In an effort to share my experience in Kunming and keep my blog updated, I thought I’d write about a few key things that have begun to fall into place in the past couple of weeks.

I’ve hired my first Chinese employee. I’m not sure if I can legitimately call him an employee, but he works for me. We meet almost everyday, so that he can attempt to correct all the mistakes I pickup from the other “laowei” and / or my own feeble attempts to put together grammatically correct sentences in Mandarin. Leon has been great. He’s eager to solve all my problems. I love it!

This week, he found me a great deal on a Suzuki scooter. 99% of the scooters on the road in China are now electric and I’m still not convinced that they’re all that practical. Needless to say, now you can see me booting around Kunming on my new scooter not worried about when my battery will run out. Note: in Kunming, motorized scooters are not allowed. On top of that, I don’t even have a Canadian motorcycle license, much less a license to drive in China.

Today, I was invited to stop by a small recording studio. It’s the better one of the two that I’ve seen so far here in Kunming and so far, I’m not very impressed. Of course, they were very impressed by the small amount of advise I was able to offer them -based on what I know about recording in the west.

I spent the past week sourcing sound equipment. I have a lot more work to do. I’ve only really scratched the surface. I’m hoping to find some audio related work here in China, but I think I will have to leave Kunming for that to happen. Perhaps I will try out Taiwan at some point. They speak Mandarin there as well. Since moving to China, I haven’t had the chance to do any audio related work. This past week I enjoyed spending an afternoon setting up and tuning a sound system. I realized in doing that, how much I love doing sound engineering. The more time I spend doing audio work; the more experience I get; the more I enjoy doing it; the easier it is to get great sound out of any system [almost].

Kunming-out.

So, I’m sitting in a hotel hall, behind a soundboard at a charity concert I was hired to organize. I would call this event production, but I was also hired to oversee and give direction to the team that put on this event. I think it turned out really well. The lights on stage are flashing red, green and blue - the band (a girl singing in the position of ‘frontman’) is covering Katy Perry’s, “Hot ‘n Cold”, very well I might add… I’ve decided I hate electronic drums live, even in a small room. They don’t give me any mixing freedom. Right now the kick is too loud and I can’t change it.

After a million technical difficulties in the form of misunderstandings on my part, my good friend Chad saved the day. Chad was such a help while I tried to troubleshoot my system. He kept an eye on things while I wasn’t and kept the bands under control during all the mayhem.

Stringnoize provided the sound equipment for this event. The promoters are very happy. I feel encouraged by the way I pulled off the night. Not everything was perfect, and things got a little behind, but there were so many things to keep track of, and I’m only one guy. Next time I’ll have [this] much more experience, and it will be [that] much more under control and ‘together’. Over all, I’m happy.

Shout out to Evan Champagne for being such a great sport while I f’d up his monitors throughout his set. You’re a pro, dude. I’m still learning. Next time we’ll use a system I know, alright? Maybe a digital one!!! I’m really glad I met Evan, and I really look forward to this new friendship. He’s great.