What can I possibly learn about Live Sound from an online course?

Everything that you can't learn by standing in front of the gear and playing with the knobs! 

It's a fairly straightforward process to teach someone how to make changes to audio devices and discern the relative change in output. But the conceptual decision making process that lies behind the use and function of these devices is not something you can learn in an On-the-Job training environment very often. I call this the conventional wisdom of audio engineers and it's a hard thing to put your finger on. So many sound engineers learn their craft in an on-the-job environment that a clear understanding of the science and physics part of our business may not be part of that learning curve. I created these classes because there do not seem to be many books or programs for young engineers that delve deeply into the esoteric side of audio decision making processes. Most stuff is pretty basic: "Turn the threshold knob and you will get gain reduction". But what they don't tell you about is why the threshold knob works the way it does and what part of the signal gets reduced first!

For instance they don't tell you why one must consider the input source signal and the shape of it's envelope to truly understand what the device is going to do to the signal next! Ignoring the more subtle functions of sounds and signals is like ignoring the fact that spoken words are made up of more than just syllables. That in fact, syllables are comprised of smaller individual sounds called phonemes and the phoneme plays a huge role in the intelligibility of human speech.

Dynamic processors have many subtle and esoteric uses and they are all subject to a wide range of interpretation. Yet I believe there's a real danger of over-simplifying these tasks. This over simplification of these devices can quickly lead to engineers mis-setting parameters on the device which leads to a serious degradation of your signal and a loss of quality from your mix. Compressors, noise gates and any other dynamic processor that use the threshold adjustment for instance, all sense signals in subtle ways and the better you understand these underlying principals, the better you are able to ultimately refine your sound. I've seen more than one engineer get themselves into real trouble because they did not understand the subtleties of the operation of a compressor limiter and couldn't figure out what was making the feedback! It's a common mistake. A channel with a lot of gain like a vocal mic or an acoustic instrument that's using a compressor must always have a short release time. Because when the music stops the gain reduction will cease and the effective gain of that channel will go up, not down! The channel will then feedback in the mains or monitors or both! With a long release time, which seems like the right thing to do and might sound a little better, you won't notice the effect as much while the music is playing because the ambient noise will keep the compressor threshold in gain-reduction. It's the silence in-between songs that becomes the problem with the compressor! That's when the compressor stops reducing audio gain and instead releases the gain to increase and the mic starts feeding back. I'll bet you've been to a club or show sometime and you noticed that every time the band stopped playing, there was feedback. Now you know why!

Using your intuition to make decisions about sounds and signals is not always a good idea. Music and sound are science and physics personified. Many aspects of physical systems and the science behind them are counter-intuitive! You can easily make a decision based on what seems like common sense only to realize after the fact that it's actually the opposite of what you originally thought! So instead of intuition, I teach young engineers to make decisions based on the science and physics of the process and to use the convetional wisdom of the industry to achieve better sounds. I will teach you the workflow concepts of a pro engineer. I will teach you these subtle approaches and some of the mysteries that I have mastered over 30 years of mixing audio and working on stages. I'll teach you what you can't learn while watching someone else do it.