Stepping back, I’ve been doing live audio since the mid-80s, mixing FOH and monitors for bands around the southeastern part of the US. While working the music scene for many years in Florida, I landed a job as a FOH mixer at Universal Studios for a wrestling show. That’s really when broadcast audio hit me and I thought, why aren’t I doing this more often? What was supposed to be a six-week gig evolved into a 14-year career mixing audio for wrestling matches.
From there, I was offered a job in 2019 with AEW as its FOH mixer and since then, we haven’t shut down production because of Covid – though things have certainly been very different!
In the beginning, we would travel to different cities every week to go live every Wednesday night, and everything had to be streamlined with as few moving parts as possible. We did that from October 2019 to March 2020 when Covid hit. Since then, we’ve been filming in Daily’s Place, an amphitheater in Jacksonville, FL.
As the front-of-house Engineer, I’m in charge of the audio in the arena. Lyon Video, our main OB service partner for the show, encouraged us to use the Calrec consoles, and I’m so glad they did because the Summa’s workflow is so easy to use; I have a good number of outs and all the routing I need, and the audio sounds great. I also use a Waves server to add FX into the chain for things like reverb, delay, and compression.