Levee

AVL Tech as a Service

The technical operations department independent music venues can’t staff on their own.

Audio, video, lighting and network — run as one managed service, by trained technicians working from documented standards. Built in New Orleans.

Four pillars, one service

Venues don’t need another gear vendor. They need someone accountable for whether the room works tonight — and next Thursday, when a different tech is on shift.

Audio

Hands-on every show, against a written standard rather than whoever’s available.

Video

Screens, capture and imaging tied to how the room actually makes money.

Lighting

Built scene libraries with recall, so a good-looking room doesn’t depend on improvisation.

Network

Installed once, managed remotely. The layer that makes everything else supportable.

The gap we fill

Small and mid-sized rooms are expected to deliver a professional show every night with no technical organization behind them. No production manager. No documented setup — the configuration lives in one person’s head. No bench when the tech calls out.

The City of New Orleans reached the same conclusion in its 2025 Tune-Up assessment, which identified limited in-house production management, inconsistent technical staffing, and missing sound documentation as recurring themes across the venues it studied.

This isn’t a gear problem. Tune-Up already proved venues can buy equipment. It’s an operations problem, and operations is what we sell.

How we prove it

At Café Negril, our reference room, the work follows the same sequence we’d bring to any venue.

Capture a baseline

Every main mix recorded from the first night, before anything changes. No added hardware, no change to how the floor operates.

Train against the written standard

The full tech staff trained on both sound and lighting — and the session itself recorded, so every future hire receives the same training on day one.

Measure the difference

Post-training nights compared against the baseline. The venue hears the change rather than taking our word for it.

What the data makes possible

A venue’s worst night is rarely a broken speaker. It’s the tech who doesn’t show, on the night the room was always going to be full.

Because we already hold technician performance and reliability patterns, each room’s calendar and expected draw, and what’s happening around the venue — nearby events, traffic incidents, weather — we can flag the rooms likely to run short-staffed the week before, rather than at doors. That turns a scramble into a scheduling decision: pre-position the bench, reallocate technicians across the corridor, and tell the venue early.

AI is only worth what the operator aims it at. Ours is pointed at staffing reliability, and every room and city we add sharpens it.

The curriculum already exists

Standards only hold if they’re written down. Ours are.

Audio Tech Training Guide Three tech levels, core skills with hands-on exercises, a 30-day plan, a practical exam and an evaluation rubric.
Stage Lighting Training Guide The same structure applied to scene libraries and recall — the approach that makes lighting teachable.
Four Core Sound Skills A field manual on signal flow, gain structure, microphones and DIs, and console basics.

Why New Orleans is the right place to build this

It’s the hardest version of the problem, in the densest possible geography. Prove it here and the rest gets easier.

Dense

Multiple live-music corridors — Frenchmen, Bourbon, St. Claude, Uptown — packing more rooms into less ground than anywhere in the country.

Networkable

Because rooms run on managed, remotely accessible infrastructure, a venue across town or across the state joins the same operation.

Exportable

Austin, Nashville, Memphis and Chicago have the same rooms with the same gap. The model travels.

Who’s behind it

Chuck Keith

Standards, training and quality

Thirty years as a touring engineer. Established the technical standard the City funded through its Tune-Up program, and runs the Loyola training pipeline that supplies our technician bench.

Maurice Toussaint

Systems, network and operations

Electrical engineer and repeat technology founder, and a working New Orleans musician — these rooms from the stage, the board and the business side.

Talk to us

If you run a room, book one, or work in one, we’d like to hear from you.

Maurice Toussaint
maurice@levee.live
Chuck Keith
chuck@levee.live