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Digitally Steerable Opinions

You don’t have to be in this business long to find out that if you get ten sound guys in a room, you will hear eleven different opinions. The old adage of, “there are no rules, just good sound” really is true. The temptation, then, is either to stick your fingers in your ears huming old Thin Lizzy tunes doing what you’ve always done. Or allow the endless web of information to digitally steer your opinions every which way. The answer, in true multiple-choice form, is none of the above. My hope is to occasionally leave you with more questions than answers, to leave you curious to try something in a different way. Take my thoughts and try them in your situation and find a solution that works for you. And it may not be mine.

You don’t have to be in this business long to find out that if you get ten sound guys in a room, you will hear eleven different opinions. The old adage of, “there are no rules, just good sound” really is true. The temptation, then, is either to stick your fingers in your ears huming old Thin Lizzy tunes doing what you’ve always done. Or allow the endless web of information to digitally steer your opinions every which way. The answer, in true multiple-choice form, is none of the above. My hope is to occasionally leave you with more questions than answers, to leave you curious to try something in a different way. Take my thoughts and try them in your situation and find a solution that works for you. And it may not be mine.

About six months ago I realized just how small this world is when a traveling band came to our church to perform on a Sunday morning. The sound guy they brought with them seemed to know me but it wasn’t until the end of the day when we were putting the lid on his console and loading it in the trailer that he realized how he knew me. He found out he had been avidly following me on Twitter. Here I was an average Joe and another sound guy I had never met was calling me a rock star. Huh?!

I used to live on the gravy train of not saying anything negative about product ‘xyz’, even if I thought it was crap. Then I started meeting people who actually owned product ‘xyz’ partially on my recommendation, and they too thought it was crap wondering why I had set it up on a Greek plinth of amazingness by saying good things about it. So, I realized that it was best to simply speak my mind. And in the past I have taken a lot of heat from bashing Genelec 1037’s, Alesis reverb units, electronic drum kits, the Whirlwind HotBox, and Wideline 10’s, just to name a few. But I can happily say that all those were my opinions. Sure there are some things I wish I had never written. I wish for instance I had never said that line arrays were a big fad that would never catch on.

Perhaps the biggest gamble I’m going to make is giving you my personal email address. That’s because while this blog is a tasty monologue of my experiences, thoughts and opinions (none of which you are required to agree with) I want a dialogue. I want to meet and learn from other people, real people. What I have learned is that there’s so much I don’t know that I don’t know. That is part of my disclaimer. My other disclaimer is in my use of grammar and punctuation. I am not a professional writer; I do this because I am passionate about audio. But what I do know seems to have put a blip on the ProSoundNetwork radar. Which is why I felt honored to be asked to write on my experiences and thoughts in the live sound and House of Worship audio topic.

Jeremy Blasongame is currently a part-time A3 for a concert production company and a Tech Arts Director at Sunridge Church. Over the past seven years, he has also worked in two major recording studios and is the author of Church Audio Blog. Feel free to email him at: [email protected] or find him on twitter at @JBsoundguy, or leave a comment.

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