-researched and thought-through design can bring a project to another level completely; by touching our audiences and end-users in deeply emotional ways, we provide a meaningful and relevant experience to their lives.

This Show Must Go Off Episode 5

What a sigh of relief, we finally have our first full-capacity concert event under our belts. Like many venues, we got excited when the pandemic infection numbers were taking a turn for the better, and we finally felt as though it was safe for us to reopen.

Mid-July the Delta variant shook all of that up, and our first two shows of the season were postponed once again.

Our venue decided to take a proactive approach and made the decision to allow only vaccinated patrons, staff, and performers into our events. New York City rolled out a similar mandate a few days later and we pushed ahead. Many artists and tours welcomed the news, including The Backseat Lovers. A few decided it is currently too risky to tour, and a smaller percentage was unwilling to support the new guidance. In those instances, the performances were either canceled or postponed.

The tour manager for the Backseat Lovers sent out their Advance email about 3 weeks ahead of their performance. * For more information about what an Advance is, and how to create a Rider, check out this great post: How to Make An Awesome Audio Rider

The band’s rider had everything I needed to know about the tour. It was professional, concise, researched, and well written. I got a great sense of the band’s personality and what to expect.

Audio would be self-contained, and the headliner would be mixed on an M32 desk. House would provide a floor wedge as a backup, drivelines to the PA, a drum riser, and power for the artist’s backline.

Artist would use our LD and our house light rig.

There would be a Meet & Greet experience that would take place 1 hour before doors.

Everything about this advance read like a classic Bowery show, and I began to feel excited.

On the day of show we coned off parking and the band pulled up with their van and trailer. Everything was professionally packed into road cases on caster wheels, which made load-in a breeze.

I needed to sort out PA drivelines through the Avid desk. Several factors made an external console management system like XTA an inappropriate solution for our needs and budget. Guests would need to pass through our console and I wanted to make sure they could do so as transparently as possible.

Avid’s “Input Direct” turns a normal Input or Output into a line-level pass through, bypassing any channel processing like EQ or compression, and routes the signal from the Top of Channel pickoff directly to the fader. The 5 channels of our PA and the Matrix Outputs were set Input Direct. The Artists’ engineer was satisfied with that solution and fed us the drivelines through his stage box into our split snake.   Our stage manager and monitor engineer assisted putting the artists’ mics on stands and running cables. All of the bands’ 4 members were using in-ear monitors that the tour carries. Right on schedule, 60 minutes after load-in the engineer tuned the room, and the band ran through a few songs.

The house crew managed the opening band. No stage plot was given, but we did have an instrument list in the advance.

Their vocal mics would pass through guitar amplifiers and that would be mic’d to achieve their desired effect. The vocal amps and the vocal mics needed to be carefully positioned around the stage to avoid bleed from the other instruments. It was an acoustic challenge, to say the least. Speakers in guitar amplifiers tend to be less directional than a stage monitor or PA speaker and have limited frequency response. Depending on the overdrive or tonal characteristics of the amp, you could have a greater potential for feedback. Everything was close mic’d as much as possible and the decision was made to aux feed the subs and front fills of the PA for the greatest control.

With soundcheck complete, the Meet and Greet experience took place in front of the stage and was completely unplugged. It consisted of acoustic performances of songs with a Q&A segment for about 50 fans, vaccinated, masked, and distanced. The fans were allowed to remain in the room while we opened doors to the rest of the ticket holders.

I feel confident that the opener sounded as good as we could make them, and I resonated with Samantha Potter’s thoughts in her interview where she mentions “sometimes functioning is better than beautiful.”

Once the Backseat Lovers hit I was able to breathe a long-held sigh of relief. We had done it. We made a show happen, with a completely new FOH desk, new lights and rigging, and a whole new set of rules due to Covid. I felt incredibly proud of all of my staff, and impressed by the artists’ FOH engineer Greg Downs, whose mix sounded energetic, balanced, and reinforced the talented band on stage.

A sign of any professional production, the band and crew started breaking down their gear shortly after their set, in favor of a quick and easy load out.

The whole night felt so organic and happy, and all the wonderful quirky parts of putting together concert events.

I look forward to the season to come and hope that our industry can offer a sustainable way to tour that values personal wellness, and that we can all support each other to continue to have conversations around vaccination and how important it is to our industry.