What a wonderful job! You get to know the band, you have dinner with the stars, you get groupies (well, the left-overs), backstage access all-areas, you can play with the most expensive pieces of gear, you always get the best spots in the audience, you don't have to wait in the line to pee, you can talk about speakers and compressors all day and you can wear t-shirts like "fuck off, I'm mixing".

Human beings like to communicate their feelings through music. They use instruments for that. By slapping, plucking, blowing, hitting, or pushing things, noises are made. We like those noises because they represent a certain emotion. The problem is that in history, people began to hit, pluck and blow all those instruments together. They even found out that you can create harmony with them. As long as you stay in tune, and in time, it can sound pretty good. In order to communicate these harmonies to a larger crowd, they invented microphones, mixing consoles, processors, amplifiers and speakers. That's where the soundmen are entering the arena.

All that junk has to be set up and tuned by someone who knows what he's doing. That requires a lot of knowledge on electronics, physics, mathematics and how-to-lift-heavy-shit-without-screwing-your-back. A lot of science, but... as soon as the band starts playing, it's all about music.

Music is, like mentioned before, created by human beings, plucking, hitting and blowing things. The performers all float on the same musical energy which resonates on the stage. That energy can be felt by the audience, only if it is communicated in the right way. That's the sound engineer's job. He or she has to feel the energy that comes from the stage and translate that into science. Not just amplifying sound. Fuck sound. Music is what we want to hear. Energy is what we want to feel.

Am I making any point yet?

Well. Ok. I'm a FOH engineer, and I like music. Call me if you make music and need someone to turn knobs in order to recreate your precious emotions, only louder. Or call me if you live near Westerpark and like throwing some frisbee.