Educating India

As digital technology marches forward so the need for education within key markets becomes more important, and few territories are ranked higher in priority than India. In the last year alone a growing number of manufacturers have begun to target the subcontinent with seminars and workshops all designed around the same premise – helping India’s live sound engineers and installers to better use the technology that is available to them.

Among those manufacturers is Avid, a company with a particular investment in facilitating the changeover from analogue to digital thanks to its Venue consoles and the shift in workflow that they offer to skilled operators. But in terms of geography, culture and the ingrained ideas of many of the country’s domestic audio professionals, educating India is quite a challenge, even for those manufacturers who are used to running large-scale education programs.

Helping to confront that challenge for Avid is Robert Scovill, a man whose official title – senior market specialist for Venue consoles – somewhat belies his true role within the organisation. As a veteran live engineer with more than 3,000 shows on his resume, including tours with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Rush, Def Leppard and even Prince, he is now Avid’s Venue evangelist, taking the digital mixing platform out to the people with a mission to help them better understand it. Whenever a market is deemed a high priority by Avid, Mr Scovill will inevitably be dispatched to spread the word. It is no surprise at all that at the time of the recent Palm India exhibition, he found himself in Mumbai.

‘The need for education exists everywhere right now, the learning curve certainly for live sound is very steep,’ Mr Scovill explained, speaking after a workshop held shortly before Palm India. As well as presenting the one-day seminar, which took place at the Hotel Sea Princess, he was present on the company’s booth throughout the show and also hosted a special in-exhibition presentation titled ‘The convergence of live sound and recording’ – a key theme for Avid.

‘We have a lot of guys out there, experienced guys, that don’t fully understand the technology that they’re using,’ Mr Scovill continued. ‘I think that’s something the manufacturers are tasked with and rightly so – they’ve got to teach the users how to use their stuff. It’s not that they’re necessarily going to teach someone how to do live sound, but they’ve got to be able to teach the people at least about the operational aspects of the products.’

Just focusing on the technology, however, can miss the point, as Mr Scovill added: ‘It’s actually something I touched on yesterday in the workshop – teaching people how to become mixers as opposed to operators. The challenge, certainly with digital technology right now, is that we’ve put so much of a burden on people operating to actually understand the piece of technology that they forget to mix the event. The creative aspect gets overshadowed.’

Making the operation of the technology in question as effortless as possible is, therefore, the priority, and Avid has arguably chosen the best possible man to help engineers achieve that goal. Mr Scovill’s involvement with the Venue platform is deep-set – he has been a key figure in its design and development in the US, and continues to be so. Speaking of the need to make the desk simple to operate, he recalled: ‘It’s something that we took really seriously during the design phases. We wanted to make that transition from somebody who’s working on analogue to digital as easy as possible’.

India is an excellent example of a territory in which long-term analogue-based engineers have sometimes found the changeover to digital to be a less than comfortable experience. Digital platforms from all manufacturers are growing in popularity but the rate of change has been less dramatic than elsewhere in the world.

‘I don’t think I’d call it complete and I’m iffy about saying that it will ever happen completely,’ reflected Mr Scovill. ‘I don’t think we’ll ever get rid of analogue and I don’t think we should. There are certainly applications where analogue is the right call both in terms of workflow and maybe in terms of sound quality and I would say the biggest resistance to digital, certainly in live sound, has been that workflow aspect. It wasn’t the sound quality necessarily, it was just a matter of being able to manage and do things quickly.

‘I think the live sound market fell into the same trap that the consumer industry fell into with computers. It’s very simple – we were sold on the idea early on that if we had a computer we might not need to do any more than a six hour working week. But the hidden devil was that when the computer came along it gave us the opportunity to just do more. I think it was similar in live sound with digital consoles, where there was this idea that it would solve so many problems when in fact it requires so much more attention to detail and more knowledge in terms of workflow and technology.’

Nevertheless, he continued, the benefits of moving into the digital domain outweigh the challenges to the degree that ‘if you looked at the number of analogue engineers who were staunchly anti-digital that we’ve now converted to digital, it would be pretty breathtaking’.

With the pre-Palm India workshop still fresh in the minds of those who attended, Mr Scovill was keen to explain how he and his colleagues have achieved that. Arguably the most important factor is tailoring each workshop to the territory it is addressing.

‘I thought this latest workshop went extremely well,’ he reported. ‘The early part of the day was all about how to specifically build a show file for our console where you can mix front of house and monitors from the same desk. That’s a very common workflow here as they don’t always have a dedicated monitor engineer. So it was really just showing them that our consoles can easily do that and how to pull it off.’

Also covered within the seminar was Avid’s current hot-topic: how live sound and recording workflows are beginning to converge. ‘Some recording workflows have merged into live sound now and we handled some of that, specifically processing and some of the bussing that we couldn’t really do before,’ Mr Scovill explained. ‘We had extra consoles there so attendees could get some hands-on time, reaffirming some of the material they’d heard during the presentation.’

Hosting educational events of the kind that Mr Scovill presents is, of course, a costly endeavour for any manufacturer, but critical nonetheless, particularly in a market like India. From Avid’s point of view, Mr Scovill is both pragmatic and optimistic regarding the effect that his work has. ‘I don’t know if it will bear immediate fruits,’ he reflected. ‘But I think once people see the kind of impact that recording workflows can have on live sound, it may start to happen here. The change will take place over time. It’s not an immediate need right now but I think it’s important to present the technology.’

www.avid.com