Personal Work

During my fourth and fifth years of high school, I volunteered to help with the tech for my former high school's Christmas Concerts. For this, I learnt a small amount about lighting and was left to set up all of the lighting presets, I took input from the students and teachers that would be performing on what colours they would prefer, as well as sourcing someone to run the lighting presets on the night of the show while I ran the sound desk as the head sound engineer. The second time that I helped with the Christmas concert, I helped with the sound, worked as stage crew on the night changing and adjusting the equipment (primarily microphones) between performances, and taught the students in the year below me how to use the equipment safely and effectively.

Outwith college and high school I started running the sound for my church when they needed it, this was usually just for the service, but also occasionally a worship night. For the services we'd go between scenes, one for the band, one for the youth band, one for the choir and finally one for the sermon itself. The band and youth band required the most focus, as I'd usually end up tweaking the levels slightly as they played, like blending vocals better, bringing the electro-acoustic guitar levels up slightly and usually would have to adjust the bass guitar depending on what song was being played. I have continued doing this for over 2 years now, as the 18th of November 2022 is the first time I recorded my work here.

November 2024 is what I would consider one of the biggest sound projects I have ever worked on, as I was running the sound for a wedding completely alone, with a sound system set up by someone else without clear instructions. Despite the challenges and stress of it, I believe that I actually worked really hard and well and so achieved a great sound for the church. However, my focus and dedication to the in person sound meant that I had forgotten to check the live stream audio, and to this day I cannot bring myself to listen back to the full recording, the levels were terrible and I wish I'd have checked it before the service. I believe I am likely exaggerating this slightly, as I am overly critical of this event with it being probably the most significant things I have worked on, however I also don't want to watch it back and find out that it really was that bad. However, many people came up to me after the service to tell me how great everything sounded, but I felt like I didn't deserve that much praise, as those people hadn't heard the sound on the livestream. But overall, everyone was happy, all of the sections of the service went smoothly during the official run through, so I couldn't really ask for much more. It was a good day and my main downfall was just that livestream, however with the many other things I was balancing and fixing during the time, with a microphone's signal disappearing completely at one point, I think it would have been difficult for a single person to have done all of that at once and I did the best I could at the time. So I'm proud of it, I did something amazing for my community and I think I would do it again, as long as I know the sound system better and have more than an hour to prepare.

For my Professional Development Project, I decided that I would become a Freelance Live Sound Engineer, and for this I started getting as much experience as possible, so I started working as the sound engineer for John Knox Church every second week to better my skills, experience and give myself more confidence as I plan to run the sound for a gig in January 2026. I have worked on fairly significant services so far, as this one was for Remembrance Sunday. For this service, we were using groups now instead of scenes, as they were more efficient to use and would keep slight tweaks made to the levels during the service. I showed up an hour early for the band check to set levels, however around 15 minutes in the front of house speakers stopped working and we had no idea why, we went through every check to try to figure out what had set it off, even switching between different scenes, however nothing brought the speakers back and we ended up just having to shut down the desk and amplifiers and restarting them, which brought the front of house speakers back. That issue has never happened before and has not happened since so we have no clue what had caused it, I spent around 15-30 minutes after the service talking to the other tech crew to try and figure out what we had missed, but we were all lost and decided to just let the issue go, as it had not resurfaced. During the actual service, there were no issues with the sound and I picked up switching between groups instead of scenes with ease. It was sound work that I thoroughly enjoyed working on and looked forward to doing it again, as it helped with my confidence as a live sound engineer immensely.

This was a gig I volunteered to help with at Ayrshire College, as I wanted more experience and wished to include additional live sound work in my portfolio as well as within my graded unit presentation for my HND at Ayrshire College.

For this, I was requested to create a channel list and a schedule, for which I used previous college work as a guide. Both of which were later reviewed and edited slightly with the help of my Sound Reinforcement lecturer. My original versions are included here and my channel list also functioned as an equipment list, as I picked out the equipment using the knowledge I've been taught throughout both my HNC and HND, as well as including my personal preferences when it came to microphones.

The gig itself required me to set up equipment, line check and run the sound for one of the 3 bands performing that day. I did this with the help of a fellow HND classmate and two HNC students. Myself and the other HND student were the main two to line check, as I worked the desk, setting the source for the digital stage box, creating a general scene, setting a rough gain and bringing up levels of each channel to test for a signal while he walked around the stage tapping the mics, all of the system worked first try, except one channel which was due to a faulty XLR cable, which was replaced. I then set up graphic EQ to lower the frequencies naturally boosted by the room to get a balanced frequency response and then saved those settings to the general scene. After the musicians had set up we readjusted mic positions slightly and then started sound checking. I was the second to sound check and saw a drastic improvement from the previous year’s sound checking, as I was far more confident and finished sound checking far quicker, however my lead vocal required me to erase the settings that the previous engineer had set up entirely as they had brought their own microphone, and so I set gain and applied EQ and compression from scratch. I then created my own scene with the changes I had made for my band saved to it. During the changeover of bands I had additional time and so created mute groups for both the effects and the entire band. I adjusted the compression on the lead and backing vocals during the gig as I was frequently changing levels for them, and also added in some reverb as I thought it enhanced the performance. After the gig finished, the four of us switched off the equipment in the correct order and then packed everything up safely, allowing us to leave at the predicted time of 5:30pm.

For the mix and master of this gig my main challenges were dynamics and spillage, as the mics at the drum kit and one of the electric guitars contained a lot of spillage from other instruments and vocals, I applied gates to the kick and snare drum to combat this, however the dynamics varied too much throughout the song when it came to the electric guitar, and after adjusting overall levels and having the gates on the kick and snare, it wasn't glaringly obvious, and no gate was applied to it in order to avoid losing the quality and tone of the guitar recording. I made sure to apply compression to the channels that were the worst offenders, such as the lead vocals, however I also relied on volume automation to ensure the dynamics were consistant throughout, because the song gradually built up in volume, I could catch the loudest areas effectively with a compressor, but it meant it wasn't as effective at the beginning of the song because adding more compression would risk overcompressing the end of the song and I wanted to retain the gradual build in volume and energy in order to replicate the live performance. The master proved a challenge as my main issue was with the limiter. I was struggling to get the song to the volume I wanted without overlimiting the track, I got around this by applying EQ and compression to enhance and slightly help with the dynamics of the song. I was able to get the volume to a point I was satisfied enough with, it's still quiet however I didn't want to risk losing the bass in order to get it louder due to the bass having such a big role and presence within the song. Overall I'm really happy with this mix and master, as live recordings are not something I have a lot of experience mixing. I think this experience will allow me to be able to think better both correctively and creatively when it comes to future gigs.

On Tuesday 2nd June, I had the honour of independantly running the sound for the wedding of Christina Ritchie and Kyle Cordner at John Knox Church. 

For this wedding I ran an hour and a half long sound check the day before the wedding with the church band, which comprised of three vocalists, keys and a drum kit. 

I was given full control of the sound system and so I began by changing the mic stand and repositioning of the drum overhead mic above the ride cymbal as I noticed that the drummer wasn't playing the toms much but had many songs where the cymbals on that side of the drum kit were being used. I also took the gate that was on the overhead microphone off so that it would function better as an overhead microphone, as despite previously being named an overhead microphone, it had been positioned fairly close to the three tom drums and was just being used to pick those up.

For the church band, I kept the gates on the kick and snare mic, and added compression and reverb to the vocal mics, as dynamics of the vocals ranged widely, especially in a duo act halfway through the service which made it clear to me that compression was definitely needed.

The service opened with bagpipes, keys and drums playing together, which I used the choir mics built into the church to pick up the bagpipes for the livestream. The other acts involved the church band as well as a solo act and a duo act, both of which used backing tracks for their songs.

One of the main difficulties I found when running the service was that every setting was saved to one scene and as that had already been set up for me to use I rebalanced the levels of the four different acts live for both the in-person audio and the livestream audio using my DT 770 PRO headphones. Additionally, whenever there was no vocalists I chose to mute their monitor to avoid any chances of feedback. I had a mute group for my reverb as well, however the vocalists never used their microphones to speak, so I found that it wasn't necessary. Finally one of the last decisions I made for the running of the service was having to mute and unmute the multiple different channels being used in real-time as I was unsure of how to create mute groups for anything other than effects with this desk. If I do another wedding with this desk, I would definitely research how to create a mute group for the channels, as there wasn't much time between sections for me to mute and unmute channels quickly, meaning that in a few sections of the livestream some of what was said was cut off.

Overall I found that I significantly improved from the last wedding I worked on and I am proud to say that I worked on this. I was able to bare in mind what went wrong with the sound for the previous wedding I worked on and ensured that I didn't repeat the same mistakes. Despite running the sound for a wedding being extremely stressful for me, I found it extremely rewarding after the fact when most of the service ran exactly as I had intended it to.