About
About
Above the Fader is a publication for the people who keep live shows running. FOH engineers, monitor engineers, system techs, instrument techs, tour managers, production managers, and the broader population of professionals whose name doesn't go in the program but whose work decides whether the show happens on time and in tune.
We publish three things. After coffee.....
A daily intelligence newsletter in the morning, local time. New gear, regulatory news, tour reports from the field, the occasional console firmware release that's actually worth your attention. Six to nine hundred words. You can read it during the line check coffee.
A weekly long-form article. Tutorial-leaning, deeply researched, opinionated in the margins. Topics that take more than a paragraph to get right: festival RF coordination, instrument tech procedures, console programming pattern libraries, the math behind what your wireless rig is actually doing.
The Daily Driver: a weekly engineer profile feature. Real working engineers, real current touring rigs, real opinions. The format is a fixed questionnaire with a 200 to 400 word rig story and three to five photos.
Who reads this
You probably mix front-of-house and live on a tour bus that smells faintly of clutch fluid and someone's energy drink. Or you patch monitors for an act whose snapshot library has more revisions than the actual setlist. maybe you tune a system at the side of a field somewhere and watch the temperature change the high-end response between sound check and doors. Or you're the guitar tech who's been building a pedalboard wiring diagram in your head since six this morning (ok, noon), and you'd like to read something that respects the fact that you do, in fact, know what an HPF is.
If you don't recognize any of those people, this publication will not feel like it was written for you. It wasn't. We're glad you're here, but the room is loud and the sight lines are bad and we've got a show to do.
Subscribe
Free. The newsletter goes out daily; the long-form drops weekly. We won't sell your email address. We won't email you the same piece twice. We won't write a subject line that's longer than the article it's attached to.
Contact
Pitches, corrections, Daily Driver nominations, complaints: hello@abovethefader.com. Letters get read. Most get answered. The good ones occasionally get printed.
Above the Fader is published from a small office that contains too many headphones, more measurement microphones than any reasonable person needs, and a copy of the FCC Part 74 rules that someone has annotated in three different colors of pen.