Daily Driver

The Daily Driver is the weekly engineer profile feature on Above the Fader. One road dog. One real touring rig. One strong opinion. Photos. The story of how the rig got the way it got.

It's the thing we read when we want to know what other working engineers are actually carrying out the door, what they swear by, what they used to swear by until last summer, and what they argue about on the phone with their tech rep at three in the afternoon.

What gets featured

Real touring rigs. Real broadcast rigs. Real corporate, theatre, cruise, club, and house-of-worship rigs, when the operator is doing the work seriously. The format is the same regardless of scale: name, role, current credit, a short list of choices about console and wireless and headphones and IEMs and mics, three pieces of "couldn't tour without it" gear, the weirdest thing in the case, two hundred to four hundred words on the rig story, and one strong opinion you hold about something controversial in the field.

The opinion is the part most submissions weaken. Don't. The whole publication is engineers with opinions. If your strong opinion is "Avantis is overrated for the price," put that down. If it's "in-ear monitoring has made the average monitor mix worse," put that down. If it's "modern guitar rigs should have shipped wireless ten years ago and most touring acts are still chasing the cable," put that down. We'd rather print a sharp opinion we disagree with than a vague one we don't.

We do not edit your opinion. We may push back in print, in a separate piece, with attribution.

Photos

Three to five photos of the rig. Phone is fine. We'd rather have the actual board with the actual gaff tape and the actual labels than a Dribble shot. If the bus is a mess, photograph the bus. If the rig is in a corporate ballroom and the lights aren't on yet, that's the photograph. The rig story is the rig story.

What you get

A byline on the Above the Fader website, indexed by your name, role, and current credit. The piece sits in the archive permanently. You get a copy of the formatted piece for your own use (portfolio, social, whatever you need). You get our email subscriber list reading it the morning it goes live, plus the website traffic that follows the long-form schedule.

You also get the small ego payoff of having other working engineers send you a text the day yours runs. That's not nothing.

What we ask

Honesty about your gear. If you don't actually use what you say you use, somebody reading is going to know. Honesty about the rig story. The interesting story is usually not the polished one. And a willingness to be wrong in print about something. The opinion field is not a marketing exercise.

Submitting

The first five Daily Drivers are recruited by us, not by open submission. If you got pointed at this page by Tal, congratulations: you're the one we asked. Use the form below and we'll edit and schedule from there.

If you weren't directly asked but think you should be, fill out the form anyway. We do read every submission. We'll either schedule you, write back with what we'd like to see different, or write back with a polite version of "not yet."

Click Here for the Daily Driver Submission Form

Pitches, corrections, and questions: hello@abovethefader.com