Sound Mentoring Program

Are you interested in learning how to run sound for contra dances? BIDA has a sound mentoring program! Here's how it works for people completely new to running sound for dances:

• A workshop where you get hands-on time with the sound equipment, and an overview of the process.
• Shadowing an experienced sound person at one of our dances.
• Reverse shadowing, where you run sound at one of our dances and an experienced person is there to support you and check your work.

Typically people come to one workshop, then shadow at a series of dances over several months. Then when they're ready they do a few reverse shadows. Then we'll do a final reverse shadow where you run sound completely unassisted, with someone making sure you really do know everything you need to know to run sound well at one of our dances. If that goes well, we'll add you to our sound rotation, where you can sign up to run sound at dances.

If you're already somewhat experienced, talk to us and we'll figure out where it makes sense for you to start. We're also happy to do 1-on-1 workshops for people who have run sound and have a decent amount of hands-on experience, but picked everything up as they went and are interested in learning the theory behind what they've been doing.

The mentoring program is all free, up through the final shadows. Once you're added to the rotation and running sound at our dances we pay $75/night.

Write to jeff@bidadance.org if you're interested in joining the program! We currently have workshops scheduled for Monday April 3rd and Wednesday April 12th.