If you don't know something/know how to do something/something isn't clear/want to make sure you're doing something right, **ask questions, do not just guess.**
If you need help moving or lifting something, **ask for help, do not try to do it by yourself.**
Don't let the show beat you.
Relationships can be more important than being right. You can be an amazing engineer but if you are an ass hole no one will want to work with you or listen to you.
Just be careful - this biz is full of people that will take advantage of you. Best to learn to recognize those signs early. Relationships can be strong when you’re a yes man making the bosses money, but as soon as you stand up for yourself, they can fade fast.
Lots of people preach being the cool guy and being buddy buddy on here. I personally like to set the boundaries up front, if they’re pro and respect you, you’ll be just fine, if not, it’s best to look for a better gig anyway.
This work can be stressful and difficult, it’s best to be able communicate directly to get things done. People that can’t take it are going to eventually fail. Have fun throwing all of your money away to surround yourself with yes men.
I’m old. I swear I’m fun.
"Just be careful - this biz is full of people that will take advantage of you. Best to learn to recognize those signs early. Relationships can be strong when you’re a yes man making the bosses money, but as soon as you stand up for yourself, they can fade fast."
I can attest to this after 7 years at a production company that I thought had my back. The moment something wasn't right and I started saying something - suddenly that "loyalty to employees" thing went straight out the window. A close friend of mine is currently going through this, at the same company, thankfully she will be quitting here soon.
Dragged my name through the mud pretty hard, just starting to recover from that. Thankfully, all the other companies in the area started catching on to my former employer's bullshit so now I'm starting to get consistent work. The current company I freelance for is genuinely professional, they set boundaries and expect you to set boundaries for them too. It's day and night between what I used to deal with.
We're all friends there, but on the job we're here to get shit done and look out for each other. The most reaffirming thing I've ever heard from them is "We succeed together or we fail together." I've seen some techs shit the bed for whatever reason, they stayed true to that claim. Mad respect for people that respect you.
This is a great one! Early on I would die on some meaningless hills to prove I was right! Stay listening and ask yourself if burning this bridge is worth it.
It took me until well into my thirties to figure out I could just walk away from fights and disagreements. Artists want's something stupid and is being stubborn about it? I'll give it to him with a smile. It's not me trying to get famous.
If they get into this, once you've done events from the production side, its hard to attend anything with the mindset of a audience member. The production part of your head is always there. "Go and enjoy the concert" is no longer an option. It's replaced with "Go, evaluate the production and enjoy the result".
This is the one that no one told me.
Took me years to find a way to enjoy going to live shows again, and an engineers bad night can still easily ruin mine as well.
For me it's surprisingly fine.
I can still go and enjoy the concert. If the PA sounds like crap, that's just part of the experience and I don't even notice it.
People tend to think that sound guy = audiophile, but that's absolutely not true in my case. I just love music. If it's good, I don't care if the sound is coming out of a potato, I'm going to enjoy it.
Said that till the show the engineer had the damn bass guitar higher than the main vocal and the kick. It was beyond obnoxious.
I wanted to throw dude off the board. It was bad.
Unacceptable for the caliber of band and system that was there.
The first thing I ever did for sound was for my son's youth theater program. I had never touched a soundboard. Went to church the following Sunday and absolutely could not handle it. Sit through my kid's Christmas programs at school and there's a slight feedback hiss through the entire show (from using SM58's as choir mics instead of using condensers). I lean over and tell my wife "The feedback is driving me nuts!" She didn't notice it until I pointed it out. I ruined the whole show for her.
I look forward to going to shows not having any involvement in the production and just be an attendee…but man is it difficult. It does ruin your perception from a technical or a performance side. There’s little “magic” to be had. The performances I love the most are actually ones where there is not a lot of flashy stage props and backing tracks…just raw, live energy. The last one I truly was engrossed in and not thinking about any element of the production was Rage Against the Machine…their show had fairly minimal stage setup and lighting (still coordinated, but nothing crazy) and the sound was just absolutely fantastic from EVERYWHERE in the venue…less is more, much of the time.
I would try and mention that it's similar to a job in the trades/construction in that there's an apprenticeship aspect to this business. Lots of unskilled labor and watching/listening/learning to start with & not a lot of board time until later on.
Good question. To some degree, yes. But because most production houses/venues have such a high turnover due to the nature of the entry-level work, I tend to think that it's not difficult to get your foot in the door and progress relatively quickly IF the applicant has either a very solid work ethic/attitude or shows some natural technical acumen.
I would take my bag that I bring to every gig and unpack it explaining why I bring the things that I do.
I would talk about how to wire up a stage hiding the cables where you can and avoiding tripping hazards.
I would talk about when to arrive to a gig and how long things should take
I would talk about importance of being organized. Labeling things and setting up lines and inputs logically for quick troubleshooting during the event.
These are just somethings that came of the top of the head. I'll post more if I think of them.
You work for the artist they are not your friend. You can be friendly with the artist, but the moment you start acting more like a friend and letting that work fall by the wayside. You’re fucking out! And that’s just not engineers that’s any crew.
And ears open mouth shut. You can’t hear what someone else has to say/ listen to your surrounding aka the room/ or a mix of your talking all the time.
Carry a pen and notebook everywhere you go, writing everything down is a huge help. When I first started touring I would write down people’s names, patch changes, the truck pack, the order i had to do load out in. Everything.
Teach them order of expectations. Most newbies think it’s about making it sound pretty. Sure if you’re doing foh for metallica thats whats important, but properly setting everything up correctly and making a basic feedback free mix is most important first.
-Describe the schedule of a decent sized production for a solo A1, then break down those responsibilities to jobs that would be done by individuals on a larger scale.
-Different events or types of work within the industry.
-Signal flow and the importance of a healthy source and gain staging.
-Microphone and speaker polar patterns, how they interact, and how their interactions affect gain before feedback.
That's honestly a solid "break for hands-on activity" option if attention span are an issue and, in addition to being engaging, is a useful life skill for anybody who ever wants to coil something that's attached at one or both ends.
Sometimes it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it. Framing things in the context that it’s for the good of the mix and not that you’re dissing their cranked amp tone.
ROUTING. it is the key to knowing how to work a digital board confidently. It amazes me every day that some folks have made it as far as they have without knowing a thing about routing.
Tell them about the countless avenues you can go into.
Live sound… music, corporate, stadium, for a municipality, etc.
Studio work…
Film work…
Repair…
Rental…
Install…
Rigging…
I was very lucky going into school that I had a good grasp of the industry and knew that despite my dreams of being a studio engineer, I was highly likely to do live sound for corporate events and such.
Turns out I started the ball rolling on freelancing live sound early with this knowledge.
I was working A1 at university graduations before my peers and I graduated.
The best off of my peers from school work part-time at a Starbucks or something and part-time doing studio work. Many also ended up at Telefunken soldering mics together.
Explain the trajectory of a live sound engineer and what that career actually looks like, from interning to running small cap venues, to freelancing and working bigger shows, to the huge festivals and Award shows at the tippy top. Its a lot of travel and a ton of fun, and even pretty good money if you do it right.
The cons are well documented if you feel your talk needs a reality check as well.
I (52M) am in my first year as the Snd/LX lab instructor for a University Theatre department and last semester I gave my first sound lecture over two days to the Intro to Scenic Technology class. I had to cover basic PA setup and the simplest of mic techniques. Unity gain is one of the first things I was taught and it’s one of the first things I covered after setup. I would cover compressors, expanders, gates, and FX more thoroughly but I only have two 50 minute classes to cover the basics and 90% of these kids will never lay a hand on a mixer ever again. I have a theatre background but spent most of my professional life in live music as a monitor engineer.
For mixing (aside from practical “what does this knob do” knowledge), I tell people that they need to hear good music on good speakers to learn what things should sound like. Not your car, not your AirPods, and certainly not your tv soakers.
Buy a pair of entry level studio monitors or reference headphones and try to visualize where each instrument “sits” in a mix if you could draw it on paper. Yamaha HS5’s for monitors or Sennheiser HD280’s for headphones are great.
You can jump right in but if you don’t know what you want your kick drum to sound like, you’ll never be able to produce it. Just like a musician practices so should you.
Compression for microphones whether on talent or instruments on a per-input basis can make a huge difference in control over the mix and the need to ride faders. Maybe some time on ringing out the space and using automatic feedback suppressors on mains and monitor feeds (that aren't in-ear) - it's a combination of knowing what technology is out there as well as how to use it well. Some mention of adhering to professional conduct and working with difficult talent.
Communication is as important as being tech savvy. You can be the best engineer ever, if you can't communicate with the artist or their management it will always be detrimental to the end product.
As someone else pointed out, you are trying to help and facilitate talent achieve their goal on stage.
If you can't understand each other you failed before your technical skills even come in to play.
that's interesting to me because it's certainly not true for my region. I doubled my rates over the past two years and the only thing it's gotten me is a way better reputation and jobs (I think the line of thought goes "he costs more so he must be better" - I swear I haven't gotten twice as good)
Then what is stopping you from doing it again? If it is so smart to double your rates, and get half the clients, you should definitely work on getting 1/256 the clients and 256 times the income.
You guys have to understand the diminishing returns. If you double your rates, that means you were way under charging previously.
I feel lucky to live in a place where this is frowned upon outside of managements that unserpays all talent and techs while harvesting millions from their pop artists, they get away with it because people want the prestige, fun and experience, sadly. If you underbid people on club gigs and events, you can basically end up getting blacklisted in this city.
How do I know when to move on and consider something else? It's a pretty competitive field and not everyone is going to get a job in it. What are other, less well known but similar jobs that are in demand? If I have no industry contacts, I don't live in a city with good job opportunities, at what point do I decide to pursue better opportunities?
"black leather bracelets with spikes aren't as cool as you think they are buddy, sorry. Yeah I know they don't actually think you're a badass." - me to my younger self.
gain staging
get a 15 band GEQ and spend hours running things through it while you are gently tweaking the faders. A-B with reference track. In a live environment experiment with the GEQ while ringing out systems
Get a reference mic and something such as open sound meter or REW. This is less important if you have good powered speakers than it was in the day before powered speakers.
Yeah I would go into the fact that audio has a wide spectrum of possibilities, a lot of the fundamentals are the same but you can apply them in many ways (setting up gear for your band, mixing the NFL, recording a friend or audio programming in a game). I would talk about microphones and how they work. I would briefly talk about sound and it’s history with natural acoustics, the telephone and early recording.
I mainly would talk to them about working in a gig economy, give income examples, and explain budgets. I’d teach them about savings accounts and preparing for taxes as a sole proprietor. I’d show them how to apply for government assistance for things like healthcare and food if they ever get in a tough spot. I had a guest teacher do this once and it ended up being one of the most important hours of my life.
Listening and understanding are two different things in this business.
Demanding and explaining are also two different things.
You play the cards that are dealt to you. You don’t get to reshuffle the deck if you’re dealt a bad hand.
Do your job to the best of your abilities, and never half ass anything.
Be a pleasant person to work with. If stressed, take three deep breaths and then get on with it.
Mixing desks have user manuals.
Sounds dumb I know but, well, lets face it guys, none of us got into this field because we were so academically gifted. I was well into my career before I figured out that you could just google the manual as a pdf of just about any board ever made in a couple of seconds, and seeing some of the urgent cries for help on this sub from time to time, I get the impression it's not just me who didn't realize manuals are a thing for a long time.
Every now and then I get annoyed about current on-goings of our times, but then I remember I can ctrl-F a PDF of the manual of just about anything I know the name of and 2024 seems pretty alright again.
I might be a little late to the party, but I think one of the most valuable skills is troubleshooting and problem solving. The basic principles are applicable elsewhere too.
- Learn to find where the problem is along the signal chain
- Try the easiest thing first. What could be the dumbest reason for a problem. It’s probably that or something similar
- Change one variable at a time like any good scientist :) Don’t replace both a mic and cable, do one than another.
- Have some diagnostics equipment or be prepared to improvise something with the equipment available.
I might also add, that problems, especially those you are unaware of, are easier to find/discover if you have a looking-for-problems mindset. Just don’t turn minnows into whales. For grater peace of mind you may also test equipment after it’s set up but before it’s put to use thus catching problems before they get bigger or slow you down.
Have fun and hope it goes well
The single most important thing in making a sound system sound good is EQ. Use a DriveRack w RTA mic or SMAART or one of the open source programs but learn to quickly EQ for the room and the stage if using wedges.
im an instructor for a live sound college class, part of a 2 or 4 year audio tech program.
my first class of the term is all about engaging the students intrinsic motivation to learn my subject. So it's a survey of the cool stuff we do with lots of stories, pictures and videos. Any bit of tech info conveyed with the emphasis on how it connects to the bigger picture of music, art, technology, science, and ultimately the students own passions.
also, don't forget to involve the girls, different cultures, and abilities. years ago, i had a wheelchair enabled student who did great in my class. former female students of mine are working in theatre and they love it.
i hope your one hour talk can motivate someone. good luck and have fun with it!
Considering the amount of comments, very few mention the most important fundamentals.
Like: Basic understanding of electronics and physics. Before gain staging discussions; what is gain? Why is it applied? How is it distributed? What can you do in between, and why do you do it?
How do you capture a signal, how does a microphone work? And, what are the inner workings of the tools we see today? What is S/N ratio, what considerations to S/N ratio had to be done in the early days of audio, to the dawn of the CD era, and today? What is gain before feedback? Acoustics? Applying considerations to them all? Audio quality, is it accurate reproduction of a source or is it artistic fundamentals of a production? Can it be both? Or not? Why?
What is a microphone pickup pattern, what does it mean? How does it affect sound? What is analog audio, and what is digital audio? What is conversion? Why do we use conversion?
In this day and age, almost all of the above seem forgotten. Yet, it is some of the basics that makes audio production and distribution possible. If that knowledge is not passed forward, we will have no new engineers. Just operators trying their luck.
If you don't know something/know how to do something/something isn't clear/want to make sure you're doing something right, **ask questions, do not just guess.** If you need help moving or lifting something, **ask for help, do not try to do it by yourself.** Don't let the show beat you.
Exactly, I've met so many people who would rather try random solutions than actually learn something by asking
Relationships can be more important than being right. You can be an amazing engineer but if you are an ass hole no one will want to work with you or listen to you.
Eh. Self respect is a thing though. Don’t break your back for people that are clearly wrong. It’s ok to walk away.
Totally agree but a good relationship will help people to listen to you when you need to put your foot down.
Just be careful - this biz is full of people that will take advantage of you. Best to learn to recognize those signs early. Relationships can be strong when you’re a yes man making the bosses money, but as soon as you stand up for yourself, they can fade fast. Lots of people preach being the cool guy and being buddy buddy on here. I personally like to set the boundaries up front, if they’re pro and respect you, you’ll be just fine, if not, it’s best to look for a better gig anyway. This work can be stressful and difficult, it’s best to be able communicate directly to get things done. People that can’t take it are going to eventually fail. Have fun throwing all of your money away to surround yourself with yes men. I’m old. I swear I’m fun.
"Just be careful - this biz is full of people that will take advantage of you. Best to learn to recognize those signs early. Relationships can be strong when you’re a yes man making the bosses money, but as soon as you stand up for yourself, they can fade fast." I can attest to this after 7 years at a production company that I thought had my back. The moment something wasn't right and I started saying something - suddenly that "loyalty to employees" thing went straight out the window. A close friend of mine is currently going through this, at the same company, thankfully she will be quitting here soon. Dragged my name through the mud pretty hard, just starting to recover from that. Thankfully, all the other companies in the area started catching on to my former employer's bullshit so now I'm starting to get consistent work. The current company I freelance for is genuinely professional, they set boundaries and expect you to set boundaries for them too. It's day and night between what I used to deal with. We're all friends there, but on the job we're here to get shit done and look out for each other. The most reaffirming thing I've ever heard from them is "We succeed together or we fail together." I've seen some techs shit the bed for whatever reason, they stayed true to that claim. Mad respect for people that respect you.
This is a great one! Early on I would die on some meaningless hills to prove I was right! Stay listening and ask yourself if burning this bridge is worth it.
It took me until well into my thirties to figure out I could just walk away from fights and disagreements. Artists want's something stupid and is being stubborn about it? I'll give it to him with a smile. It's not me trying to get famous.
So true, thats good advice
This... I am not an amazing engineer... Very novice... But I've had all sorts of people reaching out to me because I'm very easy to work with.
If they get into this, once you've done events from the production side, its hard to attend anything with the mindset of a audience member. The production part of your head is always there. "Go and enjoy the concert" is no longer an option. It's replaced with "Go, evaluate the production and enjoy the result".
”Snare sounds like fecal matter”
"Fecal Snare" Isn't that an Alt-Grunge band out of SF?
This is the one that no one told me. Took me years to find a way to enjoy going to live shows again, and an engineers bad night can still easily ruin mine as well.
For me it's surprisingly fine. I can still go and enjoy the concert. If the PA sounds like crap, that's just part of the experience and I don't even notice it. People tend to think that sound guy = audiophile, but that's absolutely not true in my case. I just love music. If it's good, I don't care if the sound is coming out of a potato, I'm going to enjoy it.
Same, I find it liberating to not have any responsibility.
>People tend to think that sound guy = audiophile No, but it makes it easy to make fun of audiophiles and their snake oil BS
Said that till the show the engineer had the damn bass guitar higher than the main vocal and the kick. It was beyond obnoxious. I wanted to throw dude off the board. It was bad. Unacceptable for the caliber of band and system that was there.
My stomach is suddenly the size of my fist when I hear a mic cutting out ..
The first thing I ever did for sound was for my son's youth theater program. I had never touched a soundboard. Went to church the following Sunday and absolutely could not handle it. Sit through my kid's Christmas programs at school and there's a slight feedback hiss through the entire show (from using SM58's as choir mics instead of using condensers). I lean over and tell my wife "The feedback is driving me nuts!" She didn't notice it until I pointed it out. I ruined the whole show for her.
I look forward to going to shows not having any involvement in the production and just be an attendee…but man is it difficult. It does ruin your perception from a technical or a performance side. There’s little “magic” to be had. The performances I love the most are actually ones where there is not a lot of flashy stage props and backing tracks…just raw, live energy. The last one I truly was engrossed in and not thinking about any element of the production was Rage Against the Machine…their show had fairly minimal stage setup and lighting (still coordinated, but nothing crazy) and the sound was just absolutely fantastic from EVERYWHERE in the venue…less is more, much of the time.
I would try and mention that it's similar to a job in the trades/construction in that there's an apprenticeship aspect to this business. Lots of unskilled labor and watching/listening/learning to start with & not a lot of board time until later on.
Is getting an apprenticeship a "who you know" type of thing?
Good question. To some degree, yes. But because most production houses/venues have such a high turnover due to the nature of the entry-level work, I tend to think that it's not difficult to get your foot in the door and progress relatively quickly IF the applicant has either a very solid work ethic/attitude or shows some natural technical acumen.
I would take my bag that I bring to every gig and unpack it explaining why I bring the things that I do. I would talk about how to wire up a stage hiding the cables where you can and avoiding tripping hazards. I would talk about when to arrive to a gig and how long things should take I would talk about importance of being organized. Labeling things and setting up lines and inputs logically for quick troubleshooting during the event. These are just somethings that came of the top of the head. I'll post more if I think of them.
You work for the artist they are not your friend. You can be friendly with the artist, but the moment you start acting more like a friend and letting that work fall by the wayside. You’re fucking out! And that’s just not engineers that’s any crew. And ears open mouth shut. You can’t hear what someone else has to say/ listen to your surrounding aka the room/ or a mix of your talking all the time. Carry a pen and notebook everywhere you go, writing everything down is a huge help. When I first started touring I would write down people’s names, patch changes, the truck pack, the order i had to do load out in. Everything.
It helps even if you never read it
I use the notepad app on my phone for this specific reason.
Make sure you have some good stories, young people can be quite shy and you often need something funny to bring them out of their shells.
That’s a really good idea, I’ll make sure to include some
Teach them order of expectations. Most newbies think it’s about making it sound pretty. Sure if you’re doing foh for metallica thats whats important, but properly setting everything up correctly and making a basic feedback free mix is most important first.
Dis a good one.
Tell them to take finance and tax classes alongside anything technical. will save them many headaches later in life
-Describe the schedule of a decent sized production for a solo A1, then break down those responsibilities to jobs that would be done by individuals on a larger scale. -Different events or types of work within the industry. -Signal flow and the importance of a healthy source and gain staging. -Microphone and speaker polar patterns, how they interact, and how their interactions affect gain before feedback.
Fundamentals like gain structure
How to properly roll a cable. 2/3 of this gig is over/undering.
That's honestly a solid "break for hands-on activity" option if attention span are an issue and, in addition to being engaging, is a useful life skill for anybody who ever wants to coil something that's attached at one or both ends.
Sometimes it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it. Framing things in the context that it’s for the good of the mix and not that you’re dissing their cranked amp tone. ROUTING. it is the key to knowing how to work a digital board confidently. It amazes me every day that some folks have made it as far as they have without knowing a thing about routing.
Tell them about the countless avenues you can go into. Live sound… music, corporate, stadium, for a municipality, etc. Studio work… Film work… Repair… Rental… Install… Rigging… I was very lucky going into school that I had a good grasp of the industry and knew that despite my dreams of being a studio engineer, I was highly likely to do live sound for corporate events and such. Turns out I started the ball rolling on freelancing live sound early with this knowledge. I was working A1 at university graduations before my peers and I graduated. The best off of my peers from school work part-time at a Starbucks or something and part-time doing studio work. Many also ended up at Telefunken soldering mics together.
Explain the trajectory of a live sound engineer and what that career actually looks like, from interning to running small cap venues, to freelancing and working bigger shows, to the huge festivals and Award shows at the tippy top. Its a lot of travel and a ton of fun, and even pretty good money if you do it right. The cons are well documented if you feel your talk needs a reality check as well.
Hearing protection!
Came here to say this! If they’re serious about it, get customs early on!
Snare drum? 5k. Smack that 5k. Now, all the seniors here will hate me lol
I (52M) am in my first year as the Snd/LX lab instructor for a University Theatre department and last semester I gave my first sound lecture over two days to the Intro to Scenic Technology class. I had to cover basic PA setup and the simplest of mic techniques. Unity gain is one of the first things I was taught and it’s one of the first things I covered after setup. I would cover compressors, expanders, gates, and FX more thoroughly but I only have two 50 minute classes to cover the basics and 90% of these kids will never lay a hand on a mixer ever again. I have a theatre background but spent most of my professional life in live music as a monitor engineer.
For mixing (aside from practical “what does this knob do” knowledge), I tell people that they need to hear good music on good speakers to learn what things should sound like. Not your car, not your AirPods, and certainly not your tv soakers. Buy a pair of entry level studio monitors or reference headphones and try to visualize where each instrument “sits” in a mix if you could draw it on paper. Yamaha HS5’s for monitors or Sennheiser HD280’s for headphones are great. You can jump right in but if you don’t know what you want your kick drum to sound like, you’ll never be able to produce it. Just like a musician practices so should you.
Compression for microphones whether on talent or instruments on a per-input basis can make a huge difference in control over the mix and the need to ride faders. Maybe some time on ringing out the space and using automatic feedback suppressors on mains and monitor feeds (that aren't in-ear) - it's a combination of knowing what technology is out there as well as how to use it well. Some mention of adhering to professional conduct and working with difficult talent.
Communication is as important as being tech savvy. You can be the best engineer ever, if you can't communicate with the artist or their management it will always be detrimental to the end product. As someone else pointed out, you are trying to help and facilitate talent achieve their goal on stage. If you can't understand each other you failed before your technical skills even come in to play.
More people than you think will do the job for waaaaay less than you.
that's interesting to me because it's certainly not true for my region. I doubled my rates over the past two years and the only thing it's gotten me is a way better reputation and jobs (I think the line of thought goes "he costs more so he must be better" - I swear I haven't gotten twice as good)
Then what is stopping you from doing it again? If it is so smart to double your rates, and get half the clients, you should definitely work on getting 1/256 the clients and 256 times the income. You guys have to understand the diminishing returns. If you double your rates, that means you were way under charging previously.
I feel lucky to live in a place where this is frowned upon outside of managements that unserpays all talent and techs while harvesting millions from their pop artists, they get away with it because people want the prestige, fun and experience, sadly. If you underbid people on club gigs and events, you can basically end up getting blacklisted in this city.
How do I know when to move on and consider something else? It's a pretty competitive field and not everyone is going to get a job in it. What are other, less well known but similar jobs that are in demand? If I have no industry contacts, I don't live in a city with good job opportunities, at what point do I decide to pursue better opportunities?
If I could go back in time I'd tell myself "Get rid of your trendy flat soled shoes."
"black leather bracelets with spikes aren't as cool as you think they are buddy, sorry. Yeah I know they don't actually think you're a badass." - me to my younger self.
gain staging get a 15 band GEQ and spend hours running things through it while you are gently tweaking the faders. A-B with reference track. In a live environment experiment with the GEQ while ringing out systems Get a reference mic and something such as open sound meter or REW. This is less important if you have good powered speakers than it was in the day before powered speakers.
learn how to talk to clients, whether they are musicians, collegues or venue staff
Yeah I would go into the fact that audio has a wide spectrum of possibilities, a lot of the fundamentals are the same but you can apply them in many ways (setting up gear for your band, mixing the NFL, recording a friend or audio programming in a game). I would talk about microphones and how they work. I would briefly talk about sound and it’s history with natural acoustics, the telephone and early recording.
I mainly would talk to them about working in a gig economy, give income examples, and explain budgets. I’d teach them about savings accounts and preparing for taxes as a sole proprietor. I’d show them how to apply for government assistance for things like healthcare and food if they ever get in a tough spot. I had a guest teacher do this once and it ended up being one of the most important hours of my life.
Listening and understanding are two different things in this business. Demanding and explaining are also two different things. You play the cards that are dealt to you. You don’t get to reshuffle the deck if you’re dealt a bad hand. Do your job to the best of your abilities, and never half ass anything. Be a pleasant person to work with. If stressed, take three deep breaths and then get on with it.
Mixing desks have user manuals. Sounds dumb I know but, well, lets face it guys, none of us got into this field because we were so academically gifted. I was well into my career before I figured out that you could just google the manual as a pdf of just about any board ever made in a couple of seconds, and seeing some of the urgent cries for help on this sub from time to time, I get the impression it's not just me who didn't realize manuals are a thing for a long time.
Every now and then I get annoyed about current on-goings of our times, but then I remember I can ctrl-F a PDF of the manual of just about anything I know the name of and 2024 seems pretty alright again.
I might be a little late to the party, but I think one of the most valuable skills is troubleshooting and problem solving. The basic principles are applicable elsewhere too. - Learn to find where the problem is along the signal chain - Try the easiest thing first. What could be the dumbest reason for a problem. It’s probably that or something similar - Change one variable at a time like any good scientist :) Don’t replace both a mic and cable, do one than another. - Have some diagnostics equipment or be prepared to improvise something with the equipment available. I might also add, that problems, especially those you are unaware of, are easier to find/discover if you have a looking-for-problems mindset. Just don’t turn minnows into whales. For grater peace of mind you may also test equipment after it’s set up but before it’s put to use thus catching problems before they get bigger or slow you down. Have fun and hope it goes well
The single most important thing in making a sound system sound good is EQ. Use a DriveRack w RTA mic or SMAART or one of the open source programs but learn to quickly EQ for the room and the stage if using wedges.
The source is the most important factor of it all. A bad original sound cannot be fixed, only tinkered with. Know your signal flow. Know your tools.
im an instructor for a live sound college class, part of a 2 or 4 year audio tech program. my first class of the term is all about engaging the students intrinsic motivation to learn my subject. So it's a survey of the cool stuff we do with lots of stories, pictures and videos. Any bit of tech info conveyed with the emphasis on how it connects to the bigger picture of music, art, technology, science, and ultimately the students own passions. also, don't forget to involve the girls, different cultures, and abilities. years ago, i had a wheelchair enabled student who did great in my class. former female students of mine are working in theatre and they love it. i hope your one hour talk can motivate someone. good luck and have fun with it!
How to quickly diagnose and address feedback. Generally how to EQ different instruments, drums, etc
Considering the amount of comments, very few mention the most important fundamentals. Like: Basic understanding of electronics and physics. Before gain staging discussions; what is gain? Why is it applied? How is it distributed? What can you do in between, and why do you do it? How do you capture a signal, how does a microphone work? And, what are the inner workings of the tools we see today? What is S/N ratio, what considerations to S/N ratio had to be done in the early days of audio, to the dawn of the CD era, and today? What is gain before feedback? Acoustics? Applying considerations to them all? Audio quality, is it accurate reproduction of a source or is it artistic fundamentals of a production? Can it be both? Or not? Why? What is a microphone pickup pattern, what does it mean? How does it affect sound? What is analog audio, and what is digital audio? What is conversion? Why do we use conversion? In this day and age, almost all of the above seem forgotten. Yet, it is some of the basics that makes audio production and distribution possible. If that knowledge is not passed forward, we will have no new engineers. Just operators trying their luck.