Live Sound / Live Music
Course 16: Working with Your Environment

When preparing for a live show, the venue itself is a huge variable. Big or small, indoor or outdoor, available gear or not, and the overall acoustics all come into play. Obviously, doing research on your venue is a must, but once you know what you’re dealing with, you need to know how to adapt.

You want to make sure that the audience can hear everything that’s happening onstage without having to strain, but you also don’t want the music to be so loud that it overpowers the performers’ voices. In this course, you’ll learn about the different waves of an enclosed space and how to thwart unwanted echoes or reverbs.

Many different kinds of waves are created in an enclosed space with four walls, a ceiling, and a floor. Not all of the waves created are bad, so you don’t necessarily need to remove them. But others can make the music sound disjointed–that’s why many (if not all) venues hang curtains, soundproof walls, and take other steps to keep the sound as solid as possible.

Learn the differences between absorption, deflection, and diffusion to work with standing waves, axial waves, tangential waves, oblique waves, and flutter echoes. You’ll see where these can cause issues and when there isn’t as much to be worried about. This course finishes with a mixing assignment, quiz, blog post, and prep for the next course.