YOU WANT ME, TO PERFORM WITH YOU??? BY TRISTAN CRIMMINS

Over this semester I have come to learn that your creative ability shines particularly bright when you find yourself actively pursuing your passion. For me, my passion throughout that last year and half has been fully with music – mainly live mixing as well as production. Over my time here at Miami I have had the opportunity to help execute and host concerts on campus.

There was one concert in particular where I got the chance of a lifetime. Essentially to frame the situation for you, all the equipment I had used in the past was the most basic form the industry had to offer and until that day it was all that I was familiar with using. That being said, this is where I really had to hone in on my creative ability. Just one hour before the concert began one of the artists requested that I play back to back with him in front of what seemed to be 10,000+ people. I had just one hour to learn how to use the most advanced equipment in the industry because it was an opportunity I was not about to pass up. I practiced as hard as I could simply by playing around with features that I had never seen before and as I sit here looking back on it now, that one hour was nowhere near the amount of time I needed to be able to hang with him.

So, I did what anyone else would’ve done – I winged it. Essentially throughout the entirety of the show I had to read and react to songs and features on 20 second intervals to simply keep up with him while also pulling my own weight in taking on the mix of the night. We ended up playing for a full hour and half and I can say in confidence that although I was doing things I didn’t ever know were possible, being put on the spot to make live improvised music was the most creative experience of my life. I also feel that I learned that creativity is an art and science, beauty and form, harmony and emotion. It is possibly the most accepted way of expressing our deepest, happiest, and most honest of emotions. I was faced with a completely uncertain event and truly felt that I just had to go for it and with that mentality of being excited and open helped to propel me into one of the most challenging but fun experiences of my life. I think that at the end of the show it was clear to me that the night was a success regardless of the sound.