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Empowering the Next Generation of Women in Audio

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Sydney Bolton Live Sound Engineer, Production Manager and Translator

Sydney is a freelance live sound engineer working out of the great Northwest. Working in live sound since 2012 and works for the Showbox / Showbox SoDo, Morgan Sound, Carlson Audio Systems,  and The Triple Door. She will be heading out on the road this fall with Gaslight Anthem as their monitor engineer.

Sydney’s interest in audio was sparked during her middle school years when she was recommended to The Vera Project in Seattle. The Vera Project is a DIY project that offers classes in audio, lighting, and studio recording and allows participants to volunteer to work their shows. Sydney says she was “always really interested in music. I actually thought I would become a musician and play in bands, I never thought I’d end up doing audio. When I was a kid I was really interested in how movies were made, and wanted to work in special effects for a while, so as I got older and started going to concerts that interest shifted to what goes into putting on a show and No one wanted to form a band with me, so I figured audio was the next best thing.”

Sydney volunteered with the Vera Project for about a year and a half before being hired full-time. At the same time, she attended the University of Washington and graduate with a degree in Electrical Engineering (focus in DSP).

CAREER START


How did you get your start?

I got my start at a DIY venue called The VERA Project in 2012, and I worked there from 2012-2016. I was a volunteer for about a year and a half before getting hired by their FOH staff.

How did your early internships or jobs help build a foundation for where you are now?

I was fortunate enough to join The VERA Project when there was a full staff of experienced engineers working at other venues, and it was those connections that really helped build the start of my career and get me outside gigs, especially once I turned 21 and was able to work in bars.

What did you learn interning or on your early gigs?

I learned a lot. I think the main thing I learned was to have confidence in myself and my skills because I was a high schooler in charge of running shows on my own. I got very used to being underestimated and doubted and learned to ignore people’s misconceptions of me. I developed strategies to deal with people that were being judgmental and ignorant and also learned the importance of letting the people that did accept me right away know how meaningful that was.

Did you have a mentor or someone that really helped you?

I would say I’ve had a few throughout the different stages of my career.

Back at The VERA Project, there was one engineer in particular named Chris Gibbs who did a lot to get me to the point where I could take shows on my own. He was also responsible for throwing me a lot of the first gigs I got outside of The VERA Project as I started to outgrow it.

Kelly Berry took a chance on me while I was still in high school and working for his small audio company was my first introduction to production work. Josh Penner, Robin Kibble, Alejandro Irragori, and Ryan Murgatroyd have all been very supportive and helpful with navigating the touring side of things.

More recently, I credit Josh Wriggle with seeing my potential as a production manager, convincing me to give it a try, arguing with the right people to make it happen, and mentoring me through the whole process. Aside from production managing the occasional Showbox show I also production manage at a smaller venue and take occasional production assistant work.


CAREER NOW

What is a typical day like?

It varies a lot depending on what job and venue.

On a typical day doing venue sound, I’ll show up and we’ll load in the tour, and get them set up. When they’re ready to soundcheck I’ll hand over drive lines and open up the PA. About half the time, especially at the larger venues I work at, the tour will be mostly or completely self-contained and that is pretty much all I have to do until load-out. If I do get to mix, I’ll talk to the support when they arrive, double-check that the input lists and stage plots we got are accurate, find out if they have any specific mix notes for me or any other requests, prep everything for soundcheck so that we can just throw and go. One of the main venues I work at has a 5:00 PM noise curfew most days, so usually opener soundchecks are pretty rushed – we are lucky if we get half an hour.

Working for production companies is obviously very different since you don’t have a system to walk into and sometimes the builds are very big. Usually, we’ll show up, dump the trucks, more often than not wait for the staging company to finish building the stage. From there we organize which cases go where and layout power, audio, build towers if needed, and fly PA. I am usually patch, so once the PA is in the air I get to work laying out everything that goes on the stage – placing subsnakes, coming up with a patch plan for all of the acts, micing everything, having a plan for changeovers, making sure the A1s know the input list. Then we do the show, take everything down, get it all back in the cases, and get the cases back in the trucks.

Production managing is very different. Hopefully, the tour has gotten back to me and I have all the information I need, but that’s not always the case. I usually show up a couple of hours before venue access, in case the tour arrives early and also so I have time to print and set out day sheets, give the shopper plenty of time to get hospitality shopped, tidy up the green rooms, etc. I like to hand over any cash to the tour first thing so that I don’t have to think about it, and if there’s a runner I introduce them to the tour manager as soon as possible. After the security meeting before doors, the rest of the day is managing parking, scanning in receipts and filling out paperwork, refilling the tour’s ice, and dealing with whatever problems arise. At the end of the night, I introduce the tour manager to our house manager to settle, help clean out the green rooms once the tour has left, and head home.

How do you stay organized and focused?

When it comes to scheduling, I use a digital calendar but also have a paper one hanging by my door that I write all of my workdays and call times into. I know my limits and try to avoid working more than 5 days in a row, and I also try to keep one regular weekday off (usually Mondays) and at least one weekend day off each month. It helps keep me sane – that I can have a little bit of regularity to my schedule, and I know that there’s at least one day when my schedule will match up with friends who work regular jobs.

What do you enjoy the most about your job?

I am the happiest on days when I get a mix dialed in that I feel proud of, on the days that I do sound for friends’ bands, and on days when I get to work with bands that I am a fan of. Those are the days that remind me why I do this. I also appreciate the huge variety of music that I get to work with – I’ve been introduced to genres that I didn’t know existed and found out about so many great artists through work. Even if it’s not music that I personally like, enough other people like it enough to show up and keep me employed that night. When I can’t appreciate that anymore it will be time to find another job.

What do you like least?

I don’t like that no matter how tired you are, how far away you’ve come from for that gig, or how injured or sick you are, there’s probably someone that had even less sleep than you, that came from even farther away to get there, that hurts more or feels worse than you. That’s the side of our industry that I don’t like.

What are your long-term goals?

I want to tour. I was really close before the pandemic, and have had many near misses since things reopened, but it just hasn’t worked out yet.

What if any obstacles or barriers have you faced? How have you dealt with them?

I’ve dealt with the usual misogyny that most women in this industry will face at some point, and I’ve written for SoundGirls in the past about experiencing racism for the first time. There are venues in town that I know I can’t work at if I want to be treated well and paid the same, and that’s frustrating but you just have to work around it. I’ve noticed too that lately it’s taken coming across some of the few other Asian people in this industry to find people willing to go out of their way to support me and give me opportunities, and while the solidarity is nice it’s frustrating that my career seems to hinge on it.

Mostly I just try to let it roll off of me. As I said above, I think confidence is key. I know that I’m a good tech and that the right opportunities for me will come along. Finding the people who support you and stand up for you, and keep them close by is also really important. I feel like I have gotten to the point where I have a really solid group of people around me, that has made a huge difference in how I feel at and about work.

But if it bothers you too much and you don’t want to put up with all of it, that’s totally valid too. I know that I have thought about quitting many times. In the end, I like my job and the people I work with too much, but that might not apply to everyone. It can be hard sometimes.

Advice you have for other women who wish to enter the field?

Be confident in yourself first and foremost. Until you get to venues big enough to have a separate monitor position you won’t have anyone to back you up or help troubleshoot, and there will be many times where you will need to stand up for yourself and trust in your skills.

Find the people that want to help you succeed and stick with them. Always say thank you. And once you get to a point where you can help others, try to create opportunities for those below you.

Also, don’t be afraid to turn down gigs or walk away from places that aren’t treating you well. If you are good at what you do, there will always be more work. There is a lot of pressure to say yes to everything, especially when you’re first starting out, but you don’t have to.

Must have skills?

You absolutely have to be able to keep calm under pressure. We spend a lot of time in hurry-up and wait mode but do enough shows and you will have one that goes catastrophically wrong.

You also shouldn’t be afraid to ask questions and own your mistakes. No one starts off knowing everything, and mistakes are part of learning.

Be someone that people like to work with. Technical knowledge can always be learned, but being someone that is on time and pleasant to be around will get you much farther.

Favorite gear?

I’m mostly on DiGiCos these days, and we’ve got Quantums at my main places of work. I got to try out nodal processing for the first time the other day when mixing monitors and it was pretty cool.

Translator

Knowing other languages can be surprisingly helpful too. During the pandemic, I revised Spanish translations for the plugin company Goodhertz and translated a new plugin into Spanish from scratch, which is a job I never knew existed. I speak several languages and I find it an excellent way to win over international crews (and it can also make facilitating communication much easier).

Read Sydney’s Blog

 

On Knowing When to Leave (and Getting Fired Before You Can)

Unfortunately, I can no longer say I have never experienced racial discrimination in our industry.

About a year ago, I landed a job after the much-anticipated remodeling of a local midsized venue. I was hired with the understanding that I wouldn’t be one of the main engineers but still taking a handful of shows a month. As an unknown quantity, I would start as an A2, and then start getting A1 shifts once I had established myself a bit. It was exciting: the room was custom-made, and the consoles were top of the line aalthough not very common.

The reality was very different. Call times were texted late at night the day before. Advance info wasn’t received until hours before the call time. At most I was scheduled for two shifts in a month. Most months I had no shifts at all. In the end, I was only getting shifts if I specifically requested to work a show. When I asked what I could do to get more shifts I was given the equivalent of a verbal shrug. I was sidelined as an A2 and told I wasn’t experienced enough to move into the A1 role, despite being a regular A1 at a couple of other venues twice the size and being the FOH engineer for a local artist. I asked for my pay to get matched to my other venues and was declined. It felt like I was being pushed out somehow, even though I was never given the chance to establish myself.

I started to wonder if my demographics had to do anything with the work environment I experienced. I was the only woman of color on the audio staff, and one of a handful of nonwhite engineers. I was left off the schedule almost completely. The other two men were pushed down into working the smaller stage more often, even though we were designated as working in the main room. Everyone scheduled regularly in the main room was white and male. It felt like I was being singled out, but I wasn’t quite sure, because I felt that I wasn’t even around enough to have a clear picture.

It became more and more frustrating. I had never properly learned the console or even the venue because I was there so infrequently, so reconfiguring my file each time I worked and troubleshooting anything that happened was a slog. I would be cranky for 24 hours before the few shifts I had, partially because I knew how frustrating just doing my job would be and also because I still had no information about what time to show up or what the show was.

I decided that there was no point in continuing to request shows. It wasn’t a good working environment. Venue politics aside, the way the venue was set up and the amount of time that passed between my shifts made simply getting a show-up and running much more difficult than it needed to be. It was clear I wasn’t going to get more shifts; it was clear I wasn’t going to move up; it was clear I wasn’t going to get paid more, and losing $250 once every two months was an almost unnoticeable financial impact. I essentially didn’t work there anyway. Finding out that one of the other nonwhite engineers, who was very much established, was fired in part for questioning the same scheduling pattern I had noticed sealed the deal. I decided to quit sending in my availability.

Little did I know that I too would get fired before I could quietly fade myself out.

I had agreed to cover a shift when I realized I had double-booked myself. There were still several weeks to go, so I contacted the few coworkers I had contact information for, and when no one was free I contacted the person who was responsible for scheduling. Instead of helping me, he gave me three options: switch to a different day that week (not possible, as I was booked or out of town), pressure the original engineer into taking the shift back (not how that works), or dropping my conflicting shift (which I had committed to first, paid significantly more, and was with a company that gives me regular work). When I declined to take him up on any of those options, I heard nothing for a day, before receiving a very passive-aggressive text message telling me that I was off the shift and also no longer in the scheduling pool. Getting fired for something as standard as needing help finding coverage for a shift only confirmed that my instincts to get out of there were correct.

Walking away can be hard, but it’s important to know your worth and feel confident in your reputation as an engineer. If you don’t feel you’re getting anything out of a gig, and you can survive financially without it, there’s no shame in letting it go. Stand up for yourself and stick to your boundaries. It’s not a failure. There will always be more. This venue fired me while I was at my home venue doing the best-sounding FOH mix I’ve ever done in that room. Move on to somewhere that values you and don’t look back.

Learning a New Console

As I’ve started working more on the production side of things recently, and my home venue is replacing its beloved but falling-apart SC48s, I’ve found myself learning new consoles left and right. This month I thought I would lay out the process I use to get the hang of things when walking into a board I’ve never used before, although, of course, everyone will have their own method.

STEP ONE: SURFACE LEVEL

The first thing I do is open an existing file that is pre-routed to play around in. That way I don’t have to worry about the deeper settings and configuration yet. My goal is to get comfortable on the board at a surface level, so that I could theoretically walk into a room with someone else’s start file already up and mix a show on it.

I start with the simple: 

Can I pink the monitors or PA system?

Can I get music playing through the monitors or PA system?

Can I label and/or color-code my inputs?

Can I connect a mic and get my voice sent to the monitors and/or PA?

Can I put some basic EQ, and compression, on that mic?

Can I save, load, and transfer files easily?

Then I move on to some more complex things:

Can I route that mic through some reverb or other effects?

Can I link channels or make them stereo?

Can I change my patching efficiently?

If there’s a virtual soundcheck set up, how is that routed?

Can I build a mix relatively quickly?

STEP TWO: BACKEND

The next thing I do is load a default template file and try to build myself a start file. This way I can get familiar with all of the deeper functions of the console, see what settings exist, and configure and patch the file from scratch.

Can I configure my number of inputs, auxes, etc., and patch them correctly?

Can I route my matrices (for FOH) and/or auxes (for monitors)?

Can I configure my solo bus, talkback mic, and oscillator?

Can I set my customizable user keys?

Can I customize my fader banks and layers?

Can I set up and route effects?

Can I color-code my channel strips?

STEP THREE: BUILD A MOCK FILE

The last thing I do, if there’s time, is to build a file from scratch. Starting completely from scratch (or, if it exists, the start file I’ve already made), I go through the entire process as if I was running a show for a specific band. I normally build a file for the artist I do sound for because it’s an input list I know off of the top of my head and then I have a starting point of a file for if we ever do a show on one of these consoles, but it doesn’t really matter if you’re building a file for a specific artist or a generic rock show. The goal is to start from the ground up and do the entire process from start to finish: inputs, outputs, labels, arrange layers and locations, route effects, talkback, monitoring, house music, and pink noise.

GUEST BLOG: krost: “You’re pretty good…for an Asian”

This guest post is written by Anaheim-based indie singer-songwriter krost. 

I’m conflicted. I don’t know how I feel about being an “Asian American artist”.

When I was in middle school, YouTube started getting popular and became a platform for a lot of Asian American artists. It was the first time I can remember interacting with media that truly resonated with me. It wasn’t necessarily that I thought it was impossible to be an artist at the time. It was more so that I had never really actualized the concept of being an artist in the first place. I never saw someone who looked like me doing the thing, so I never envisioned myself doing the thing. I think that’s the power of representation – it plants the seeds of what is possible. To see people who look like you, doing cool things. It’s crazy how much that can influence your own perception of self and what you believe yourself to be capable of.

Integrating myself into this online community of Asian American artists sparked a strong desire to create. At the core of it, I wanted to connect with people, and I wanted to make people feel connected. Connection for me is hearing a song that is about an experience or feeling that resonates; it shares a story that I can personally relate to. For example, listening to Run River North sing about the immigrant experience in “Monsters Calling Home” hit pretty hard. I felt like my story was being represented, and it felt nice to feel seen.

Now, as I reflect on my artist career, I can say I’ve had a few really great opportunities – I am truly grateful for each one. But there’s a common theme to a lot of my opportunities, and it’s that they are Asian American focused or run, spanning from blog posts to performances to interviews. Not all of them are, but a lot of them are. And I make that observation with the utmost level of respect, gratitude, and love for the people who have graciously given me the opportunities I’ve been lucky to be a part of.

And so here’s the internal conflict – I feel so empowered by these experiences, but I can’t shake the underlying feeling that I only get those opportunities because I am Asian American, or that I am only getting Asian American opportunities. I think it says something to me when my most reliable gig season is playing shows during AAPI month. If I get a cool gig partly because I’m Asian, it’s still a cool gig at the end of the day. But then I wonder if I would have gotten the gig based on artistry and skill alone, and those wonderings run parallel to a spiral of feeling invalidated and sub-par as a musician.  It’s like the whole, “she’s good….for a girl” deal. Maybe I’m good…for an Asian American.

If that is how I’m interacting with and being perceived by the world, what does that tell me about my artistry? Am I an artist just for Asians, by default because I am Asian? How do I break out of the bubble? Do I want to break out of the bubble? I’m not sure. I don’t know the answers to any of these questions.

But there are a few things that I do know. I know that I am grateful for everyone I’ve had the privilege of connecting with. I know that I started writing music because of feeling empowered by seeing Asian American artists. I know that by creating and sharing, I have the potential to catalyze someone else’s desire to create and share, even if that is through playing an annual AAPI celebration show. Lastly, I know that Asian American opportunities are not less than – they are beautiful, they are important, and they are necessary for cultivating and sustaining a community that is built on shared experience and a desire for connection.

All In on Wage Transparency

I’ve spent the week trying to help a coworker try to collect pay rates from venues around town so that we can efficiently argue for a raise at our own. A surprisingly large number of our colleagues declined to share any information about their pay at all. Luckily, one was all for pay transparency, and with his help, we were able to fill in most of the gaps we had.

I know that talking about pay has customarily been frowned on, but that needs to change. We can’t effectively make the case for better pay, whether at an individual venue or across the industry if we don’t know what each other are making. Those of us just starting out are more likely to be taken advantage of or lowballed if we don’t really know how to connect our pay to our experience. And, crucially for members of underrepresented demographics like me who are more likely to be underpaid anyway, we can’t see patterns in pay disparity if we don’t know what each other are making.

 

Life in the Less-Than-5%

 

As hate against those who look like me has skyrocketed in the past year, and been largely ignored by the music industry, I’ve started to rethink my assumptions about how I can move through the audio world. If women make up 5% of sound engineers, then the percentage of women of color like me is even smaller. In my nine years in live sound, I have never crossed paths with another Asian-American sound tech, although I know we exist. The times that someone onstage has looked like me have been far and few between. I always thought I would have to be extra careful about my safety because of my gender, not because of my ethnicity. Clearly, that was naïve.

As strange as it feels to say, I am one of the “lucky” ones: nothing I’ve gone through has been bad enough to force me out of the industry. A friend of mine, who is also Chinese-American, had such a bad experience interning at Big Name Music Hall with a boss and coworkers that constantly asked him incredibly invasive, weird, and racist questions that he decided to stop pursuing a career in live sound altogether. I’ve experienced nothing so constant and pervasive. The worst environment I’ve been in was as at my first and only training at a production company whose manager went on a bizarre, semi-incoherent rant for several minutes about how racism doesn’t exist, and “the only racism” is green (money), which was triggered by a comment made about the Papa John’s Pizza we were eating. 

Most of the racism I’ve experienced come in the form of the harassment most women face anyway, just with an extra racial component. The stereotype of Asian women as sex-hungry “dragon ladies” who exist only to serve white male pleasure is alive and well (just look at the coverage of the Atlanta shootings). So the assholes who aggressively hit on me and wouldn’t take no for an answer might throw in a reference to anime, hentai, massages, and happy endings, Japanese schoolgirls, or anything else that would make what they are saying that much more degrading. Another non-white friend and I found ourselves and our credentials excessively scrutinized at the few AES meetings we have gone to, compared to the other new faces at the meetings. The gatekeeping worked – I haven’t gone back. Moving from clubs and bars, where often there is no one able (or willing) to back you up, into the more structured world of larger music venues, where the touring crew probably know my coworkers and I am suddenly a friend-of-a-friend instead of a complete stranger, has helped cut a lot of this.

What never goes away are the offhand comments and assumptions. The negative ones are self-explanatory: assuming I don’t speak English or learned English as a second language, pressing me about “Where [I’m] really from” or asking “What are you”, arguing with me about whether or not I am a different Asian sound engineer who you worked within a city I’ve never lived in, being asked to confirm my citizenship by someone literally holding my U.S. Passport when filling out paperwork. Being called ‘China doll’, having someone proudly explain to me how they can tell the different types of us Asians apart as if that deserves my congratulations and gratitude. The supposedly complimentary ones, often based in stereotypes like the model minority myth, are equally as gross: saying that they’re glad I’m Asian because I’ll work harder, or assuming I can do a quick calculation on the spot because I’m Asian, and therefore good at math. And of course, there is the classic ‘Oh I love your culture!’, which is quickly followed by a bunch of half-baked romanticized stereotypes that probably aren’t even from the right country. 

Overall, the biggest issue I’ve run into in my career is tokenism: being paraded or held up for being a person of color as proof of diversity. It was particularly bad at my first job, whereas the only non-white sound engineer I was constantly pressured to participate in the marketing campaigns, fundraising events, tabling, and basically become the face of the audio program. There was a hard push to show how diverse we were as an organization when we really were not. A single person cannot be diverse! I declined until I was eventually left alone, but it was extremely uncomfortable to go through, especially as a high schooler.

Recently it’s resurfaced again, in a slightly different form. I have become the token woman/minority audio engineer success story to a white coworker of mine, who I barely even know. This person has tagged me in social media posts about how inspirational it is to see a non-white woman in audio, and has privately sent me several long messages of solidarity and apology over inconsequential things the venue has done. Did I have to ask my venue to put STOP AAPI HATE up on the marquee? Yes. Was it painful or traumatizing that they didn’t put it up automatically and I had to make that request? No. It was moderately annoying at best, and it’s insulting to decide that it was something deeply distressing on my behalf. To continue doing so after I have explained that to you that this not the case at all is ridiculous. Removing my agency from the situation and operating under the assumption that it is the duty of white people to swoop in and save me, is not ‘being an ally’. It is an unhelpful and infantilizing statement that paints me so delicate that something as simple as requesting my venue speak out is a shattering ordeal. 

Flattening me into a single dimension, whatever the intention, is not okay. It takes the complex, whole person that I am and reduces me down to be defined solely by my race. It doesn’t matter how much solidarity you claim to have if you can’t see past the surface of my skin. Especially at work, the body that I am in should come second to what really matters: the fact that I am a great sound engineer. 

 

Explaining Effects: Reverb

“Can I get some (more) reverb on my vocals, please?”

If I had a dollar for every time I’ve been asked that, I’d have… a lot of money. Reverb is one of the most-used audio effects, and with good reason, since natural reverb defines our perception of everyday sound. In fact, we are so used to hearing it that completely dry sounds can seem strange and jarring. It’s no wonder that everyone wants a bit of reverb on their vocals.

What we perceive as reverb is a combination of two things, called early reflections and late reflections. Early reflections are the first reflections of the source sound that make it back to our ear; they are the reflections that travel out, reflect off of something once, and head back. Late reflections are the reflections that spend time bouncing off of multiple surfaces before returning to our ear. Because we experience such a large number of reflections arriving at our ears so closely together, we do not hear them as an individual, echoed copies – instead, we get the smooth sound of reverberation.

Analog Reverb

There are two main types of mechanical reverb systems: plate and spring. Plate reverb was one of the first to come along. It revolves around the suspension of a large, suspended steel plate, roughly 4×8 feet, in a frame with a speaker driver at one end and a microphone at the other. When the speaker driver vibrates the plate, the vibrations travel through the plate to the microphone, mimicking the way soundwaves travel through air. The tightness of the plate controls the amount of delay – the tighter the plate, the longer the decay, as the energy of the vibrations takes longer to be absorbed. Additionally, dampers may be used to press against the plate and fine-tune the amount of delay. Of course, the unwieldy size and design of plate reverb present some pretty significant logistical challenges. Aside from the amount of space needed, its microphone-based design means that any external noise is easily picked up, so keeping the units away and isolated from any noise is also essential. For these reasons, its use was relegated almost exclusively in studios. A famous example of plate reverb is the Pink Floyd album Dark Side of the Moon – plate reverb (specifically the EMT-140) is the only reverb used on that album.

Spring reverb, developed a little later, is much smaller, more portable, and what you will find built into most amplifiers today. Unlike plate reverb, it relies on electrical signals and does not need any speakers or microphones to function. Like plate reverb, it relies on creating vibrations but does this by sandwiching a spring between a transducer and pickup. The transducer is used to create a vibration within the spring, which the pickup then converts into signal. Spring gained popularity as the defining sound of surf music, where you will find it used in copious amounts – any Dick Dale record, for example, is a good way to get familiar with how it sounds.

Digital Reverb

Like analog reverb, digital reverb can also be divided into two main categories: algorithmic and convolution. Most digital reverbs are algorithmic reverbs. Algorithmic reverbs require less processing power than their convolution-based reverb counterparts, and most of the pre-stocked reverb plugins you’ll find in your DAW will fall into this category. Algorithmic reverbs work by using delays and feedback loops on the samples of your audio file to mimic the early and late reflections that make up analog reverb, creating and defining the sound of a hypothetical room based on the parameters that you set. The early reflection component is created by sending the dry signal through several delay lines, which result in closely spaced copies of the original signal. Late reflections are then created by taking the already-generated early reflections and feeding them back through the algorithm repeatedly, re-applying the hypothetical room’s tonal qualities and resulting in additional delays.

Convolution is the more complex method of creating digital reverb. It involves capturing the characteristics of physical space, defining a mathematical function called an impulse response that can apply that space’s characteristic response to any input signal and doing an operation called convolution to get the (wet) output. Essentially, you are using a mathematical model to define the reflective properties of a physical room and imprinting that room’s unique signature onto your digital sample. The entire process is based on the measurement of a room’s response to what is called an impulse, an acoustic trigger meant to engage the acoustics of the room. These are usually atonal sounds, such as a white noise blast or sine sweep. Microphones are used to register both the trigger sound and the resulting acoustic response. This audio is then fed into a convolution processor, which separates out the triggering sound and defines the room’s impulse response. With the impulse response obtained, the convolution processor can now use convolution to apply that room’s response to any input signal it receives, essentially multiplying the frequency spectra of the input signal and impulse response together and coloring the output sound with the harmonics and timbre of the impulse response. The end result is a signal that is a convincing model of the input sound being played in the space the impulse response defines.

The versatility of digital reverb means that the sound of just about every space you could want, real or imagined, is at your disposal. If used well, it can add completely new dimensions to your mixes or create wild effects. Just be careful not to wash yourself away in the process.

How I Got Started

 

When I was 13 or 14, I was reading the liner notes of some CD and saw that one track had been written, recorded, produced, and mixed by one of the band members. At the time I only had a loose grasp of what most of those things meant, but I knew one thing: I wanted to be able to do all of that. Someday I would have a liner note like that all to myself. (Ironically, nine years later I have stayed almost exclusively within live sound.)

A local DIY music venue I knew of offered both audio classes and volunteer opportunities. I quickly convinced a friend to take the first class with me: Live Sound 101, a primer on signal flow, miking techniques, and general day-of-show procedures. Live Sound 102: Mixing for Monitors soon followed. Before long, thanks to the open schedule of a high schooler and parents who would pick me up at midnight, I was volunteering at shows multiple times a week. Within six months I had gotten through all of the classes: Small PA Systems, Mixing for Front of House and Troubleshooting. Once I felt comfortable behind the monitor board I moved up to shadowing the front-of-house engineers.

Like a lot of people, my first gig was unplanned. Around a year and a half, after I first started volunteering, I found myself sitting in rush hour traffic on I-5 with another volunteer friend, worrying about whether we’d make our 5 PM call time. Before leaving my house, we had noticed that there still wasn’t anyone listed as the sound engineer that night, and we spent the drive speculating about who (if anyone) would be there when we showed up. Suddenly my phone rang – the venue was calling me. I picked up, and a voice on the other end told me that they still hadn’t found anyone to come in, but it was okay because I could just run sound, right? The interns were busy, but one could come after doors if we felt like we needed him. Surprised, and feeling nervous, I agreed.

That was that –  suddenly, I was the sound engineer, and my friend who was signed up to shadow the sound engineer was now shadowing me. The show itself is a blur, and I don’t remember much, but I know that once I got over the initial anxiousness and we got to work, things went pretty smoothly. It was a hardcore show, and a few of the bands contained audio students I recognized from a local community college. I went in and filled out the hiring paperwork a few days later, and it was official. I had my first job as a sound engineer.

 

We Need Help

It is now October 28th, 2020. Aside from unemployment benefits, I have had no income at all since my last show on March 7th, 2020. The amount I get from Pandemic Unemployment Assistance has fallen to $235 a week before taxes – not even enough to cover my rent, let alone food and other living expenses, and it looks like no further economic stimulus is on the way. Many of my old coworkers have taken grocery store jobs or are driving for delivery services to make ends meet. I myself am about to start a temporary part-time job. It barely covers my expenses, but after eight months of nonstop job applications, I have to take what I can get. Some of the event workers, especially those of us who are less established, are starting to doubt whether we will be able to return to our jobs when live performances finally return.

Full-time audio engineering is something I have worked eight years for. Finally finished with my electrical engineering degree, I had planned to spend this year pursuing audio engineering full-time and prove to myself that I really could make a living with it. Until the pandemic hit, it looked like I would succeed.

Unfortunately, when discussing my situation with people, the reactions I have gotten are not exactly sensitive. Variations of “Wow, must be nice, I wish I could be on vacation like that” and “Well, now you can go and get a ‘real’ job instead of chasing your hobbies” have been a constant refrain since the pandemic began. I’d like to give these statements some perspective.

To start: we have not been on vacation. We have not been coasting. Sure, having the time off was a welcome change for a couple of weeks, but nobody I know has been treating eight months of unemployment and an unknown return-to-work date that moves farther back every day as a vacation. We have been worrying about how to pay our rents, mortgages, utilities, find health insurance, protect ourselves and our loved ones, and still put food on the table somehow. We have been grieving the sudden loss of the careers we have spent years and maybe even decades in. We have been applying to jobs for months without success or have had heavy discussions with our family and roommates weighing making money against the risk of catching and bringing home COVID-19.

More importantly, our jobs are not hobbies. We are highly skilled professionals who have worked hard to get where we are, and most of our jobs cannot be done seriously on the side. Working days that tend to fall anywhere between 10 and 18 hours, usually in a row, is not a hobby. Living with minimal health insurance, or none at all is not a hobby. Managing mental health on the road is not a hobby.

A career in the arts is a legitimate career

Many of my music-loving friends are itching to go to concerts again. But I think what they don’t realize is the extent of the damage that the pandemic is doing to the entire entertainment industry. It’s not just independent music venues that are at risk of closing – they are just one small part. It’s the whole ecosystem that inspires people to get onstage and allows artists to go from playing house shows to playing local, regional, national, and international stages that are about to collapse. This includes the production companies that rent audio and lighting equipment out for tours and festivals. This includes the bus companies and drivers that make bigger tours literally go. This includes the bookers, promoters, and artist management organizations that set touring schedules and keep talent circulating. The small amount of economic stimulus that was doled out to these sectors at the beginning of the pandemic ran out long ago, and the entire event ecosystem is struggling. Many closures have already happened.

Refusing to value the arts not only damages the culture and identity of a city, but it also removes revenue from the industries that are interlocked with the events industry like tourism, hospitality, nightlife and restaurants.

One of the last shows I worked on came at the end of February. It was a sold-out three-night run of Death Cab For Cutie hosted by The Showbox, one of Seattle’s most iconic music venues. It was incredibly impactful to see a homegrown Pacific Northwest band come back to play three intimate shows in a city that has gentrified immensely since they first shot to fame. It felt like a piece of old Seattle had been resurrected, if only for a few hours. But it also felt bittersweet. The land the Showbox sits on was recently sold to a developer intent on replacing it with luxury apartments. The possibility that this kind of homecoming might never happen again in that venue, that maybe six months later the Showbox might just be another construction site downtown, hung over the room. This is the same future many venues around the country now find themselves trying to avoid. Without help, the structure that allowed a night like this to happen and the pathways that led this band full circle will no longer exist.

This is where you come in. Write your local, state, and federal officials demanding relief for the arts, and keep writing. Participate in social media campaigns and use whatever platforms you have to speak out. If you know a band or artist that might use their platform to speak out, ask them! Buy music and merch from bands — with shows gone, that is the only source of income for a lot of musicians right now. If you have the means, donate to relief funds and the organizations that are fighting to keep our stages lit. We need you.

Get Involved:

National:

We Make Events – www.wemakeevents.org

National Independent Venue Association – www.nivassoc.org

Live Events Coalition – www.liveeventscoalition.org

MusiCares – www.grammy.com/musicares

Extend PUA — www.extendpua.org

Washington State:

Keep Music Live Washington – www.keepmusiclivewa.com

Washington Nightlife Music Association – www.wanma.info

Save the Showbox – www.savetheshowbox.com

 

 

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