One nice thing about hanging the same rig in the same room regularly is that I get to explore and experiment, and try to improve things each time. Here are some of the things we worked on this time around: Mains Mains are 6 boxes per side zoned as three composites (2 @ 3°, 2 …
This past weekend, I mixed an outdoor concert with RCF as the PA sponsor. My colleague has been planning on investing in a new compact-format array system for a while, and this event proved the perfect occasion to do a test drive. A trim height of 17.5 feet on an SL100 and a coverage area …
Handled monitors for a small split-stage festival this weekend. The idea is that the stage is an A/B configuration: as a band is playing on one side, the other side is being turned over. We had 32 inputs on stage (16 per side) on an analog split with FOH. We set the entire console up …
Ahh, dance season. These shows are playback-only and thus far too easy to screw up by zoning out. As Keeper of the Playback Timer, audio calls the cues for lighting, so you have to focus even with you have nothing else to do except hit the spacebar in Qlab. It’s also very hard to judge …
A colleague of mine owns a production company and had a gig yesterday for a government accounting agency. The setup is simple: a podium mic and a couple of RF handhelds that everybody needs to be able to hear and understand. The trick is that the event is inside a literal aircraft hangar, probably the most acoustically …
One of the common themes for me is consistency. I’ve written in the past about keeping as much on the console as consistent as possible from gig to gig. I’m fussy about my channel naming and coloring conventions, my patching, and my console layout. However, all this routine loses its usefulness when it stops serving …
One thing that I’ve found to have a disproportionately large effect on how smoothly my mix goes is where the faders fall under my fingers. I feel strongly that time spent banking / paging through a desk to find the right inputs is not time well spent in a performance environment. Case in point: this …
Started the day off with a Pro1 programming session. I’m trying to get the desk to do a VCA line-by-line style show, in which the automation only recalls the channel mutes and VCA membership. I do have it working but there are a few little niggles that need to be smoothed out. Got an email …
My auto-correct suggested “gig diarrhea,” which is ironic considering that this comedian has been telling poop jokes for the last twenty minutes. A single-input comedy show is a very revealing test for a system tech. If your system is leaving seats uncovered, you’ll know. The good ole’ 58 EQ: By this point in my career, …
Doesn’t get much more “back to basics” than this. My role in this production is limited to comms and an announce mic, so I took the opportunity to do an RF coordination on the venue’s ULXD rack and their wireless comm packs. Feeling newly inspired after our chat with RF guru James Stoffo, I ran …