One day, one of the live venues in my town had a workshop on sound engineering. It was basically a crash course in running live sound so I thought I'd learn a little bit more about the other side of the stage.
Little did I know that this wasn't as
much of a workshop as it was the venue's way of vetting the people who seemed most interested in running cables and connecting microphones.
The workshop basically taught you to connect the equipment needed to run the show so that if they ever needed someone to fill in as a live sound-tech, they had a list of names.
Turns out that my reputation for being a musician and being halfway proficient
in connecting microphones was the only certification they needed to call me in the following week.
Now, instead of having one side-gig I was unqualified for, I had two.
Except for this time, my lack of skills was out in the open in front of the audience.
I felt very insecure, like if somebody forced me to strip down naked in front of my crush after jumping into
the frigid Icelandic waters...
You see, if the band sounded like shit, they weren't going to blame the band.
They were going to blame me. It didn't matter whether I did a good job or not. If the band sounded great, the audience gushed over how good they were. If the band sounded bad, they all blamed me.
Talk about nervewracking.
So, like a typical live engineer, I ran around the venue sweating my ass off, not from physical fatigue but from sheer nervousness.
I was determined to make the most of my new gig and try to do my best to make every band sound good.
Luckily, my band had recorded and released our debut album the year before, so I was familiar with the engineering process, although I had mostly
just played the role of the long-haired guitar player bitching about his guitar tones the entire time.
As I found myself at the early stages of my audio engineering career, I really wished I had paid more attention while we recorded our album.
However, the workshop had come in handy and I quickly got the hang of connecting all the equipment and running a good show.
But I wouldn't have been to able to make those shows sound so great if it wasn't for one invaluable processor.
The EQ.
EQ helped me take that shitty music venue from its reputation for having terrible sound to becoming an in-demand music venue where all the coolest bands wanted to play. At first, I just moved the knobs randomly and had no idea what I was doing. I mean, the sounds
changed. Sometimes for the better, most of the time for the worse.
But it wasn't until I spent hours behind that mixing board in that dimly lit venue, studying what each frequency sounds like and what it does to the mix that I finally got it:
EQ is the most important mixing processor to create separation between the instruments in your mixes.
EQ can help you in any audio situation, whether you're doing live sound or recording your own music in your home studio.
As a guitar player, I quickly learned that understanding frequencies was kind of like learning the right chord progressions or the right scales to use during a solo. Understanding frequencies was like having a cheat sheet for making your mixes sound good.
I learned a
lot about EQ during those days. With my background in bands and now with a firm on audio engineering I felt confident in my abilities, but I knew that I still had a lot to learn. If I would've had to rate myself in those days, I would've probably rated myself as a 3 out of 5 when it came to my skills.
However, it wasn't until I boarded a plane and was forced to learn another language that I also became fluent in EQ.
What language? Where did I go? What did I learn?
More about that in tomorrow's email, but if you want shortcuts to learning what I now know about EQ, I've put that all inside my EQ Strategies - The Ultimate Guide to EQ.
Check it out here:
www.EQStrategies.net
P.S.
If live sound is your jam and you want to get better at it, I also have a great crash course over at www.LiveSoundBasics.net
