This past weekend my college, Saginaw Valley State University, was putting on Fiddler on the Roof, for the second weekend. All was going well until the second to last show. I was using a 32 channel Crest Century GT console with 28 mics and various monitors and recording outputs. An hour before house opens we start mic checks. My friend (calc) was starting the checks for me while I was finalizing some recording settings. He started the check on Tevye, and it started to feed back and send bad signal to the subwoofer. So I natually go out to the mixing position and see what was going on and by the time I got there, smoke was poring out of the main mono channel. We kill the power to the board and it still was sending signal to the speakers so we pull the outputs. All the while smoke is now comming out of both the main mono and main right channel as it reaks with the smell of burning circuits. We then start unscrewing the ripping out the main channels on the board. Three minutes go by until we get the mains out. As we pull out the main right channel it is still on fire. By this time we have the stage manager, director, and the couple of people from the cast who know something about tech. Once we got the fire out we had to decide what to do and fast because we only had an hour until house opened. We had no replacement parts and no board to take parts from. So I deciede that I need the two small 16 channel Crest Century TCs and join them together. I send someone to contact the Conference Center, because they have all of the equipment (I know it sucks having to request equipment from them, including gaff tape and mic cables). The message back I get is that their (unknowledgeable) tech will be here in 15 minutes. I told them I dont need their tech I need a sound board from their lockup. By the time I finished hooking up all the equipment and setting all the monitor routings we had just enough time to do mic checks with only holding the house for 5 minutes. We ended up selling out the house that night. The show went on without a hitch and no major equipment failures. It sure made a memorable run of the show. In the end we ended up frying two channel boards, and traced it to starting on the main mono board, burning through the board, burning the paper on the back side of the board and starting the main right board on fire. What a night!
Jeremy
Sound Designer/Operator
Jeremy
Sound Designer/Operator