The larger pro media arts & sciences schools have been steadily adding and expanding their course offerings, and many have taken the next logical step and are adding online courses, just as their more conventional college and university counterparts are doing. But how does live sound fare when it hits the broadband pipe?
Recording vs. Live Productions
Compared to how music recording has gone further into the desktop paradigm over the last decade, live sound has been applied to ever-larger venues, giving even behemoths like the New Meadowlands Stadium in New Jersey a hi-fi experience. The former lends itself well to online teaching – an instructor in New York can listen to and guide 20 students from Maine to Mississippi overdubbing and mixing in their homes and plugged into MacBook Pro laptops running Pro Tools. The latter, however, is a trickier proposition. Beyond the basics of electronics and acoustics, can you deliver a useful learning experience about live sound, with all of its spatial and acoustical nuances and logistical complexity, without actually being there?
A couple of schools seem to think so. SAE Institute's online education initiative recently expanded with its first two online live sound courses: Live Sound Engineering 101: Front of House Mixing and 102: Monitor Mixing. They are four-week courses whose curricula include PA tuning, gain structure, mixing, dynamics and EQ.
The courses are taught by Ric Wallace, an affable live sound veteran in Athens, GA, where he he's been the technical director at the Georgia Theatre for the past 16 years. The online courses use Moodle, an interactive, open source course virtual learning management system (LMS) that can scale from hundreds or thousands of students at a time to the four that Wallace says are currently enrolled in his two live sound classes. Wallace meets with students once a week in a live chat room, lectures, discusses the classwork and fields questions. He also uses online forums for non-real-time dialogs. The textbook for both courses is the venerable Yamaha Sound Reference Handbook.
Virtual Limitations
Wallace has been teaching live sound to students at SAE's Atlanta campus for a couple of years, where he says FOH and monitor mixing account for barely two weeks out of the school's music recording arts curriculum's nine-month length. He adapted the syllabus he uses there for the online version, which he says is more focused since it's no longer such a small part of the larger education agenda. Nonetheless, Wallace acknowledges that an online live sound curriculum can't realistically go much beyond the 101/102 entry level. "Live sound is more complex than can be taught in a virtual environment, like music recording can," he says. "You can take advanced courses in recording arts online and you can take them pretty deeply, because ultimately the teacher and the student are all working from a software platform. But you can't take that as far with live sound courses. We can teach the science, the fundamentals, online, but to learn about being in a room and how gain structure interacts with acoustical environment, that can't be done anywhere else but in a room."
Bill Gibson, an educator, music pastor and technical director for a large contemporary music-oriented church in the Seattle area, also has taught a 12-week-long Live Sound: Mixing and Recording online course to 20 students or less at Berklee College of Music. The course description is fairly generic – "This course explores the acoustical, musical, and technical aspects of the live performance, in order to learn how to present the best possible sound to the audience" – and Gibson also feels that there are enough similarities between studio and live mixing that lessons can be relatively equally applied. (A position some FOH mixers might take issue with.)
The Challenge of Consistency
However, while there is plenty of data to back up his assertion that online education allows teachers to give each student more personalized attention and deal with students progressing at different rates, it also often eliminates a hallmark of in-class learning: situational consistency. For instance, Gibson says that he has his students set up systems at home and evaluate the sound of the same materials in different acoustical spaces. But that means that each of 20 students could potentially be listening to disparate systems in disparate environments, even though the program material may be the same. Gibson responds: "If it were a science project with a goal for quantifiable evaluation of acoustic personality, there would be a problem. But I want these students to learn the importance of listening… I want them to take the same system, and I don't really care what it is, turn it up and listen to the effect of the acoustical environment. Then I want them to do that again in a different environment and tell me what they heard. And then I want them to do it again. There's no right or wrong answer and I tell them that. I just want them to listen. Over the span of the course, it's amazing how much better their work sounds! Because they're listening. A technical course that would teach them acoustic, electronics, system design, circuit design, and so on would be nice but it's just not going to fit into 11 weeks for folks who have lives and jobs."
Never Say Never
Not every school agrees that live sound is good candidate for the online teaching environment yet. Dana Roun, director of audio programs at Full Sail University, says the school has does not presently instruct live production online. "It's an area to be very careful to be sure in my opinion, since actually having the gear and venue is important… Do you say, ‘Imagine you are in a concert hall and imagine the band is a five-piece metal band and you have a giant FOH rig. Okay, push your laptop key and pretend you hear the crowd roar?' I don't think so."
That said, Roun reveals Full Sail is contemplating an online version of some of their live production courses, but, he adds, "It may still be months or a year away from reality. We have a great LMS… so it's all about content and being able to really deliver to the ‘in the field' users, in my opinion. You need to be able to apply all that theory." He pauses. "Do I believe you can teach live concert touring and engineering online? Well, one thing I've learned is never say ‘It can't be done.'"
That Ric Wallace understands that live sound education can only be taken so far explains his next venture: when it reopens next June after a lengthy renovation, the Georgia Theatre in Athens will also be home to the Production Institute, his 36-week hands-on boot camp for aspiring mixers and other live production skills. "It'll focus on audio but teach a bit of it all, using lectures and textbooks," as well as having students "shadow" theater technicians to learn by watching, says Wallace, who will still continue his online work with SAE.
The School of Hard Knocks
I asked a few friends about the idea of teaching live sound online. Brett "Scoop" Blandon, now out with the red-hot Lady Antebellum, readily agrees that core fundamentals can be taught on the Internet. But he wonders if a stand-alone entry-level course really gives a prospective FOH mixer an accurate picture of what's out there. "Do you want to be a systems tech or a road mixer? Do you want to make it all work by yourself of just mix the show and then head back to the bus?" he asks. "In my experience, the school of hard knocks is paramount. You learn what 250 Hertz feels like by standing in front of a wedge – you feel how it resonates through your body."
The preference for empiricism is common to road dogs and studio rats alike, most of whom grew up when consoles had just one layer and recording studios still made money. But the increasing complexity of live sound production and the fact that live performance continues to emerge as the entertainment industry's biggest money maker argues that formal education will be more and more necessary to create an informed entry-level cadre of workers to run it. And it's equally obvious that that live sound learning proposition is going to have to migrate to some extent online. This might be a good time to inject some virtual reality into the conversation. After all, isn't that was programs like EASE are? Imagine Tron – now add a Midas XL8 and a JBL VerRec line array. It's showtime – in your mind.
