Brief Summary
Live sound is an excellent training ground for people working in all areas of audio. The practical mindset and lack of a safety net or undo button help develop skills which will be useful no matter who you are.
Going Deeper
We know that you don’t get better at something without practice. You’ve probably also heard of the 10,000 hour rule which suggests that expert performance in a field can be acquired through 10,000 hours of practice. Spoiler alert - it’s nonsense, but the story behind it is interesting, it’s the name of a chapter from Malcom Gladwell’s 2008 book Outliers: The Story Of Success. Find out more in this excellent BBC article from 2014 Can 10,000 hours of practice make you an expert?
The reason I mention the 10,000 ‘rule’ is that it draws no distinction between valuable practice, which results in actual improvement, new learning or the synthesis of new knowledge and connections, and low-value repetition. Every hour doesn’t count the same so there really can’t be a ‘magic number’, regardless of how many zeros follow it.
So high value practice in important. I wrote about this in a recent article the Real Value Of Experience In The Audio Industry and in this article I’m going to focus on one area in particular - Live Sound.
Live and studio sound are far from mutually exclusive and most engineers do, or have done both at some point in their careers. This is a point which should emphasised to young and aspiring producers and engineers as the benefits are so immediate it doesn’t matter what work you do or want to do, live sound will help you.
Why do I say this? My first experience as an engineer was in a studio in the early nineties. That kind of backstreet community studio was reasonably common in those days. 8 tracks on half inch tape, 8 bus mixer, a small collection of outboard and a few mics but most importantly a premises which was a busy hub for musicians to practice and record. I learned a lot and it was a great next step from my home recording with a 4 track phase. However I earned almost nothing and motivated purely by the possibility that I could actually get paid regularly, I approached a local PA company
I was lucky enough to have stumbled on one of the first PA companies in the UK to offer line array systems and my understanding of how sound behaved in spaces was catapulted forwards by this experience. I learned that there was far, far more to audio than I’d ever imagined. It was however still poorly paid, very hard work and in the 90s health and safety was something of an afterthought.
The feeling there was higher quality work out there resulted in me eventually working for prestigious AV companies in London who had quality clients (and their quality budgets). The work was professional, varied and usually interesting. While I’d been briefly seduced by the idea of working in “Rock and Roll”, increasingly I found myself working on jobs where we were working in difficult environments and having to create innovative solutions to these problems. How do you make sure everyone can understand every word of a speech in a room with a 10 second reverb? No amount of turning it up is going to help you with that!
So to focus on the ways I think live sound has made me a better engineer, here are some examples. Most of them aren’t technical.
Pressure
The biggest difference between live sound and studio work is the fact that it’s a one time only thing. You can’t go again. This pressure teaches harsh lessons when things go wrong. If you’ve never had the feeling of realising you’ve messed up, just as it’s too late, it’s excruciating. Thinking about a couple of doozies I’ve dropped in the past makes me feel anxious even now, and one of them was in 1998 (no, I’m not telling…). However, while this pressure ultimately scares some people off, the positive is that it makes you very diligent about preparation and planning. Triple-checking things, always having a patch list and I’m sure my live sound days are the reason I’m always early for gigs.
Communication
Live sound is by its nature collaborative. Studio sound used to be but is increasingly a solitary experience. If you’re doing live sound you’re working with people who are anywhere between less interested than you and not at all interested in what you’re doing. You’re not the reason people are there, they just want the job done right. Being able to communicate clearly, just enough to let people know what they need to know and to be present and reassuring that everything is under control is a skill which is always useful, no matter where you are or what people are trusting you to do.
Communication isn’t purely about language though. Learning to look is another key skill. When tracking in the studio, where do you look? We should be monitoring levels, managing takes, but we should also be looking at the performers. Smiling helps. The thing you’re looking for is how comfortable they look. If someone isn’t happy it might well be because of what they are hearing. Live engineers know this.
Problem Solving
Stuff goes wrong, things break, it happens. Being able to quickly diagnose the problem and fix it fast needs quick thinking, an open mind and a thorough understanding of what you are dealing with. If you don’t know what you are doing, say so. I remember seeing a new freelancer we were trying out attempt to plug a mic into an XLR panel on an amp rack. He was sent home on the spot. If he’d just asked where to patch it he’d probably have been OK.
Patience
If you’ve never worked in events you might not understand the phrase “hurry up and wait”. It is the best summary of working live events I’ve ever heard. That is literally 90% of it. Patience is a great quality. Studio sessions also throw up those times where you’ve got to be there, ready to go at a moment’s notice but precisely when is as yet undecided. Learning to navigate these, often rather boring, times is a skill I learned in live events. You’re going to be very busy soon enough so don’t complain.
Mixing
OK, but what about mixing? Live mixing is what all studio mixing ought to be but often isn’t. You listen, you hear something you want to change (either because it’s bad, or it’s good but could be better) you make that change. And repeat… Live mixing is ephemeral. Once it’s happened, it’s happened, and however inspired your idea of a delay throw on that vocal line was, if you didn’t get it together to do it in time it is very literally too late.
However, most live sound mixing isn’t about creative use of effects, it’s about getting the sounds to listener’s ears in as good a shape as possible and the focus is on riding faders, utility EQs and dynamics processing. For me, decisive use of EQ is probably the biggest single identifying trait of a live engineer in the studio. Confidence with EQ. Dialling in a frequency and cutting, no sweeping narrow boosts up and down to find the offending sound. That is something I recognise in experienced live engineers, particularly monitor engineers. Knowing what you want to achieve is a requirement for a good mix so anything which encourages clear decision making has to be a good thing doesn’t it? There’s no room for option-paralysis or deferring decisions further and further down the mixing process in live sound.
The world of live sound is unforgiving, but it’s an excellent proving ground for anyone wanting to work with audio. And it happens literally everywhere. Possibly the best way you can spend a few hours learning how to mix better in the studio is to leave the studio for a few hours and mix something in real time, with some actual faders in front of an audience.
Do you or have you mixed live shows? Do you think it’s helped you in the studio? If so, how? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
Photos by Roman Pohorecki, Clement Felix