Subscribe on iTunes, SoundCloud, or Stitcher.
Support Sound Design Live on Patreon.
In this episode of Sound Design Live I talk with Brian Adler about good and bad of being a tour managing FOH engineer and how he lost his passion for audio in the recording studio and rediscovered it in concert sound. We discuss:
- Why getting fired was the best thing that ever happened to his career
- The benefits of working at smaller concert venues
- How to control your relationship with an artist (even if you work at a shitty club)
- One important demand you should make when taking tour managing gigs
- Staying healthy on tour
- Brian’s industry secret for optimizing a sound system on tour 😉
- Brian’s #1 trick for controlling stage volume
- How to give guitarists and vocalist plenty of volume on stage
- How to double a vocal channel at FOH for separate monitor control
And we answer these questions:
- Do the places you work affect your reputation?
- Should you go after tour managing jobs to get more audio work?
- What are the responsibilities of a tour manager?
- What’s it like working at a museum?
- Where do you get the best burritos in San Francisco?
You can’t control whether someone has a good time or a bad time with a venue. You can control whether someone has a good or bad time with you and your sound system.
Details from the podcast:
- All music in this episode by eO
- Fighting sound clip from SoundNimja
- Sad trumpet from Doctor_Jekyll
- San Francisco restaurantes: Ebisu sushi, Taqueria Cancun, La Taqueria
- Bottom of the Hill, The Independent, Slim’s, The Fillmore, Cafe du Nord, Red Devil Lounge, The Rickshaw, Austin City Limits, The Brava Theatre, The Mercury Lounge, Ace of Spades
- The California Academy of Sciences
- Dan Kroll, The Stone Foxes
- Midas Heritage 3000, D&B rig
- Quotes
- You’re never going get to into the big places unless you do the little places.
- Word gets out if you’re bad.
- Being a tour manager is just another way to get work.
- Being a live sound engineer has really opened up a lot of doors for me.
- That’s my #1 way of Smaarting out a room: Play Tom Petty and talk to the house guy.
- You can create a listening environment on stage that can be fantastic just by moving the monitors.
- If you are making too many cuts [in the EQ], it’s because your monitor is too loud.
That story Brian told about going to audio school and being so excited to get out there, then realizing what it would take & how little the pay would be is so familiar! It’s the story of many folks I know. I think that’s why so many folks (including myself) ended up in the systems integration biz. Another awesome episode Nathan!
Thanks Nate!
Totally. I wonder if the solution is as simple as a career or business development seminar where students would be exposed to the many opportunities in audio, outside of the studio?
I am said British guy at Ace of Spades in Sacramento, thank you for your kind words! Very much appreciated
Ha! Awesome.
Thank you for your hard work!