As you may or may not know, I'm a sound engineer for a local rock band.
I also play bass and write songs and do lights and take pictures and play webmaster and drive the truck and load the trailer and fix the gear and...pretty much everything.
Anyway, for over two years I have been with the band BLISS and on Wednesday my boss finally bought a new mixing board.
It's the one I really wanted, a newer version of the board that revolutionized the industry 15 years ago.
I took these pics right after he dropped it off at our house.
Muy complicado, but nothing I can't handle.
The main thing is that all the broken stuff and limited resouces of our old board are fixed, and I can finally make this band sound the way that they deserve.
We loaded into the club and I set to work with my cordless drill, pulling now-redundant equipments out of their racks and stashing my own custom cables.
Simplifying, thank God.
I had devised many creative solutions for the old board's problems.
As we went through sound-check my workload was a bit heavy because none of the knobs or switches are anywhere near the right place, since everything is set to *zero* from the factory, but the sound was so awesome that I was getting very excited.
5 minutes before showtime I saw some strange patterns of flashing LEDs, and then my boss (who paid for the new board) got a puff of smoke in his face from the ventilated rear!
We're both heartsick and furious, but there's no time to waste.
I got the shitty old mixer set up, then went nuts finding and connecting all of the custom cables that made our old board get the job done.
We started our show 15 minutes late.
The new burnt mixer goes back to the store tomorrow, and they better have a "loaner" to cover the multi-band Cinco De Mayo show, or I'm in for a huge ration of grief from the other bands who might want guitars in monitor 2 and the drummer's vocal in monitor 4.
The last time I experienced this level of catastrophic gear failure was probably 2002, and yet the show went on @ Iguana Bay.
Before that, I think it was the time that lightning struck the Baylor basketball facility and a bunch of my gear got fried.
Finished that show with only a short interruption, too.
I remember re-patching everything while several hundred college kids did The Macarena, so tonight was a definite improvement!
2 comments:
Oh. My. God! That sucks! I'd have crapped my pants right there on the spot.
Damm good thing you had the old equipment with you for backup instead of piled on the livingroom floor.
Any idea what fried?
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