Last week I had the pleasure of doing sound for Rock n’ Roll Camp for Girls San Diego, a nonprofit music camp aimed at empowering young women through music. The girls — ranging in age from 8 – 17 — were tasked with learning an instrument, forming a band, and writing an original song, all within five days. The campers then went on to perform the music at the House of Blues downtown. Very cool.

Upon arrival the first day, I quickly found that I had my work cut out for me — well, we all did. The camp space was a performing arts center with one decent size auditorium and a smaller “fun room,” along with several rehearsal spaces. In addition to helping with general tech, I did live sound during both a daily morning jam session and a lunchroom performance, plus a grand HOB dress rehearsal in the auditorium on the last day of camp.

The fun room was equipped with a Presonus StudioLive, connected to a 16X4 snake at the stage. There were two powered mains set up behind the performers and no monitors. Most performances were either DI acoustic guitar plus vocals or DI keyboard plus vocals, so it was a really easy setup with no major problems. To me personally, that particular board is not the most intuitive, but by Friday I had grown a bit more accustomed to its layout. The performers were great and I was quite taken with their vocal abilities.

On Friday we moved into auditorium where things got exciting. That space featured a Behringer X32, which is truly a pleasure to work on (or even just play with). We encountered some initial stress in the morning as the snake was routed a little peculiarly (i.e. input 1 went to input 7, and input 2 went to 23, etc.), but once I checked the connections and did some re-routing, the room sang. Incidentally, this marked my first experience working with a sub kick mic, which was really fun to dial in and added some wicked thumps — sounding at times almost like a house beat. Because the room utilized in ear monitors, and we thought this might be bit advanced for the girls, I cobbled together some basic stage monitoring using the powered mains from the fun room, which worked well.

After soundcheck, each of the seven bands got their turn to perform a song. On more than one occasion a girl would have the guitar volume knob all of the way down or turn down her amp mid song, which required a bit of shuffling from me to and from the stage, and kept me entertained. But, overall the girls did a great job, particularly given that many had just picked up their instrument for the first time only days prior. In fact, some of the songs were so catchy that I still have them stuck in my head!

All in all this was a terrific week filled to the brim with tech problem-solving opportunities. Life doesn’t get much better than that. It was also really great to be part of an organization that is doing such positive uplifting work, and to get a chance to volunteer alongside and jam with great local and out-of-state musicians. I hope we can encourage more women and girls to also think about getting involved on the engineering side of music in the future.

1…2…3…Rock!