Curtis Flatt

Curtis Flatt of Nashville’s Spectrum Sound was a gracious host to our PSW contingent that attended the August 2001 Eric Clapton concert at Los Angeles’ Staples Center. The American leg of the Clapton tour used EAW 900 mains from Spectrum, with a monitor rig and FOH console supplied by Concert Sound UK. Curtis was Spectrum’s FOH tech for the entire tour, and when house mixer Robert Collins had to leave for a days, Curtis had the experience of personally mixing several of Mr. Clapton’s concerts.

C.K. - Can you sum up your own early experiences? Basically, were you schooled, or a club guy, or church sound, or what ... any musical training?

C.F. - I started as a (really awful) guitar player in junior high and high school...mostly fixing the equipment, which was never much. Somehow that moved into handling everything audio for this very small school. When a local college pop "recruiting" band came through with an admissions counselor handling all their tiny production, I tried to talk them into a sound engineer/production manager. They had no idea what either was (neither did I really) but somehow they bought in, and I got the gig, and a free ride for a few years. It was at that time I met
Ken Porter (head of Spectrum Sound) from buying their supplies from him.

I did a lot of work for a couple local sound companies and a local lighting company. Ken needed extra help one day so i walked next door to his warehouse and when I left that Friday afternoon he said “See ya Monday.” That was 15 yrs ago.

Lotsa trials by fire. but it seems to have worked out. I went straight from there to arenas and stadiums, somehow ending up as the guy the client dealt with. I couldn’t have asked for a better situation to learn in. Somehow being there the longest ended me up as senior engineer. I can bitch but I have no complaints. The bitching just makes it fun sometimes.

C.K. When did you first start using the BSS Soundweb?

C.F. Early 1997

C.K. Was it difficult to learn?

C.F. Not really. It was handed to myself and Will Sargent to try with the
900’s. We were already familiar with the Media Matrix, and Soundweb had many similarites in the file writing department. The hard thing was converting all the settings from MX 8600s to Soundweb. Just converting from Q to bandwidth took quite a while. There are many people who have made Excel files for conversion, but most of those files are only good if the filter is + or minus 6db. the equation changes radically after that.