Did I make the right choice to return live sound?! I have contemplated for a very long time. Did I still had the energy that it takes? Was I strong enough, mentally and physically? Could I deal with my insecurity? Would anybody give me a job? I knew this would turn my life upside down. (more…)
Rachel Ryan has been working as an independent audio engineer for the last eleven years. She has worked as a FOH and TM for School of Seven Bells, Phosphorescent, Little Boots, Nightbox and Honeyblood. FOH for Albert Hammond JR, MNDR, Streets of Laredo, and as ME for Silversun Pickups, The Strokes, and Joe Russo’s Almost Dead. She is currently doing monitors for The Strokes and FOH for PHOX. When she is not touring she works at the Brooklyn Bowl as both a FOH and Monitor Engineer. (more…)
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. (more…)
Back home in Denmark I know two very talented women in their mid-twenties and I am envious. I wish that I was their age and just starting out in the industry. On the other hand I don’t, the ten years I spent away from the industry was full of life experience. I obtained a Masters in Science and became an nurse anesthetist. I know I am intelligent and smart and I will always be able to support myself. (more…)
At the end of August, I got the opportunity to work my first festival out of state. Electric Zoo was a three day EDM festival that took place on Randall’s Island in New York. We had five stages, Riverside, Main East, Main West, Hilltop, Spiegal, and Vinyl. (more…)
Last night we successfully completed our first weekend at Austin City Limits Festival. If it was a competition it would be safe to say we won or at least made it into the postseason. (review of show) It was a great show, the weather was not brutally hot or cold and it did not turn into a mud-fest. Both the audience and band brought it. This show at this festival should be put in memory books. Except we get to come back next weekend and do it all over again. Should be a piece of cake right? (more…)
After a bit of a rough show Friday night, we showed up early in the day Saturday to regroup and figure out how to make things go a lot smoother. We did end up catching some heat from our superiors about the hiccups we had the previous night but that was kind of expected. (more…)
I recently worked a Soul Survivor Momentum conference, as a volunteer. I thought it would just involve manning a microphone for seminars… button pressing work. Boring, but I really wanted to go the event and when you volunteer you get to go for free plus meals (win!). So I decided to do it.
It turned out I was wrong. This week long event turned out to be one of the best learning experiences of the summer. I was assigned to work in a venue called Cafe Uno. My responsibilities were manning the microphone for seminars (as I suspected) but then every evening I got to mix a great function band. The venue had two to three hundred people attending each evening, with capacity reaching 1,500 one evening. It turned into a one in – one out policy and at a Christian festival it is relatively unheard of.
Here are some of the things I came away with.
I came away with experience on how to effectively direct stage hands. This may sound strange, but I am so used to either doing it on my own or being the stagehand I did not know if I would be able to effectively direct them. The advice I can pass along to everyone going through this phase in their career (as we all hopefully will) Make sure you make a connection with your stage hand. Do not just start ordering them around. They are a people to and you were once in that position. Find out their skill set. What are they good at? What part of sound do they like doing? What do they want to learn? By finding out these things you will now understand how best to utilize them. This will help keep them passionate and excited throughout the week and what you can teach them throughout the week.
I also go to load an Artic Lorry, (for those residing in the United States articulated lorry- a truck consisting of a tractor and trailer together or a semi…) Everyone has to do it sometime. I don’t have any advice, I just thought it was pretty damn cool!
I had the same function band all week who also stayed on site and were easily accessible. I made a point of spending time and hanging out with them in the ‘teams lounge’. I found having a connection with the band outside of being their sound engineer allowed us to work together better in the evening. I found the difference between day one and day five were polar opposites. It definitely pays to hang with the band!
All in all I had a great time. I went on my own and left having made some great new friends, good contacts and a new appreciation for the guys I work with.
Here is a picture of the biggest evening. We had to bring in extra stewards to man the stage due to some crazy crowd surfing the previous evening. In addition, the venue layout had to be shifted around because the original purpose of the venue was a chilled cafe with a function band playing background music. As you can see it naturally became more like a gig/party vibe.
Thanks for reading.
Woodstock is the iconic music festival that continues to influence the music industry today. Woodstock brought over 350,000 rock n roll fans to a six-acre farm in Bethel, New York to celebrate three days of peace and music. Woodstock inspired countless attendees to pursue careers in the music industry, one of them was a young woman by the name of Karen Kane. Woodstock would inspire and put her on a journey that would start by learning to play music and wind up forty years later as a well-respected audio engineer with countless awards to her name, owning a professional studio, and teaching the next generation of audio engineers.
One of Karen’s earliest jobs was managing 6 West Recording, a New York jingle house. Even though she was working in a studio, Karen says she still did not think about a career as an engineer. Karen explains “When I worked at 6 West Recording, there was an unspoken rule that women did not touch the equipment”. Thankfully, there were a few engineers that took Karen under their wings and trained her, and most importantly taught her that she could be a recording engineer regardless of her gender.
Karen would move to Boston and enroll in Berklee College of Music, where she studied guitar and bass performance. She then landed a job at Intermedia Sound in Boston, starting as an assistant studio manager but soon after starting work there; she received two diplomas from the Recording Institute of America. (The first audio classes in the U.S. were held at Intermedia). She learned the basics of audio, as it applied to analog recording in a studio environment While there, Karen would pull all-nighters with one of the engineers, learning everything she could, including how to ride a motorcycle. Eventually, Karen would become one of the studio’s engineers.
Once in a blue moon is a woman does work in our favor, although I admit very rarely. For Karen it was beneficial as she explains “I hooked up with a community of musicians who were “folky/leftists” and when they wanted to record their songs, they wanted to use a woman because it was a male-dominated occupation and they wanted to make a statement by using a woman engineer. So even though I was a beginner and not very good yet, I got the job because I WAS a woman. I ended up making albums with them for the next 12 years and got better and better”. Karen learned everything hands-on, after graduating from RIA. Karen credits Barry Ober, R. Berred Ouellette, and Bob Stoughton as being her early mentors at Intermedia.
Intermedia 1977
Through the years Karen spent in Boston she continued to work as an independent recording engineer, music producer, and live sound engineer. You can check out all her recording and live sound credits on her website mixmama.com.
One of Karen’s favorite live gigs was the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, where she was the live sound engineer for the acoustic stage for 19 years (she retired in 2010). The Michigan Womyn’s Festival often called the Womyn’s Woodstock was an international feminist music festival. It started in 1976 and was put on every year (until 2015) in August with attendance ranging from 3,000 to 10,000.
The event is unique in that women built all of the stages, ran the lighting and sound systems, provided electricians, security, and medical services. They facilitated workshops covering various topics of interest to the attendees. Hundreds of women spent upwards of a month out on the land building the festival from the ground up because every year the festival was torn down, leaving the land as close to how it was found as possible. You can read more about this unique festival here Michigan Womyn’s Festival
Love brought Karen to Toronto where she continued to work as an independent engineer/ producer. During her time in Toronto, she developed courses in Audio Engineering for the Learning Annex and Centennial College. She also was hired to teach at Toronto’s Harris Institute for the Arts which Karen says “was a big highlight in my life, getting to teach at such a great school.” “I learned how to be a teacher at Harris. I realized I was good at it and the students really liked me. I spent four years teaching there”.
The desire for a warmer climate would bring Karen to Wilmington, North Carolina, where she is now based. In Wilmington, she owns her own professional home recording/mixing studio. She also runs her own audio courses, which take place in the Fall, Winter, and Spring. There are five courses offered, including, Intro to Audio Engineering, Learning Pro Tools, and the “hands-on” only Advanced Course. You can check out her courses here mixmama.com.
In addition to her independent recording work and audio courses, she joined the faculty at the University of North Carolina Wilmington as the instructor for the Recording Technology program there. Karen says the University job is “one of the best things to EVER happen to me.”) Getting to teach Audio Engineering and Pro Tools in a University setting is my dream part-time job! I plan on it being my retirement job!” The 2nd “best” thing to ever happen to her is WINNING the “Producer of the Year 2013” Award last summer at the Carolina Music Awards in Raleigh, NC. AND, she just found out that she is nominated again for Producer of the Year at the Carolina Music Awards for 2014.
I never had any trouble with how I was perceived as a woman in a live sound position. I THINK mostly because I was not doing big shows with mainstream artists. At the time in Boston, there were not a lot of engineers studio, or live. Because of that, I was able to hook up with a few rock bands and started doing local/regional gigs with them. Later, I went on several U.S. tours (on a converted school bus) with a political folk band named Bright Morning Star. That started in 1980, and I did gigs with them for several years. I also did a lot of local acoustic shows with other singer/songwriters.
The studio gear today blows my mind compared to the studio gear in the ’70s and ’80s. There are things I can do today that I NEVER DREAMED possible. I do miss, some things about analog recording (especially the smell of 2″ tape) and the simplicity of it all compared with today’s gear. I cannot speak to live sound, but I can say that as I am learning how to use live digital boards, I love some of the features like calling up monitor mixes and FOH mixes (as many times I do both).
Learn to play a musical instrument…for fun or seriously. It helps with audio engineering in many ways.
Go to a good audio school. Research them and find out all you can about the teachers! That is what makes an audio school GREAT, the teachers! The best audio schools have teachers that are ACTIVE professionals in the music industry.
If you are interested in studio work, TRY to get an internship at a local studio.
If you are interested in live sound, go to as many live shows as you can…stand by the soundboard and watch and listen to what the engineer is doing. This will start to train your ears. And by the way; ANYONE can learn to use equipment, what separates the good from the great are your EARS!
You can also begin training your ears by analyzing recordings…. on a good pair of speakers, describe the tone of each instrument, describe what you hear more in the left speaker or in the right speaker, describe the overall balance of the instruments, and then the instruments with the vocals. It’s a good way to get you to listen more intensely.
