What You See vs What You Don't See!

What You See:

What you don’t see:

Again in the list of things no one tells you about life as a professional musician... the amount of stuff you need! Mics, speakers, stands, instruments, cameras, lights, laptops, audio devices, and of course the thousands of leads that connects it all together. I’ve spent most of my life at school, university, and beyond, studying music theory and performance but totally neglected the technology side of things!

It’s definitely a female problem (apologies to all those tech-savvy female musicians out there, I am generalising) that we’re often seen as "just the singer". Now I’m not one to usually be particularly feminist, but this is a topic I spent quite a bit of time researching at university, and the facts show that the music industry is often biased towards men. Most of my life when it came to recording, or sound checks, and I would ask the sound guy (yes there are female sound technicians out there, but in my experience I have only ever come across men) “what is this/what are you doing/how do you do that” the common reply was, oh you don’t need to know that. So I never learned how to record, or the differences between mics etc. I know I’m to blame too for being ignorant and not asking further questions!

Fortunately now things are changing, and with so much information available online, a person can teach themselves anything, and more and more I’m seeing women self-producing records and going into sound technology, which is so inspiring! I’m doing my best to learn as I go, but it is a steep learning curve and I have a very long way to go, and I still rely on friends for advice and information. And I’m enjoying sharing the process along the way, mistakes and all, because it’s all part of the journey!

If you’d like to see more “warts-and-all” performances, I’m going live on Facebook every day this week at 1pm, and anything goes!