YesItWillWork
Member
Alright, so today we had the grand opening of our high school's new (well actually just seriously renovated - so pretty much new) gymnasium which has a sound and lighting rig which I'll try and get some photos of later. Being a Catholic school the ceremony was a mass and blessing ceremony. It was quite a big affair with the school's 1100 students, just over 100 invited guests, the Bishop who had traveled to be there, 2 other priests, and a handful of brothers and nuns. Without getting too descriptive, we are rather short on technicians at school. In fact there is me, who is in my last my last year of high school and probably the most experienced, a friend of mine who has some experience, and then a student who is in the year below me and reasonably experienced. I don't particularly enjoy working with this student because we don't get on personality-wise, but we manage because we need to in order to pull off events.
So it was just me and him running the setup for the mass because my friend was setting up another room in the school for a dance party which was happening later in the day. I was running the sound desk which was a very simple set-up, we just had a wireless mic on a stand at the lectern, a wireless lapel on the Bishop, two AKG condensers (not sure of model) covering the choir, and a line in from this other students macbook (which was playing all the music and outputting karaoke style lyrics for some of the songs to the video scaler for the projection system, so it was running Qlab and the karaoke program which runs under windows XP within OSX, and it was also recording a video of the event coming in through firewire), I think you can probably see where this is going. It was a disaster, we had the macbook run out of hard drive space halfway during the video, and we got views of things on the projectors that we didn't want because he didn't freeze the scaler output or blank it, the whole thing crashed just before one of the songs. I had tried telling him to split it up and I would run the music of one laptop and he could do projection, but this students likes the glory of doing it all.
Though my area in sound wasn't exactly faultless either. All of a sudden halfway through mass we start getting a fairly loud hum, turn down the lights and the hum goes away. This other student starts fiddling with things trying to get rid of it (God knows what he was doing to be honest) and of course keeps bringing the lights back of to see if he has fixed it, so not only do we have lights coming and going on stage, but the hum also coming and going. He continues to do so even when both myself and the head of drama who was sitting next to me tell him not to because we don't actually need the stage lights as its daylight in the room as the blackout curtains haven't been installed yet. Then even with the lights off there is a slight background hum in the system which was never there before, and also that we had lost the left speaker cluster (2 speakers) so the system was only running one side, which was still adequate.
Once mass finishes I begin troubleshooting because its only half an hour until the next event starts in the venue which was ZUMBA. I start repatching through different lines etcetera trying to find the source of it. Finally I reach the last step, a 2m cable from the patch panel in the amp room into the amp rack. This is a brand new install with a brand new cable. It's been in there no more than 2 weeks, and has run perfectly during that time, and the cable decides to die right in the important part. So swapped that cable out with another one and the system was back up running both sides hum free ready for the zumba and then the rock concert which followed.
All in all an eventful day, plenty of fun and excitement, overall happy with the sound rig though, it has so much headroom and is so clear, a lot better than what I was expecting.
So it was just me and him running the setup for the mass because my friend was setting up another room in the school for a dance party which was happening later in the day. I was running the sound desk which was a very simple set-up, we just had a wireless mic on a stand at the lectern, a wireless lapel on the Bishop, two AKG condensers (not sure of model) covering the choir, and a line in from this other students macbook (which was playing all the music and outputting karaoke style lyrics for some of the songs to the video scaler for the projection system, so it was running Qlab and the karaoke program which runs under windows XP within OSX, and it was also recording a video of the event coming in through firewire), I think you can probably see where this is going. It was a disaster, we had the macbook run out of hard drive space halfway during the video, and we got views of things on the projectors that we didn't want because he didn't freeze the scaler output or blank it, the whole thing crashed just before one of the songs. I had tried telling him to split it up and I would run the music of one laptop and he could do projection, but this students likes the glory of doing it all.
Though my area in sound wasn't exactly faultless either. All of a sudden halfway through mass we start getting a fairly loud hum, turn down the lights and the hum goes away. This other student starts fiddling with things trying to get rid of it (God knows what he was doing to be honest) and of course keeps bringing the lights back of to see if he has fixed it, so not only do we have lights coming and going on stage, but the hum also coming and going. He continues to do so even when both myself and the head of drama who was sitting next to me tell him not to because we don't actually need the stage lights as its daylight in the room as the blackout curtains haven't been installed yet. Then even with the lights off there is a slight background hum in the system which was never there before, and also that we had lost the left speaker cluster (2 speakers) so the system was only running one side, which was still adequate.
Once mass finishes I begin troubleshooting because its only half an hour until the next event starts in the venue which was ZUMBA. I start repatching through different lines etcetera trying to find the source of it. Finally I reach the last step, a 2m cable from the patch panel in the amp room into the amp rack. This is a brand new install with a brand new cable. It's been in there no more than 2 weeks, and has run perfectly during that time, and the cable decides to die right in the important part. So swapped that cable out with another one and the system was back up running both sides hum free ready for the zumba and then the rock concert which followed.
All in all an eventful day, plenty of fun and excitement, overall happy with the sound rig though, it has so much headroom and is so clear, a lot better than what I was expecting.