Week 1 EOC: My Voice

Music has always kept me in movement. Whether it be mentally or physically, music is my motivation to keep going in life. It picks me back up when I am enduring the lows in life and it enhances the highs that life brings along. I rely on music to make my life better than it truly is. I’m open minded to listening to all genres of music because it makes me want to understand why the listener prefers that specific genre. Of course everyone has their favorite song, band, genre, etc., but something that is extremely important to me is how you experience music.

 Listening to a great mix with some high quality headphones or at a venue that has great acoustics makes me feel like I am over the moon. Live sound is what I want to pursue so I do try my best to attend as many concerts as my wallet can handle. Being at an amazing venue with a great audience mix is everything to me. I pay attention to what frequencies are too loud or too soft, as well as which frequencies are too muddy and need to be cut. I'm not only watching the performance, I'm observing the venue and where everything is placed. I enjoy looking at how the employees mic the instruments, amps, and vocalists. This is why I'd like to strive to work Front of House (FOH) for a venue that really cares about their audiences’ experience. When I'm at a venue with a great audience mix that envelopes around me that is an experience I will remember forever. That experience is what I want to create for other people. I want to be able to mix live sound and make it something that the audience will remember.

 I have been to many venues where the bass is overwhelming and the higher frequencies are dampened and all I wish I could do is fix it somehow. Many people like to feel the bass vibrate throughout their body, but what’s the point if you can’t even enjoy the melody of the song? In my opinion everything should be balanced to where you can hear every part of the song. If a mix is making me want to cover my ears because there is too much feedback or too much of the highs or lows, I can’t enjoy it. I want the mixes that I adjust to make people feel something. I want my mixes to make people move, emotionally and physically.

I’m always on the lookout for concerts that are at different venues. That way I can analyze how live sound is handled by different people in different environments. I especially enjoy how live sound is mixed during festivals. My first festival was Life is Beautiful. I already knew that there would be some interesting issues because of the fact that it was downtown and there were a lot of people to please. Since it was downtown there are buildings that sound bounces off of. This caused a little bit of feedback at some of the stages. However, although there was some feedback, I must say that the mix was pretty spot on when it came to being able to hear the songs in its entirety. One stage in particular had a great mix for what it was. The Troubadour stage was an open ended dome. Because there was a roof over the area, it was easy to feel surrounded by sound. The bass was at a level where you could feel it, but it did not over power the rest of the music.