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Kelly Sayer, the young and passionate recording engineer at KIDinaKORNER studios, discusses who inspires her to keep striving for success in a male-dominated industry
Who can aspiring female engineers look up to?
Every engineer has role models that they can aspire to be like. And as a Berklee College of Music graduate who works for a Grammy-award winning producer, I’ve been lucky to learn directly from some of my own. The trouble is that, since there are so few females in this industry, it’s no surprise that most of our role models are male.
Aspiring female engineers need successful female role models
Since women seem to need to work twice as hard to prove ourselves as we start to break through the prejudices of the engineering world. So I want to give praise to two of my own greatest inspirations, in the hopes that their successes might inspire some of the other determined women out there.
In an interview with Tape Op in 2002, Leanne explained that music is an emotional art that desperately calls for the participation of more females. With over 30 years of experience as both an engineer and a producer, Leanne’s remarkable discography prove that women can break the mold.
She is best known for the seven albums that she produced and engineered with Leonard Cohen as well as having worked with Laurie Anderson, The Temptations, and Tom Jones, to name just a few.
As my professor in college, Leanne encouraged me not to connect every struggle I face in the studio with being a girl. She reminded me that there would be difficult sessions and difficult people, who might even be equally as difficult towards a male engineer, but at the end of the day, it is going to matter most that I can believe in myself and be proud of the work that I create.
Susan Rogers: Another highly successful woman in the industry, Susan is internationally recognized for her work with Prince on albums such as Purple Rain, Sign o’ the Times, Around the World in a Day, Parade, and The Black Album.
From establishing herself as a tech in Los Angeles to solidifying her reputation as one of the most successful recording engineers in the world, all the way to acquiring her doctorate in music cognition and psychoacoustics, Susan has not let the bias’ of the industry slow her down for even one moment.
When seeking production advice from her on an EP that I produced earlier this year, Susan told me to let the song drive me – the arrangement has to serve the song (and often, the vocal), not detract from it. Her philosophy also reminded me that if you keep your focus on the music (which is what drew most of us into this line of work, to begin with), everything else falls into place. When you are making good music – music that you love – that’s what really matters and prejudices that might usually get in the way of the creative process become irrelevant.
These two incredible women are both examples that show how we as women can defy the odds and make a name for ourselves as successful engineers if we set our minds to it. And there are many others like them. So I encourage you to go out and seek female role models, whether you know them on a personal level or not, who can inspire you to keep pushing boundaries and persevere they way that they did.
“I like to approach engineering from the eye’s (and ears) of a musician. Having trained as a singer myself, it has been invaluable for me to know what it feels like to be on both sides of the microphone”.
To Find More Role Models and Inspiration Check Out SoundGirls Profiles on the 5%
Kelly Sayer is a passionate audio engineer, songwriter, and vocal producer. Originally from Cape Town, South Africa, she is currently based in Los Angeles, where she is employed as head engineer for platinum-selling record producer Alex Da Kid.
It’s easy to miss the SoundGirls news and blogs, so we have put together a round-up of the blogs, articles, and news from the past week. You can keep up to date and read more at SoundGirls.org
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While I was pregnant (The Audio Girlfriends Guide to Pregnancy) my plan was to take off a couple of months off after the baby was born then go back to work part-time for a while. My husband, who also works in audio, planned to work from our home studio. We figured between the two of us we wouldn’t need a babysitter or daycare. How hard can it be to mix and watch a baby?
Things didn’t quite go as planned.
Before having a baby, I thought I’d be better prepared for parenthood than some of my non-industry friends because I had survived studio life. I’ve worked the night shift for years, and most of my career has been irregular schedules and over 40 hours a week. What I discovered, though, is in my pre-parenthood days working a double shift meant you deserve a day off and a cocktail. With a newborn, Golden Time (working beyond 16 hours) is just called Monday. And Tuesday. And there’s no weekend or days off. The recovery time you get really depends on how much help you have – and the sleep patterns (or non-sleeping patterns) of your baby.
It’s true you can have time to yourself while an infant sleeps but in actuality that “free time” can quickly get taken up by basic needs like eating, showering, or catching up on sleep. My grandiose plans for bringing Baby J to work at night or updating my plugins while he slept was never even an option (although some parents do manage to do it!)
The first work project I took on didn’t go as planned. It was a Sundance Film when Baby J was two months old. It took me two weeks to do EIGHT HOURS of sound design. I expected it to be difficult but it went so much deeper than just being sleep-deprived! I later learned about factors like mom brain or mom fog (a real condition due to hormone changes during and after pregnancy). It makes it difficult to focus long periods or remember details. Also, women’s brains change attention when a hungry baby cries (which doesn’t happen to men) The two combined make it incredibly difficult to get into a flow or stay focused on a single task. Like everything else, it gets better over time.
After ten weeks of maternity leave, I went back to work part-time. I could have easily taken off another month, but it was nice to have a few nights a week to talk about compressors and upmix plugins instead of diapers and swaddles. By six months I felt comfortable working from home on occasion. It was only possible with someone else handling child care (husband, babysitter, etc.). Now that Baby J is a year old it’s much more manageable to take on more complicated gigs or even gigs out of town.
I did learn some things that saved me as a working parent:
I used to wonder how I would manage to be a parent and having a career or if it’s even possible. It’s definitely possible – it just takes being flexible, patience, and accepting things won’t always go to plan. There’s also times you’ll have to put your family first or have someone available who can in those moments (like an unexpected doctor visit or illness).
The one thing I didn’t expect about becoming a parent is how rewarding it is. I’m still proud of my career accomplishments, but they don’t carry the same significance as they did before. Watching someone smile the first time or recognize that the sound of an airplane means there’s something in the sky is pretty amazing. It’s a challenge but worth the effort.
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There are so many rules that as adults we must follow. Things we can get in real trouble for if we don’t pay our taxes, but then there are other rules such as eating a salad for lunch. Who came up with that rule anyway? This can be a stigma for women – all we eat are salads all the time. Well good for you if you really do, but it’s ok to eat the burger too. Now I get where the taxes come in, but who decided salad was the prime meal, a sundae for lunch wouldn’t hurt and it’s a whole lot more fun, too!
Anyway, things around the world are a bit rough right now so I thought I would write about a way to build in some fun. Especially since so many of us work long hours; we need to make sure to balance the seriousness of life and work with some fun. For instance, just the other day I got into work and immediately there was too much to do with not enough time. Story of our lives sometimes, right? Well, when things finally calmed down and I got to start wrapping up the crazy week my coworker, and I were a little burnt out. We decided to add a little fun into the end of our workday. The best part was there was a third person in the office that had no idea why there were peanut butter cups and paper airplanes flying across the room. (Sorry Ann!) But, it was a blast, and we laughed super hard about it, which made it easier to make it to the end of the day and week. Something so simple made a rough day a little easier to finish. We decided to break the so-called work rules and had a little fun. Something so simple can make such a difference.
A few years ago, I had a fantastic speaker come through my venue where he shared their philosophy with me. His name is Jason Kotecki, and he is all about breaking the rules of life and bringing some fun back into every day. Jason calls this fighting Adultitis. You can check out his work here http://escapeadulthood.com/blog/ for some inspiration and for further explanation of his idea about breaking the adult rules that don’t matter and bringing some fun back to life and work.
It can be simple things such as paper airplanes to things like trying your hand at stand-up comedy during a soundcheck or at least switching it up. Next time you are about to say check one, two, change it up, try some of your best movie lines. Or something like wearing a bright color one day instead of black, have breakfast food for dinner, dye your hair purple, and so much more. I personally like to break the unspoken rule of not having fun at work.
A while back my crew adopted a cartoon movie figurine. We named it Rex and decided to hide it within our staff-only areas for our co-workers to find. People got a kick out of looking for Rex and hiding it again. People would see it on top of work lights or buried under cables, and it always brought a smile to their face, and they would quickly hide it again. It was something so simple that the entire team had fun. What have you done to break the adult rules? How do you have fun or be silly once in a while?
On Jason’s website, he has a saying – “Don’t settle for the life you’ve been told to live. Create the one you were made for.” I feel this is a true motto that many SoundGirls can relate to; I know I do as I have worked hard to get where I am today. Women are told every day what they should be or how they should act, but as SoundGirls we are following our passions and creating the lives we want to live.
I recently embarked on my first tour ever. Yes, I’m 27, and yes I’ve been playing in bands and making my music for over a decade. I’ve done long drives and weekend “mini-tours,” but I have never been on a real tour. And then this September, it happened!
Before I left, I was feeling grateful that I was going to go on tour this year and not last year, or the year before, or the year before. I had finally reached a point where I stopped caring about what other people thought of me. My anxiety about making an ass of myself in the years between absolute-and-total-beginner and goddess-of-pop-and-production-and-also-successful-film-composer—aka my ultimate dream—had pretty much diminished once I turned 27. I knew that this was going to be a very valuable asset on my first tour because my band was the opener for two other well-known bands, our budget was next to nothing, and at the end of the day, it was entirely possible that the headliners’ fans wouldn’t like us. The thick skin was a welcome change. My newfound penchant for not giving a shit, paired with years of work that had led to this moment was, without a doubt, feeling pretty good right about then.
Another reason I was glad to be touring later rather than sooner: I had worked in restaurants a lot, and my restaurant “skills” that I had previously seen as invaluable were suddenly feeling extremely valuable:
But one of the things I had not foreseen was how much my live set design* affected the entire flow of my band’s setup, our soundcheck, our show, and any challenges that came up along the way. My live setup was lightweight, looked good, and got the job done. At the onset of my first-ever national tour, my live set consisted of:
Drum World:
Bass World:
My World:
The music we were performing contained synth riffs and all sorts of expressive percussion sounds, as well as swells and other emotive drops that were integral to the songs. After tweaking frequencies and decibel levels according to the feedback of a number of trusted sources, I was proud of what I was going to be working with on stage every night, and I was excited about the live musicians I’d chosen to play with me.
However, midway through our tour, I had to fire one of the musicians I’d been so excited about. The reason? Sexual harassment of underage fans.***
That this happened mere weeks before the Harvey Weinstein stor(ies) broke and dominated our news feeds. Of course this person tried to defend himself with comments about how “no physical harm was done” and how “the Internet isn’t really real.” (Yes, these are real quotes from a real adult who was a working professional. And no, they had no bearing on my decision to promptly remove this person from my tour.) By the time he got home, our entire nation was fuming over sexual harassment scandals. Perhaps it’s silly of me to think that he learned his lesson by reading the news? I’m still hopeful.
Anyway. My remaining bandmate and I were five shows deep into a ten-show tour, and were suddenly faced with a huge task: play a set of (relatively complex) pop music for an audience of about 1,000 people in an expressive and engaging fashion, all while being short one musician.
So how did My World and Bass World pull it off?First of all, I was lucky. The Ableton project folder I had saved to my brand new, purchased-on-credit solid-state laptop**** happened to include the Ableton session I had used months before for a couple of impromptu two-person shows. The day after we fired our rogue drummer, I fired up said session in the minivan and promptly began adding any bells and whistles I believed we were missing in his absence. This consisted mostly of drums tracks and one-hits that I had to mildly adjust: some pocket issues here, some EQ issues there. I made a decision to add a bitcrusher effect to any drum tracks that felt too “acoustic” to play on the house speakers. For those who don’t already know, a bitcrusher is a rudimentary distortion that digitally alters resolution. It adds a bit of a prickly sound to sounds that don’t have much prickle. Too much bitcrusher and things can easily get chaotic, but the right amount and things sound more interesting. Put another way: drum tracks that sounded too angelic were transformed into a sample that sounds something like the lo-fi quality of Sleigh Bells or Crystal Castles. (Side note: I still haven’t decided if I am still a Crystal Castles fan after member Alice Glass’ public statement about her prior bandmate’s extremely abusive behavior toward her. Considering Crystal Castles is the work of both of them, is it more supportive to engage with her work, or to denounce his?)
After this brief editing, my bass player/backing vocalist (who herself is a talented producer and songwriter) and I rehearsed in our minivan while our photographer/tour manager drove us to our next show. Our rehearsal was my laptop, my Push, and us singing and playing air guitar and bass.
Our first show without a drummer I told the audience to “take care of each other.” Our second one I told the audience “we used to have a drummer but they had to be sent home.”
I was under the impression that something was wrong. But, as it turned out, I was the only person on the tour that had that impression. Myself, along with my team, had communicated with the tour team about what had happened, and we were scooted off with nothing but blessings and anecdotes from similarly sad experiences. For the remainder of our short but sweet tour, new fans poured their hearts out to us, took photos, purchased autographed posters and t-shirts, all without so much as a mention of the absence of a live drummer.
So what was at play when I pressed play each and every remaining night on that tour?
First: and foremost: songwriting. Before this tour I’d spent years working on singing styles, lyrics and character perspective concepts that (finally) seemed relevant and original to a wider audience.
Second: our live setup was simple, but it was also capable and flexible. I’d never anticipated needing to let a core player go in the middle of a tour, but I could when I needed to. My remaining bandmate and I were at a slight advantage because we had played a two-person set before (albeit to a much smaller and drunker audience), Also the fact that we were the first of three acts meant that it was totally okay that our setup was simpler than the other bands’. But, we were also open to the objective criticism of what we would be missing without a live drummer, namely dynamics and the energy of another person on stage with us. So we made up for that with some lightweight native plugins and mad stage presence. We had so much stage all to ourselves now! So we used every square inch of it to keep energy high.
We did not see any decrease in merch sales or new fans. We did not need to field any questions about the absence of a drummer. Anyone who spoke to us about our music was excited and wanted to know when they could come to support us again. Most surprisingly, myself and everyone on my team took it in stride. The weight of sexual harassment among our personnel had been dealt with swiftly and strictly. We had exercised morals we lived by, and now we had shows to play.
So. What’s my point?
Sexual harassment is never tolerated, even when the harasser’s role is theoretically indispensable. Make the most of what you already know. And most importantly, be prepared for anything. A good attitude will keep you going.
*Music Directing is the design of artists’ live setups and is a profession unto itself. I will be sure to devote a whole blog post to this topic soon.
**In the past I have played with having my own vocal rig. At one point I ran my vocals through Ableton Live because I anticipated the possibility of wanting to play with effects and looping in real-time without having to purchase expensive pedals. At another point, I invested in the TC Helicon VoiceLive Touch which afforded me amazing on-stage effects. However its signal flow also provided a great deal of noise and confusion, usually from front-of-house people. Ultimately it didn’t do the job I wanted, so I sold it.
***Again, this story will eventually be a blog post unto itself.
****If you are going to use a computer on stage (especially one that you interact with while you are performing), it needs to be a solid-state drive laptop. Traditional spinning drives can skip when they feel vibrations from drums, stage monitors, your own body accidentally knocking your computer over. And you don’t want that!
Sign SoundGirls Open Letter to the Professional Audio Community & Music to Address Sexual Harassment
Find Information on Sexual Harassment in the Music Industry
It’s easy to miss the SoundGirls news and blogs, so we have put together a round-up of the blogs, articles, and news from the past week. You can keep up to date and read more at SoundGirls.org
Prince’s sound engineer, Susan Rogers: ‘He needed to be the alpha male to get things done.’
Women Make An Impact on the 2018 MPG Awards Shortlist
Katie Tavini on supporting other members of the pro audio community
The end of the year will be here before we know it. December-January is often a bit of a quiet season for the sound industry, so for my last blog for 2017, I’ve put together a list of ten highly recommended activities to make the most of it.
Step away from the faders.
Rest. It’s been a busy year; you need it. Start the next year refreshed, not exhausted.
Get some exercise
…that’s not just running cables. If it’s cold on your side of the planet, wrap up appropriately and remind yourself what weather feels like. If it’s warm, sit in the sun and take the fluorescent edge off your studio tan
Be an audience member
Watch a play, see your favourite band, take in a film without trying to analyse the convolution reverb. Take your sound ears off for a bit and remember what it feels like to just enjoy a great piece of art.
Do a career stocktake
Look back at the work you’ve done this year. Which projects took you closer to your career goals? Which ones took you further away from your goals? Which were a side-step? Use this to figure out what kind of work you want to do more and less. Maybe you’ll find it’s time for a brand new set of goals altogether.
Have a bit of a tidy-up
The quiet season is a perfect time to do the tedious but essential maintenance that you put off when you were busy with tours and projects. Software upgrades, backups and archiving, PAT tests, clean-ups, and clear-outs. Start the new year with something resembling a tidy studio/working space and a clean system.
Get educated
Dust off that online course, podcast series or webinar that you never quite got around to watching. Time spent investing in your skills is never time wasted.
Polish up your portfolio
If it’s been a while since you updated your CV or your showreel isn’t showcasing your very best work, you’ll need a refresh. If you’re planning to target a different area of the industry, or a different country, in the new year, make sure you have a portfolio that’s tailored accordingly. Resources for Resumes and Social Media
Say thank you
If you have a mentor, remarkable colleague or someone who’s given you a great opportunity this year, this is a perfect time to say thank you and tell them how much you value their support. It’s simple, it doesn’t have to cost much (or anything), and it will be appreciated.
Indulge in some celebrations
Reflect on your achievements and take a moment to acknowledge what you’ve learned and created. You’ve done good work, and you deserve to celebrate it. Glass of seasonal refreshment is recommended.
On behalf of the UK SoundGirls Chapter, thanks to all our members for being part of our SoundGirls community this year. Cheers to the year to come!
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