Live Sound

I have just finished 7 weeks of live sound training at SAE, and if theres one thing I've learnt it's that I love plugging in cables and understanding signal flow, and HATE carting around gear. During the 7 weeks of training, our class was split into two groups. Each week, each group would set up, work, and pack down a small live sound environment in the largest recording room at SAE. We started by learning the absolute basics; how to set up speakers, amps, and how to get signal from the desk to front-of-house. Each week we would build on these basic skills to gain a more in depth understanding of signal flow, room tuning and basic live sound mixing, and in week 7 we set up a very small live performance and recorded it to ProTools.

For me, everything we have learnt so far has been quite easy to understand. Due to our prior knowledge of signal flow in the studio, most of the practices in live sound were already very familiar. After receiving simple instructions from Ben (our lecturer for the live sound unit) we quite easily understood the signal flow from the stage, to desk, to speakers and monitors. If anything, it was easier to understand because we could always see how signal was travelling between devices because we plugged all the leads in ourselves, rather than dealing with patch bays and the separation of control/recording rooms. I liked having the control of deciding where different cables should be plugged in.

The only thing that really went wrong during live sound training was the dbx drive rack not working. It wasn't so much of an issue because we learned how to tune the room by turning up the gain on the desk to find which frequencies are feeding back and then cutting some of those frequencies with the graphic EQ. However it would have been nice to gain a little more experience using devices like the drive rack to quickly and easily tune the room.

We had a few issues where we would get no sound from front-of-house or left and right signals being mixed up, but this was usually just a case of switching around two leads, or forgetting to assign an output. These were simple mistakes but it was good that we learnt to realise these mistakes and were able to fix them on-the-fly, because at a live show we wouldn't be able to spend too long trying to fix an issue when there is a band waiting to perform.

We also had a few cases where we would get no signal from the DI set up on stage, but we eventually realised that we had not turned the master phantom power on. This was actually really helpful to learn because we found out that some venues' equipment have their own phantom power, and sending two loads of 48v to the stage is a great way to fry their speakers.

For the assessment in week 7, we each chose a role (front-of-house engineer, monitor engineer, systems tech and recording engineer) and recorded one of our lecturers singing and playing an acoustic guitar. I chose systems tech; I was quite confident in my understanding of signal flow and setting up the desk and I would quite often help others in my class understand how to send the signal from the desk > EQ > compressor > drive rack > multicore > amps > speakers. The assessment went relatively smoothly; I was hoping to use the assessment to have a shot at operating the drive rack but once again it was not running as intended, so I just tuned the room using the graphic EQ and a frequency detector app on my phone.

In the future, I would like to keep doing the role of systems tech because I enjoyed it and it is satisfying knowing that I've set up the signal flow correctly and can relax a little bit when my job is finished and let the front-of-house engineer take over. To continue the things that went right during live sound training, I will always set up the desk and drive rack straight away so that as soon as the speakers and amps are powered up, I can quickly tune the room and ensure that the desk is correctly set up so that the front-of-house engineer is good to go as soon as they arrive.

To avoid the things that went wrong, I would focus more on tidyness and organisation skills. A lot of the channels on the multicore don't work at all, so I would take the time to test each of the leads and label on the box which channels work and which don't. This would save a lot of time trying to figure out which channels I can use. I would also save a different template for recording at SAE and one for recording at venues like the rosemount, to avoid little issues like master phantom power being turned off.

While I'm pretty confident at the systems tech role, in the future I will definitely have a shot at being the front-of-house engineer, just so I can gain a more in-depth understanding of sound-checking and mixing live music. I'm still a bit nervous about the concept of having to mix on-the-fly and having to fix issues really quickly to keep the show running smoothly so it would be good to put that little bit more pressure on myself so that I can be more confident in that area and perhaps do some work in live sound if I need to later down the track.

Overall I'm pretty happy with how our live sound training went (it wasn't nearly as daunting as I thought it would be) and I look forward to setting up a live performance on a larger scale at the Boston at the end of Trimester 4.