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Junior Varsity
My festival strategies
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<blockquote data-quote="Jay Barracato" data-source="post: 31596" data-attributes="member: 24"><p>Re: My festival strategies</p><p></p><p>I think this weekend I drew to an inside straight.</p><p> </p><p>Had a festival Friday in Kentucky and my only advance contact was a dead end. After several no responses, I showed up early on Friday to make sure I could get what I needed because the printed schedule only had 10 minute changeovers. When I arrived at the stage the rig looked extremely familiar and sure enough the tech that I was referring to in my last post showed up with crew. Like I feared my technical advance had never been forwarded through the festival staff. I explained my needs with the mic package, split and in ears and found out that the other two evening bands were set up similar to me (one with split and iem monitors on stage and one with iem run from FOH).</p><p> </p><p>Since I trusted the FOH tech, I thought the easiest thing was for me to supervise the patching on stage and have him rough in my gains while we worked. His stage crew had no problem with my patching instructions and everything went right up. I got to FOH and found my exact layout on a custom layer on a LS9 with high passes on everything but the bass, eq's flat, compressors dialed in with the thresholds all the way up, and both instrument and vocal effects ready to bring up to level. I quickly added a little of my standard starting eq for my vocal mics and instrument mics, dialed in the compressors, and we were into song one within a couple of minutes. With the scene saved, we got patched and into set 2 even faster. As I would expect from any competent system tech, none of my board eq's were more than 3 db from flat and I never even looked at the system eq. It is so nice to be able to use board eq for creating space in a mix for each player rather than being forced to use it for damage control.</p><p> </p><p>One thing I know I have to work on is the effect level on the 01V/LS9/M7 series. It always seems like it goes from not really there to too much on me. I seem to be able to get what I want from the same effects on a SPX900, but the built ins still seem a little elusive to me. I also picked up a good simple trick of pulling back the instrument group between songs to help eliminate the resonant mud from the stageline stage during the spoken word parts. Probably something I did know from some point in my experience but had not been thinking about recently.</p><p> </p><p>As a study in contrast, we were hanging out with another band that had played the main stage the day before and was scheduled to play a side stage just after dinner. So I went to tell the FOH tech where I was going to be and since I knew the band he asked if I would mix them. It turns out the side stage was not being provided for by the main company but by a local band who brought in their own stuff. it turns out, the band member who was meant to be mixing the side stage was also scheduled to be performing on the main stage. The FOH tech had told the festival promoter that he would cover it with his crew, even if it made him a little thin on the main stage. My covering it for him seemed easy payback for how easy he made our main stage sets, and it was a first opportunity for me to work with a band that it is likely I can get some future gigs from. The promoter was extremely happy and seemed to think we had pulled off something amazing.</p><p> </p><p>I went over to the side stage and found an absolute mess. Most of the mics were early 1970's vintage. The powered mixer had an 1/8 of an inch of finger oil and dust fur stuck on it. There was no way on the mixer to tell if a channel had a signal or relative level. I went back to my truck and ran into the band leader and told him "say yes", so he said "yes, what is the question?" . The question was "Since I am going to mix you, do you mind if I dip into my personal mic box and put up something that might actually sound decent." Even so several things in the stage patch were tangled, and I could not figure out where the banjo was. We never did a sound check, just walked up and started playing. In the small tent, the stage volume of the banjo was close to the amount in FOH so I ended up turning up three different channels: the one that matched the label at the stage, the one that matched the label at the board, and the last remaining channel on the board that had something plugged into it that I had not identified. After the set was done, it took us all of 5 minutes just to strip all the cabling down and re-patch it in a way that matched the labeling.</p><p> </p><p>There were some other odd things from the festival but they weren't tech related, so thanks to Jason and crew for making that part run the way it should. It was the good part of a weekend that went from bad to worse quickly. I blew a spark plug out of the head in my truck on the way to Saturday gig, was towed into a dealership after the service department was closed, and then only managed to rent the last car available in town 1/2 hour before they closed. It was the fourth place I had tried. I still managed to beat the band to the next venue, they were dragging even more than me. Since I had to go from my F250 down to a Corolla, I had to leave behind my FOH processing rack which I could have really used for Sunday's show. Sunday was going to be a performance "under the stars" that got poured on just as we started setting up so we moved into a tent with all that involves. After adding in rapidly changing temperatures and 100 percent humidity, it was a good thing the system tech had a good ear because there was something my tired ears just couldn't identify. I guess that was the last lesson of the trip. Driving, even with the radio off, is not really resting your ears.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Jay Barracato, post: 31596, member: 24"] Re: My festival strategies I think this weekend I drew to an inside straight. Had a festival Friday in Kentucky and my only advance contact was a dead end. After several no responses, I showed up early on Friday to make sure I could get what I needed because the printed schedule only had 10 minute changeovers. When I arrived at the stage the rig looked extremely familiar and sure enough the tech that I was referring to in my last post showed up with crew. Like I feared my technical advance had never been forwarded through the festival staff. I explained my needs with the mic package, split and in ears and found out that the other two evening bands were set up similar to me (one with split and iem monitors on stage and one with iem run from FOH). Since I trusted the FOH tech, I thought the easiest thing was for me to supervise the patching on stage and have him rough in my gains while we worked. His stage crew had no problem with my patching instructions and everything went right up. I got to FOH and found my exact layout on a custom layer on a LS9 with high passes on everything but the bass, eq's flat, compressors dialed in with the thresholds all the way up, and both instrument and vocal effects ready to bring up to level. I quickly added a little of my standard starting eq for my vocal mics and instrument mics, dialed in the compressors, and we were into song one within a couple of minutes. With the scene saved, we got patched and into set 2 even faster. As I would expect from any competent system tech, none of my board eq's were more than 3 db from flat and I never even looked at the system eq. It is so nice to be able to use board eq for creating space in a mix for each player rather than being forced to use it for damage control. One thing I know I have to work on is the effect level on the 01V/LS9/M7 series. It always seems like it goes from not really there to too much on me. I seem to be able to get what I want from the same effects on a SPX900, but the built ins still seem a little elusive to me. I also picked up a good simple trick of pulling back the instrument group between songs to help eliminate the resonant mud from the stageline stage during the spoken word parts. Probably something I did know from some point in my experience but had not been thinking about recently. As a study in contrast, we were hanging out with another band that had played the main stage the day before and was scheduled to play a side stage just after dinner. So I went to tell the FOH tech where I was going to be and since I knew the band he asked if I would mix them. It turns out the side stage was not being provided for by the main company but by a local band who brought in their own stuff. it turns out, the band member who was meant to be mixing the side stage was also scheduled to be performing on the main stage. The FOH tech had told the festival promoter that he would cover it with his crew, even if it made him a little thin on the main stage. My covering it for him seemed easy payback for how easy he made our main stage sets, and it was a first opportunity for me to work with a band that it is likely I can get some future gigs from. The promoter was extremely happy and seemed to think we had pulled off something amazing. I went over to the side stage and found an absolute mess. Most of the mics were early 1970's vintage. The powered mixer had an 1/8 of an inch of finger oil and dust fur stuck on it. There was no way on the mixer to tell if a channel had a signal or relative level. I went back to my truck and ran into the band leader and told him "say yes", so he said "yes, what is the question?" . The question was "Since I am going to mix you, do you mind if I dip into my personal mic box and put up something that might actually sound decent." Even so several things in the stage patch were tangled, and I could not figure out where the banjo was. We never did a sound check, just walked up and started playing. In the small tent, the stage volume of the banjo was close to the amount in FOH so I ended up turning up three different channels: the one that matched the label at the stage, the one that matched the label at the board, and the last remaining channel on the board that had something plugged into it that I had not identified. After the set was done, it took us all of 5 minutes just to strip all the cabling down and re-patch it in a way that matched the labeling. There were some other odd things from the festival but they weren't tech related, so thanks to Jason and crew for making that part run the way it should. It was the good part of a weekend that went from bad to worse quickly. I blew a spark plug out of the head in my truck on the way to Saturday gig, was towed into a dealership after the service department was closed, and then only managed to rent the last car available in town 1/2 hour before they closed. It was the fourth place I had tried. I still managed to beat the band to the next venue, they were dragging even more than me. Since I had to go from my F250 down to a Corolla, I had to leave behind my FOH processing rack which I could have really used for Sunday's show. Sunday was going to be a performance "under the stars" that got poured on just as we started setting up so we moved into a tent with all that involves. After adding in rapidly changing temperatures and 100 percent humidity, it was a good thing the system tech had a good ear because there was something my tired ears just couldn't identify. I guess that was the last lesson of the trip. Driving, even with the radio off, is not really resting your ears. [/QUOTE]
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