My last gig of the season beside a swimming pool in Ibiza is now a distant memory. I am back in the UK working out what to do for the next few months.
Summer is festival season and these fun events are separated by dull journeys by rail and plane. Most of these journeys for me provide a rare opportunity to sit, relatively undisturbed, and work on the various on-going mix projects I have.
Well, this is less of a blog post than a rant. A month or two before every festival I start what is known as the advance. This involves badgering agents and promoters to provide information about what we are likely to expect at each festival. This varies in detail (and accuracy) usually producing a fairly hefty back and forth of email between our production and theirs. Recently, though, a new phrase is becoming more prevalent and with it my heart sinks...
After being harangued about how much space my analogue set up occupies at FOH at the various festivals this year, I was relieved, for once, to find one larger. I was pipped to the post on the last date of the summer by Portishead with their vintage digital set up!
It is my firm belief that many young people are struggling to find sound engineering jobs because their CVs aren’t up to scratch and they simply don’t know how to ask nicely! As
the owner of an agency that specialises in finding opportunities for engineers, I get sent dozens a week, and I peruse them all.
As a sound engineer, and in particular as a studio owner, I get a considerable number of job requests each month. These vary from general emails from colleagues letting me know that they are looking for work - usually having finished a long tour - to hopeful requests from young engineers looking for their first employment.
I was asked the other day, as I unwrapped a Line 6 DL4 guitar pedal from the slightly dirty towel that protects it from the rough and tumble of my cables box, if this was my favourite echo unit. “Well, no, not this one,” I replied, “I don't really like it but it’s practical.”
The older I get the more I realise I don't know! This week I am off on a training course for several reasons. Firstly to find out about a speaker system I don't know very well, Martin MLA, and secondly to generally refresh and top up my knowledge. It seems a long time ago that I did my V'Dosc training, and although the principles remain the same, the technology has moved on.
Having just spoken to one of the Soulsound Agency engineers who had an especially bad day at work last night, I was reminded of this article I wrote in 2012 for FOH Online magazine. So, if you’ve had a really bad day at work, where everything has gone wrong, fear not. You are not alone! In the following post I ‘fess up to the worst day I have ever had at work...
This week I am off to Millennium Studios for a three-day course on speakers. Not just any old speakers, but Martin Audio’s MLA system. This line array has a comprehensive software based control system allowing you to optimise the coverage for the audience - exactly how it works I should know by next week. But do I really need to know?
I recently returned from Malta and my second time on this island. I would wax lyrical on it's beauty and fantastic sights, but to be honest the incredibly mediocre restaurant (the nearest with a free table to the hotel) and the fairly dismal stage in a car park by a football ground, made up most of my experiences on this trip. However that is to denigrate what for me is one of the great joys of international touring.
Festival season is almost over for this year, which is shorter than last year’s, as we haven't extended beyond Europe. This means means that by the beginning of September I can stop worrying about packing sun cream and waterproofs in the same case, not knowing what the weather will throw at me for the coming weekend.
This year, in Sweden, I was presented with one of my lowest ever levels of 97dBA over 60 minutes. The reason for it being lower than the normal Swedish level is that the concert was open to under-13 year olds. My band went on stage at 1 am, few under 18's in the audience and certainly no pre-teens.
My mission with Soulsound is to help make people more employable by teaching things that often are impossible in the classroom, to give young engineers examples of success to aspire to, and to help jobbing engineers improve their skills.
Today we are back at the Hockenheim race track for Rock 'n' Heim. We had a show last night at Sziget Festival with our B rig, but today is the A rig. We have two sets of equipment, as often the distance between the festivals is greater than you can drive in a night, so a second set is needed to do the show.