Hi guys. My name is Scott. I'm a junior at CHS in Philadelphia, PA. I (unfortunately) run everything in our school's auditorium. Our building was constructed circa 1938-1940 and we have a roughly ~700 seat auditorium. I'll get some pictures of the place tomorrow. We run four major events every school year. The first is a "talent show" which we put on for a school of physically challenged students that is down the street from us. Our second show is a collection of dances from our various cultural clubs (we have 2k+ students which include tons of different cultures). Our third production is the annual spring play which is put on every April. This year's production will be based upon "Harvey" which should be quite fun for us. The fourth and final show will be the senior showcase, which is another talent show in which the graduating class show's their talents and such.
Since I've taken over as the tech manager (referred to as "President of Stage Crew") I've tried to get our systems to work as best as we can. We have a three tier curtain system that fits our shows pretty well. Stage left we have a "shed" which houses our $19k grand piano and a small (~4x20ft) storage space. Stage right we have our sound "cage" which is constructed of metal fencing material. When I joined as a Freshman, there was no flexibility on our system. It was a giant black rack with a bunch of buttons and knobs of which nobody knew about. We have 8 XLR inputs on the stage, one on each side of the stage and 6 spread out on the front of the stage facing the audience. There was a tape-deck player, a CD player, an old wireless mic system which had no wireless mics, and a few other various rack mounted pieces.
I was fed up with a lack of variety, so I convinced the teacher in charge of the Drama club (who puts on the spring play) to purchase a brand new Mackie CFX-12MK2 sound mixer. We were able to take apart our rack (for the most part) and re-route everything to the Mackie. It's amazing how much easier it is to play music for a group of breakdancing asians through an ipod rather than a CD which might be corrupt.
Anyways, my fingers are starting to hurt from all this typing. I'll be back with some pictures and some details on our lighting system and the infrastructure of our auditorium. I need some help with an intercom-type system for communicating between the different stations (sound, spot lights, light board, etc).
Since I've taken over as the tech manager (referred to as "President of Stage Crew") I've tried to get our systems to work as best as we can. We have a three tier curtain system that fits our shows pretty well. Stage left we have a "shed" which houses our $19k grand piano and a small (~4x20ft) storage space. Stage right we have our sound "cage" which is constructed of metal fencing material. When I joined as a Freshman, there was no flexibility on our system. It was a giant black rack with a bunch of buttons and knobs of which nobody knew about. We have 8 XLR inputs on the stage, one on each side of the stage and 6 spread out on the front of the stage facing the audience. There was a tape-deck player, a CD player, an old wireless mic system which had no wireless mics, and a few other various rack mounted pieces.
I was fed up with a lack of variety, so I convinced the teacher in charge of the Drama club (who puts on the spring play) to purchase a brand new Mackie CFX-12MK2 sound mixer. We were able to take apart our rack (for the most part) and re-route everything to the Mackie. It's amazing how much easier it is to play music for a group of breakdancing asians through an ipod rather than a CD which might be corrupt.
Anyways, my fingers are starting to hurt from all this typing. I'll be back with some pictures and some details on our lighting system and the infrastructure of our auditorium. I need some help with an intercom-type system for communicating between the different stations (sound, spot lights, light board, etc).
