Andy Reynolds's Live Music Business - BETA
My name is Andy Reynolds, I am a freelance concert tour manager and live audio engineeer who has been working in the concert touring industry for nearly 25 years.I also lecture in Live Sound Production at Buckinghamshire New University and have written several books about the live music business.
This is a BETA site – I am still adding functionality and design elements. The posts and tweets are real and will be continuing.Thanks!
Many of you will be playing an open-air festival show such as Glastonbury, Reading and Leeds, Roskilde or Pukkelpop this summer – maybe for the first time. While providing the potential to reach out to an increased number of music fans, the scale of a festival stage may be daunting.
Festivals operate on almost split-second timing; festival promoters are subject to very heavy financial fines if they run past an agreed-upon sound curfew. Bands performing at festivals are given a strict time to be onstage and offstage, with another set time for changeover (getting the previous act’s gear off and their gear on). The pressure is on you to get on stage, play and get off in your allotted time and with all that rushing around it is easy to forget about health and safety.
I do not want to come across as being like your mother, but please be careful up there onstage – there is a lot of electricity in those cables and a lot of things to bump into or fall off, so watch yourself! From (sometimes bitter) experience, I have compiled the following dos and don’ts when it comes to stage safety, these apply to festival shows as well as club and theatre gigs: Continue Reading
I am honoured to be presenting a tutorial on audio engineering jobs for live music tours at the 130th Audio Engineering Society (www.aes.org) conference in London. The tutorial session is called ‘How to Gain and Keep a Career in The Live Music Business’ and is based on my experience on helping people get ‘roadie’-type jobs on music tours.
The tutorial session will cover such information as:
· The live music business today
· Routes into the live sound business for engineers
· The different audio roles on a music show or event
· The specialized skills relevant to concert audio engineering
· Why sound engineering jobs are never advertised
· Employment vs freelancing
· Writing and presenting a relevant résumé/ CV
· How to start and run a freelance live audio business
.. and much more.
The 130th AES Conference takes place at the Novotel London West from May 13th – 16th. Full details can be found here.
..According to Robert Scovill.
Scovill is a renowned live audio engineer who has mixed live sound for Prince, Rush, Def Leppard and Tom Petty among many others. He is also Senior Market Specialist for live sound for Avid.
The link will take you to a transcript of his recent keynote speech at an AES student conference.
There are some great points in the transcript: the ability to ‘mix’ and not just drive a console is my favourite.
http://bit.ly/hQY4DQ
