5 Tips from a Drum Corps Audio Engineer

5 Tips I've learned through my time as an audio engineer
Check out our website, social media, and more!: solo.to/catherallaudio
Chapters
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0:00 Intro
0:11 Practice Your Set Up Procedure
3:09 The Ear Not The Gear
4:35 Read The Manual
6:23 Ask Questions
7:40 Hire An Audio Manager
#CatherallAudio #JamesCatherall

[@MrIanGrom]

Good stuff, James!!

[@CatherallAudio]

Thanks Ian!

[@dizdawgjr34]

6:24. I can’t understate how important this was for when I was helping a group my parents teach at after they tasked me with figuring out how to build a setup to mic their mallet instruments and add a synth since they knew I had shown in this realm before. CZcams and the Marching Arts Audio Facebook group really helped a lot with figuring out what we needed to do, the best ways to minimize setup time and maximize ease of use alongside finding how to integrate it into equipment we already had. It’s not perfect (we literally can’t add anything since our setup uses 16 channels, our mixer only supports 16 channels so we have no way to expand what we are doing without buying a new mixer, our speakers are a pain to move around since we don’t have speaker carts that would be effective in every stadium we’d play in so we have to use pole mount speaker stands, and we don’t have subwoofers currently), but we never expected it to be perfect in year one and considering the constraints Im pretty proud of what I came up with.

[@CatherallAudio]

That's so great to hear! Making it work with what you have!
Facebook groups are such a great resource for what we do, it's basically the only reason I still use Facebook at all.

[@dizdawgjr34]

@@CatherallAudio It’s the only reason I use Facebook in the first place. But yeah, if you do a bit of digging between there and youtube, you can probably find something to at least point you in the right direction with a majority of problems you might have.

[@dizdawgjr34]

@@CatherallAudio Also the “It’s about the ear, not the gear” is definitely something we try to keep in mind as part of this process. We definitely do have issues where it is the gear we have (particularly involving future expansion and ease of setup/convenience) but they have specifically been using the stadium to figure out how to make everything sound right and what they like in those regards and do reps of setup and teardown. My mom (front ensemble instructor) and I also had near front row seats to a dci show with a good lineup as well as watching a Crown show day rehersal so we decided to try and see if there’s anything we could figure out there in terms of setup and translate it to how we were going to be doing things as well as potential future ideas. We definitely saw some things that we really liked and are considering figuring out how to implement in the long term future.