Ready?
Live Sound Engineer — your shift
Line-check everything, mix for the room you have, and kill feedback before it is audible. Read what this person needs, then tap the place that sorts it out.
Full screen — no distractions
What does a live sound engineer do?
You mix a performance live in a room whose acoustics change when the audience arrives, and there is no second take.
Also called: sound tech, front of house engineer, live audio engineer.
A day looks like
- 1You get in early, rig, and line-check every input before anybody sings a note.
- 2You soundcheck an empty room and then re-tune the whole thing once four hundred bodies have absorbed the top end.
- 3You catch feedback before it is audible, by knowing which frequency the room will give you.
- 4You mix for the back of the room and for the singer's monitor at the same time, and those are different mixes.
Hardest part
The room is different every night and different again once it is full, so a mix that was perfect at five o'clock is wrong at eight — and everybody hears it happen.
Best part
A mix where every word of the lyric is intelligible at the back, and nobody in the audience thinks about the sound at all.
How you actually become a live sound engineer
- At schoolAny live work — most engineers started humping boxes for a PA company.
- TrainingLive sound courses plus a great deal of practical experience; ear training is the real qualification.
- How longA year or two as crew, several more to mix headline shows.
- Your first jobPA crew or monitor engineer's assistant.
Frequently asked questions
- Why does a room sound different when it is full?
- Because people absorb sound, particularly high frequencies, and add low-end. A mix balanced in an empty room will sound dull and boomy once an audience is in, so engineers expect to re-balance at the start of a show.
- What is 'ringing out' a system?
- Deliberately finding the frequencies at which a particular microphone and room will feed back, and reducing them slightly, so the system can run louder before howling.
- What is the difference between monitors and front of house?
- Front of house is the mix the audience hears; monitors are what the performers hear on stage. They are different mixes with different priorities, and on bigger shows two separate engineers do them.
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