Free Sophie's Encore by Nicky Wells Page B

my exciting news in. “He’s training me to be a sound engineer.”
    Now, Rachel was my best friend. Had been so since college. We had gone through an awful lot of stuff together, the best, the worst, and everything in between. We sat at each other’s hospital beds and danced at each other’s weddings. She was there when Dan crash-landed back in my life when I was twenty-eight, and she cheered me all the way along. She understood the attraction and the sex and the glamour. But she had never ‘got’ the music. Not surprisingly, she looked at me blankly.
    “A sound engineer.”
    I pursed my lips into a goofy smile and nodded. “Yes, a sound engineer.”
    “Like the chap who sits behind that desk with all the buttons and does weird geeky things.”
    “Exactly like so.”
    “And that is exciting because…?”
    “Oh Rach, how can I make you understand? It’s amazing. It’s like doing magic. You’ve got the great musicians there, and their talent is unbelievable. Yet they put their trust, their faith, their music into your hands to make a fantastic performance outstanding, to add the edge, the sparkle, the fizz.”
    “I don’t understand,” Rachel confessed. “I always thought sound recording was a bit of a fraud, you know. If the musician is so great, why do they need all that engineering malarkey?”
    I took a deep breath, summoning my every wit to try to explain what sound engineering was all about. “A live voice, a live instrument, that’s a beautiful thing. It’s a living thing with three dimensions. When you try to capture it with a microphone and put it onto a record, you mess with the sound waves, you break them up and parcel them up and reassemble them. It doesn’t matter how good the band is, something gets lost and distorted in the process. A voice like Dan’s, no matter how powerful, can come out dull and hollow, and it doesn’t sound at all like him. The sound engineer undoes that. The sound engineer makes it sound like what it really sounds like.”
    Inelegant as though this explanation was, Rachel seemed to connect with it. “So it’s not fixing the tuning or correcting mistakes. It’s more making it true to the original.”
    “It can be about fixing the tuning or correcting mistakes. A sound engineer can do that, but a professional musician will always insist on re-recording a flawed section to improve on it, and that gets spliced and crossfaded into the recording…”
    Rachel poked me in the side. “Listen to you. You sound like a pro!”
    “Hardly.” Although I did enjoy the compliment. “Mostly what a sound engineer does is… I don’t know, think about it as a picture gone pale in photocopying and the sound engineer puts the color back in.”
    “Nice analogy,” Rachel approved. “Did Dan teach you this?”
    “Nuh-uh, I made that up myself.” And it was true, I had made it up. Somehow I ‘saw’ music in color; I was forever making the connection, and Dan was endlessly fascinated by it even though I couldn’t explain it properly.
    “So that is pretty exciting,” Rachel concurred after a little thought. “Is it difficult?”
    “Heck yes, it certainly is,” I burst out. “You have to be light-fingered and golden-eared. You can’t just twizzle buttons and off you go. First of all, you have to understand what needs fine-tuning and how. Then there’s all your tools, your EQ and your reverb and your delay and pitch and…”
    “I get it, I get it,” Rachel laughed. “It sounds complicated. But I can see that you’ve totally got the fever.”
    “I do.” There was no denying it. “It gives me such a buzz. You know, I don’t really ‘do’ music, but mastering and mixing, that’s totally my niche. Dan says…” I petered out, suddenly fearful of sounding arrogant.
    “Dan says?”
    I took a deep breath. “Dan says I’ve got a real talent for it, and he thinks I’ve really good ears and a light touch.” There, I said it.
    “That’s high praise, from a rock