LightSoundJournal.com: James Wooten, front-of-house engineer for “Shut Up and Dance” pop-rockers Walk the Moon, is among the latest FOH engineers to experience firsthand the high-performance audio of the ShowMatch DeltaQ line array system from Bose Professional. He has gotten a chance to mix the band through installed ShowMatch systems at multiple venues now, including most recently the Crystal Ballroom in Portland, OR
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I don’t know much about sound but this article caught my eye due to the band it mentions. I’ve seen Walk the Moon several times live, and I’m always taken by the technical excellence of their performances. A few months ago I found an article written about their current tour lighting operator, so it’s interesting to read about a different aspect of their performances. One thing that interests me about this is that it mentions that their sound operator was previously a musician. Over the years I’ve been reading about concert sound design, and speaking to designers, one thing I’ve always noticed is that they tend to be musicians. It makes me wonder what about being a musician lends itself so easily to sound design, and what it is that draws musician to sound engineering in the first place. I’d love to learn more about this, because at my high school sound tended to be exclusionary and difficult to learn from, simply because the students in charge weren’t willing to teach, or they didn’t know themselves. My junior year I had the privilege of shadowing a professional load in for a concert at my local arena, and we were able to talk to the sound designer for several hours. The way he talked about his craft is something I’ve never seen before, and the wealth of knowledge he had was extraordinary. Personally I’d love to learn more about concert design in general, because that’s not something it’s easy to get experience in, so reading articles like this one is really cool to me because I get to hear about an industry that parallels theater but we don’t get the chance to hear about often.
In high school, I primarily was our school's front of house engineer for every show that involved more than a couple handheld speaker microphones. While I have worked with plenty of JBL, QSC, Meyer and other systems, just like Wooten, I have never used a Bose Professional system before. This year at the National Association of Music Merchants show (NAMM) in Anaheim, Bose had a huge display of their professional audio equipment, and people seemed very interested in it. After talking to a representative from Bose I was very intrigued by the system. Unfortunately, I have yet to have a chance to play with the system. As a musician myself, concert audio has always interested me even though most of what I have done was theatrical and event mixing. Through my event work, I have mixed bands before, but I have never mixed a true, large, concert. I hope to be able to intern on a concert tour one day so I can learn all about loading in and out a concert, as well as mixing the show.
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