Christine Butchart spends 60 hours a week exercising her skills as a financial planner in Hillsburgh, Ont., 100 kilometres northwest of Toronto, a profession she has practised for 31 years. But behind her professional financial planner image lies a dedicated fan of folk music who has parlayed her love of music into a talent for mixing sound.

Butchart, now with Assante Capi-tal Management Ltd. , is often on the soundboard adjusting the musical sounds for several Ontario folk festivals a year, including Winterfolk in Toronto, Hillside in Guelph, the Celtic Roots Festival in Goderich and Mill Race in Cambridge.

“I love being part of the musical team and spending time with creative, musical people,” Butchart says. “Being a sound technician requires a good ear, but also the ability to take lots of different pieces of information and pull them together into a cohesive whole. In a way, that’s what financial planning is about; it’s just a different application of similar skills. You pull various pieces together to move clients in the direction they want to go.”

A soundboard, also known as mixing console or audio mixer, is an electronic device for combining (“mixing”), routing and changing the level, timbre and dynamics of audio signals. Soundboards are used in many applications, including in recording studios, public address systems, broadcasting and television, and film post-production.

A simple application of the technology is combining the signals from two microphones (each being used by a vocalist while singing a duet) so they may be heard through one set of speakers simultaneously. When used for live performances, the signal produced by the mixer is usually sent to an amplifier.

Butchart has been a “folkie” since her university days and has been a regular attendee at music festivals. As she has listened to performers at concerts over the years, she began to notice what was being done by the sound engineers, and could pick out occasions when they may not have played up a solo properly, or when the various instruments in a group were out of balance.

Butchart took a sound-mixing course at Celtic College, a four-day learning program associated with the annual Celtic Roots Festival. After the course, she hung around the stage watching the mixing and hearing the changes being made. By the end of the festival, she’d managed to find her way onto a soundboard for a live performance. After that, she took every chance she could to learn from other sound experts and to practise on the board at various festivals and concerts.

“The board allows you to enhance the quality of the sounds,” says Butchart, who also plays the bodhran, a Celtic drum. “For example, someone’s voice may have a lot of sibilance [hissing], but you can take away the sibilance and make it sound natural. Or you can add reverberation or echo, which sometimes enhances the sound. It’s a partnership between me, the musicians and the audience.”

Sound mixing can be done in many ways, Butchart says, and it is “an art and a skill at the same time.” At concerts, she finds it hard to listen uncritically to what other sound mixers are doing. Small details, such as where the microphone is placed on an instrument, can make a huge difference, she says.

Mixing is affected by the strength and tone of the various musicians’ voices, the way those voices combine with instruments, as well as the acoustics of the venue. An outdoor concert requires different techniques than a concert hall, for example. And some instruments may be amplified too much by the shape and size of a room, while others need the effects of the room to increase their power. The sound mixer can compensate for these differences.

Each mixer can allow his or her personality to come through, emphasizing different sounds. “Every mixer has his or her own sonic signature,” Butchart says. “I can often identify other people’s mixes.”

Folk music, whose listeners play close attention to lyrics, requires more sensitivity to vocals than hard rock. Sometimes, there might be two singers on stage, and other times there could be 15 musicians, each adding to the complexity of the mixer’s job. It’s also important to know exactly how instruments are supposed to sound. A guitar with plastic strings, for example, has a different sound than a steel-stringed guitar.

@page_break@“I’m the intermediary,” Butchart says. “I listen for the audience and try to make the musicians sound as good as possible.”

Indeed, Butchart loves the immediacy of mixing at live concerts. Like live theatre, mixing is totally in the moment and there are no second takes.

“It’s different than financial planning, which is an ongoing process that you keep tweaking,” she says. “When a concert is over, it’s over.”

Butchart entered the financial services business almost immediately after graduating from the University of Western Ontario with an honours degree in psychology. She started selling insurance in 1977 but quickly realized that her clients’ needs went far beyond insurance products. After spotting a newspaper ad for Winnipeg-based Investors Group Inc., Butchart decided to become a financial planner.

“My focus was never on being a salesperson; it has always been to help people,” Butchart says. “By becoming a financial planner, I had the opportunity to do more for clients. Ultimately, this has helped build deeper relationships with clients and has resulted in long-term client relationships.”

When Butchart eventually moved from Investors Group to Planvest Financial Corp., which was later bought by Assante, most of her clients went with her. Indeed, some have been with her from the start. She has lived in the same area of Ontario for 29 years, but during that time, some of her 190 or so clients have dispersed to other parts of Canada, including Vancouver, Calgary, the Maritimes and across Ontario. To continue to serve her clients, Butchart has become licensed in four provinces.

“You don’t always get verbal feedback from a client that you’re doing a good job. Nor do you often get a sense of completion, as financial planning is an ongoing process that constantly requires little tweaks,” Butchart says. “But my high client-retention rate and ability to hang on to assets tells me my clients are happy. And a lot of them have stayed with me, even after they’ve moved away.”

Butchart, who is both a registered financial planner and a certified financial planner, strives to do what’s right for each client, even if it isn’t immediately lucrative for her business. For example, Butchart has advised some clients who have received inheritances to pay off their mortgages, even though that hasn’t resulted in a sale of investment products and thus commissions for her. And there have been circumstances in which forgoing an RRSP contribution has made sense.

“Some of the top salespeople may be constantly bringing in new clients, but they’re often losing others,” Butchart says. “I hang on to my clients. I try to move my perspective to the clients’ side of the table, and if something feels like it would be a fit for me if I was in their shoes, then I’m doing it for the right reasons and am on the right track. It’s a partnership, and I’m part of the clients’ team, helping them make the best decisions.”

As a “night owl,” even with her financial planning business, Butchart starts work in the early afternoon and often stays at her office until the wee hours of the morning. She is always available to clients who have questions or simply need clarification, and many have discovered that they can reach her in the office to talk in the evening, even after midnight. The late hours devoted to mixing certainly agree with her.

“The mixing allows a lot of creativity in my life, and is so different from my day job,” she says. “It’s very cool to have that other dimension.”

Butchart has assembled her own sound equipment, which she lugs to concerts in the back of her Toyota Corolla. Although she has reached the stage at which she gets paid for her gigs, her mixing only netted her $1,800 last year.

“It’s a paying hobby,” she says. “I would be going to the shows anyway, and this way I get my costs covered. I also get to adjust the sound quality the way I want.” IE