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Going Freelance

Hello everyone and welcome to 2019! As a new contributor to the SoundGirls blog for 2019, allow me to briefly introduce myself.

I am a foley recordist/sound editor based in Toronto and have been working in the audio post industry for just over three years now. In late 2017, I left my salaried position at a studio to pursue a freelance career. 2018 was my first complete year as a full-time freelancer. As a recent newcomer to the freelance world, I would like to share what I’ve learned and what has helped me so far. Here are some tips I hope you find helpful if you are thinking about, or are in the process of going freelance.

FINANCES

This is going to be the most significant subject because it is the most important – in my opinion – if you are considering going freelance. Some of us don’t like thinking about the money part. It can be stressful, but it is one of the most important things you need to do to set yourself up for success and peace of mind. Freelancing can be unsteady. You may be swamped with work for a month and then not have a single job the next. This uncertainty requires advanced planning, financially. The first thing you should ask yourself is: “How long can I survive without work on the current savings I have?” It was recommended to me to have six months of expenses saved.
At the time I went freelance, I maybe had four. This is really up to you and what you’re comfortable with. For me, the timing was more imperative, and I felt the decision to leap into a fantastic opportunity outweighed my concerns of not having enough savings. What did help ease my peace of mind in those uncertain first few months was keeping a budget. Whether you use a simple spreadsheet (as I did) or go for software like the highly recommended YNAB, a financial tracker at the very least will help you see where your money needs to go vs. where it is going. One important thing you need to include in your budget: setting aside money for taxes.

TAXES

The word generally comes with a winced or exhausted expression from a freelancer. Being your own boss requires you to do the not-as-fun stuff that your employers would have done in the past. This means keeping track of and filing your taxes. Now since I am in Canada, my advice may not specifically relate to your region, but I will try to be broad.

Two pieces of advice here: 1. Keep all of your receipts for EVERYTHING and keep them organized. You will be doing yourself a huge favour if you can keep up the habit throughout the year. Buy one of those small accordion file folders and organize your receipts by category. Things like ‘work equipment,’ ‘travel fees’ are good business expense categories to file in. You should also keep a record of your invoices. (I have a digital record to save on printing.) You may also consider digitally tracking your receipts/invoices with software like Quickbooks or Wave (Free). Organizing this paperwork will make things easier to tally at tax time, and heaven forbid, keep things in order if you are ever audited. * knocks on wood *

HIRE AN ACCOUNTANT

believed I could file my taxes all on my own and I probably could have with relative success but having an experienced accountant or tax preparer handle this for you is well worth the money. (Plus you can write off their bill as a business expense.) An accountant who specializes in your industry will be extremely helpful as they will know all the ins and outs of what expenses you can write off. They will also be your best bet to save more of your money from going to taxes. I mentioned earlier that you should budget for taxes. Your accountant can help you to determine what percentage of your income you should be putting aside based on your estimated income. You should also set aside any sales tax earned (HST/GST/PST in Canada). Once again, your accountant will again be a useful resource in knowing how to file your sales tax return as well. Keep the money you set aside separate for organizational purposes and so that you don’t inadvertently spend it.As far as finances go, I’ve only just scratched the surface. I would highly recommend you research resources specifically pertaining to the region you live in – especially in regards to taxes.

Networking

It can be extremely daunting, exhausting, and anxiety-inducing for some, but networking in the audio industry is your best way to gain work and experience. This is a relatively small industry. Everyone typically knows each other – especially locally – so try and use that to your advantage. One connection can help introduce you to another.

My biggest piece of advice for networking is to try your best to be yourself and be genuine. Those who have been doing this for a while can sense when you are being fake or insincere. No one wants to work with someone with a bad attitude or an ego and those people will have a much tougher time finding work no matter how knowledgeable they are or how qualified they are for the job. Also, being a small industry, your reputation will go far. So just in general, be a good person. Also, never expect anything from someone else and appreciate whatever opportunities or experiences you may be given.

Stay Social

Freelance work can be very lonely, especially as a sound editor where you may spend your days working from home. I like to stay in touch with my other audio friends and make plans to meet up every so often. It’s helpful to have that community of like-minded people to bounce ideas off of. And they usually know some key commands you haven’t heard of yet that will change your life (I’m looking at you, OPT + CMD + V). That community can also be a great way to get more work. If we have work pop up that we are too busy to take, we often recommend or offer it to each other.

 

SoundGirls’ social media groups are a great way to connect to the industry.

 

As much as I dislike social media, it can also be a great way to stay connected to the industry, learn new things and even find work. There are tons of groups online for audio (including SoundGirls’ various social media sites) that you should definitely bookmark and keep in touch with.

I would not have been able to survive the leap to freelance if it weren’t for the amazing support I had in my professional and personal life. I was very fortunate to have great mentors share their own advice with me and I hope this information helps someone else. Freelancing certainly isn’t for everyone and that is OK! In the end, you’ll know what works for you.

If you have any other advice from your own experience or have any questions, please leave a comment or feel free to contact me.

I’m looking forward to sharing more of my experiences and what I’m learning in 2019.

 

Sonic Tourism

Have you ever planned a vacation around your ears?  As in a location with something unique to offer in aural pleasure instead of gastronomic or visual?  If you have not, it is time to become an epicurean for your ears. Many places host ear-pleasing experiences, but some are local secrets.  Here are a variety of options to kickstart your listening adventure.

If you are tight on vacation time, Soundwalking is a simple way to reward your ears. According to Dr. Andra McCartney, Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Concordia University, “Soundwalking is a creative and research practice that involves listening and sometimes recording while moving through a place at a walking pace.”  It is to observe, rather than participate in the surrounding environmental ambience.

Soundwalking can happen anywhere. Urban centers are full of industrial symphonies for people watchers. Cars and machines can lay a rhythmic background for melodies from sirens and conversations.  City parks are a quieter option, full of birds and trees. During certain seasons birds migrate and bring with them a variety of songs. When I visited the Sandhill Crane Festival in Othello, Washington, I was fine with not using binoculars, because I heard the calls of cranes, hawks, harriers, and my favorite redwing and yellowwing blackbirds (metalheads of the bird world).  Next time I will bring an audio recorder in addition to a camera.

More remote parks and wildlife refuges reward listeners with isolation from mechanical sounds. In the Hoh Rainforest on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington state, there exists one square inch of silence. Other old growth forests might be hiding similar pockets of stillness as well.

Hoh Rainforest

Big Trees at Hoh Rainforest

When planning a metropolitan vacation, add a multipurpose experience.  Architecture is not just designed around the eyes, and older buildings are full of creative pockets of reverberation.  Cincinnati’s Union Terminal, a train station turned museum is not alone in its whisper arch, as an arched channel will do.  Whisper arches are perfect for private conversations between two opposite ends of a crowded room. In Europe, there is a garden that you can have a discussion with your echo.  The delay time of the reflecting sounds allows them to respond to your initial spoken message. Complex words can become full discourse as the word’s beginning decays with each successive reflection.

The Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City has gorgeous acoustics purpose-built for the choir and a massive pipe organ. While the modern trend is to create multi-purpose performance halls, venues from the early 20th century (or even earlier) are awe-inspiring locations for the bold and beautiful verb.

Mormon Tabernacle

 

An ambitious sonic tourist should start with The Sound Book by Trevor Cox to create their travel plans.  Cox chronicles the weird and the unique in the sonic realm. Abandoned cisterns in the UK boast insane sustain times, sand dunes in Death Valley sing and boom, and Australia has a little bird that can copy whatever sound it hears.  Also explored in the book is a silent retreat, where Cox does not speak at the monastery and instead learns to meditate and listen. After reading about his experiences, I started paying attention to other sonic peculiarities in the news.  Detroit has a fascinating little island with a mysterious hum of possible sinister origin, and Siberia has an old mining pit that emits an eerie noise. Otherwise otherworldly intermittent sounds, like ultra-low frequencies, occur in ways similar to UFO sightings and inspired The X-files.

No matter your vacation goals and budget, there is an audio experience for you.  Treat your ears to sounds that vary from peaceful, luxurious, strange, to intriguing.  There are places to participate or spectate in the sonic wonders, and there are places to be introspective.  Enjoy the world with a new perspective and add a new dimension to your memories. Go forth and explore with your ears.

The Double Glazed Glass Ceiling

PRODUCER OF THE YEAR, NON-CLASSICAL

The Producer of the Year, Non-Classical category was established by the Recording Academy in 1974 to honor those who “present consistently outstanding creativity in the area of record production.” Non-Classical is the Academy’s designation for popular music.

267 individual Grammy nominations have been made since the category’s inception. Several producers have been selected more than once. 7 of these 267 nominations were presented to women. That means less than 3% of those considered for Producer of the Year, Non-Classical has been female.

To date, none have taken home the trophy.

Let’s take a look at the handful of women who’ve blazed the trail thus far.

Janet Jackson – Rhythm Nation 1814 (1990)

Miss Jackson was the first woman to receive a nomination in the category, with longtime collaborators Terry Lewis and Jimmy Jam.

Expanding on the narrative of power established by her 1986 commercial breakthrough, Control, Janet bucked expectations even further and released a slick, socially-conscious concept album in the unlikely vein of Marin Gaye’s “What’s Going On?”

Rhythm Nation 1814 was nominated for 9 Grammys and spawned seven Billboard Top 5 singles, breaking the record previously set by her famous older brother. Five of those singles made it to #1. The groundbreaking 30-minute “telemusical” released as a video companion to the record earned Janet a Grammy for Best Music Video – Long Form.

Mariah Carey – Emotions (1991)

Co-produced with Walter Afanasieff, Emotions marks the second occasion upon which a woman was up for the award, in 1991.

Upon signing with Columbia Records, 19-year-old Mariah—who co-produced the demos that got her picked up by Tommy Motolla—was obliged to take a backseat to established producers for her chart-topping debut, Mariah Carey. Hers is a classic case study in the perils of being a young woman in the record business; though she’s accomplished plenty in her own right, one wonders what she might have achieved if she’d been granted better access and support early on in her career instead of finding herself trapped in what she refers to as “the golden cage.”

After her first album’s success, Mariah sought to take more of a producer’s role on Emotions. She is credited as a vocal arranger, producer, and mixer.

Paula Cole – This Fire (1998)

Though she’s technically the third nominee, Paula Cole was the first woman to be nominated as a sole producer, in 1998.

Cole was a frontrunner on the wave of 1990s women fighting for a stronger foothold in the music business. A self-proclaimed “dark horse,” the Berklee College of music alumna received backlash for her appearance at the award ceremony for sporting unapologetically hairy armpits and flipping the bird during her performance of “Where Have All The Cowboys Gone?”

This Fire was nominated for seven awards, including Record of the Year, Album of the Year, and Song of the Year. She took home the award for “Best New Artist.”

Sheryl Crow – The Globe Sessions (1999)

The fourth nominee had already made an indelible mark as a singer, songwriter, and musician when she received the Producer nod in 1999.

Sheryl Crow caught her big break on backup vocals with Michael Jackson in 1987. Her first album, produced by Hugh Padgham, was scrapped for being “too slick.” However, those songs found homes with some major artists: Tina Turner, Celine Dion, and Wynonna Judd. She established her rootsy-yet-pop-sensible sound with the official 1994 debut, Tuesday Night Music Club.

On The Globe Sessions, the storied songstress took the driver’s seat; producing all tracks except for a cover of Guns N Roses’ “Sweet Child O’ Mine” (produced by Rick Rubin).

Crow was the first nominated female producer to have a woman on the album’s audio engineering team—Trina Shoemaker, who took home the first female win that year for Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical.

Lauryn Hill – The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (1999)

1999 was a landmark year for women at the Grammys, and Miseducation was the career-defining album of fifth nominee, Lauryn Hill. She was recognized alongside Sheryl Crow, marking the first time two women were simultaneously up for the award.

Stepping into the spotlight as one-third of hip-hop legends Fugees, the outspoken young singer-rapper captivated listeners with an updated rendition of Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly.” The group disbanded in 1997 amid interpersonal issues and power struggles. Hill was determined to distance herself from her male contemporaries and establish her own creative space.

Though her legacy has suffered quite a bit of controversy, Ms. Hill’s contributions to hip-hop are lasting. She was the first female artist to be nominated for ten Grammys in a single year. She hit yet another first when she took home five trophies that night—unfortunately, none of them were for Producer of the Year.

Lauren Christy – (2004)

Lauren Christy, another singer-songwriter who found her true calling off the beaten path, was nominated in 2004 for her work with writing and production team The Matrix, which included records made with Hillary Duff and Liz Phair.

Before establishing herself as a behind-the-scenes hitmaker, Christy was an award-winning solo artist. Her contributions to Avril Lavigne’s breakthrough debut, Let Go, earned her seven Grammy nominations and cemented her place in pop history.

A prolific songwriter, she’s most recently cut records with Bebe Rexha, Dua Lipa, and The Struts. Additional credits include David Bowie, Jason Mraz, Rihanna, Britney Spears, Shakira, Chris Brown, and Korn.

Linda Perry – (2019)

Like the other women on this list, Linda Perry got started on her path to Producer of the Year as an artist. She scored an international hit with the song “What’s Up?” by her band 4 Non Blondes in 1992 and has since parlayed that success into a highly regarded songwriting and production career, making records with some of music’s top artists.

The seventh nominee, Perry stands out as the first to really step into the role of Producer. She runs a professional recording studio and is credited as an engineer on multiple projects. She founded two labels, a publishing company, and an artist development organization (We Are Hear). Her catalog—featuring such artists as Pink, Christina Aguilera, Alicia Keys, Joan Jett, and Dolly Parton—imparts a pointed engagement with and championship of women.

After 14 years of no representation in the category, the 53-year-old super producer stands a chance to finally shatter the glass ceiling for an increasingly upsurgent tide of female music producers.

Will the Recording Academy “step up” and award a woman with the Grammy for Producer of the Year, Non-Classical?

We’ll have to wait and see.

* For purposes of this article, we’re focusing on the primary branch of the Grammys, established by National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences in 1957. Linda Briceño was the first female producer to take home a Latin Grammy, in 2018.

Ainjel Emme is a musician, songwriter, and producer. She has spent the past 20 years immersed in the study and practice of record production, shadowing world-class audio engineers, working in professional studios, and making records via her Los Angeles-based production house, Block of Joy.

Read Ainjel’s Blog

 

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These Women Are Fixing The Gender Problem in Music Tech

Making up just 5 percent of the music tech industry, women are vastly underrepresented. There is a long way to go to achieve gender parity across the board. However, as Chandler Shortlidge discovers, welcome and overdue change is in the air. 

Great strides have been made across the electronic music industry in recent years to bring more visibility and opportunity to women and non-binary artists on stage. Major drink brands have launched entire campaigns around the issue, helping to highlight the work done by groups like female:pressure, Keychange and Discwoman to make lineups gender equal. And while there’s still much work to be done, few would argue that the efforts have been in vain. But beyond the stage, and into major audio production and engineering studios, women are still greatly underrepresented, currently making up just 5 percent of the music tech industry.

The question of why this imbalance exists has been well covered and is seen by some in the industry as counterproductive. Focusing on the disparity itself only “reinforces the message that women and non-binary people working in sound are an anomaly,” says Kirsty Gillmore of SoundGirls, a non profit organisation founded in 2013 with the mission of inspiring and empowering the next generation of women in audio. Instead, women like Gillmore think the message now needs to be focused on solutions.

Kirsty Gillmore

Kirsty Gillmore, photo by Issac Peral

Gillmore has worked professionally in the sound industry for 17 years. She graduated in New Zealand in 2001, and says she was one of only two women in her class studying sound engineering. “Sound design wasn’t really a known thing in New Zealand,” she says. So she moved to the UK, earning a job at the BBC, where she worked for eight years in a variety of sound-related roles. Now she does sound design for theatre and opera, where she’s responsible for everything you hear. “So that’s everything from the speaker selection to microphone selection to the soundscapes and sound effects,” she says. She also creates soundscapes for audio drama, where she shapes and selects sounds before mixing it all together. As for SoundGirls, Gillmore works on a volunteer basis as the European co-director and UK chapter head.

With over 6,000 members and chapters worldwide, SoundGirls first launched a directory for women in audio two years ago. It was a place where anyone looking to find a woman for their engineering or production needs could find one. But early this year, Spotify reached out to SoundGirls about updating the directory in the hopes of giving it more visibility. “Spotify has made an ongoing commitment to making strides towards equity in the industry,” Gillmore says. Together, they launched The EQL Directory, a revamped version of the original database that’s more dynamic and user-friendly.

You can’t keep saying that there’s no female producers because you just don’t know them. We know them, and we gather them here.

“A lot of what was heard in the industry was, ‘oh, we really wanted to hire a woman engineer but we didn’t know where to find one,’” Gillmore says. But by creating a focal point to easily find female and gender non-conforming sound engineers, designers, producers, mixers and editors, Gillmore hopes the days of claiming ignorance will soon be over. “This is a way of saying, actually, there are a lot of women working in the industry, and now we’ve made it easier for you to find them, so you don’t have that excuse anymore.”

This ethos is echoed closely by Anna Ingler, who helped establish the Upfront Producers Network. Like its name implies, the Stockholm-born network is producer orientated and helps connect and highlight non-male artists in pop, electronic music, and occasionally hip-hop. Artists come mainly from Stockholm, but also Berlin, London, Finland and Denmark.

Anna Ingler

Anna Ingler

“It’s a way to tell the industry, look, there’s a lot of producers here,” Ingler says. “You can’t keep saying that there’s no female producers because you just don’t know them. We know them, and we gather them here.”

Anyone wanting to join the network must apply. Ingler says this is for quality control, so anyone looking to hire a producer through the network already knows the artists have been professionally vetted. The network also serves as a way to connect non-male artists who have shared backgrounds. “They have experiences with sexism, or just people not believing in them or being degrading in some way,” Ingler says.

This isn’t universally true, of course. But male-dominated production and party crews are already a backbone of the electronic music industry, in part because men already gather in their own spaces. However, analogous female and non-binary crews are still rather rare. By meeting other like-minded producers, they can develop their own creative spaces where they feel safe, learn from one another, have fun and grow as professionals. “To get jobs or to become a professional producer, you need that kind of time to develop and refine your skills,” Ingler says. “I think it’s important to do that in a safe space.”

SoundGirls members are already audio professionals, but many women listed in its original directory obtained further work because of it. And with EQL, Gillmore expects that only to improve. Now she says the focus should be on increasing the visibility of women and non-binary professionals across the entire audio industry so that women and girls who are less experienced have someone they can look up to. “I know when I was starting out in sound, there very few female role models,” Gillmore says. “They were out there, they just weren’t visually represented.” Famous female engineers are still rarely used as spokespeople for audio equipment advertisements, or listed amongst many manufacturers’ famous clients when touting the quality of their brands. “I would like to see those manufacturers pledge to have gender equity on their websites,” Gillmore says. Women and non-binary people should be given equal representation in interviews with audio publications too, so future generations can clearly see someone like them they can aspire to.

“You can’t be what you can’t see,” Gillmore says. “We obviously want younger women and girls to come into the industry, and if they look at these publications and manufacturers and all they see are men, then it’s difficult to then go, well, there’s a path for you there.”

Saffron Laura Lewis-Paul also wants to give women a path. Though initially, her background wasn’t in music or technology, she’s long been interested in making creative spaces more diverse. But while working for Creative Youth Network, a youth creativity outreach program, she set up a “very small” label, and soon noticed the music industry’s lack of diversity. “[It’s] not a very diverse industry at all,” she says. And music technology even less so.

So in 2015 she launched Saffron, a music label and artist development program with six to eight week courses in DJing, Ableton Live, Logic and sound engineering, aimed at teaching women the skills necessary to empower them in traditionally male spaces, like music studios. “It’s a difficult place to hold yourself, to navigate a career,” Lewis-Paul says. “By giving women those skills, they can reclaim creative control over their work, and know exactly what needs to be done to make their careers the best they can be.”

Saffron Laura Lewis-Paul

Saffron Laura Lewis-Paul

Heavyweight studio veterans like Katia Isakoff agree. “Walking into a professional recording studio armed with session files and the necessary skills and confidence to communicate one’s technical and creative ideas can be very empowering and liberating,” she says. A veteran composer and producer, Isakoff owned a commercial studio in West London for 12 years, composed and produced for Mute Records in 2002. She also co-owned a commercial studio which she co-designed and built, and her lengthy resume is dotted with a host of other equally impressive achievements.

You can’t be what you can’t see.

Today, she works in experimental avant garde electronic music using hardware synthesisers, voice, DAWs, Theremin and other hardware and software. She knows better than most, how powerful professional knowledge can be when working with a recording or mix engineer. “Especially for a self-producing artist—it can indeed help reclaim or maintain creative control over their work and career,” she says.

Katia Isakoff

Katia Isakoff

Last year, Lewis-Paul says roughly 15 percent of Saffron graduates went on to study higher education in audio at dBs Music—a production, sound engineering and electronic music performance school with campuses in Berlin, London and Bristol. It’s a Saffron partner, and where Lewis-Paul’s students learn the tools of the trade. Lewis-Paul is hoping she’ll soon be able to further track how many of her students then go on to work professionally in the music industry, but that’s still a work in progress.

Right now, her focus is on encouraging new students into the program, and organically developing the Saffron artists who are starting to show potential. “It’s a slow process, and I think I’m okay with that,” she says. One graduate of Saffron’s DJ program is now playing on Worldwide FM. And while it might be easy to try and quickly push her up through the ranks, Lewis-Paul says it’s “really important not to skip over some of those processes in the journey.”

When it comes to encouraging women into Saffron’s classrooms, Lewis-Paul says DJ classes fill up almost instantly. She thinks this is due to the high visibility of women on international and local DJ circuits. “In terms of what we’ve created in Bristol, there are women on nearly every lineup,” she says. But studio work is done behind the scenes, so “you can’t see them being celebrated,” she says. Which is why she thinks EQL is so important, closely echoing Gillmore’s “you can’t be what you can’t see” mantra.

“You can’t see there are other people like you going into these engineering positions,” Lewis-Paul says. “And there’s a fear with that where you might think, ‘well that’s going to be intimidating. It’s going to be men. If I’m going to have to spend more than a day in that environment, I’m going to feel vulnerable.’” But with the EQL database, women can see that there are people like them in those behind-the-scenes roles who they can connect with. “It’s about having a community and feeling supported in what you’re doing and what you want to go into so that you’re not the only one,” she says.

Saffron Masterclass

Saffron’s Masterclass. Photo by Rianna Tamara

As for the future of women in audio, Gillmore says she’s optimistic. “Well I have to be, really,” she half-jokes. In terms of actual numbers of women working in audio, “there’s a long, long way to go.” But there is more awareness, she says, and a willingness to do something about the gender imbalance. That includes initiatives like the EQL Directory, Girls Make Beats—an American school similar to Saffron—and Red Bull’s Normal Not Novel campaign, a monthly series of workshops for women led by

female electronic producers, engineers, and DJs. And although she’s heard the gender imbalance hasn’t greatly improved in her New Zeland class since 2001, she’s also heard about post-production studios in Australia that are half women. Things are improving with manufacturers and the media too. “ProSound News Europe does a regular podcast about women in sound, and they’re very good at featuring equal numbers of sound engineers, designers and producers,” she says.

As for Lewis-Paul, she thinks change needs to start even earlier, by erasing antiquated gender stereotypes as young as possible. “Around 13 to 15 years old, a lot of girls can start to lose their confidence and not want to go into some of those tech subjects,” she says. “So it’s about education starting from a young age, and continuing that so that there isn’t a drop off [in interest].”

With more focus on early education, an emphasis on highlighting female and non-binary role models, and the continued success of empowering networks and education programs, a large and lasting gender shift in the audio industry does look set to happen. Which Upfront’s Anna Ingler says is something we should all be excited for. “I see equality more like a resource than a problem that we have to fix,” Ingler says. “I mean in a company, if you have a diverse staff, you’re going to have different perspectives of a problem and you’re going to solve that problem better. It’s the same thing with creating music. If you have a more diverse, creative team, you’re going to come up with a more creative product.”

Chandler Shortlidge is a dance music journalist based in Berlin. Follow him on Twitter. 

Valuing Your Worth and Getting Paid

Happy New Year, SoundGirls! Let me start by saying I hope you all have a fantastic year ahead of you. I hope you get that gig you’ve been working toward for years. I hope you learn lessons that make you a better engineer, and business owner. Most of all I hope you have fun! We engineer because we love music, we love the job, and because we all want to live exciting lives! So, I challenge you this year to do all of these things.

For my first blog post, I’m going to jump right into the nitty-gritty: payment. First of all, we as women and as creatives often sell ourselves short when it comes to how much we charge and how strict we are about receiving payment. We’ve all been there. You’re spending hours on a song, an EP, an album, and you haven’t even seen half of what you should’ve made yet. I know I have spent hours in front of Pro-Tools working on a mix only to do the math and realize I have made less than minimum wage for hours invested in a project. Why does it give so many of us anxiety to charge what we deserve? I mean this is how we make our living, isn’t it?

Now, I will clarify that I engineer for more than just the money. I feel so passionate about this work that I tear up sometimes – especially when I finish a project. I love helping people bring their music to life, hold their project in their hands and share it with the world. Engineering warms my soul. It gives me a strong sense of purpose. I imagine many of you feel similarly, and this is likely the reason we have anxiety about asking for what we deserve. It’s true; we are fortunate to have such a cool occupation – one that sometimes doesn’t even feel like “work.” We’ve all had those sessions we walk away from thinking, “I had that much fun, and I get paid for it?”

However, being paid fairly for our work is still essential. It’s taken practice, but I’m better at realizing my worth and charging appropriately. I’ve also learned to make sure I see half of it up front before beginning a project. I always ensure I get paid immediately at the end of a session. I also only take projects that excite me. I’ve stopped taking projects just for the money or because I feel like I have to say yes to everything that comes my way. I’m engineering because it makes me happy, so I choose to work on the music and with the artists that make me happy. I hope that is what all of you decide to do this year, too.

So, to bring this first blog post to a close; here are some key things to have ready to bring up the next time you are talking to a potential client about pricing:

An Underwater Recording Adventure

I recently began work on a new show, and luckily it has already presented tons of new challenges.  At Boom Box Post, we like to consider sound design challenges as creative opportunities. So, when I spotted an episode in which the characters travel via microscopic submarine through a human body, I was excited.  Each exterior shot of the submarine illustrated it moving through a viscous plasma-like liquid. I wanted to call upon the tried and true sounds of a submarine for the vehicle itself, but I wanted to do something unique for the sound of it moving through the plasma.  This was the perfect opportunity to get creative with some recording!

This presented an immediate challenge:  we do not own a hydrophone. I looked into buying one, but they are somewhat expensive, and our underwater recording needs are pretty slim.  It didn’t seem worth the investment. I considered using one of my current mics and wrapping it in a water-proof casing, but that struck me as pretty risky.  So, I settled on buying a couple of inexpensive contact mics, a pack of condoms to act as waterproofing, and some heavy duty duct tape to put it together.

About Contact Mics

If you’ve never used a contact microphone before, they are wonderful things.  Sometimes called piezo (pronounced pee-EH-zo) mics, they are what is used for the pickups on electric guitars.  You can buy them as a standalone version, and either tape them to the object you are recording or use the adhesive on the mic itself, thus turning any everyday object into an electric whatever (i.e., electric cello, electric rainstick–the possibilities are endless!)  But, keep in mind that they work differently than all of the other microphones in your mic locker. Normal microphones pick up subtle changes in air pressure as an audio wave passes the microphone. Conversely, contact mics pick up the vibrations of physical matter and transduce those vibrations into an electric signal which can be transduced again into audio.

Thus, contact microphones have no sensitivity to the audio waves passing through the air. This makes them very unique as recording devices (and sound designer tools!) because you don’t need to worry about ambient noise that must be removed later.  A great example of this is that if you were to, say, turn on an electric beard trimmer and skim it across the surface of a cymbal, a traditional microphone you would pick up not only the awesome sound of metal on metal but also the whir of the trimmer’s electric motor.  If you, instead placed a contact mic on the surface of the cymbal, you would only pick up the sound of the trimmer skimming the metal cymbal, because it does not transduce sound waves traveling through air, only those through the physical object itself.

Now, would this particular technology lend itself to recording underwater?  That was a tough call. Would the pressure differences in the water as the mic moved through it be extreme enough for the contact mic to pick up the physical change?  I acquired all of the necessary parts: contact mic, tape, condom (for waterproofing), recorder, and headphones, and then filled a small metal tub with water to find out.

The Trial Run

I learned a lot from this initial experiment.  Dragging the submerged contact mic through the water did not result in any audio.  However, turning on the faucet and letting the water hit the contact mic did. Unfortunately, that audio did not have the sound that I was looking for.  It was crackly (think: rain drops landing with hard splats on a plastic surface), not watery. From there, I tried submerging the microphone near the point of entry of the running water and found that I got a great bubbly sound.  The water pressure was changing constantly as the faucet poured into the basin, but I wasn’t getting the hard hits of the water slamming against the mic itself. I brought those sounds into Pro Tools, and while they were definitely in the vein of what I wanted, the size just wasn’t there.  They sounded too small.

The Final Record Session

So, I took the recorder home and did my final session in my home bathtub.  I submerged the mic and recorded steadies at the point of entry of the water, and then ran the mic back and forth over that area for the submarine bys.  The contact mic, being that it records physical vibrations, picked up fabulously unique splatty sounds for these–just what I was looking for!

Editing the Material

I brought everything into ProTools again and then was faced with an additional technical issue inherent to almost all contact mics.  Because they consist of small capacitors in series, they function at a much higher impedance than a regular microphone. When connected to a typical line input, this creates a high pass filter, thus cutting out any low end from your recordings.  I was aware of this issue and had set up my session with this in mind. I separated the files I wanted to work with, then ran them through a low-pass filter EQ, pitched them down an octave, and also applied both tactics to each file to see which approach brought the sounds closest to what I was looking for.  In the end, I bounced some of each. Here are a few samples:

The Sounds

You can hear the final product here

Kate’s Gear Recommendations

Sony PCM-M10 Portable Linear PCM Voice Recorder with Electret Condenser Stereo Microphones, 96 kHz/24-bit, 4GB Memory & USB High-Speed Port

Neewer Piezo Contact Microphone Pickup for Guitar Violin Banjo OUD Ukulele Mandolin and More

Gorilla Tape, Black Tough & Wide Duct Tape, 2.88″ x 30 yd, Black

Trojan Non-Lub Latex Condoms, Enz 12 ct – 4pk

This Blog originally appeared in Boom Box Post Blogs

 

SoundGirls at Mix Sound for Film

Every year in the fall Mix Magazine presents a Sound For Film and TV conference.  Hosted at Sony Pictures Studios lot in Culver City, California, it is a congruence of the many different facets of film and television sound.  This year SoundGirls had a good showing, there was an energetic group of volunteers that braved the morning rain to register and greet the attendees. SoundGirls were attendees and even presenters.

New member Kristina Morss was excited about the wide variety of panels.  She lamented that the Animation and First Man panels were at the same time, which meant she could not go to both.  Coming from a video editing background, Kristina wanted to learn more about the sound side of post-production.  She had heard of the event from the Soundworks Collection, which also records some of the panels and hosts them on their website.

I too struggled to narrow my itinerary. Beginning with the keynote Scott Gershin, who focused on the possibilities of immersive sound, I made sure to see a sampler of different sound niches.  The Parade of Carts presented by Cinema Audio Society is always a must-see for me because each Mixer’s cart is a master class in problem-solving on set.

Parade of Carts

At the Animation Panel presented by Motion Picture Sound Editors panelist Eileen Horta promoted being bold, while she and the other panelists warned the differences between animation and live action.

Karol Urban moderated the Mixing Dialog: Audio Pipeline Panel, which followed the dialog process from location recording to final mix. You can listen to the panel Karol moderated here

To round off my day I attended the Future is Female Panel. This was the only panel with only women presenters, but that was not the focus of the talk. Each panelist is a respected composer in the industry, and each one presented a sample of their work and an explanation of their creative process.  Other panels that I missed included Composing for Video-games, The Sound of A Star is Born, Ambisonic Recording, and hands-on Dolby Atmos demonstrations.

Future is Female Panel

At the cocktail hour, there was finally time for networking.  Breakfast and lunch held similar opportunities but within a shorter time frame.  It was in these brief moments that I connected with another new SoundGirl Julie Keller, a former choreographer who is pursuing her new love of sound editing.  She told me about the panel on The Sound and Music of Black Panther, and how the design balanced between the cultural (African drums) and the futuristic. Afterward, I went to the local SoundGirls meeting and met even more amazing people in the industry.

This was my third time attending the Sound For Film and TV conference, and it keeps getting better.  The panels and talks are always insightful, and they cover many aspects of sound for film. I feel that there is almost not enough time to see all of the panels I was interested in, and there’s a lack of networking time.  I would also like to see more booths and vendors. Overall, however, I just want to see this event continue and grow. Let’s get more SoundGirls there next year!

Editors’ note: Althought SoundGirls was not involved with Mix for Film & TV Sound, we hosted an event at Sony Studios in September. You can view our panel discussion here. Moderated by Anne Marie Slack – Panelists: Karol Urban, Kate Finan, Onnalee Blank, and April Tucker

 

Live Digital Audio Part 3

Digital Audio in the Real World   

Read Part One and Part Two

Knowing the theory of digital audio is all well and good, but how do you set all that stuff up on-site? First of all, both good and bad news about digital audio is a lot of the equipment looks after things like sampling and clocking for you. Word clock signal is often carried on the same path as the audio signal, so for a lot of systems, you don’t need to worry about plugging sync cables in separately at all. This automation makes it much more user-friendly and quick to set up, but it also means it can be tricky to troubleshoot because manufacturers will proudly proclaim that their system “just works!” This is also yet another subject where there is no consensus, and each brand has its preferred protocols, cables, and network topology. When using any new equipment, primarily digital, it pays to read the manual: you might find out about some crazy quirks you would never have thought of checking for. You are also likely to have several pieces of equipment from several different manufacturers; follow their advice about how to connect these together, including using the correct convertors or adaptors.

Practise best practice

If you want to avoid digital audio issues, keep your system as simple and neat as you can. Much like analogue, you usually want to minimise the number of connections and cable length between points in your system. For example, connect your devices in a “star” topology when possible – this means each unit gets plugged straight to one central device, like a network router for system communication or master clock generator for synchronisation (like in figure 1a). The alternative is a “daisy chain” topology – linking from one unit to the next (figure 1b). Even if you use a direct output from a device, each loop through introduces latency to your system. It may be a fraction of a millisecond, but if you have several units, those can add up to cause trouble. It can also mean that if one device or cable fails in the chain, everything downstream of that loses connection. If your devices don’t have the ability to link out, you’ll need to use a splitter or ‘T’ connector to carry the chain on, which is another potential point of failure or signal loss. However, certain manufacturers recommend leaving their section of the set up (e.g., a desk and its stage boxes) connected in a chain for syncing purposes. Their argument is if everything is clocked directly to an external master and it fails, everything will fall out of sync. Their equipment was designed to work together, so allowing it all to clock from one of its own units, which in turn is clocked to your system’s master, means that if the master goes offline all that gear will at least be in sync with each other, if not the rest of your system (figure 1c).

Figure 1: Different methods for connecting a live system

 

Figure 2: 50 ohm male and female BNC connectors (right) with their dielectric rings clearly visible, and 75 ohm male and female connectors (left) without. Source: By Kaback [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], from Wikimedia Commons.

Figure 3: A BNC terminator connected to a T connector (left), a T connector (centre) and a terminator. As you can see by the dielectric material, these are actually 50 ohm connectors and would not be ideal for digital audio setup. Source: By Romantiker [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), from Wikimedia Commons.

Are you using the correct connections?

There are a whole bunch of different cables used to connect digital audio. Confusingly, several have the same connectors as other cables, and look and feel very similar. For example, your device might have BNC sockets, but should you use RG58 coaxial cable or RG59? What’s the difference? RG58 has a characteristic impedance of 50 ohms and is used for RF applications because it can deal with the high power involved in radio transmission. RG59 (you might know it as ‘video cable’) is 75 ohms and is what you need for digital audio connections. Its lower impedance will let the signal pass through it more efficiently and accurately.

Similarly, AES3 cable uses XLR connectors but is 110 ohms rather than mic cable’s 75 ohms. If you’re lucky, the grade will be printed along the length of the cable, but if not, RG59 and AES3-grade cables tend to be stiffer and less flexible than RG58 and mic cable (beware of RG213, which is even thicker than RG59! There are quite a few different cables with BNC and XLR connectors out there. If you are in charge of organising cables in your workplace, please store all these different ones in clearly marked places, far away from each other! It will save a lot of confusion). There are two different BNC connectors: a 50 ohm one with white plastic ‘dielectric’ rings and a 75 ohm one without (see figure 2). However, this isn’t a foolproof way of identifying the cable itself, because some manufacturers or repair people cut corners or are genuinely mistaken and can use the wrong ones. The shorter the distance, the less critical it is to use the correct cable, but if you’re having issues and you know you cheaped out and used let’s say mic cable instead of AES3-grade cable, swapping it for the real deal is a smart move. Make sure you don’t connect cables of different impedances too. Each time you connect a 50 ohm and 75 ohm coax together it can result in the loss of roughly 5% of your signal (this is also something to bear in mind if you know your cables have the wrong impedance connectors).

If you connect your devices to a word clock generator separate to the audio transmission, you also need to make sure that each path is terminated, to stop parts of the signal being reflected back down the cable and causing jitter. Some devices have a switchable internal terminator that you can select, or if you’re using BNC you can plug a T connector into the input of the last device in the chain, with the word clock plugged into one side of the T and a (75 ohm) terminator (see figure 3) on the other side.

Is everything singing from the same hymn sheet?

Once everything is powered up, make sure all your devices are running at the same sample rate. Most equipment these days has an internal sample rate convertor, which can switch between sample rates, called up or downsampling. Downsampling to the slowest device’s rate is the norm in live audio. This option is usually found in the system/settings menu, but sometimes there is a physical switch on the unit. If a device has a second brain/engine or fallback feature, make sure that it is also set to the correct sample rate. Some systems are now smart enough to choose the best word clock to be the master themselves and even switch to the second best one if something happens to the first, without interrupting the audio. If your system doesn’t do this, decide on a master clock and tell each device what it is. Again, this will be in the system/settings menu.

Is the network working?

If you networked units together, make sure they each have a unique IP address, that can be seen by the router (if you have a straightforward setup you may not need a separate router). If two or more devices have the same IP address, or any device has the wrong type of IP address, it will cause issues. Here is a brief rundown of the basics of IP addressing:

Static IP: You set the IP (‘internet protocol’) addresses of each device manually, and they stay the same until you change them. This is best for most live audio cases, so you can keep track of all your devices and can quickly identify which unit is faulty, for example, by its IP address.

DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol): You let the router assign addresses. This is faster, and best if other units are likely to be added to the network without your knowledge (this is normally used for things like wifi networks in offices and cafes). As devices come and go, they are certain to have unique IP addresses and won’t clash. However, the same unit can be assigned different IP addresses over time, which can get confusing.

Subnet: The part of the IP address that a router looks at to see all the devices in a particular network. e.g., a desk might be 192.12.34.3, a stagebox might be 192.12.34.4, and they are both part of the “192.12.34.x” subnet. A laptop with the address 168.12.34.5 would not be part of that subnet.

Subnet mask: The number that defines the range of the subnet. For each section of the mask, if the number is 255, each IP address must match at that section exactly. If the number is 0, it can be any value between 0 and 255. For example, if the subnet mask is 255.255.255.0, each device’s address must match in the first three sections. 192.12.34.3 and 192.12.34.4 would be seen, but if an amp was set to 192.12.56.7, it wouldn’t be seen. If you expanded the subnet mask to 255.255.0.0 the amp would then be seen by the router, along with anything else that had an IP address starting with 192.12. (so that laptop would still not be seen as part of the subnet). It is best to avoid assigning IP addresses that end in 0 or 255 because these are often used by the router for its own system tasks.

It might seem like a lot to take in, but most of this only really comes down to setting up like you would an analogue system, then doing a few extra checks in your gear’s settings menus. Getting the fundamentals right will minimise the need for troubleshooting, which I promise I will get on to in my next post!

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