Evan Martin & Molly Graham
Part 1: Evan
Evan Martin doesn’t love talking about himself. He doesn’t have a website, doesn’t seek the spotlight, and doesn’t play instruments on stage. In fact, when he’s doing his job right, you might not even see him. What you will notice is that everyone around him sounds phenomenal. The bands he’s recorded (Zita, Headbone, Sweetheart, Wolfe Johns) and the artists he’s toured with (The Rumble, David Shaw, The Revivalists, Hans Williams) all keep hiring him again and again. He does everything you could need and he does it without drama. He’ll set up and break down stages, run sound systems and monitors, liaise with venues, tour manage, and even drive the band van without taking breaks.
His partner Molly Graham also works in production but has a different approach. She can often be found front and center, speaking on comms radios, hawking merch, setting up lighting, promoting causes she cares about on the mic, and even jumping up on stage with her violin. Evan and Molly’s dynamic makes them a well-balanced team, personally and professionally.
When I arrived at their Uptown home, I was first greeted by their two cats, Pablo Picasso and George Gershwin. Evan said, “Hello,” and then immediately left the room to go find Molly, who had just baked a cake, sewed a costume, and cooked a pot of red beans and rice. While Evan meandered back towards the couch, Molly started the discourse.
Molly Graham: I think what makes Evan good at his job is that he makes people feel comfortable and when you’re performing, you can be very uncomfortable. You’re vulnerable on stage and Evan is a great listener and empathetic, so even when a performer isn’t saying exactly what they need, he can pick up on things from their body language. He anticipates needs really well. It’s one of the most important aspects of both of our jobs. We’re solution-oriented, so when we get in disagreements personally, it’s never a fight. It’s always a question of, “What did you need from me to not make you feel like that?”
Did you two meet on tour?
Evan Martin: Yes. With David Shaw.
So, would you get him to be your officiant? And would he be shirtless?
MG: David would probably love that. We would say, “You have to wear clothes.” The first time we ever met, Evan was working in the sound booth at the Maple Leaf. I took a picture of him and sent it to him, and we chatted a little bit. And then when we went on the David Shaw tour we just became really close and loved spending time together and would order in, stay on the bus, go out, watch movies, play games. We’d go hang out on our off days. All the guys would be making plans and Evan would text me like, “Did you want to go to the steakhouse with the guys?” And I’d be like, “Not particularly.” And he’d be like, “Sick! Me neither.” When we got home, I remember still texting and talking every day even though we were done working together.
It sounds like the way you two met, on the road, actually translated to the reasons you’re successful as a couple.
EM: Almost directly.
MG: We help each other. If I’m assistant tour managing for The Revivalists and I’m trying to bring everything from the green room to the bus or need help with merch or VIP or stocking the van, Evan’s the first person to come and help me. And if he has a question about who his best contacts at the venue are gonna be, I’ll point out who he needs. We complement each other because my skills are with people and logistics and Evan’s are technical and mechanical, so we make a good team when we’re on the road… and off the road.
How do you balance both being out of town so often?
MG: When we first moved in, we maybe saw each other for two days in two months.
EM: We missed each other at the airport. I would leave for a two-week in the morning and she would get back from a three-week at night.
MG: There were a couple times where I was like, “Maybe I’ll get to see him at the airport because my flight goes out the day his comes in.” But then my flight would land early and we missed each other a bunch of times. It works well for us, though. We’re both 26, so we both encourage each other to do our own things.
EM: And we need money. Rent is not free!
OK, Molly, I’m kicking you out. Your interview is going in next month’s edition, so the floor is Evan’s now. Tell me about your company, Evan.
It’s called Dynamic Sound. I’ll go wherever sound is needed and really do whatever for anyone who needs a mixing board, pole speakers, wedges, and some microphones.
You’ve always been an engineer, never a musician. That’s pretty unusual.
Yeah. I started doing DJ stuff when I was 13 and my mom found a class that taught me about live sound when I was about 14 or 15. Then I studied audio at NOCCA and now I just record music and do live sound.
Have you ever had any non-music jobs?
I washed dishes for two years at Midway Pizza on Freret Street when I was in high school, but by the time I got to college, when I was 19, I managed to pay rent through music, which was a big deal.
Did you continue to study music engineering in school?
Yeah, but I’ve been ahead of the curve at school my entire academic life. I’ve always just figured stuff out on the internet and then been an assistant to the teacher by default. At Loyola, I didn’t really learn about engineering so much as I helped teach the classes.
So, really, they should have been paying your tuition.
Tuition was free for me, so, they were. That ended up getting me a job at the Maple Leaf, which expanded my opportunities to the entire scene here.
One of my first interviews for this column, Cam Smith, said that the Maple Leaf was the trickiest room he’s ever done sound for. What is it that makes it so difficult?
It’s just ear-blisteringly loud. It’s really loud. It hurts. It’s a long rectangle so it’s like a sound cannon from the stage. It’s also got metal-lined walls, harsh and reflective, super unforgiving when there’s no bodies in the room.
So the more people there, the better it sounds?
Yeah. Human flesh between the speaker and the hard surface helps.
That is an incredibly serial killer-y way to phrase that.
What can I say? Humans absorb frequencies. We do! That’s what seeing and hearing is.
You worked on The Rumble’s Grammy-nominated Live At The Maple Leaf?
I was assistant to Mack [Major] on the day of recording and helped plug in microphones to facilitate recording, which I’m sure was very helpful, but I didn’t touch it in post-production and I wouldn’t claim any footprint over the sound of that record.
Do you feel like the recording accurately represents what it’s like to be at one of their live shows?
Yeah, definitely. It’s hard to convey how loud The Rumble is at the Maple Leaf though. It’s like being at a gun range without ear protection. And that’s not even digging on The Rumble. Anyone with a loud drummer and two horns in the Maple Leaf is gonna sound like that. When there’s two or three hundred people in there, it’s nice sometimes. Really high loudness with a bunch of bodies in there can sound really good.
I’ve only been to three concerts since I’ve been home this year and you’ve been running sound on two of them, one at Marigny Opera House and one in a backyard, so when I see you, it’s most often a view of you walking past me, face in an iPad, adjusting levels.
That’s where people will normally find me.
Are you able to control almost everything with an iPad?
Yeah, everything that doesn’t need to be physically plugged in with my hands. A lot of soundboards will have remote capability, so it’s the app for whatever soundboard you’re using. I’m gonna be using a Midas M32 most of the time [the M32-Mix app with that soundboard]. It’s what’s at most bars and mid-level venues in America.
Do any mixing boards intimidate you?
DiGiCos. They just cost a quarter of a million dollars, so I never get to touch them. I’m not afraid to mess them up, per se. It’s gonna be fine. It’s all just EQ, compression, preamp, routing. It’s kind of like a kitchen: knives and forks. You know everything in the kitchen, you just don’t know where it is. It’s like when you cook in someone else’s house and you have to find the slotted spoon and it takes 40 minutes.
The joke is when you go to a rich person’s house…
And you’re like, “Where’s your garbage can?” A DiGiCo is a rich person’s kitchen. It’s the industry standard if you’re a big artist who goes on a lot of tours. I use an M32 most nights, and that’s about five grand, which is very affordable.
How long do you typically need to set up the sound in a new venue, when you’re touring?
If I’m just mixing front of house, I need however long sound check takes, about 40 minutes before the set, to configure the board how I want it. But a lot of times I’m not just walking in and being like, “Cool. Let’s go.” I’m usually getting the band in there and being a liaison between the band and the stage crew. In town, I’m usually also doing monitors. If I need to get the stage set up, if I’m the one plugging everything in and arranging it as to the plot, I need about two and a half hours. In the case where you’re traveling with the same soundboard, the same speakers, and the same microphones, then the amount of time you need is the amount of time it takes to plug it all in, plus 20 minutes.
As a musician, I get enraged when I’m denied a sound check and have to just start performing cold or only get a few minutes to line check. What’s your feeling about line checks?
When I’m on monitors, I hate it, because I would not have time to bring out the monitors and I gotta hear feedback to take it out, so there’s always gonna be a first time that you hear feedback until I get to fix it, and you want that time to be before the show, not during. When I’m doing front of house, there’s less opportunity for feedback but I definitely feel miffed, bamboozled, when I’m mixing a show for hundreds or thousands of people and I didn’t get the sound check. It’s like, “Come on. This represents my ability to mix to all of these people.” It sucks but being a pro is also being like, “Whatever,” and having the ability to deal with it and move on.
Recording with Zita at Loyola’s studio, June 2024. Photo by Nathan Schweitzer.
Because my last Sound Check interview was with Valerie Sassyfrass, wireless microphones have been on my mind. I remember asking you about them and you having strong opinions on the matter.
Yeah. They’re impossible to make sound good. It’s just a super tiny diaphragm condenser mic which is usually hanging here [on the cheek, not right in front of the mouth], so if you’re in a rock band, what you’ll pick up is just gonna be drums. That’s already what every vocal mic in a rock band is—just cymbals, unless it’s a loud singer, right on the mic. It’s the reason why it’s mostly pastors and corporate stuff with no drum kits where you see those mics employed, ‘cause it’s an omnidirectional microphone, so it captures in a circle. Forget about putting that in a monitor in front of you. It’ll never be loud enough to hear but I like the form factor. If it sounded like a Shure SM58 it’d be on every person, but it doesn’t.
What’s the difference, for you, in the way you do live sound versus studio recordings?
Making records is art that lingers. You have to go home and think about it. When a live show’s done, it’s done. It already happened. You can make mistakes or do things on a live show that make you think, “I’ll remember that” and then not, but when you go home with an album that isn’t done… Studio work is like a chisel: You’re really thinking about things and being purposeful with the chisel. And then live work is just a jackhammer. Do it. Get it done. Make it happen. When you start off a project you’re like, “I’m so excited. This is gonna be so sweet. I’m the best. Everything’s awesome.” And then every project ends like, “Just get it out. Fuck it. Just release it.” That’s, like, every project I work on. So lately I’ve been getting good at helping artists not get too caught up in the minutia of their projects, and then you get better at that and you just make more albums. You’ll pretty much never listen to an album you’ve made and be like, “We don’t have to do anything to this.” If you ever get done with a record and you’re like, “I’m a genius. This is perfect,” you’re probably not very good. Usually I have to convince artists to “give up” on it—not exactly give up, but just let it go, let the recording out into the world and make a new one.
So, you mix live shows, record studio albums, and do a podcast?
I’ll do any breadth of work with a microphone and speaker that people want to pay me for, so I record a podcast for a dude who played for the Saints and LSU, “the Honey Badger” [In the Bayou With Tyrann Mathieu]. I go to his huge mansion on the North Shore and record him talking for 90 minutes and then I dip. I do the sync of the audio [to the video], then I process the audio, then I send it off to editors.
Does editing out mouth sounds drive you insane?
Not really. They have really sophisticated new ways of automating it which makes it really quick. There’s literally a plugin called de-mouth click [Mouth De-click]. In Pro Tools, on my plugin search, if I type in “De–” there’s, like, 17 plugins. The tools I use are available in any DAW. It’s just the iZotope RX series. The RX series is fantastic. Go look up NoiseWorks’ VoiceAssist. DynAssist. I think it’s Pro Tools only and, say you take a vocal, right click the vocal, enable DynAssist, and it will automatically ride the vocal level to be perfectly the same vocal level on every word, not dissimilar to how a compressor would, but it doesn’t impart the sound of compression on it. And then the newer one, VoiceAssist, this one isn’t a plugin, it actually looks at the whole file. It’s ARA [Audio Random Access] processing, so I think it’s in Pro Tools and Cubase, but they’ll also do things like automatically gate it, deal with sibilance, deal with breaths, and then it will also kill the room tone. Say, for this recording, it would take out the background sound of the dishwasher without affecting the quality or the clarity.
So it’s like the equivalent of photoshopping out something you don’t want in the background of a photo?
Yes, perfectly. So I’ll record live shows, multitracks, and offer to give people mixes of their shows and I don’t charge them what I would charge them to mix 10 songs because that would be a lot of money, so tools like that help me perfectly level and gate and de-ess an hour-long vocal with this tool, and then get to mixing. So like, for an hour-long show, I’ll use DynAssist on bass and have it perfectly level the bass for me and then I’ve got the basis to start mixing it, to do creative and tone shaping things after the dynamics are taken care of. Ninety percent of the time, when something doesn’t sound good in your mix, it just needs to be turned up or down.
Top photo by Sabrina Stone
