Crank It Up: Live Sound Secrets of the Top Tour Engineers

by Clive Young

The live concert business is exploding; hundreds of acts are hitting the road every year, and whatever style music they play, they need to sound great. How can you be at the controls for these show? Learn from this book! Meet 72 of the world's finest front-of-house and monitor engineers, and listen as they reveal what gear they use and how, how they make top acts always sound amazing, and what it takes to survive the climb to the big time. Get the inside scoop straight from concert engineers on the road with stars such as Aerosmith, KISS, Billy Joel, Paul McCartney, the Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, U2, the Dixie Chicks, Blondie, Madonna, Norah Jones, Elton John, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and many others!

202 pages, Paperback

First published May 7, 2004

About the author

Clive Young is an author/lecturer covering the crossroads between high tech and popular culture.
He is the author of Homemade Hollywood: Fans Behind The Camera [Continuum, 2008], the first in-depth look at the Fan Film movement, where amateurs create their own unauthorized movies starring world-famous characters, from Indiana Jones to Captain Kirk to Harry Potter. The book follows their stories and more as it traces Fan Films from the 1920s--when con men made fake Little Rascals movies--to the YouTube videos of today.

While senior editor of Pro Sound News since 1994, he has also written for MTV, VH1.com, American Songwriter, Music Business International, Wine Enthusiast and other outlets, and his book, Crank It Up [Backbeat Books, 2004], profiling the worlds top roadies, received strong reviews from Billboard and Hit Parader, among others. As an in-demand speaker, Young has lectured extensively on film, fan films and music at universities, libraries and conventions around the U.S. He lives in Rockville Centre, NY with his wife and daughter. Visit his website, www.cliveyoung.com.
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Reviews

[Nikolai Varlamov]

Enjoyed reading about popular band setups. Lacked narrative and educational part for me.

[Elias Kokkinis]

Being a sound engineer myself and having spent 5 years working for a local sound company for various small to medium gigs, I was yearning to read this book and gain some insight into the huge world tours and the secrets of their engineers.

The book was fairly disappointing, providing only a few good stories and only scarcely some piece of interesting information, mainly on monitor techniques.

It is advertised as containing much more than it actually does. Maybe a very good read for someone who just started out (although Yamaha's Sound Reinforcement Handbook is a much more helpful read) or who knows all of these guys, but to me it was almost a waste of time, just hanging in there for the occasional trivia or piece of information.

Maybe if I had bought it used, I wouldn't mind so much...