What are some of your favorite tours you have worked on?

Warped Tour in 2016 & 2017, and a short run with Blink 182 earlier this year. I don’t have a particular favorite. I am fortunate to have worked with talented artists and crew.

What got you started in the industry?

I attended Warped Tour as a high schooler and found myself watching the audio engineers and techs working, rather than the bands performing. I started researching about sound and stumbled upon Rat Sound and Dave Rat’s blogs. I started learning live sound from working on musicals in the theatre department at Fullerton College, and found other avenues to practice this craft by working at a theme park and cruise ships. Throughout this whole process, I have been surrounded by amazing peers, mentors, and supervisors that helped me get to where I am today.

What SoundTools products do you use? How?

I personally own the XLR sniffer/sender and carry it to all of my gigs. I mainly use it to check XLR cables before making a drum loom. Sometimes when I’m looming up a pair of XLR's, I will forget to label the ends of the connectors (I know many people are guilty of this! haha). Instead of tracing a cable all the way down to the opposite end of it's connector, I use the XLR sniffer/sender to help me identify the cables quickly, and then proceed to label them.

Rat Sound provides CAT tails/boxes at some festivals. If a band requests hardwired in-ears and turning around an input to an output at a stage box isn’t an option, CAT tails/boxes, over shielded CAT5 cable, would be used to send signals from monitor world to the desired location on stage.

Where did your nick name "Ninja come from?"

I got this nickname during my first year of Warped Tour, from my colleague named Mark. Mark was the monitor engineer and I patched the stage. I’d like to think that he called me Ninja to describe the swiftness of my stage changeovers. I’d show up and execute the changeover, and then disappear into my corner off stage. During a band’s set, sometimes mics would move out of position or things would get knocked around; I would always be ready to run out to fix them as quickly as possible. I’m always watching. Swift and stealth, like a ninja. shoutout to Magic Mark.

Any audio tips you have for all the Sound Humans out there?

Paying attention to detail goes a long way. Not an audio tip but, be cool and kind to others. Something I’ve been jokingly saying as I make my cable runs (understood in some cases, not always true), If it looks clean, it sounds clean!