I love travelling, I love going on tour, but I hate packing. I think it boils down to my inability to make decisions, which is what packing is after all; deciding what you’ll need for maybe months at a time. You might leave home during a heatwave and not come back until the middle of winter, taking in all sorts of weather in between. How can anyone know what they’ll need through all that?
“Mixing a club tour tends to be your first step as an engineer. It’s hard knocks, different gear, various spaces, nothing is ever the same. A lot of club gear it is broken, blown and bad, but that’s where I learned the most about phase reversal and troubleshooting. Clubs tours can accelerate one’s understanding of gear, rooms, stage volume and band dynamics, and how they correlate. Invaluable.”
As a new monitor engineer, it can feel intimidating when the band turns up in front of you for the first time. Here’s a bunch of people who probably all know each other, who might be considerably older than you, and who all seem super-chilled and confident. And here’s you, about to play a major part in how they experience their gig, probably not knowing any of them and maybe feeling a little nervous.
As a full-time sound engineer, she is involved in making people feel the emotion in the music the way that she does, albeit a little differently. Whether it’s pushing up the fader for a particularly awesome guitar solo or dialing in the perfect vocal effect for a more intimate song, it’s hugely rewarding to watch people experience the music instead of just listening to it, and know that she has had a part to play in that.
By: Grace Royse
There’s a new face in the touring world, a west coast favorite now making her way across America. And the best part, I got to tour with her first!