THE GOOD THE BAD AND THE UGLY

[HBSPro]

Set up for a show a while back everything was going good until I plugged in the Light Board SMOKE STARTED COMMING UP THROUGH THE FADER SECTION WOW NOT GOOD. started tagging wall outlets for stage lighting they had to stay on all ight boy it was warm near the stage.


any one care to share there fun also.

[Jones]

Get to a show and realize 7 of 8 18s are locked up tighter than shit. The one weekend of the year Rittenhouse was off.........quick phone call, and fast drive from Lewistown later, show is on.

[cruseaudio]

Drove an hour back home to get another mixer 45 minutes before the show started. Can't complain though the band only started about ten minutes late despite the problems. Sweatin bullits every second of the way!!!!

[HBSPro]

get to the venue set up the entire show early to make everythng as perfect as can be . only to find out the bands not comming forgot to tell the sound company . the club booked another band who showed up with there own production (talk about a lot of work for nothing)

[HBSPro]

Was working a in house gig at the Full Moon Salon in Barnsboro Several Months before it Closed. Showed up to Load out Collect all my Gear Only to find out I was Now Missing a set of 18s, a Power amp, and a Stereo 31 band Eq. and some Lighting and tools (gotta love that)

[Jones]

Oh sorry, you want that back? Just kidding.

[bassist_25]

I showed up to play a gig at the Starlite Lounge in Mahaffey. A lot of our material is drop-tuned down in C#. I plug my only five string in and can't get any sound besides some farty boom. An amp issue wouldn't have been a gig deal; I could have just plugged into a DI box and went without any stage volume. An issue with my only five string is a big problem. After playing with a series of instrument cables, our drummer finally walks up and shoves the chord as hard as he can up into the jack. I then get sound. The jack must have been loose or something. I went out and bought a back-up five string the following week.

old sKool can tell you about some stressful gear malfuctions. I always tell him that his rack has more lights than the Nasa control board. All it takes is one short in a patch cable.

[HBSPro]

Thanks for the offer (jones) But i know who took the Stuff it was the owner of the club.

but if you have extra gear to give away and feel sorry for my loss heck yea ill take it hahahahahahahahaahah

thanks

[onetooloud]

Worked a show in the not to distant past where the club owner is on me like white on rice over volume.

So I back it down alot still on me!! So I now tell him all thats left is stage volume. I told him what that meant, so he now asked me to have the band turn down. Wish I'd tried that. Dah!

I speak to Mr. Marshall about his stage volume, and he may or may not have backed it down.

Club owners back again, I go back to the stage. No change this time for certain.

Mind I've worked this room plenty before, actually recommeded at times by same person (club owner).

So now the club owner is very visably upset and starting to understand whats happening. He goes to the stage and has a talk with Mr Marshall.

The owner walks away from the stage. " I hear were are too loud" comes over the pa from Mr. marshall and at the same time almost tears the knobs off his marshall turning it up. After turning up he rips off a couple of notes that would make the captain of most airliners return to the airport for repairs.

Well the club owner is near me so I told him all I can do now to save face
is shutdown the pa. Simply to prove to him its not me!

I work this room plenty often enough and didn't want to lose it. At this point the band is finished there and I wasn't going down with the ship

Theres still more. I have part of the my road crew go out and move my box truck away, because I'm worried about its safety.

The owner and this person have heated words while we are tearing down.
I feel its a good time to go find out whats going on and get paid. I go to see whats happening its all is over. I return to the stage expecting Mr marshall to be there and the band is gone. No pay no get out of jail free card!!

The following week if find they also walked with my drum mics.

Live and learn.

[Jones]

That's about the time I'd be going to Mr. Marshalls next gig and breaking his fingers, one at a time.

[HBSPro]

dont Break his fingers until you get your Drum Mics back

[bassist4life2004]

played a show on new years eve in a small room, assured that we wouldnt need monitors FROM THE BASSIST AND DRUMMER OF OUR BAND (our full electric experience)....well, the drummer couldnt hear anything that we were doing (and i told them we needed monitors no matter what)

And, during the song Imagine by John Lennon (a song that i do almost every time ryan and i play out) i forget the last 2 lines to each verse and just do the mumbling...But i remembered the lyrics to all of the songs we JUST learned in the past 2 weeks as a full electric band. How the fuck does that happen?


Luckily, i quit the band.

[songsmith]

I worked a weeklong county fair (mostly on the monitor console), it was 95 degrees most of the week, and because we had some equipment issues to fix, I worked 36 hours straight. During country singer, T.G. Sheppard's set, I wasn't needed so I climbed UNDER the truck in the only shade and fell asleep in maybe 15 seconds. They woke me up about an hour later, and I was covered in TICKS, everywhere but my face and hands. I was still finding them 3 days later, all engorged with blood and gross-looking. Thankfully they weren't deer ticks, so no Lyme disease.
One of my favorite sound engineer stories is:
I worked another county fair in Poughkeepsie, NY... while the big system was over at the grandstand with the national acts and the 20,000 people every night, I was relegated to a "talent" tent on the grounds. During the day, this tent hosted a weeklong talent contest, which was great training for anyone to run sound, as there was everything from tweeners dancing to canned New Kids On The Block songs, to full-on country bands. At one point, a very nice family was to sing a little song, Mom and Dad, a few small kids, and a 12 or 13 year old boy. Earlier in the day, the boy threw a hissy and refused to sing the song, an extremely cute one about living on a farm. So, in lieu of actually embarrassing himself by clucking like a chicken onstage, one of the parents came up with the idea of having a real chicken cluck at given points in the song. They brought a Leghorn chicken in a regulation chicken crate, which we wisely set up behind the stage, both so the boy wouldn't be seen and embarrassed, and so animal rights people wouldn't see the kid POKING the poor chicken with a long stick during the chorus hook. I have had the pleasure of miking many things... Celtic harps, Bodhran drums, timbales, pennywhistles, kalimbas, flugelhorns, hell, even telephones, but this was my first and only experience miking domestic fowl. Incidentally, I used an EV CO15P small-format condenser mic on a short boom.
This was also the fair that had the national finals for horse pulling. I went into a porta-potty for a minute, and when I came out, I was surrounded by pissed-off 2 ton Percheron horses that were literally 7 feet tall. They get all keyed up before a pull, so they didn't like me surprising them. Believe me, I didn't like surprising them, either! I almost pooped again. I beat feet out of there, and the farmer told me not to get too close, that they kick hard enough to kill a guy. Gee, thanks.
Soundguy war stories are awesome. Never a dull moment.----->JMS

[cruseaudio]

Ok now I have NEVER had to mic a chicken!! That is rich

[HBSPro]

the Mic in the Chicken wow Hands down that is the best so far.

Oh yea
explain that one on a rider.

[HBSPro]

Did Some Work on a guys rig the other night . when i got there all the low mid 15s were blown or locked up solid. ill bet the band was pissed they only had horns left in there monitors. had to get the 15s from some place. at least they foh was back up and running.

[Victor Synn]

We played a private birthday party over the summer and Craven couldn't make the gig due to helping his dad run a national show in State College the same evening. So we got a friend, who was a soundguy in his own right, help us set up our system and run it till his gig later that night. Everything was set up and ready. Soundcheck went fine. Filler music went fine. We played a full set and things were ok. We started into our second set and a few songs in, we hear this god awful squeeling coming from FOH. Our roadie is back at the soundboard waving his arms like a madman. I run back to see our rack smoking. I start ripping plugs out and finally get the squeeling to stop. Upon inspection, it turns out we were pushing too much power into the PA and the power distro. blew up. The band tried to figure out what to do and we decided that we'd just turn our monitors around and play the rest of the night through them, since the monitors were powered seperately from the rest of the PA. We told the guy that was paying us that if he wasn't satisfied with that arrangement, we'd basically play for gas money back home. We played a few songs and he was cool with the arrangement, so we got paid the full amount. Thank god our monitors were powerful enough to be heard well among the people there. I'm sure the partiers and their alcohol consumption helped us get paid too. However, when we got in contact with Craven, that was another story. He was pretty pissed at us, as the distro. unit is his, but we paid for the repairs and all is good. Pretty ugly show all the way around.

[HBSPro]

Did you Figure out the power problem . and what caused it.

[Victor Synn]

Did you Figure out the power problem . and what caused it.

Yeah, we figured it out. Turns out whenever we patched the power into the main power of the hall, it was too much. At least, that's what I gathered from the conversations after the rack blew up. They didn't have 220 plugs, so we went direct into the box, which Craven has done a million times. However, this wasn't Craven setting the PA up this night, so we paid for it. Literally.

[JeffLeeper]

Wow...miking a chicken...You reminded me of a gig we played with Heart N Soul.
The lights were in a truck we didn't have , so the only light we had in the hall was a chicken-shaped lamp with a 60-watt bulb.

We joked about the chicken light for years.

[Primates]

30 minutes before the show was supposed to start i had 1 band that forgot to give their other members directions, 2 bands were no where to be found. 1 got in a car wreck. the other totally forgot they had a show. an hour later we got a fill in from a friend and when we're about to start the power amp quit. i probly smoked over 70 bucks in smokes that night.