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Cause aint nobody got time for Amateur's
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You're listening to locally produced programming created in
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KUNV Studios on public radio. KUNV 91.5. The content of this program does not reflect the views or opinions of 91.5 Jazz and More, the University of Nevada Las Vegas, or the Board of Regents of the Nevada System
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of Higher Education. This is
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talking with the pros. Like, professionals. This is Talking With The Pros with me, Jess Speight. I speak to the professionals in the world of audio to gain an insight into what it takes to become a pro. Talking With The Pros. Alright, today we have Anthony Ard. Hey, Anthony. Thank you for being here.
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Of course. Thank you for having me.
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Of course. Oh, man, this is a long time coming. You were like on the top of my list to be interviewed with Talking With The Pros because let's face it, you are a professional. For those who don't know you, go ahead and tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, and how you got into
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audio. I started playing piano in middle school and that eventually led to me being on the band for this church I went to. By the time I was 17, I was looking around for work. I asked these people at the church if there was any positions available, looking for whatever. Maybe they'll put me on custodial or something, or helping out around. But they put me with the sound guy there, and that was just an amazing opportunity. With piano, I feel great about doing it because it lets me come into a support position for other people who like are singing or like you more of like the face of things like and Like I want to support them and help them do their thing and I wanted you not interrupt I want to facilitate that kind of stuff. So with audio, I feel like it's a similar position I'm supporting like these people on stage, you know, I want them to Like have their show. I want them to sound good, you know, and not like I'm in between that. So yeah, so in high school I got this job with the audio person there and started learning a bit. I loved it because of that purpose of the job. And, you know, kind of since that point I just started trying to learn more about that. You know, like studying on my own, just asking a lot of questions. I was always asking questions. If someone was from another place and they did audio, I would always try and watch and see what they're doing and try to come up with, hopefully not stupid questions, but just trying to figure out how I could keep on doing this because I love doing it. I want to support the people out there, you know, and I'm happy, I'm happy where I'm at with that work right now.
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So how long ago was that? I know you said high school, but how many years now has that been?
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Like 32 years.
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Stop it.
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Exactly.
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No, no, let's see.
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I was 17.
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Wow.
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Like, like nine years ago. So, yeah, so about that length of time I've been working at it, you know.
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So how long have you been playing the piano?
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A bit longer. I started playing piano, I believe like 11 or 12. It was in middle school and like I didn't really like set out to learn piano. It's just that the course that was offered at my middle school, for your elective, you could either choose having a health class for your elective class or having piano. I'm just like, I don't care about health. I'm not going to learn. I'll just try piano or something.
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And then you went into the piano class and they're like, oh, so for health reasons.
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Yeah.
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And you're like, oh wait, what class am I in?
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No, I enjoy hand washing. I wash my hands.
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Oh, good, good. I'm so glad to hear that.
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Thank you.
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Oh, I never doubted you for a second.
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Oh, good.
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Oh, yeah.
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And now you're venturing into audio and you said you were asking a lot of questions and doing a lot of studying on your own. So would you say that you would take time to like read up on the subject?
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Oh, yes, definitely. I like reading, I guess I like reading manuals just to figure out how something works. Especially when you have the product in front of you and you kind of have free reign to make use of it. I love just reading, these people made this product. I want to see what they had in mind, what I could do with it, and then after, I got those fundamentals, and I'll figure out the rest later. But I want to see how this is intended to be used. So I enjoy reading in that capacity.
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I like reading.
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And I mean, you can learn a lot, even though the field is probably a lot of hands-on and just kind of like experience on the equipment. But like you said, there's valuable information when you hit the books on that subject. You also went to UNLV, right? And you had a double major, is that correct?
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Uh, sort of. I was in two colleges. My major was entertainment technology and design. That was like a marriage between the fine arts and the engineering colleges. And so, my particular track, like it did have some mathematics, but not as much as entertainment engineering and design, which is more focused on math and physics and even more technical stuff. I'm not bat capable. Math is quite difficult for me. So I took the technology and design, had a little bit more fine arts. And I'd say overall it was an okay journey. I wish I'd realized sooner that I could really make of it what I want to make of it. Choosing courses, being kind of aggressive in that aspect, course selection, and telling my advisors or my program head what I want to do. Because when I did that later on, it was awesome. I got to take some courses with some audio people here.
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I just loved it.
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What was that like, taking audio classes
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with people here at UNLV? Sometimes, with other students,
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it was a little bit frustrating because they were taking it for something else like some other music major. There has been a couple people that I met that like really want to do audio and they're throwing themselves into a class to try and better themselves and it's always really fun working learning alongside people like that. And also I think there's some really cool guys here teaching, you know in that audio class? There's so many things, so many courses
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and classes. What were the kind of like the highlights of that class in particular?
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I was working with that teacher that's over there. We worked with Chuck, Chuck Foley, really good man and just easy to learn from I think because he likes explaining and I think he loves what he does and that really helps. When people ask me questions about audio, like where I'm at right now, or doing stage work, I love to tell them about it because I love what I do.
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So you got to learn on some audio equipment here at the university?
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Definitely best practices. meter on stage and keeping things in a proper workflow, proper signal flow. That's so important.
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Yeah, definitely.
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To be efficient.
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Yeah.
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It's just like, you can learn so much and do all these things and try and get complicated, but really it's all about the source and capturing it in the most simple, effective way.
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Kind of a throwback to what you were saying, being the support for the band and just making sure, like you say, you have a great workflow so that things run smoothly and on time. Like, that's a big part of production, making sure things are on time and we're not dragging, and so that the event can take place on the dot. That's really great. Like, you got a really rounded experience here at UNLV, a lot of different experiences in terms of understanding where your love lied. So with that, what was the moment that you knew you had a love of audio?
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Pretty early on. I think I touched on it a little bit. Like oh, this is similar to piano. I can support people on stage. You're mixing like a band and there's just like a moment you know, maybe Maybe not everyone in the crowd is connecting, but you could get like a feeling in the air That's I think one of the many joys of this type of work, you know experiencing Like something in the now like those people they could play that thing really well and it sounds cool and we're all grooving to it whatever and we're
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just sharing this moment right now. Yeah the shared experience of the appreciation of the sound that's coming out from the instruments and you're helping support that and adding those flares and adding those reverbs and adding the delays and all those little things and the sparkles that are happening that people can just connect with. It's a great moment, I agree, to see people making a connection. That's all through audio. This is like a sound experience. This is part of their senses that, you know, we take for granted, but it means so much and it's so vital and important. That's fun.
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It's so fun.
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And also, you were saying you do keyboard and you play piano. So take me back to what you're doing now with that. I know you have that still going on, right?
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Oh, piano?
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Yeah. Yeah. I have my childhood piano at my place where I live now, and it's lovely because I could just play music with my wife and play songs that we've known for a long time, play songs that we love. It's a huge, huge thing to me. I love it. I love using what I could do in that capacity. Sometimes we try, well most of the times we try and get our toddler to fall asleep. So we'll sing and play piano a little bit. Hasn't been
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successful lately but... So you're a singer? No. No, my wife sings. Okay. I support her singing. That's so cute. That's just the joy that you can you can take it from you were just learning it, now you're sharing it with your own child. Yeah. That's awesome.
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And...
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I was going to say also, I did a little bit of recording for our friend Jaden Monto, Monto the Rookie. Right. I tracked some piano for him and that's a source of joy with it too, just recording. It's like little simple parts, just send it off.
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You know how to record audio too, and like produce songs.
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I don't know about producing songs. I don't feel very comfortable producing songs. I feel like I can add some useful texture to a song, what I could do with piano, but beyond that, I'll leave that to the professionals
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that are not me.
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No doubt you elevate it, I'm sure.
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So as an audio engineer professional.
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Thank you.
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Yeah. Tell me about what your current job in this field.
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Yeah. So I'm an audio engineer at the Fremont Street Experience. It's like an outdoor venue. Lots of bars there, lots of outdoor entertainment. And at this place, there's three stages. And basically every night of the week, there's a band booked at each of these stages and also some other accompanying acts like DJs. And so I'm part of a team that helps facilitate these events as well as helping put on big concerts that we have during the summertime. Like Fremont, they put on a free summer series and it's just been so much fun working on those events. Like we'll get there at 10 or 11 a.m. Whoever's coming in, they might have a truck or you know there might be a truck from a local company providing backline. We'll get set up and I've been you know happy to provide help with the RF out there and I mean I feel like the field of RF radio frequencies and like doing that I like it a lot because it's very technical it's kind of like a like a black and white thing, like either it works or it doesn't, you know, and the show is like depending on it. And so I feel very happy fulfilling that position and putting in time like of my own to make sure I can do that job as well as I can.
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So break down RF for us.
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Musicians don't like to be tied down by microphone cables or even wedges on stage. Wedges are heavy, they provide sound reinforcement to the musicians that need to hear what they're doing. So nowadays, often they'll be wearing these in-ear packs. It's like a little pack that you wear on your belt. You have some really good headphones or earbuds plugged in, and you can hear how you're performing and make sure that you're in tune with the rest of the band or whatever other information you need to know. And so to accomplish this we have to transmit over the air and so you're making sure that that that transmission is rock-solid is so important because these people on stage, in front of all these people, they're under a lot of pressure to put on a show. They've been paid a lot of money, a lot of people worked really hard to put everything together, and they just need to deliver and be able to hear themselves, hear each other, to deliver well, because that's their job. They've got to do it. It has to be done, and they need to be supported with that. So, you know, those little packs will be wireless and often microphones, they'll be wireless microphones and that lets them run around and be themselves everywhere on stage. Express themselves on stage. Yeah, even out in the audience too. Oh really? Yeah, we had a Switchfoot last month and he had a wireless mic, he had wireless ears, ran out into the crowd, which at Fremont is kind of wild, you know, it's a scary place down there sometimes. And, you know, he was like, like dressed up too, like he had a heavier jacket on or quarter wire or whatever. That man was so sweaty. Like the green room after that show, I've never been in a sweatier room. Oh man. Yeah, it was musky. Oh man. But he got out there and connected with
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people. Yeah, that's the name of the game. With audio, it's just another form of connecting and being musicians, I know making that connection with the crowd is important, just so that everybody's engaged in the experience and they have a great takeaway. Your past experiences with audio, I know you've done an internship over a summer period. What was that job like for you?
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Yeah, so this summer theater job that I had, it was last year. It was at a lovely state park, Spring Mountain Ranch, right outside of Las Vegas. It was a really fun experience because of just being around other people around my age, especially that first show that we had. We had Mary Poppins, and a lot of the cast were the same age as me. And it was really nice just being in a community of people, doing something, putting on a good show. Also, the woman who had hired me, my boss there, she was a really great woman. She was excellent at teaching. She knew her stuff and she's also a technical book learning kind of person. So it was nice to see someone like that in a leading position and really doing a good job of directing us and putting us in places where we could learn. At that job, I had a lot of experience with RF at the church that I was at, and so I got to carry on that kind of work out there, which it was a nice kind of practice out there because there's not much noise out there, radio noise out there, and so it kind of made it simpler in a few ways, and it was only microphones that we were handling. So there wasn't like microphones, ear monitors, just the radio traffic of being like in a valley out in the city here. So that was a really fun experience and the weather was nice. It was good hard
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work out there. And and outdoor so... Yes. Audio, you know, reacts different outdoors
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and temperatures and so you had that to deal with as well. Yes, we had some weather events, you know, cancel some shows, some lightning, threat of lightning.
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A threat?
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The threat? Well, I mean, yeah.
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He's out here.
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He's gonna kill you.
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Yeah.
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Oh no. Lightning don't care. It'll just boom.
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Oh man, with the equipment, right?
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Yeah, so whenever lightning would be within, I believe, five to ten miles, we would just have to pack up for I think for the night. I think it only happened maybe once with lightning and a couple other times we just got rained out.
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And is this equipment waterproof at all? Are we doing that for the audience or for the equipment?
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For the equipment it was mainly, I mean probably lighting was at risk, definitely. People sitting outside in the rain, probably unbearable. And the microphones, these little microphone elements just being bombarded by raindrops would not be good. I mean, these microphones are already assaulted by sweat from these actors. Salty, nasty sweat by these crazy actor people.
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These crazy people.
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Yeah, but besides that, I think a lot of the equipment is pretty resilient. We had some speakers, like, on delay towers out there. Like, powered speakers on poles with, like, some nylon covering on them. And I remember after a week of rain or something, we go back and we're like, the speaker's not working. And like, I couldn't figure it out. And my supervisor, he came out and he, he tipped the speaker. Like it was up there. He tilted it down downwards. All this water like pours out. He does it both ways. So all the water comes out of the and leaves it up there, I think, kind of open to dry off. And it was fine. Wow. Okay. Which, to me, I'm just like, okay, I didn't know. This is how we roll out here, you know. You could just fill a box with water, tip it all out, and be okay.
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And it's better now. Yeah, I like those speaker jackets, if anybody's ever seen those. They're cute. They're like a little cozy. Yeah, these ones have taken a lot of stuff out. Because that's where they live, right? You don't bring them back in?
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Not for the whole summer. They stay out there for the whole summer. Which the daytime is brutal, but at night it was always beautiful weather. That was a huge positive for that.
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Yeah, that's great. That's great. I've got to go out there. I know I never got a chance to go out there. I had car problems. I'm sorry. No, it's okay. Take a bike next time.
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Take a bike. I know, right? Get one of those donkeys.
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Oh, man.
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Ride one of those donkeys, yeah?
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Yeah, you heard those creatures, too. They got busy out there. They had their own act. Oh, yeah, yeah. They didn't care if people were out there.
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That's hilarious.
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So when we're talking about the future of audio, what is it like for you as an audio professional seeing everything that's going on, but also taking the time to be like, okay, what do I want to do in the future in this field? I think I kind of want to do the same things I'm doing now.
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I really love what I'm doing. I love being part of live music. I love being able to use that technical side to make sure that what's happening happens. And in the future, I just hope that there's more of these festivals that we see, like the Life is Beautiful Festival here in Las Vegas. I think it is really beautiful because of like all the culture, you know, people are coming out to see all these different bands Yeah, putting on a really good show and having like good food good art everywhere. I think that's such a beautiful thing and I think I'd like to see a lot of those a lot more of those in the future You know, I'd love to be on a crew that facilitates that
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Yeah, you said you want to be on a crew with that in terms of Concerts. Do you see yourself like in one venue multiple venues or? Maybe like going on tour with a band. I'm open to whatever I like where I'm at right now
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I can support my family and have a solid position and You know just still have a lot of fun out there the crew where I'm at is really good, too. It's just been fun so far. I've been there for a year already and wow
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That's full. Bye. Yeah, everything that you're saying about how audio affects not only you know from the technical point, but just reaching the the audience and just using the skills that you've learned in audio to help make that happen and I Know everybody's talking about the sphere. I mean it puts on a show every night What are your thoughts about? The audio in terms of like all this new technology that's coming out What's what's your take and what's something that's exciting for you? I think it's cool. I'm just
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You know, I'd rather go somewhere where there's just something simpler.
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And also, you have these custom in-ears headphones, like a professional over here.
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I'm fancy, yeah. I got the UA-18s at my work. My boss suggested that I get these, and I did. I'm pretty grateful for that.
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And that helps you perform just at a higher level in your field?
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Yeah, yeah. These earbuds, they're famous for being flat. And so, I mean, what I was using before, I was kind of skewed in what I thought, you know, a flat mix should be. So I trusted this other pair of headphones, and it just turns out that it was more of a consumer product with some EQ on it or something. Having these earbuds helped me figure out what's the truth of a mix that's being put out there. It really helps me replicate that when I'm going to go mix in the house or something. I'm glad. Being technical, I'm not very confident either, so it'll take a while for me to do something or I won't be sure of myself. I'll read into it a lot and I'll pick up some other methods for doing things. Sometimes that just gets in the way of just keeping it simple, like just make the band louder, put an effect or two on it, and just let them speak for themselves. I was having trouble earlier this year just being, trying to be simple and letting the band shine. I was having trouble doing that because I just got so carried away with trying to be fancy, I guess. Reading a lot, oh, this could do this, this could do that. I got carried away with it. Having these earbuds really help me get back in tune with what needs to be done. Just make the band louder. They're good enough. This job is simple, you know, and there's a lot of tools that I have in my work that can get it done so well. And so it's been a good time there. I've learned so much, and I'm just happy to do what I do.
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That's, that's what you want to know, like the tools and out of your the tools available to you to help you, you know, elevate your workflow. Yes. And I'm sure these earbuds also very fancy, by the way, protect you to as well, because in audio, you need your ears and the most valuable thing.
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It is so loud. It is so loud. Yeah. My goodness, you know, because like where I'm at, at Fremont, there's a lot of bars out there, so there's a lot of drunk people. If you're running a show for drunk people, their senses are dulled, you know, so you got to like hit them or at least, you know, get them to think that they need a drink or
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something. Sure. And then the natural sound pollution already happening near Closter Street, you're close to entrances to other casinos and just the foot traffic close to other stages to right to to the stages down there are
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Not too far. Yeah. Yeah And you have the sides the sideshows happening to
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Down the circle people the hall. Yeah This is a sideshow. Literally. A sideshow. Yes. You got that. Well, Anthony, I want you to be safe and keep on mixing for us. I just appreciate you and all of the knowledge that you have and I can't wait to hear more from you and I just love to see your journey in audio. Definitely want to say that you've been an inspiration to me. So thank you for just doing you and being you and help continue to share your gift with others. Thank you. I wish the same for you. Thank you, Anthony, again. Audio engineer professional. Like a pro.
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Like a pro. Yeah, when I started working at this new job, I got a key card. It says Audio Engineer on it. I'm like, whoa, I've made it. Like, this is it.
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That's what we all strive for. Like a professional Anthony Ard sound engineer. Go check him out at Fremont Experience pretty much any night. Yeah, Tuesday through Saturday. Yeah. We'll check that summer series. It's free.
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Yeah, a lot of good shows coming up. Taking Back Sunday, Young The Giant.
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They need to feature you on their Instagram. Every time I'm watching their live or seeing a post, I'm like, where's Anthony?
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No, no, no, I've been in a few of those videos. My wife has sent me them. Oh, okay. Like, I see you, I'm like, I'm just standing there hoping all this wireless stuff is working A-OK.
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Oh, and speaking of, you have that iPad too, right?
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Yeah, I get to play Minecraft during my job, yeah, it's great.
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I get to be an iPad kid. You get to be an iPad kid, out there on Fremont, mixing in front of a house. I just wonder, like, what are the counters like when you're holding that? Like, do you have to hold on for dear life? Is there a strap involved so that nobody comes in and takes it?
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No, yeah, no, it's chained to my hand. No, no, there's like a handle I put my hand through and I just kinda, I usually just keep two hands on it and I try to be cognizant of what's happening around me because it's Fremont and there's crazy people down there and there's drunk tourists.
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It do be crazy.
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Drunk locals, just drunk people. I like being out there, I like being in front of the system and just hearing it, especially at our 3rd Street stage. They have a pretty new PA there and it sounds amazing. I love mixing on that PA. But yeah, I have any future jobs in this audio engineering position at different venues, I'm gonna be so street smart, I'll know what's happening. No, yeah, it's just, gotta keep your wits about you, I guess.
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Well, no doubt, you have all the skills and mind and brain power to go forward. You're so smart already, you're telling us about all the things you did here at UNLV. So again, great hope and great aspirations ahead of you. So just thank you again, Anthony, for being here. Thank you for taking the time to talk with us. Yeah, of course. Thank you. You're welcome. You rock. You rock. I want to thank you so much for tuning in. And if you missed any of today's episode, you can find us anywhere podcasts are available, like Spotify, Google and Apple podcasts. Thank you for listening to today's episode of Talking like Spotify, Google and Apple podcasts. Thank you for listening to today's episode of Talking With The Pros with me, Jess B. I love you, and I'll catch you in the next one. Bye.
Transcribed with Cockatoo