Empowering the Next Generation of Women in Audio

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How to be Lucky

“I’ve never had those kinds of well-paid opportunities happen, not everyone is lucky.”

“She’s so lucky she got that job, I’d kill to work there.”

“You’re so lucky to be doing what you love! I wish I could do that.”

Any of these sound familiar? I saw one of them on Facebook today. One of them is something a friend said to me a few days ago.

Up until recently, I got annoyed when someone described me as “lucky.” I would have said, that where I am in my career today has very little to do with the vagaries of fate, and everything do to with hard work. But recently I was reminded of the well-known quote attributed to Seneca the Younger: “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” And I realised, I am pretty lucky.

I have spent the past twenty years preparing for my current career and creating opportunities. I invested in training and qualifications. I moved to the other side of the world on a one-way ticket where there were more chances for work. I learned how to run a business as well as configure a console. I joined organisations, I went to events, and talked to everyone I could. I learned from other people’s experiences and my mistakes. I built up my skills and my portfolio, and then when the opportunities arose, I took them. According to Seneca, I am lucky. And I know – at the risk of sounding like a motivational speaker – you can be too.

Be prepared

If your dream sound job came up tomorrow, would you have all the skills and experience you need to take it? What do you have to do to be ready for that job? You need to be prepared not just for when opportunity knocks, but for everything leading up to it – those smaller jobs which will gradually take you to a place where you feel capable of doing the more prestigious jobs.

Back in June 2004 I really wanted to be a radio sound engineer, ideally working in radio drama. I’d got as far as the practical test round of interviews for a trainee sound engineer position at the BBC in London. It was my third application for a trainee position, and the feedback from the previous one was to get more hands-on experience. A colleague in my department suggested trying a local arts radio station, as they were always looking for volunteers. I didn’t follow it up. On the day, the test went fine, but I didn’t get the job. The feedback they gave me was that they were looking for people with practical radio experience. I had the opportunity to get a job that would put me on the path to my chosen career – but when it came to it, I wasn’t prepared.

Create your own opportunities

If you’re relying on opportunities coming from one or only a few sources, you need to broaden your horizons. Think about the people who could recommend you for jobs, not just within sound people who work in adjacent fields. Venue owners, studio owners, production managers, tour managers, producers, directors, lighting designers, other sound engineers. Make connections offline and online and maintain those connections – relationships take time to develop. Make sure you’ve got a consistent, professional profile online, whether that’s a personal website, or an online professional directory like the Directory of Women in Professional Audio and Production (sign up if you haven’t already). The adage “you never know where your next job is coming from” is a persistent one for a good reason: it’s true. And the people who might be the ticket to your next step on the career ladder can’t give you anything if they don’t know you’re out there.

Take action and keep taking it

Getting up and doing it is the first real step – no one gets lucky by waiting for the world to come to them. But what if you’ve done all the preparation you feel you need, you’ve busted a gut creating opportunities, and you’ve yet to feel that magic “lucky” moment? Keep at it. Look at learning the kinds of skills that will attract not just the jobs you’re looking at now, but the ones in the future. Reconnect with contacts who’ve dropped off your radar and tell them about the latest brilliant show, album, or project on which you worked. The more prepared you can be, and the more opportunities you can make, the luckier you will become.

Whatever your goals for the future, in every possible way, I wish you good luck in achieving them.

 

 

Kirsty Gillmore – A Diverse and Rewarding Career

kirsty3Kirsty Gillmore is a London-based sound designer, sound engineer, voice demo producer, and voice actor. She started working as a sound engineer in 2000 in her home country of New Zealand. She has had a diverse career since that start, working across a variety of fields including music, post-production, broadcasting, theatre, opera, and live sound.

Musical since the age of five Kirsty was always part of the choir and orchestras at school. As she grew up, she played around with recording technology using cassette players and her mum’s record player. One of her favourite toys was a Casio PT-1 Synth and Kirsty credit’s this with an endearing love of vintage synths! After secondary school, she applied to study for two degrees in music and arts at the University of Auckland in New Zealand because it seemed like the logical choice. At this time. Kirsty wasn’t aware that studying sound engineering was an option until the second year of her degrees.

While playing viola in an outdoor production of Macbeth she struck up a conversation with the composer about a gig they had both been to and how it could have been improved by changing the mix. It was the first time she had thought about what went into making that music and sound happen, and it grabbed her. It was around this time that Kirsty decided that she didn’t have the talent to make it as a solo musician and the only other career option that seemed to have a clear path for music graduates was teaching. Kirsty was already teaching and didn’t consider this to be a lifelong career at this stage of her life. Being a sound engineer gave her an entirely different career path and a way of using her musical training without being a musician.

After that conversation in the mid-1990s, Kirsty spoke to a lot of sound techs and sound engineers, all had learned on the job by attaching themselves to particular bands. At the time, it was a pretty closed shop, exclusively male, and Kirsty couldn’t see a way in. She started looking into courses when her composer friend suggested a course that a friend of his had done. In the ’90s in New Zealand, there were only two institutions that offered sound engineering courses, so Kirsty applied to the one with the best reputation, the Music and Audio Institution of New Zealand. She almost had to decide on studying stage management and technical theatre, as she had been involved with theatre all the way through university, but the only technical theatre course in the country was brand new and didn’t cover sound. She spent two years training as a sound engineer, mostly in music production and also synthesis, live sound, post-production, radio sound, electronics, and sequencing. In her second year, Kirsty did a placement at a post-production studio and was offered a trainee role, which then led to a freelance position.

Her first job after graduating from the Music and Audio Institution of New Zealand was as a freelance ADR & Dubbing Engineer at Native Audio in Auckland, New Zealand. One of Kirsty’s jobs as a dubbing engineer was for a series of English-speaking children’s programmes that were dubbed into Maori. At the time in New Zealand, there weren’t many opportunities to work in sound and in 2002 Kirsty made the decision to move to London, UK. She threw herself into the local scene and applied for any audio job she could find and surprised herself by getting a job within the first month as an audio archivist at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).

For the next eight years, Kirsty built her experience working in various roles at the BBC where she learned about sound for speech-based radio, TV and online.  By 2010 her job had somehow become entirely administrative, and she was pretty unhappy, so when the opportunity for a redundancy came along, Kirsty took it and went back into freelance work.

By the end of 2010, Kirsty had set up her company, Sounds Wilde and spent the next year doing various freelance sound jobs in post-production, live sound and theatre before deciding to focus on theatre, voice acting, and voice production. Currently, Kirsty is looking to expand into sound design for games, which works well alongside voice acting work and directing for voice acting. She is also interested in more composition work.

Kirsty is a big believer and advocate of educating yourself both formally and with ongoing training. Her initial formal training gave her a solid understanding of the basic concepts and a common language for sound, but she finds that since she has been working in sound, she has consolidated these concepts, and it’s allowed her to build and expand her knowledge. Kirsty says there are topics she covered in her formal training which she only now really understands. In the past few years, Kirsty has done short courses on mixing for musicals, radio production and various aspects of theatre sound.

Through the early years of Kirsty’s career, she didn’t have much support, in fact, asking for support was actively discouraged in the jobs she held in the first five or so years of her career. Kirsty found that everyone was just expected to get on with their jobs and learn through mistakes. While Kirsty never had a mentor, (though she would have really loved one) there were people whose work she admired like Nigel Godrich, an English record producer, recording engineer and musician best known for his work with Radiohead, Butch Vig, an American musician and record producer, who is the drummer and co-producer of Garbage and also Sylvia Massy who, at the time was the only female producer, mixer and engineer Kirsty knew of. Massy is recognized for her work on Los Angeles’s alternative metal band Tool. When Kirsty started to specialise in post-production, she found she definitely admired the work and career of Leslie Ann Jones.

In her studio, Kirsty has Focal CMS50s as monitors, (which she loves). Kirsty does all her mixing in the box and in doing it this way – she doesn’t need a console.  Her main go-to mic for voice-overs currently is an AKGC414 and for software, she uses ProTools for most of the recording and mixing she does, Ableton is used for looping and Qlab and Ableton are used for the theatre sound design work. For theatre sound, Kirsty prefers DiGiCo desks (with the theatre sound “T” software) and definitely DPA mics!

kirsty2Kirsty has had her share of discrimination and is a prime example of self-belief and determination to come out the other side. Discussing how she has been accepted in a male-dominated field, Kirsty will tell you she has been discriminated against too many times to count.

Thankfully, the more experienced Kirsty became, the discrimination issues seem to be fewer. She is not sure if the climate is changing or if her body of work speaks for itself but says it’s nice not to have to deal with it as frequently.

Looking at what’s ahead for Kirsty seems pretty exciting. In her studio, Kirsty is looking to invest in more mics. She is interested in what Advanced Audio can offer as alternatives to the Neumann U47 and U87. She is also looking at replacing her soundcard soon and is hoping to trial a Focusrite Claret with Thunderbolt, and the equivalent from Apogee as well.

Hopefully, there will be more international opportunities. After years of working in London Kirsty is looking forward to working at least a few months next year in her home country of New Zealand both as a sound designer and sound design tutor. She would also like to expand into game sound design and develop a composition portfolio, as well as taking on more voice-over directing opportunities.

Kirsty’s message is about being consistent, persistent, and open to opportunities.  She says “It’s great to have your heart set on a particular career in sound but don’t be put off if that doesn’t pan out at first. Once you know the fundamentals of sound, you can apply them to lots of different career paths as long as you’re willing to learn and take the time to meet people and build relationships. Technical skills are obviously imperative, but it’s your people skills that will get you the job. You’ve got to be prepared to hustle and find the opportunities; the jobs won’t come to you. Don’t be afraid to sell yourself, be proud of your achievements and confident in your skills while being open to learning from others”.

By Toni Venditti

 

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