Time for another phone clear out

Here’s a shot from the first gig I did upstairs in the jekyll, it’s a mess cardboard boxes full of tangled house cables that hadn’t been touch for years, my old rack which was so shallow I couldn’t even leave cables pluged in to the back of the fx units… We had cables tied on to the ceiling, some going round the wall and I almost emptied my adapter stash. A steak knife was the most used (and by that I mean abused) tool of the day: It fixed a microphone stand, a speaker cable and cut a drum carpet.

Eight months later and things are a little bit more orginised, the power amp has been racked along with the asociated cables, lots of dead stuff has been fixed,  I got myself a new rack with a 2U drawer from Swan Flightcases, setup is a lot smoother now which gives me time for food and sometimes even a sound check (ok so I actually just like an excuse to listen to good music on a not bad sounding PA) Here’s FOH from a few weeks ago (and pretty much the layout I’ll have for a while)

Also just at the side of my desk is a new cable tester from cpc (studio spares and thomann have similar) very useful bit of kit for 20 quid..  although I am considering hacking a cat 5 tester in to it to make a poor man’s version of the Audiojog Pro8

Look a drumkit!

Yes it is a Sennheiser e840 and in that room it does actually work. No it’s not my first choice in kick mics, no it’s not even my 3rd choice for a kick mic. It’s not a big room and the mic works well enough to bring up the click from the beater.

On other drum related news the house snare now has new heads, which reminds me I really must upload the photo of the old one.

I have 2 more gigs at the Jekyll this year and hopefully next year will involve some new gear.

Anyway now it sunny I can hopefully get back to reparing leaking windows.

Whitby!

A long time a go in a town not so far away I was having a few beers at a music festival: The Whitby Goth Weekend.. then the next time I was there I was on the crew, next time running the crew and then a couple of times after that I suddenly find myself as stage manager..

Thursday was load-in day and for the first time ever the stage was almost in the right place (normally its on the wrong side of the hall, completely the wrong size and bolted together with 4 bolts a section).
So with a little bit of tweaking the stage was built. Next up was the slightly sparse lighting package (which desperatly needs some source 4s on the front truss) the lighting truck also had the 8×2 decks which served as a front extension for the stage and a backline riser for the headliners stuff. Lastly the always excellent PA from Phil at Flux Acoustics. I almost forgot to mention the backline package from the studio who’s name has just completely vanished from my head…

Hmm my grand plans for a day by day write up are failing due to the fact that I just can’t be arsed so have some pictures.

Monitor World

Band Storage area

I also decided to bring all the merch into the main hall:

1 day build
2 show days
10 bands
3 hour take down
7 rolls of gaffa tape
100 cans of rider beer for the crew afterwords was a pretty nice bonus too.

Looking forward to next time when we’ll have more dressing for the stage and hopefully a really interesting LED and scrim combo for the seating areas. Sadly I have hardly any photos as my girlfriends SD card crapped out and as you can probably see my phone pics are getting worse and worse as my phone gets more and more sratched.

Weekend fun!

I didn’t think waking at at 2:30AM was going to result is a good day… but you know what? It’s been a great start to a busy weekend. Have some pictures:

Yes there is a lot wrong with this picture but it does the job! It’s also quite pretty in a stange scaff based way.

The video wall ready for the final panels (the last 2 were installed on camera).. BTW if you see me on Britains got talent STOP WATCHING SHITE TV!

Then it was off to Glasgow for a Plastic Noose gig and I only took one picture:

Tomorrow will be just as busy and Monday will be for sleep.

Plastic Noose

Multi-instrumentalist Alan Emslie lauched his latest project on the world a few months back. It’s bass guitar driven industrial music with Alans growling vocals and drum smashing making the final product. The first gig was a good laugh as it was all mixed from a Tapco mix 6 and a pocket pod for effects. Thankfully them room was small neither the drums or his bass even had to go through the PA.

The pocket pod battery ran out between sound check and the show which was a PITA but thankfully we had spares… other than that the gig was fine and nothing broke.

Anyway the reason I’m posting about this now is that not only is their a new album but also T-shirts and a load of upcoming gigs at least one of which I’ll be back behind the desk for… although consderably better equiped than gig one. Oh and he has a nice new website too click here to see it

Another festival over

At the start of the month I was thinking the festival was going to be quiet this year but by the end I was wondering if I was going to get more than 4 hours sleep at once.

From Scottish Ballet to the big purple cow and then the month was very nicely finished off with a somewhat famous pyrotechnics display.

There’s still one thing that really bugs me about festival time.. I had a busy month and so did most of the people I know in the industry but it could have been busier especially at the start of the month students are a major contributor to the quietness. Not all students but a fair number of them: Students want experience, fringe venues want cheap labour which means that those of us who wish to earn a living have to compete with 100s of people who will put in a whole months work for less than I’d normally charge for a week. This is annoying in the present but it also potentially forces rates down over a longer term as lots of fringe veterans agree to work for peanuts when they finally start applying for jobs. IIRC there was a union agreement regarding rates of pay for the EIF stuff but nothing similar exists for the fringe.

I suppose the problem with paying techs is that most fringe stuff can barely afford to pay the talent.

Oh and on happier news I have been enjoying setting up my new TC M-One XL fantastic effects especially given I paid less than the cost of an MX300 for it.

The joys of websites

Anybody who is reading my google+ posts will know I’ve recently been tarting up my website in order to bring it out of the dark ages… in fact this very blog post will be syndicated to it. In the past I’ve always been a fan of hand writing all my html and css but for this iteration I took the plunge in to the world of cms (content management systems). I also decided it would be an interesting experiment to see how far you could go without writing a single line of html or css… (at this point I should probably confess that I did edit a few lines of CSS but only edit but it was only colours and margins).

So anyway it’s still very much a work in progress but: You can see the results here.

Thinking back to the first sites I made in 98 and 99 its hard to imagine the internet being static anymore (by that point php and mysql had been around for 4 years but from memory most of the internet was still static content.) 1999 Was also the first time I used dreamweaver it was version 3 in a very very early macromedia studio bundle which Clyde Valley High School had purchased… but the thing I remember most about their site was the tedious process of drawing animated gifs frame by frame.

Oh and if you were expecting an update about gigs: Boyzone was wet, Skyfest was wet and muddy.. I do have a couple of pic which I may post later.

The two extremes

Strange day at work this weekend. First job of the day was a get out for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. Very interesting because the performance featured surround sound mixing. This was used heavily for soloists as well as percussion. Everything had it’s place, even the leaks from the ceiling didn’t stop the show and most importantly everything worked even with the setup being as complex as it was. Sadly it was at this job that I learned about the death of a friend and fellow crew member earlier in the day.

So I decided to go for a pint before heading home (post work beer is always good and it also provided an opertunity to inform a couple of folks about the sad news) and this is where the other extreme comes in (Yes it’s time for another rant about one of my favourite pubs again)

DJ setups are about as simple as it gets (well ok they can be complicated but lets ignore that for now) All you need is a couple of audio sources, a mixer, an amp, some speakers and the appropriate cables to link it all together… Some hints about cables:

• Cables, especially really thin ones do not like to be closed in cupboard doors.
• A hum killer will not stop the buzz caused by a broken cable shorting.
• Tying all your cables in a big knot and stuffing them in a box is not a good way to store them.
• If you’ve sucsessfuly coiled a cable a cable tie is NOT a good thing to put round it.
• If the aforementioned cable tie is velcro (or some other easily removable type) then I’ll let you off.
• A pile of broken cables and a soldering iron need some human interaction in order to become useful.
• Speakons are a lot more reliable if the terminal screws are tight.
• Having spare cables is ALWAYS a good idea.

Being the nice person that I am I soldered enough to get both dj setups working in exchange for a couple of pints.

Cleaning out my phone

and found a few photos from the 2 recent gigs at Murrayfield which I thought I’d be nice and share.

Heres one of the PA hangs for Bon Jovi: It’s Clair Brothers i5, i5b and BT218.. Also featured in the PA was a whole bunch of S4 some FF2s. I don’t know how long Bon Jovi have used Clair Brothers for PA but I can imagine if they were using them 20 years ago the entire rig might have been S4 which would have been seriously heavy! Not to mention it would also have taken a lot longer to setup.

I really did not expect to see a pair of Mackie desks at a stadium gig…. but it’s ok because no audio from them was going FOH or even to monitors: They were for talkbacks and vidiots.

• Main Act FOH: XL4
• Main act Mons H3000
• Support FOH and Mons was a pair of Profiles

Finally heres a shot of the stage and a very early morning shot of the KOL stage.

Almost forgot if you want to see some silly numbers about the Bon Jovi tour have a look The circle tour

Jekyll Fest

I think that went pretty well, looking forward to seeing other peoples photos because my phone decided it was going to flash and then take the photo… which resulted in lots of dark blurry pics.

Used my desk along with a multimix 8 (which was only being used for reverb) and a D-Two for delays. It was IMO an excellent test for the room and rig (Yamaha SV12 tops and Tannoy VS subs) as the bands were very varied in style and volume.

Monitoring was provided by 2 Mackie SRM450s which were very kindly lent to the pub by Steve Adam

Plans are already being made to make things better for the next one.