Julius Grafton charts returning to mixing live sound after forty years had passed.
‘Groovy, baby’, was on my mind when – like Austin Powers – I was de-frosted and reactivated. I took some bookings as a walk-in audio engineer referred by mates and pondered how it would be.
Lockdown #2 in Sydney scuttled that. Then as we all watched Netflix and drank too much, I started hearing people were quitting the live sound biz as they got other work. Around September I figured I should step up, so I started to investigate buying a PA system.
Julius-AV had been running since the pandemic in soft launch. I’d chased school work, and when I did some realised most of it was low paid. You’d go to ‘fix’ a problem that was simple and could not really bill much for it.
I came full circle – my first production rig came together in 1981 and I built that into Graftons Sound & Lighting, then Australian Monitor. After I sold out in 1989, I did some random mixing gigs through the ’90s and buried myself in publishing CX Magazine and running a college where we did Diploma courses in Technical Production, Theatre and Events.
These all-consuming jobs meant I had to stay ‘current’ with technology, but I wasn’t actually working behind an audio console.
Mid-November I had a system! I bought parts from many vendors and quickly wised up with who is selling what and how. These days every physical store has a web store, and many web stores don’t have a shop front.
The amount of promotional spend blew my mind – each and every device I searched for online showed three or four online stores first, they must be investing enormously with Google to get positioned. Less mainstream devices revealed a second tier of online stores, and eventually, I think I spent money with as many as a dozen.
Not all are equal, I now know what I didn’t know before, but hey, isn’t that how we learn?
Gig #1 was in-house, my mate Jimmy Den Ouden came to make sure I could navigate the T112 iLive desk. Which I did. Then I did a corporate gig as an operator on a Ui24 Soundcraft. Finally, I hired a van and loaded my PA and basic lighting rig for a pub gig with a band who probably figured I’d done it all before.
Which I had. But not for decades!
It’s the same only different. These days the musicians turn up with incredibly valuable, sometimes rare equipment, and even the bass players have pedalboards. Backing tracks are very common, and drum add-ons like Yamaha’s ‘Electronic Acoustic Drum Module’ are amazing.
I have half a tonne of PA compared to three times as much in the old days, which is four times more powerful in wattage, using half the mains. My LED lights run cool and never need replacement globes or colour gels.
The mics and stands are the same. The speakers are processed, weigh less, and sound better. I have ‘classic’ JBL wedges because they sound better for vocals.
All my rookie mistakes re-visited me in my first month, in which I did fifteen gigs.
The money isn’t great, I seem to average $42.50 an hour when everything is added up. But I’m loving being back in live sound.
