When Adam Johnson asked us to run the sound and stage for the Houghton
Spring Art and Music Festival, I said "sure, no problem". After all,
we had a pretty good sized PA just sitting in storage. What's the
point of having a large sound system if you don't use it once in a
while?
If you know me, you know that I don't like to get
caught with my pants down. I tend to prepare - actually over prepare -
for anything were other people are going to be counting on me. The
first thing I did was bust out the old 32 channel mixing board - a
piece of equipment that I had done little more than trip over for the
past five years - just to see if it would power on. Now this thing has
a lot of knobs and jacks and I went through each and everyone to see if
they still worked. Most did work, some needed a little TLC, and a
few... well... I just couldn't remember what they were supposed to do
in the first place.
I
also dug up our old 100' snake, which is used to extend the reach of the mixing
board to a stage that was up to 100' away. Now this snake had spend
the last 8 years living on the floor in Ray Bosley's garage. I fully
expected it to be a rusted out piece of $#!@$, but to my surprise, ever
channel worked perfectly. Cool! You can see the stage end of the "snake" sitting to the right of the mixing board below.
Now
that I'm older and wiser (in other words I've learned to use Google), I
performed a little research and discovered that I've been under
powering my speakers for, oh, well... my entire life. I was
unsuccessful in my attempts to locate a power amp to rent or borrow, so
I ended up investing over $350 in a new 2500W EuroPower EP2500
power amp. Like I said, I don't like to let people down and I knew I
was going to come up short without beefing up my rig a little - at
least my "under power" problem was solved. (EuroPower amps are not the best in the world, but they do provide clean power at about half-the price of a more main-stream amp, like a QSC).
Technical Note:
It is really not possible to "under-power" a speaker. That is to say, you
can't wreck a speaker by giving it too little juice anymore than you
can wreck a car engine by under-revving it. What you can do, however, is expect
too much sound (power) from your power amps and end up over-driving them. When a
power-amp enters an over-driven state (meaning the input signal is
continuously maxed out), it can react by delivery 3 to 4 times its
rated power and unexpectedly "over-power" the speakers thus burning them
out. So under-powering is really just freaking out your amp with ends up over-powering the speaker.
In addition to being responsible for the stage and sound at the arts festival, I was performing with on of the groups, Hannah Bethel. Fortunately, this created an opportunity for me to test out the state of the PA equipment before the show. So we set everything up in my garage and I was able to test out the equipment. See below. Hmmm... maybe I should wipe some of that equipment down.
Now I never would have been able to pull of this gig by myself. There was simple too much equipment to move, too many wires to run, too many things to keep tract of, and most certainly too little time for it all to happen. Basically, we had to arrive early, setup stage rises, speakers, amps, the mixing board, a dozen microphones and a drum kit. We needed to get everything wired up and tuned in, which we did just as the first of six bands that would be performing that day arrived.
Mark Lucier was a savior. He provided the drum kit and drum microphones, helped set everything up and tear everything down, and stuck by my side the entire day helping the bands get on and off stage, as well as, debate with me all day about how the bass drum should sound.
Mark Lucier and Adam Johnson fighting with the risers, but don't worry, they had a secret weapon this year - the instructions! Adam, who just strikes me as being the slightest bit accident prone, escaped the grueling setup unscathed this year. Below mark is "deploying" highly organized microphone cables to mic up his drum kit. (or maybe he's untangling my cable mess, its hard to be sure).
Another life savior was, Ray Bolsey, who worked tirelessly throughout the day setting up equipment, troubleshooting problems, routing and re-routing microphone cables and just helped keep things moving smoothing. Depicted below is Raymo setting up instrument microphones and labeling them so we could identify them from across the room.
This would be a great time to mention that I personally own one microphone, just one. Well... that's not entirely true... I actually own more like a half-dozen microphones of various shapes and sizes, but only one of those is appropriate for stage work. Learning that I needed to have eight microphones and eight stands on stage caught me a little of guard (I suppose it shouldn't have, but it did).
I ended up purchase two Shure SM57s and six microphone stands, but that's about all my financial stomach could handle. Thanks to the generosity of local musicians like Mike Labeau of the Blackflies and Marc Geborkoff of The Outlaws who generously donated equipment for the festival, we were able to pull together everything we needed for the day.
That's me about donig something with that EQ, who knows what exactly.
All in all, thanks to a lot of hard work from a lot of people, the Houghton Spring Art and Music Festival Stage Show was a huge success. The day was not without its glitches, but with help from people like Mark Lucier, Ray Bosley, Adam Johnson, Mike Labeau and others, the music kept flowing.
I like to put a special thanks out there to Mike Labeau and Adam Johnson for manning the sound board while I performed on stage with Hannah Bethel. I was releaved to know we had a couple of seasoned musicians making sure we sounded great. Its all about the audience and we wanted to give them the best show we could.
Just one more photo of Jessie relaxing at the art festival listening to the bands.
Thanks to everyone who helped make the stage show a huge success!
- Todd
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