Ryan Scoble

When you’re on tour, anything can happen. And when you’re overseas, performing for people who don’t necessarily speak fluent English, things can easily get misinterpreted. 

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Audio engineer Ryan Scoble’s favourite tour story is when he was in Germany with indie rock band, Vacations. Their stage had elaborate set pieces – think an old-school rotary telephone Ryan had rewired into a microphone, a carpet, and a few chairs. During the final show, the singer invited the crowd to meet at the merchandise table and take a few pieces home.

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“As soon as the show finished there was like, a stage invasion,” Ryan says, laughing. “They grabbed whatever they could, including guitars and powerboards. The tour manager ran on stage trying to chase it all up, it was really funny.” 

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Audio engineers are the unsung heroes of live music – the better they are at it, the less you’ll notice them. 

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“Essentially, a sound engineer manipulates time and sound in a live environment to ensure that any kind of performance can be reinforced to a crowd so they can hear and understand it,” he explains.

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This means he’ll take all the different sounds coming from the stage – microphones, instruments, voices – feed them into a mixing console, and then balance the signals to better project the music to the crowd. 

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Being an audio engineer also means doing a lot of problem solving to realise a band’s creative vision. For example, Ryan recently worked with a band supporting Parkway Drive’s 20th Anniversary Tour, which had just released an album. The band wanted to recreate a few studio effects from their album into the live show, such as vocals sounding compressed, as though they were coming from a telephone or radio. 

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“Doing that live was a great way to stay true to the album,” he says. “A lot of tricks people do in the studio can be recreated live, but sometimes they really just don’t work.” 

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Ryan, a mainstay of Melbourne’s live music scene, says he fell into this career thanks to skills he learnt while playing in bands in high school and getting involved in studio recordings. After graduating, he worked in hospitality and managed venues. In one pub he ran, the owner asked Ryan to put on some live music. 

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“I was the only one who knew anything about musical instruments or how to amplify them to a large crowd, so it was on me to mix the bands with the crappy little system we had there,” he says. 

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“I started learning from there and getting into it more and more, and now I find myself on arena tours with bands and travelling overseas.”

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The best part of his job, he says, is the satisfaction “when everything works in such an orchestrated way such that you really can see all the excitement and energy of a room. That’s a really good feeling.” 

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Aspiring audio engineers can kick-start their career by enrolling at Industri, which offers a chance to be taught by people like Ryan in a hands-on learning environment, mastering the skills to mix live sound. Ryan adds that it's important to go to a lot of gigs.

“Think about what you liked and what you didn’t like when you were listening to the gig," he says. "And talk to whoever was mixing the band – the thing about sound engineers is they love to give people their opinion.”

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