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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.