Sweetwater Internship Post 2 - 3/11/2021

Some interesting things have happened since my last internship post. A sweet lady named Tamika came in to record some R&B christian music early this week, and it was really groovy! She was trying to go for a modern pop-like vibe, so it was cool to be able to watch her work with the in-house producer to try and achieve her goal. In between all the sessions that went on this week, I had plenty of time to observe some mixing from a couple of Sweetwater Studios' engineers. I got a couple of tips by doing so. For example, I learned a trick where you duplicate your snare track, limit the duplicate, then reverse its polarity so that it cancels out the hi-hat once they're summed together. Another fun thing I learned is that Sweetwater Studios has a microphone which I can assume was a one-off made by Lauten Audio, because its serial number is "ST0000", it has "Built For Sweetwater" engraved in it, and the model is not noted on their website.

In other news, I experienced a pretty wild stage malfunction this week. One of our giant light fixtures on stage collapsed, and I was watching as it happened. Nobody was around it, thank goodness, but this was the first huge live performance-related malfunction that I've gotten to experience in person. Once it happened, I got to learn some ways to troubleshoot trusses, clamps and cargo straps as well as how to communicate with a team to fix a crucial and potentially dangerous issue.

To finish the week, I got some time to watch the rehearsal of the group that's going to be performing on the stage soon. It was nice to be able to watch the monitor engineer do his thing to make sure each musician had good mixes in their in-ears as they were playing.