In conversation with Warren D’Souza,
the mastermind behind the
‘Monitor Mixing Summit 2019’
The Monitor Mixing Summit 2019 took place on August 6th in Mumbai, an event for Applications workshops, Presentations & Panel discussions from the
best in the industry on Mixing Monitors for the biggest events and artists. The event was curated and brought together by experienced engineers who took
the audience by storm with their tips and tricks.
We had a conversation with the man behind this show, Warren D’Souza who spoke about how the idea came about, challenges and much more.
On what criteria did you select the speakers?
The choice of speakers was not just by me. Fali, our
curriculum mentor for this platform and I decided
and we wanted to have somebody who was strong in
mixing mainstream acts and the regular gigs that they
provide the sound for and for this Ashish Saksena was
a good choice. We wanted someone who was good in
festival monitor mixing and Bruce was an undisputed
choice there. For an international flavor, we had James
who spoke about working with acts outside India.
We also wanted to showcase the headline act of this country
AR Rahman and hence had Raghu and Mark talk about it.
Since Fali and me don’t do monitors, we thought
why not have Fali open the event with basics. He
actually started the monitor mixing scene in India.
He has worked with most of the guys in the industry
as an FOH engineer or a monitor engineer.
Talk about the challenges you faced while putting this together
Tell us about the event and how it came about
The event started with a dream of bringing great sound
education to India. Although over the past decade, there
has always been elementary education provided by
institutes, I realized that people working in the field never
had any kind of advance applications engineering kind
of knowledge. This applied to both visiting engineers and
sound rental company owners and over the past year,
I got a lot of requests for artist managers asking me for
monitor engineers. I realized that this was one area that
wasn’t covered or people don’t know about it. I decided
to fill the gap and that’s how the subject was decided.
The first important thing I decided was for it to be a
summit and not a workshop as it would cover panel
discussions and a mix of engineers from all across the
country. We did not realize that we would cross 100 plus
registrations. We were overwhelmed! I wanted the event
to be selfless. We didn’t want any branding of even Sound.
com. We wanted it to have a revenue model and everyone
who attended had paid for it. I also did not invite brands
for sponsorships as I wanted to prove to people that
this was possible with good content and speakers.
I think the first challenge I had was the time I could allocate
to this project as we have our productions and businesses
running parallelly. It all happened very organically. When
you are clear with content, everything else falls in place. I am
a big supporter of producing good content. I don’t like any
brand related workshops that is brand or product centric. It
improves relationship with artists too. I wanted the industry
to understand that this would be an educative platform only!
What would you tell the ones who missed this summit this year?
I would honestly say that from an intent
perspective, 98% of them wanted to come, 90%
turned up and 8% had commitments.
I would like to see more rental company engineers
and owners attending the summit!
Upcoming plans
I have got a couple of things at the back of my mind.
Now that we have a good database, we would like to
hear from the people to know what they are interested
in learning. We want to take one step at a time.
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