CREATIVE LIVE SOUND ENGINEERING With Dave Swallow

"If you're a painter, you're controlled by the colours you have and the canvas that you're painting on. Your imagination can run wild but the tools impose limits," says veteran sound engineer Dave Swallow. "It's the same for a live sound engineer - your limitations are the room, the band and the equipment that you're using. Once we understand those limitations we can understand how to push those boundaries and get more from them, rather than just seeing them as a limitation."Promising to approach his seminar on the creativity of live sound mixing "from a very artistic point of view", Swallow - whose CV includes mixing FOH for Amy Winehouse, La Roux, Seasick Steve and Corinne Bailey Rae among many others - will explore the essential elements of live mixing.His talk will cover the important ideas behind putting a mix together, and explain how to add a third dimension to a flat, two-dimensional mix, using a simple understanding of how we hear distance. He'll also look into the idea of using dynamic processors in a creative way, rather than just as a way of controlling signal level."We have to understand how to get space in our sound, he concludes. "It's an important element of a live show, which seems to get sucked out of quite a lot of gigs at the moment - my question is: is the right sound or just the trendiest one?"

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