So the other day I got called in to work in a local theatre where I do some stuff occasionally. I started working there through one of my other clients, who is the main provider for the theatre, which incidentally has very limited house PA. There is alot of story there, that I just won't go into. Anyway though, I was called in to be the PM5d guy, since none of the regular audio folks that were available that day were familiar with it, and MAYBE, the band MIGHT have an engineer....the also MIGHT be a 10 piece that turned out to be 4, and they MIGHT need 12 in ear mixes, but they MIGHT not, and we MIGHT not know anything at all....
It turns out that the show is a show of Turkish Sufi music and the Whirling Dervishes or Rumi (Hope I got that right...) The show is being put on by a promoter/producer type that is doing this as a series of cultural/educational type events, all near college campuses. As a result production info is being filtered severely. We have received a couple of vague production riders apparently, but haven't been able to confirm anything on them, such as the second set of paperwork, which included a request for 12 ear mixes, which we were never able to confirm with the production people. The main audio production guy that couldn't actually be at the show due to prior commitments had alrady decided that they were just going to get wedges and sidefills, and have to live with it. He also speced a basic mic kit of 57s, 58s, and some 391s. We got there early that day and the other audio guy and I decided to try to figure out as much as we could in the time we had before they arrived to try to set mics and such, and lo and behold the production called! After about 5 more calls over the next 30 minutes or so, we finally got some concrete info. It was only to be 4 musicians on stage, as some of the group had trouble getting visas. Our day just got easier...right? They arrived a bit late, over an hour actaully, and we got them setup and ready to sound check. Now all day, I had been showing the other audio guy, previously a regular at the theatre, features of the 5d and how to do various functions on it. He's a great guy to work with and we really hit it off, and form a good working relationship. When it comes to actually mixing though, we found out that they don't really have an engineer, so my partner decided that he would mix the show. I didn't really argue since he had much more experience with ethnic music (Although I think I did pretty well with the Spirit of Fes festival earlier in the year at the same venue) and he also was more familiar with the venue and many many years my senior. Since I wasn't planning on mixing anyway, I had no objections, and stood by to help him get around the 5d. All went well until intermission when I went to show him how to use fader flip to quickly make similar mixes in the sidefill mixes, and a presenter ran out to the podium unexpectedly and caught us off gaurd. I immediately retreated from his space and let him go about his thing, and immediately after that two performers with headmics entered the stage to do their thing, and uh oh...problems. Now, the astute listener will already know what happened. Neither I nor my partner immediately caught it due to the back and forth nature we were sharing on the console. Yes Virginia, the console was in fader flip and he brought the headmics up in a far upstage wedge mix, rather loudly, enough to hear it in the house actually, but due to the muffled nature of the sound through the DS curtain, we couldn't pin it right away and it took us 15-20 secounds to figure it out and rectify the situation. After that, pretty much a great show overall, and we spent some more time talking about the 5d, and the show and well...you know how audio guys get when they get talking? Kinda like this long and winding blog entry huh??
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