The Early Years As a child, I grew up listening to my grandfather play big band swing and jazz. He was a successful sax and clarinet player and used to practice in the basement at my grandparents' house in Columbus, Ohio. My grandfather was a major influence in my career in years to come. As a kid, I had always been a tomboy who loved to play with electronics, taking stereos apart and trying to put them back together again. That combined with my love of music, led me to a career in professional audio.

I started my professional career in audio engineering at age 19. After a brief stay at Kent State University, I decided to try the Art Institute of Pittsburgh after finding out that they had audio classes in their Music Video Business Program.

One day, a classmate at the Art Institute named Cat, introduced me to the House Sound Engineer at the major club for touring acts in Pittsburgh, Geoffrey Jones at Graffiti Showcase Cafe. I knew I was in the right place.

Geoffrey took me in under his wing during my internship at Graffiti. He enabled me to mix monitors for a number of touring bands as well as mix house from time to time during local shows. I learned more in the few months of my unpaid internship than I had during my expensive classes at the Art Institute, so after a year of schooling, I dropped out while continuing my education by working at the club every night.

Geoffrey realized I was serious about becoming a professional sound engineer and strongly urged me to continue my education. He introduced me to a school called Full Sail that held a strong reputation in the industry for being a fine school for audio engineering. I was reluctant at first, but after some investigation, I ended up in Florida less than a month later as a Recording Arts student at Full Sail.

Full Sail was an incredible learning experience. Combined with my real world experience at the club in Pittsburgh, I knew it wouldn't be easy once I graduated, but at least I had done everything possible to stack the cards in my favor. After graduation, I fulfilled my long-time dream of moving to Los Angeles and the struggle began.

It was April of 1993, and our country was suffering from recession. I had a number of sound companies laugh at me when I called them about work. However, with the few good contacts I did have, I worked my way into a series of one-off gigs and club gigs, thus solidifying my existence in Los Angeles as a sound engineer working in the trenches.

I was really poor, but doing what I loved. Rat Sound hooked me up with my first club gig, The Anti-Club in Hollywood. It was more like being a referee for gangs, punks, and skin heads in mass chaos. Dave and Kerrie told me that if I lasted 3 weeks there, I could deal with basically anything in the future as a sound engineer. I worked at The Anti-Club for over 3 months until landing a position as a sound/lighting tech/stage manager at The Troubadour. The Troubadour became like family to me.

Then came the massive earthquake of January 1994. Being from Ohio, I was pretty freaked. I noticed the trend of really good music coming out of the Pacific Northwest, so shortly thereafter, I landed a gig as House Sound Engineer in Seattle, Washington at a club called MOE, and made that home while I enjoyed mixing for some of the best talent the country had to offer at the time.

Taking Off

Seattle was the first stop in my many travels yet to come as I increased my knowledge and pay in my craft as a sound engineer.

My next major opportunity came out of Chicago, IL. I worked as a sound tech for all of the Grant Park Music Festival events the spring - summer of 1995. Chicago Sound hired me on as a seasonal employee. It was a great experience, but only guaranteed me work until the end of that summer.

Then, right on cue, an old friend of mine at Full Sail hooked me up with a tour at the end of my Chicago gig. I would then be the Monitor Engineer for The Ringling Brothers Circus Band. I also had the opportunity to mix some FOH while on tour at venues as big as The Fleet Center in Boston. Another amazing learning opportunity. I finished up the last leg of the tour and then decided that signing a two year contract to go out again with the new show was probably longer than I wanted to be out of civilian life at one time. Once you're on road with the Circus, it's non-stop. Not like most tours where you have the possibility of some kind of break here and there.

After a short break and some good reassociation with old friends, I came back to Los Angeles in December of 1995 and have dwelled here since. I struggled upon first arriving back in L.A. I worked for a variety of one-off type of gigs and took up shifts at The Troubadour again.

Discovery of Corporate Gigs

Toward the end of 1996, I was introduced to corporate entertainment gigs. I was hard for cash and found a gig working for an Audio Visual company at a major hotel in downtown Los Angeles who had just purchased a sizeable P.A. system consisting of KF650s, Crest Amps, and a Crest GT32 board. I found myself working more hotel AV type stuff than actually running sound though, and thoroughly disliked it. The in- house AV company was not able to sell the larger shows to clients, so the new P.A. mostly sat in storage.

I noticed a company named Audio Visual Headquarters was doing all of the big gigs at the hotel. So with some money saved in my bank account, I left the hotel gig and contacted Audio Visual Headquarters. That began my my full-time position as an Audio Engineer at their Los Angeles Staging Division and opened me up to a whole world of lucrative gigs in the corporate entertainment realm which I previously had no idea even existed. I held my full-time position with AVHQ for 2 years. I learned the art of mastering delaying speakers, working with satellite feeds, mix minus, phone hybrids, mixing for both live and records, as well as building racks, running sound for large panels of people wearing RF lavs along with Q and A mics in the audience. There is no room for slop in corporate gigs, so during my two years at AVHQ I was well trained and gained a wealth of experience as an engineer.

In 1999, the acquisition of AVHQ by Caribiner was destroying the company. There were layoffs as well as many people leaving on their own accord. Being the youngest and newest in the audio department, I knew it was only a matter of time before I would be laid off.

WebRadio

I had taken a major interest in the application of audio for the internet. I taught myself how to build websites and stream audio on the internet. I had also developed a website/organization for women in professional audio called, Women In The Audio Industry. I was recognized internationally for Women In The Audio Industry with the published article in Pro Sound News March 2000. The online article can be viewed by clicking here.

My background in audio coupled with my website landed me a job at WebRadio.com. I was hired as the Webcast Operations Manager, increasing my knowledge of internet protocols and telecommunications. My first big project was our WebRadio Launch Party. During NAB, we had arranged for a grand party at the new House of Blues in Vegas featuring Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, Missing Persons, and Berlin to be webcast world-wide live as well as archived for future viewing on the website. I worked with a team of computer technicians and software application writers from Israel along with the U.S. Webradio team on making the event a success. I brought my own Mackie 1202 along with a compressor for the audio feeds from FOH to the webcast feeding it into the computers. I also organized a 3 camera shoot for the event. At the point of webcast, all we had to do is adjust the gain a little, and our camera crew took care of the rest. It was one of the most exciting projects rushed full of adrenaline I had ever done. We were making history with this webcast, and it looked and sounded awesome!

Within four months, however, the WebRadio team had split. It turned into a crazy dot-com nightmare that could easily be portrayed in a television mini-series. I was one of the last remaining from our WebRadio team, but missed mixing audio and decided to part ways in August of 1999. I missed live sound and knew that was where I needed to be again.

Freelance World

Luckily I had left AVHQ on excellent terms and had made a variety of comrades who were freelancers during my AVHQ career. Therefore, I was able to get my feet on the ground immediately as a freelance engineer. I have been working for a variety of companies such as AVHQ, AV Images, AV Concepts, Rat Sound, Creative Technology Los Angeles, VIDEOCAM, AVW, Jim Henson Productions, and many others doing an array of events. Corporate to Broadcast to Entertainment gigs.

My most recent long-term gig was as the Mixing Engineer for a 26 episode television series for Jim Henson Productions. The production is called "Telling Stories with Tomie dePaola", and is currently being aired on the Hallmark Channel. To learn more about "Telling Stories with Tomie dePaola",

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