What are the best ways to train and develop your audio team for live events?

Understanding the unique demands and tasks inherent with each role on your team allows you to build a risk management strategy that can be executed with minimal interruption. When issues arise during a live event don't expect your lead audio engineer to solve a problem while managing a full active show and still fix things. Instead, build a team that can collaboratively select the best person and solution for the issue. (They can all quickly talk about it, figure out who best can fix it, and then work as a team to implement a fix). This comes through quality communication, empowerment of each team member, positive leadership and a culture that embraces the value every single person brings to the table.

In audio, redundancy is your friend. I always have backups for my backups. If something fails, there's something in place to cover you until the failed part of the chain is mended.

With any system, its ability to work is based on an understanding of the fundamental components and how the components are expected to function or work together. This is true from server and datacenter systems to audio/visual systems. This often means experts on the disparate systems, which is why engineers are so valuable. Specific to audio, it is important to understand signal flow and have the capability to ‘sniff’ signals. It is always vital to have a listening box. This is comparable to a QBOX. One option is a headphone amp by Sound Devices. It is also useful to have a single channel preamp with phantom power capability to check microphone level.

During live events anything could go wrong. Even after constant sound checks and endless rehearsals, it is important to know your equipments from A to Z which helps during the troubleshooting. Nowadays audio equipment are complex than ever before. Users should have basic knowledge of digital audio as well as AoIP if using digital console. Creating redundancy by having backup can help lower event failures but can add extra burden for costs and logistics and also users need to setup correctly in order to work simultaneously.

In my experience, having a backup plan is always mandatory, especially if you do live events. I recomand a test one week before the event and in the morning of the event. Have a stand by host who can come up on stage if anything happens.

Communication is a superpower. Train the team on what to look for and how to clearly share what they are seeing. For instance it's not enough to say sound isn't good. What about it isn't good? Is there a lot of feedback? Is one sector a dead zone? Is it a hum in the system? It is paramount to clearly state what's not going well. I worked with a team that used a combination of words and predetermined hand signals very effectively. This avoided misunderstanding each other when the volume was above talking volume

Team building Having everybody know what are the actual duties not to step on others jobs Respect supervisor Think of it as a basketball team Then at the end wrap up party

As a team, have a back up plan and a back up for the back up. I remember one time we had an awards gala and flash drive with the presentation for the chief judge had a virulent virus that crashed three computers. We could complete the event because our audio partner had the two laptops we requested, a back up one and their boss had his MacBook on site. They also had the knowledge to reboot, format and reconfigure the machines. They simply alerted the whole team of the happenings and we reorganized the program to accommodate the time needed to get back on track.