The guys from Carlson have become experts at equipping top Seattle venues ranging from the Gorge at George, to Key Arena and Memorial Stadium, as well as outdoor venues like the annual Bumbershoot festival and the noise-restricted Summer Nights on the Pier. With hundreds of pieces of their gear constantly moving around, a flair for troubleshooting has become a key survival skill.

“Troubleshooting isn’t usually a priority until you need things fixed right now,” Carlson points out, “so people don’t go through things methodically or take small steps. But it’s easy to fool yourself when you jump around. When you assume its something on a larger scale, you don’t take those little steps and you can troubleshoot around the problem.

Midas Heritage monitor desk

“A lot of independent sound engineers think the whole job is about doing the mix: That’s the easiest part of the day. Most of these guys have trouble troubleshooting themselves out of a paper bag, but that’s what makes them more valuable to us as an employer than getting a good kick drum sound.”

As they work through the challenges of running a sound company -- now made even tougher with the shock waves that the World Trade Center attacks are sending through the industry -- they’re keeping up on their innovations, like the online store at the Carlson site. Sticking with it is just a matter of being as insane about music as the rest of us.

Hey, it’s the Northwest, you get heaters with your 12AM’s!

“People say, ‘You’re crazy for doing it,’” Stoverud-Myers admits. “You have to love the business, love what you’re doing, and be excited about it.”

(Editor’s note) Carlson and company did indeed come up with a great tuning for the EAW 750 box, as I discovered when I stepped onto the FOH platform at the Bumbershoot Festival two years ago, to mix Cake for about 12,000 fans, with only a line check. I was calmer than I would have been in many other places, because Carlson had taken good care of me before, at Seattle’s Key Arena, and at a stadium in Arizona.

Unidentified former Carlson employee

They weren’t flustered if Courtney Love and Hole were late ending their soundcheck, the Carlson guys just whispered “we’ll get it, don’t worry.” And we did. In Arizona my Carlson systems guy was a cheerful guy named Dave Stevens, who kept talking crazy about something called live-audio.com. There is a feeling that a travelling mixer (one who can’t afford to carry full production) grows to crave. That is when you feel that everything going in and out of the console is stable and functional. You don’t need to go personally examine the distro – you know it is tight. Same for the XLR looms. The speakers, the amps, everything. That’s the kind of company that Carlson is.

I knew, after I got some basic gains through my headphones, that when the D.J. announced Cake, I could start raising faders, and expect to hear reasonable facsimiles of the sources on stage. I would be able to start working on my mix immediately, instead of spending half the set chasing messed up channels, or trying to re-tune a badly EQ-ed set of mains.

- C.K.

Allan Bagley

Matt Stern at the wheel

Jamie Harris

The Great Puyallup Pumpkin

Smaart program with CDRW drive