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Radiohead

Diary of an audio engineer

What a fantastic find sent in to us by radiocoocooo. Graham, Radiohead’s audio engineer is keeping a daily blog on his MySpace about Radiohead’s tour rehearsals. He only has two posts so far, but it looks promising.

Today we had an old songs day! The band have decided that everyday we will cover 10 old songs first, Ive been supplied with CDs with more than 40 songs they propose to perform on this tour and then with the remaining time do some work on their new material. So in some ways it was much easier for me, everything suddenly became much more relative. As a monitor engineer I always have to deal with the artists parameters, for example, today they all wanted to use their wedge mixes instead of in ears, which was good because on stage they use a combination of the two. So again it was a mad mix day, with a great result!
Jonny made us all stop work for a while with his crazy samples, in fact we had to stop to wipe our tears from our eyes, how can you possibly turn a voice into the sound of ducks quacking! The boys are in fantastic form, absolutely dieing to get back doing live shows; the overall atmosphere has been great until something goes badly wrong. Technology has the great ability to stop doing what it is supposed to. Thom has a new set of in ear moulds, only used for 2 days, suddenly one side stops working, a hold up while for me to change the cable, and panic phone calls to the USA to get more supplies. So we finish the, again successful rehearsal, the boys go home and there is another few hours work getting everything ready for thier next appearance tomorrow. Id still rather do this than have a proper job any day!

Read more here.

By Jonathan

New York, NY