Parnelli NextGen honorees are live event personnel who haven’t been in the industry long, yet who are already making a mark. Meet another member of the NextGen Class of 2023. All are in the running for the “NextGen of the Year” Parnelli honor, which will be announced at the 22nd Parnelli Awards ceremony in Anaheim, CA on Jan. 26, 2024.
“Ironically, I don’t think my parents still understand exactly what I do, but they are still very supportive and very lovely.” Well, Sam Boone is, after all, a systems engineer, and there are professionals in the live event industry who don’t exactly understand exactly what they do, so it’s easy to be empathetic with her parents. Currently, Boone is bouncing between Danish rock band Volbeat and singer / songwriter Lee Brice in addition to picking up additional work, and in just a short period of time, she’s established herself as a consummate professional.
Carolina Roots
Boone grew up in Charlotte, NC, and recently moved back, making that her base. “It’s a hectic life for sure,” she says of the road, so when she can get off for a break, Charlotte is a good place to be. The home she grew up in was filled with music. She picked up the oboe and performed in the high school orchestra. Later, she learned guitar, started writing songs and spent a semester in college studying songwriting. “I realized I loved it so much I didn’t want to do it for a living, because I could end up hating it,” she says.
Since high school, she had been working with Apple Logic Pro music recording software and was intrigued by the possibilities. But the recording studio would not become her goal. “I grew up right in the deep South, where there’s a church every 10 feet,” Boone says. “So I’ve grown up mixing front of house in churches and learning how a console works and all the tech stuff on that side. I got really lucky from day one with good mentors.” The church, Fairview, was small, and there she cut her teeth on a Yamaha LS9. Before long, she was mixing for other churches with better, more sophisticated gear.
At 18, Boone graduated from Mitchell College with a two-year associate degree. Her foray into songwriting made her familiar with laptop recording programs, and she thought that going home and getting a taste of production work before switching majors would be a good idea. It was. She then nabbed an internship at Special Event Services headquarters in Winston-Salem, expressing gratitude to company founders Jim and Lynn Brammer. “I’m really lucky that Jim and [wife and partner] Lynn gave me a job in the audio department.” Boone started prepping gear, building racks and doing basic repairs. “They have this really cool rule that you have to learn everything in the shop before you go out,” she explains.
Then came the opportunity to load in a Joel Osteen event and fly the P.A. It must have gone well, because at the end of her 90-day internship, they offered her a job. It was especially fortunate and generous, because the pandemic was around the corner and SES kept her doing some work through that. “I won the lottery on that one,” she quips. Boone then worked a variety of jobs for SES, including doing those pandemic-inspired, large-scale drive-in concerts, which she found to be quite fun.
The Science of It
From the beginning, Boone was drawn to the science of system tech work, developing an appreciation for how sound moves in various locations — like a drive-in. “I thought that part was really interesting. The number of delays that are needed and then even going in the back and listening to how it all moves over an audience — it’s impressive.”
After that stint, she had moved over to Clair Global for a couple of months before going off on her own as a freelancer. Having proved her ability to do the work, she made some friends who became mentors. One was Dennie Miller, Volbeat’s FOH engineer. “Dennie is a brilliant front of house engineer, but also a phenomenal system engineer, and working with him on a rock tour was a great opportunity.”
She’s been with that group ever since. “They’ve been incredible to me. Two weeks into my first tour, we headlined Rock at the Ring and Rock in the Park festivals.” These festivals, taking place at Nuremberg, Germany’s Nürburgring race track and Zeppelinfeld, respectively, involved huge audio systems including up three rings of delays. She laughs, “I had this moment of ‘where the hell am I?’ and ‘what did I just sign up for?’”
Working with the band continues to be a great experience for her. “They play such a wide variety of venues on a single tour,” Boone explains. On some of these tours, the band wasn’t carrying P.A., “which I found much easier because I could focus on the systems and the speakers and learn how to properly system engineer. I didn’t have to talk to the riggers every morning and worry that the points were going in. I was able to ease into it.”
Boone got to figure out the systems and make sure everything works. The next week, though, they headlined at the Expo Plaza in Hanover, Germany, where she oversaw the hanging of the P.A. and went through properly tuning the system. “Then we started the really big festivals. I was really lucky to do so much in an incredibly condensed time frame, but I did get eased into it, and got to do it in a camp full of people who are just so supportive; they were all teaching me not only how to do the work but also how to tour.”
She is also grateful for the sheer variety of systems she’s worked on. “I’m generally brand-agnostic,” she declares. Boone has also gotten to hone her chops working with what she calls “P.A. salad,” noting that, in January 2023, “I did a corporate show that was half RCF and half Meyer Panther. Sometimes it gets crazy working with unusual speaker combinations.” Another benefit? It has made her learn everyone’s control software and work through interesting situations. “I’ll be measuring something, and if it looks funny, I have to figure out what’s making it look funny. To do that, you have to go into the software plus work with the house engineers, because at the end of the day, it’s their system. I’ve gained a lot of knowledge from those diverse situations.”
Once again, she returns to the theme of getting by with a little help from her friends. “I got really lucky and was taught how to read Smaart data by people who worked at Rational Acoustics. From day one, the thing that was kind of drilled into me was: if you can read this data and can read a transfer function, and can use the tools, you can make it work.”
This prepared her for the nightmares — systems without proper wiring, someone in the house unplugging the drive lines from the Galaxy after tuning, etc. “Things always happen, and I’ve learned to do the best you can with what you’ve got. Sometimes it can be frustrating, because you always want it to be better. But it’s been incredibly helpful for me to go, ‘Okay, what are the variables? What can I actually control?’ And if you come to peace with the things you can’t, for me, as a person, it’s made me far more patient.”
Boone says the biggest reward she gets in her day-to-day work is making the system work equally for every audience member. “I want the kids that paid $15 in the back to get the same show that those in the front get. So often the people that are most excited for the show are all the way up in the very back, and you know, they absolutely want that show. My job is to advocate for every person in the room. And that’s the part I love the most about this, getting to care about everybody.”
Boone is enjoying her career so far and looking forward to doing more of it, though maybe down the road she could end up in research and development at an audio company “I really love the tech side of this industry, so I’m very interested in helping develop what’s next for the tool set. I love my job; I will absolutely never be finished, because I will never ever be able to hit 100% of the goal. But hopefully, I’m really looking forward to develop some tech or just getting to play with something that’ll outlast me in this industry.”
