Yeah, it’s a cheesy headline, what can I tell ya? Like so many other choices we make in life, it seemed like a good idea at the time. So, it is actually official. FOH has made it through five years. Pretty amazing. I know there are a few folks out there who lost money on this particular bet.
I sit here well after midnight, after working to get this issue out on time and waiting for my lovely wife (and our intrepid production manager) to make her way home from the office I left four hours ago. And I am trying to think of where I was five years ago. I was living in another state. My now–senior-in-high-school daughter was just starting middle school. My wife was still in publishing doing pretty much what she does now, but for a different company. I was brand new to the world of big-league live event production, having come from about a decade on the MI side of the equation. I was two months out from gastric bypass surgery, had broken the 300 pound mark for the first time in longer than I could remember and had just starting to eat solid food again. I was mixing anklebiter shows and doing the occasional band gig.
A lot has changed. We lost one dog and gained two more. Gave away an iguana and got a macaw. Moved to Las Vegas (a year ahead of the company). Where walking a block used to be a chore, now I run several miles a few times a week and did a half-marathon late last year. I still mix the occasional gig (but they have gotten bigger), still play in a band that has the same name, but probably none of the same people. Still married. My daughter still thinks I’m a moron, and I am still under 190 lbs. Like I said — big changes.
What about the business? I remember five years ago, I drove from L.A. as far as Palm Springs to see someone actually touring with a new board from a company called DiGiCo. It was a digital console with touch screen -— unheard of just five years ago. I drove from L.A. to Fresno to see a midsized tour using a line array. The idea of digital system control was likely on a drawing board somewhere, but it had not yet transformed into a product you could buy and use on a gig. The thought of Digidesign — a recording company — making major inroads into the live world was laughed at. And I was one of the ones laughing.
Now it is hard to find even a midsized tour that does not use a digital console with touch-screen interfaces. Every soundco bigger than the guy down the street with a few speakers and a pickup truck has a line array. None of us are laughing about that recording company moving into live sound, and there are probably a dozen digital control and transport schemes, none of which seem to easily work together (my latest pet peeve, which I will be pounding on in a panel discussion at AES — this could be entertaining).
And we are no longer the new kid. In fact, we have been around long enough to have a couple of very big companies so pissed at something we wrote that they refuse to talk to us. Hey, there’s an accomplishment…
And more change and growth is coming. We have published our first book (an extension of Mark Amundson’s popular Theory and Practice columns). We continue to grow the Parnelli’s — the only awards in the live event industry aimed at people, not gear. We have greatly expanded our online presence and are starting to experiment with things like video components for gear reviews and show coverage. Our sister mag PLSN has started a series of educational webinars, and you will see a bunch of those from FOH aimed at the sound tribe very soon.
But some things don’t change. There may be a plethora of digital boards out there, but I am still more likely to see a Yamaha than anything else. People are still using point-and-shoot systems designed 20 years ago, and sometimes they even work well. But the biggest thing that never changes is that the people who I like and admire in the business are the ones in it because they love what they do. We may bitch and moan about the long hours and too much work, but few of us would give it up for a straight day gig. Not even me.
Thanks for a good run. Let’s see where we are when FOH celebrates a decade. It seems like a long time away, but when it gets here, it will seem like I was writing this yesterday.
