Jen Watman doesn’t have a lot of downtime. The 34-year-old engineer spends half her time on the road, mixing FOH and monitors for up to several touring acts each year, including Bikini Kill, Dilly Dally, and the Miles Electric Band (FOH) and Anita Baker, Googoosh (monitors); the rest of the time she works as a freelance engineer and sound tech in Los Angeles, mixing dates at clubs and concert venues around town. The common thread? An unshakable work ethic, continual quest for new skills and experiences, and a lifelong commitment to hearing health.
Live Design: How did you get into audio?
Jen Watman: I grew up outside Chicago; I attended Columbia College, and pretty much from the day I started going there, I started working in audio. I had never done any hobbyist work like a lot of people start out doing, but I've always played music. So I came at it from a musician's standpoint, and I still approach it that way to some extent.
After I graduated in 2007, the majority of my work was in midsize clubs and venues around Chicago. I moved to Vegas for about year and a half, and worked at the Cosmopolitan and Station casinos. In the Cosmopolitan, I did more audio and A/V work, managing audio over IP and learning about distributed audio systems in large-scale buildings. I decided I wanted to move to LA, and got a job as a mix engineer in a live show at Disneyland. I did that for about four months, and started getting calls to do touring.
LD: What’s your work mix like right now?
JW: Since 2014, I've been touring at least six months out of the year. I've toured with a variety of artists every year; it's usually two or three main clients and then a handful of one-offs. I work at a few venues as sound technician, and I also partner with international audio vendors like PRG/VER and Eighth Day Sound. I'm a freelance tech within their labor pools; sometimes I'm on their gig as a tech or operator, and sometimes I'm in the shop building touring rigs for major clientele.
The main request for my services is at FOH as a mix engineer, but right now my goals are geared toward focusing on the operational sides of production. I've been learning a lot more about system engineering and system tech procedures. I'm also trying to beef up my RF coordination skills. And I try to beef up my mix skills as a recording engineer on the side. On whole, you can't really ever know too much about any one of those things, and they're all valuable skills on or off the road!
LD: It sounds like you've been really proactive about getting the experience you want.
JW: Definitely. I have a very traditional midwestern work ethic. I was taught to put one foot in front of the other; you know, shake people’s hands firmly, make strong eye contact, present yourself attentively in the company of business people, and do your best to always be learning more. As females, we often have to fight for the space to be present, to be seen as qualified options for hire in the industry. However, there are many incredible organizations teaming up to create visibility for women, trans people, queers, non-binary, and people of color. One great example is the EQL Directory run by Spotify and Soundgirls.org, which offers a virtual database of all women working in audio around the globe. I think my current level of success is due to always making myself available to as many entities as possible, showing up to do a great job and being a pleasant personality on the road, while also working to know as much as I can about the systems I am using, with a curiosity to always know more.
LD: Hearing conservation is very important to you.
JW: I’ve been using Sensaphonics custom ear plugs since I started mixing audio. At school, instructors encouraged us to learn how to mix and hear frequencies and understand sound in a space, and also to learn how we perceive it with hearing protection, because it's the only way we'll be able to protect our gift and our work. And I took that to heart.
Right now, I have three pairs. I switch out dB-rated filters with different levels of reduction. I also have minus-32 dB sleep plugs. Admittedly, those aren’t flat response, but sometimes those are necessary, especially if I'm doing like a DJ club night and I need to be side stage or somewhere where it's super loud, and once you get everything stable, the promoter or the club owners want the presentation at a certain dB level consistently for five hours. I don't think I would be able to preserve my hearing if I didn't have that type of protection on me. I try to talk them up to anyone I encounter who works in a live environment. It's just so important to preserve your hearing.
LD: It’s surprising how many people build careers in sound yet don’t take precautions.
JW: So many engineers neglect to use any type of hearing conservation when they mix. Sometimes they end up putting the foam earplugs in. I don't know how they get to that decision, but for me it's like, I trained my ears to understand how flat-response filtered earplugs help to reduce unwanted noise. I learned how to do sound with them, so it’s for my benefit and it's a helpful tool. In addition, I use real-time analyzers and other dB meters, because I also want to know what type of sound exposure I'm pushing on the people I am presenting audio for, for extended periods of time.
In many instances, it actually helps me balance out the finer points of my mixes when I wear earplugs. I think I'm better able to mentally filter out some of the additional upper harmonics and noise reflections in the room. Not so that I don't hear them and then create an inaccurate presentation of the sound, but just so it cuts back on ambient noise. If there are lots of people talking around me, I have this murmur from like 800 to 5k Hz, depending on the timbre of people's voices. But that's a really important frequency range of information. If you have earplugs in, it helps to tune that out a little bit and focus in on the sounds you need to hear.
For example, I was mixing the band Bikini Kill for a couple of sold-out shows at the Palladium in Hollywood. There were several thousand really excited fans, and there was this room noise in the upper midrange, from the screaming and yelling and singing with the band, which is phenomenal for the aesthetic, but also at certain points, with a trained sensitivity, difficult to sometimes decipher minute irregularities at 80 feet away from the PA. For that show, I actually had to take my earplugs out because I had only -15 dB filters and I thought, "Damn, I wish I had some minus-nine filters right now." I felt like even just that little bit would kind of take the edge off, so to speak, but still give me an accurate picture of what I was hearing.
LD: How do people respond to the way you work?
JW: It’s interesting. At Disney, I worked in an amphitheater mixing front of house for a live stage show. The amphitheater holds about 2,500 people; I mixed in a hut with a Plexiglas window that I would slide open to be able to hear the PA. The show was really cinematic, and there were very high SPL peaks; I was running six or eight lavaliers using wireless RF transmitters alongside playback of 24 channels over a fiber-optic network.
The whole show was timecoded, and there was moving automation on stage; the show was fully automated. So I was just mixing the levels of their microphones; I wasn’t necessarily adjusting the other levels because of the quality control in the presentations. Long story short, I had my ER-9s, and I started to put them in and I got push back from the managers of the show. It wasn't over the OSHA standard in terms of peak exposure level limits during length of time per exposure, but we did the 22-minute show five times a day. The managers and I met with a couple of department heads and the union steward. They ended up siding in my favor when I presented some reasonable remarks about the peak SPLs, because I took a meter up to FOH and measured the peaks to display the loudness exposure, including soundcheck and show run.
Sometimes I get pushback from other engineers who think that they wouldn't be able to perceive accurate sound. But I experienced ear training using earplugs. So I feel comfortable wearing them pretty much all the time unless the show is too quiet or the content has such quiet elements that wearing earplugs would impair my mix abilities.
If I feel like my mix is suffering or that I'm missing information, I will definitely take them out and live without them; ideally, there are many ways to make a great reinforcement presentation without mixing loudly! However, some shows, in particular live concerts, call for volume. I work with a lot of bands who have intense sonics coming across in their presentation, like very unique-sounding vocals or really angular or creative instrumental tones that don't always fit neatly without engineering to manage them. Even though that music is more intense, I have to take my earplugs out more often because I want to make sure that any distortion, harmonics, or noise and effects are intentional.
LD: Do you think other engineers are afraid of getting the kind of pushback you've gotten?
JW: I think the choice for hearing conservation comes at your personal comfort level, how you’ve learned to trust your hearing and listening ability to identify balance and problematic resonances. I find that I actually won't wear them during soundcheck and maybe throughout the course of the show I'll stick them in and leave them in, because that's when I'll probably push the overall system output through the range of headroom I've left for the amp-up game that might be needed, depending how full the room is. Or I’ll wear them once the mix is stable, if management requests a loud mix that may be too loud for my personal comfort level for several hours per night.
Even if the mix is just the right amount of loud for people to still enjoy it and say, “I can hear every aspect of this. I can hear and feel the bass. I can hear the guitars and the lines.” I never want anyone to say they went to a show and they couldn't hear fill-in-the blank instrument. I like everything to have a place and be tonally, spatially, and dynamically present so there's no question about what's going on onstage. And there's no question that I’m able to protect my hearing while also being in control of the management and clarity of those elements.
Sarah Jones is a writer, editor, and content producer with more than 20 years' experience in pro audio, including as editor-in-chief of three leading audio magazines: Mix, EQ, and Electronic Musician. She is a lifelong musician and committed to arts advocacy and learning, including acting as education chair of the San Francisco chapter of the Recording Academy, where she helps develop event programming that cultivates the careers of Bay Area music makers.