Living Life as a Concert Audio Technician

Working as a concert audio tech means that you will be committed to making other people sound good when they play music at a concert. If you go to a concert and the band sounds off, if they seem flat or the instruments are too loud and you cannot hear the singer, it is because the concert audio tech is not doing his job properly. If you become a concert audio tech you will be the one who makes the band sound good. You will be the one who makes sure that the audience gets the quality performance that they paid for. It is a great responsibility, but also as rewarding as any career you can imagine.

As a concert audio tech you won’t be working in a retail store where every day you sell things that you restock the next day, and sell again – repeating the process into oblivion. You won’t be working with numbers on pages, all representing products you will never see in person. You won’t be reporting to multiple levels of supervisors in suits and ties all telling you to do conflicting things and expecting you to perform increasingly better every year. Life as a concert audio tech is about working with cables and wires, soundboards and mixers, amplifiers and speakers. You will work with artists and with sound to create results you hear immediately. There are no hypothetical situations, you will do the work and you will hear the reward.

Being a concert audio tech means that you work behind the scenes, rain or shine, with the thunderous screaming of thousands of fans, to make the band onstage sound as good as they possibly can. No matter what the musicians may think, they cannot play on stage and still hear what they sound like for their audience. So it is your job to be their surrogate ears and hear the music for them, adjusting pitch and volume, input and feedback, as necessary to create a live music experience for the audience that they will never forget. You are the one responsible for the quality of the music that the fans remember and tell their jealous friends about who couldn’t go to the show. You will work around live music, getting paid to be at concerts and work with musicians. Life as a concert audio tech means living for the love of high quality live music.