38 l June 2013
www.psneurope.com
livereport Graham Burton: Likes to think Box clever
Acclaimed FOH engineer Graham Burton ditched the glories of standing behind a mixing desk and returned to his system technician roots some years ago. He tells Paul Watson why he did it
NOT MANY engineers can say their first job was going on a US tour with Bon Jovi as system technician, but that’s exactly how Graham Burton’s career began – and he was just 16 years old. The role, Burton says, has changed dramatically over the years. “I learned an awful lot about
that job touring with Bon Jovi, though I was way down the food chain,” Burton reflects, somewhat ironically, considering he gained 40kg while on the road with the band. “It’s a very different beast now than it was back then; we’d deploy lots of big boxes, try to point them in the right direction, then hope for the best; now there’s no excuse for getting it wrong!” After a stint at Concert Sound
(now Clair UK), where he gained valuable tech experience on Eric Clapton’s annual Royal Albert Hall show rehearsals, he went on
which was, he says, “all about trying to interpret what the audience wanted”.
But piloting the mixing desk Touring with Bon Jovi was a learning experience for Burton
to work for audio supplier Eurohire, which is where he really started to hone his skills. “At that time, we’d always put a lot more PA into a venue than was necessary, just to get coverage,” he reveals, “because the horizontal dispersion of a point source system doesn’t
come close to that of a line array, and line arrays weren’t around at the time.” In the late ’90s it was time for a change, so Burton delved into the world of engineering, starting out on monitors, where he got up to speed with his frequencies, then at FOH,
was not for him. “Although I enjoyed working on the festivals and learned a lot touring with artists as diverse as Turin Brakes, Billy Ocean and The Stylistics, I noticed the industry start to change around 2005,” he says. “Interesting things were
happening in loudspeaker technology, and it was when I received a call out of the blue from [Portsmouth-based] BCS Audio offering me a one-off system tech job that I had my lightbulb moment. System teching was about to change significantly and I wanted to be a part of it; and besides, I realised I could
about the horizontals and verticals not just the ‘left and right’
make more money tuning PA systems than engineering gigs!” What initially fascinated Burton was the fact that he could no longer get away with thinking in two dimensions. “Suddenly I had the horizontals and the verticals to think about as well as just left and right; even now, I’m constantly working out how I get my PA onto the audience without taking their attention away from where the performance is happening,” he reveals, adding that it’s actually become quite a psychological process, getting the audience to focus on the performance. “In venues with balconies, a good system tech will now fly the PA lower than they used to, but angle it up into the balconies to bring
Photo: Kevin Westerberg
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