Open mic session gives students live mixing experience
Photo by Katherine Rountree
Professor Peter Damski and his graduate sound design students welcomed performing artists to the Mondanaro stage in Crites Hall Sunday afternoon for a collaborative live mixing session. This was an opportunity for performers to practice in front of an audience as well as a chance for graduate students to get out of the classroom and into a live theater setting.
“If you’re mixing a performance, you’re basically taking what the players are doing and sending it to the speakers, setting up levels and everything, and making sure nothing goes wrong during the set,” said Lourdes Cols, a graduate sound design major from Puerto Rico.
Said Jodrell “Silent D” Walker, a graduate sound design major from Columbia, South Carolina,“The end goal is to get experience mixing live in a stage, basically getting experience working in a live environment.”
Added Cols, “It’s one thing for the professor to talk to us about it in class and the other part is actually doing it in the stage and mixing stuff.”
A major benefit of the live theater environment is that students are able to leave the textbooks behind and hone their artistic instinct.
“They have to learn how to separate the tech from using their ears,” said Damski. “In other words, every decision that you make while you’re mixing should be a decision based on what your ears are telling you, not on what your tech is telling you.”
Will Kommor, a third-year sound design major from Atlanta, was the first to take the stage. He performed some original pieces, some covers and even asked the audience to join in an improvisational exercise in which he was given four random chords with which to compose a song.
“I wanted to challenge myself,” said Kommor about his decision to take the stage at the open mic. “I enjoyed that the sound design guys could get together and do this. It’s a really good outlet for musicians like me to go up and get recorded. That’s not something that gets done often.”
Damski hopes that this opportunity will help students not only get extra practice, but also gain experience that could give them direction in a career path.
“That’s the advantage of this experience, is that they have the opportunity to get their feet wet and see what really turns them on,” said Damski. “One of the things that I always tell my students is to do what they love, because ultimately you spend so much time doing something, if you’re not enjoying it it’s not worthwhile. I also tell them not to make up their minds about what they want to do until they’ve done some stuff and given it all a try and see what really resonates with them.”
The performing arts department has scheduled two open mic sessions per quarter. Damski hopes interest for this opportunity will continue to grow.
