Week 9 - Live sound

This Trimester of Uni is positively flying by. Finished up my second intensive last week, now unto the the third, Live sound! Kicking myself a bit, because i keep trying to make a mental effort to take my photos of the kind of audio stuff i'm learning and i forgot to do it last week!

my first class in live sound was good. Lots of information! We are tasked with putting on a live show together by the end of the Trimester(4 weeks!). I've actually worked in live sound for the last year doing more corporate and events, so i already have a bit of knowledge. However live sound is quite a different beast then studio work, and different desks/gear and system setup makes a huge difference. After doing the AV at events for the past year i definitely gave up on the idea of doing any kind of live sound! Rough hours and high stress, the only kind of live work i'd look to do would be the in house tech at a pub/club that has good gigs on and i can leave the system set up and tuned how i want.

Now after having a bit of a slag off on live sound, i will say i'm still happy as larry to learn as much as i can about it. as it will be invaluable, and learning about the Avid s3 desk is interesting. Tim Dalton started our class off with a bit of a presentation about how it was for him touring with huge bands and doing the sound for them, different setups, etc. Then we got stuck into just throwing signal around to different spots on the live sound stage, using the avid S3 sound desk. The Desk itself is pretty cool, with a lot of options for everything you can think of, other then the way they have colour coded some of the navigation buttons and what not, seems like a very powerful and efficient tool in live sound. I especially like the ability to put your run of the mill plugins down channels of the desk. Having learnt most of what i know about processing from plugin versions of hardware, to be able to use plugins i'm familiar with in a live setting is awesome.

That was pretty much all we went over in the first class, having goes at getting the signal moving, and having a play on the desk. Also a lot to think about with putting on this gig at the end of the month!