When Dave Lockwood and my friend Bruce Jackson began goading me into writing a monthly column for this gazette, I was ambivalent. I stopped doing interviews years ago. If some kid asked me one more time what drum mics I used or what my favourite reverb program was I swore I would put the leeches on him. Besides, I hardly read trade magazines anymore, and they are not the kind of magazines you find lying around in a doctor's office or where you get your oil changes done. If something really spiffy comes out, they usually send me one. I don't do endorsements either, because I really don't need or want any of the stuff, and a company would have to be foundering, awash in senility, to even want me in the same room as their product.

The editors want none of that. I don't have to write about gear (although I probably will), technical treatises (hardly), or 'how to' articles (figure it out yourselves, I had to). No, they want colour. I'm out there doing it, and to me, all those knobs are the least important part of this business, out there amidst the flotsam and jetsam of life's rich pageant with a fist full of per diem. Secretly, I'm also quite flattered.

So, I'll give them colour. I've been doing this for some years now, and for all of you with expensive stereos, who admire pop bands and who think what we do is amazing, consider this. What I do for a living is basically silly. Mixing live sound for famous people in large venues to huge crowds at a handsome salary seems like a perfectly fine and perhaps noble profession, but things are never what they seem.

I sit in front of a vast untamed beast called a multiple speaker array. Face it, there is no way to make half an acre of 18-inch speaker cones and a few hundred compression drivers aimed all over the place arrive at any point at any time in anything even closely resembling a coherent wavefront. Things just sound a bit strange. Real Time Analyzers develop nervous tics, and whole octaves disappear like UFO blips on a radar screen. But that's okay: if you don't like the way it sounds, move two feet to your left and it sounds totally different anyway.

This array is hanging in an arena, a Roman invention, purpose built for the masses to see wild animals tear people apart, or in a stadium, purpose built by the Americans to see people tear each other apart. Arenas have reverb decay times approaching my age, with interesting standing wave pockets and a few hundred reflections, rendering any information coming from the array unintelligible drivel. Being open air, stadia are the best of the lot, but they have these rear stands from which, just when you thought everything was going fine, comes a rather coherent reflection of the previous verse of the song, colliding horribly right at the back of your head with the chorus the band is playing now, and just enough out of time to make tapping your foot something you need to plan carefully. Then there are open air festivals, in large flat fields where the sound goes directly over the audience's heads out into oblivion; it doesn't matter, because nobody can see anyway. In the US, there are amphitheaters, or 'sheds' (aptly named), purpose built for selling music and hot dogs — the way these places sound, the two commodities are virtually indistinguishable. Then when you get it just sounding not too embarrassing, your production manager makes you tear it all down and go someplace even worse.

Add to this that nemesis of logical thought, the monitor system. This is usually staffed by either a small, wiry fellow, who never looks you in the eye, or a large tattooed thug, who intimidates the band into liking the awful caterwauling from these terrible sounding cabinets aimed right at the microphones you rely on for your livelihood. When (not if) there is feedback, he immediately points in the vague direction of the front-of-house as if somehow, this is all your fault.

Then there are the bands you work for. They may be vastly wealthy and extremely talented, but on a sane planet, most of them would be kept in a cage, and for a small amount of money, you could poke at them through the bars with a sharp stick. You are completely at their mercy. This is one of the fundamental rules of live audio: You Can't Make A Bad Band Sound Good. You can try, but if they can't play, or if 'one' is a vague concept, they will get away with it and you will get the blame.

As touring devolves into corporate rock from its drug driven, sex fuelled beginnings, as it becomes an industry with career opportunities, competition and politics become the real areas of talent necessary to succeed. Your mixing skills become secondary to your ability to smile and instill confidence, because (and here is the strangest part of all) the people you work for directly have no idea what you do! They are on stage playing, and you are out front — they will never really know what unspeakable things you are doing to their tunes. It is becoming everything I loathe.

In about 1984, I saw an unfamiliar face cross the stage. I was told it was the 'tour accountant'. It has all been downhill ever since.

So why do I do this? Simple — I have no other marketable skills. That's not exactly true, I'm now a Professional Journalist, whatever that means. I really do this to pay for my flyfishing habit and to finance my endless fascination with tall beautiful women. I've also met some of the most astonishing people walking the planet: some famous, some not; some are good friends, some are dead, some ran off screaming into the underbrush.

But the real reason is this: every once in a while, I get control of a half million watts of good PA with a hundred thousand people around me, mixing extraordinary players. There is a point, on a good night, when my vision actually begins to blur from the kick drum as it transcends audio into a purely visceral sensation. Then, this isn't such a bad gig after all.

Trip Khalaf is the Senior Engineer at Clair Brothers Audio and works with lots of famous people. He sometimes lives in the US, although he won't tell us where. He refuses to be photographed for legal reasons.