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This is part two of the Tim Weaver interview! Picking back up, Tim says he has been seeing fewer new-to-audio people over recent years showing interest in getting into live sound work. He gives some advice about work ethic for starting out. He also tells us about the equipment available in the cowboy church where he works (and where he signed into the interview from).

At this point he drops a thesis that will be a theme throughout this episode. In live sound, ultimate audio quality is a myth, Good Enough is good enough!

He used a two channel Focusrite interface with an Audio-Technica 4040 on his end of the interview.

Tim gets back to the topic of work ethic.

Tim - "the number one thing that will keep them calling you is reliability ... being there, being reliable, being someone they can count on for all things, means they will count on you for all things. When it happens, they're gonna have an event show up and the sound guy's gonna be booked somewhere else, and they're gonna give it to you."

"Be careful cause you can get abused in that situation ... you have to audition the company you want to work for."

Tim claims there's a labor vacuum in the production economy for live events. Also, does anyone remember Kinko's?

Tangela pointed out to me (Jeff, the editor and shownotes writer, Hi!) that she had a title for the episode in mind.

Tim says he gets weekly calls from venues looking for sound engineers to run live sound.

"There are gigs out there and not enough sound guys to go do them ... Part of that is because this industry ... on this level ... the hours are terrible and the pay is low."

Tim ended up starting his own sound company in 2008-2009. He ran it for a few years. "I wasn't very good at it. If I had another piece of advice for anybody ... take business classes ... because that will ... teach you about taxes, teach you about pricing yourself, teach you about total costs involved in doing what you do, and those were all the things I was missing in my business."

Tangela says she's been thinking about "entrepreneurship versus nine-to-five mentality. And right now ... the world in general is just like 'start a business!' and nobody really talks about, one, how hard that world is ... and then secondly ... that being nine-to-five is OK for certain types of people!"

Tim says his FoH guy in the church, Matt is a corporate AV guy in a tower in downtown Houston for his day job through the week, plus he does a couple additional night gigs on the weekend.

Next, Tangela gets Tim to explain the story about how he hired Chance Sampson (which is how she got acquainted with him later). It involved a truck with a trailer full of gear and cash waiting for Chance to show up, sight unseen, having only spoken to Tim over the phone previously!

Tim points out he's old, and grew up rural, so that's his background mindset. Further, "I've been pleasantly surprised, way more than I've been screwed over. And I think part of that, is because I'm placing my trust in a person, and that person is responsible for their own stature in life at that point."

Tim relates another story about a mediocre lighting tech he took on tour once.

Afterwards he talks about the presence of adversity in live production, and how that issue has decreased over the years. The digital technology advances have decreased the workload significantly. The consoles are lighter. Connectivity options like Dante, wifi, and bluetooth have decreased the need for mic snakes, etc.

Tim relates a couple of different stories of getting yelled at in tense situations by members of bands he was working for.

They move on to a discussion about networking. How does the popular media's emphasis on networking differ from the work of building a strong network?

Tangela asks Tim, "what does XLR stand for?" because apparently he asked her that question one time, because he didn't know. So Tangela went and found out.

Shortly thereafter, Tim rants about Apple products and their lack of connectivity options.

Tim points out there are lots of areas of opportunity in the pro-audio software space. He prefers Behringer consoles over others because the user interfaces are better. He relates a story about running FoH for a symphony with a director who has an impeccable ear.

This story is used to support his point that "ultimate highest quality ... doesn't really matter at all. Good enough is good enough. Get there ... learn how to get to good enough really quickly and do it on a consistent basis. And then you can spend the rest of the night tweaking out to get it as high fidelity as you can handle. Just be aware that ... you can tweak yourself into a whole. Unfortunately the only way to learn how to not do that is experience ... Sometimes I have to just stop, and A B what I did vs no EQ on that channel."

Tim Weaver is going on 30 years in the production business. "I still love it, even if my back doesn't!"

In the preshow questionnaire Tangela asked him if there are any current projects he's excited about. "About once a month I mix a group of old timers doing western swing music. There are some grammy winners in the band. I absolutely love it."

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As usual you can find Tangela on her website where you can sign up for the Newsletter!