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…)
SG Member Malle Kaas has returned to school. She is currently enrolled in the 12 week production training program at Britannia Row. She will be sharing with us her experiences and training this is part two. (more…)
At the young age of sixteen, Magali Couturier happened upon a man setting up for a very small concert in a park. As she watched him set up a couple of tiny speakers, microphones, and equipment, she questioned him. After he finished explaining to her what he was doing, she asked him if that was a real job? When he replied yes she thought to herself that it sounded much more interesting than all of the jobs she had heard about before, and since she always had a love for music it might be worth pursuing.
Magali enrolled in a two-year technical school in France where she earned a degree specializing in sound for Television/Cinema, which she found to be rather useless. She moved to the UK at age 19 where Mags met a small UK audio company and got her start in the business. Some of the lessons she learned working for that company were; “(among how to make a proper cup of English tea!), perseverance, confidence, flexibility, multi-tasking, never to think you know it all, mix with your ears rather than your brain, how to load a truck, and how to lift things a lot heavier than my own weight.” She also picked up skills in accounting, bookkeeping, and payroll, dealing with clients, and all sorts of management skills.
It paid off, and Mags has been working as an independent Monitor Engineer for 19 years. She’s toured with The Dandy Warhols, Rufus Wainwright, My Bloody Valentine, Gary Numan, Duffy, Nick Lowe, Natasha Beddingfield, Lila Downs, Mathew Herbert, and Camille and is soon starting with Marianne Faithfull. Mags occasionally does Production Management as well. Her first tour was with Nils Lofgren. Thrown in at the deep end, she ended up mixing monitors for her company. Mags also spent eleven months managing a US band but recalls that she would never want to do that again.
Mags has had some obstacles to overcome in her early days at the sound company- being foreign (French and working in the UK) young, and female. “There was this one guy who spent every gig we worked together re-doing what I was doing.” She dealt with it by being stubborn, persevering, and having faith in herself. “However the boss of the company believed in me, and he didn’t treat me any different. Actually, he was a very hard boss/teacher, but he pushed me more than I would probably have been able to push myself.” Mags ended up working alongside her boss in running the company for years.
She started working for the Dandy Warhols in 1998 and would still return to the company to work in between tours. Mags did this until 2004 when she became strictly a touring engineer. She now spends her downtime between tours working on her home, an ‘old ruin’ she bought nearly ten years ago in the French countryside. Mags still tries to work at least once a year with the old company, “not mixing but just loading trucks and moving gear around, to keep sane and grounded in this industry.”
Mags loves the constant travel with touring, losing track of time and what day it is, as well as the diversity of the people, places, and culture she sees while on the road and enjoys ‘being a little part of bringing joy and entertainment to the world through music.”
The downside of being independent, however, is that “you never know when the next job is going to come.” The other difficult bits about touring for Mags are “saying goodbye to your touring pals when a tour is over, bad catering, and the lack of a proper croissant and hot chocolate.”
Mags enjoys her alone time on days off, along with running, going to a museum or movie, and “eating gorgeous food.” Her long-term goals include doing what she loves and loving what she does, and right now she wouldn’t change her job for anything in the world.
Advice to anyone wanting to enter the field of live sound reinforcement– “make sure you know the meaning of perseverance.’ Be flexible, open-minded, and have a good work ethic.”
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…)
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.
SG Member Sarah Black
Sarah Black has been working in live sound since 2006, and is one of the seven women on the sound crew at the iconic Sydney Opera House. Sarah shares her experiences working Vivid Live with SoundGirls.Org. (more…)
By: Karrie Keyes
Sydney Opera House
The Sydney Opera house is an iconic performing arts center in Sydney, Australia. It was designed by Danish architect Jorn Utzon and opened in October 1973. The first performance was the Australian Opera’s production of War and Peace. The Syndey Opera House cost over one million Australian dollars to build. The Sydney Opera House hosts over 3000 events each year with over two million people attending, and provides guided tours to over 200,000. It is 185 meters long and 120 meters wide, has 2194 pre-cast concrete sections in the roof, with sections weighing up to 15 tons. There roof is held together with 350 km of tensioned steel cable and has over one million tiles. There are 6225 square meters of glass and 645 kilometers of electric cable. The Sydney Opera House has 1000 rooms. (more…)
The gigs that you remember usually have had a great impact on you. They can inspire & empower or devastate & destroy you. They can humble you. They can make you laugh or make you cry. They can provide a sense of accomplishment. Sometimes you witnessed a performance that becomes legendary or history being made. They can open your eyes to other viewpoints, cultures, musical genres, and artistic expression. The gigs you remember are the ones where you stood on your own when everything clicked when you overcame challenging situations. They are the ones where you thought “I Have the Best Job in the World”. The gigs we remember shape our lives in small ways that may be unnoticeable, but sometimes they alter our life path. The gigs that you remember provide us with experiences that make us stronger humans and engineers. (more…)