Running of Event

Upon dropping gear to the venue at 2:30pm, I began setting up equipment. As the replacement sound engineer was unable to make it until 8-8:30pm for sound check, I wound up spending the day assembling everything myself.

I own and brought a HiWatt bass combo, a Roland JC75 for guitar, and both PAs as well as power strips. The mics, cables, and mixer were borrowed from CSM AvTech. 

The PA system I own has yet to have stands purchased, so in order to bring the speakers to audience head-height I had to use a chair for one speaker and the other was placed on the top half of their flight case. The chair was slightly rounded, so for safety I wrapped it in Duct tape. It looked bad, but worked. I also wrapped everything else I saw in duct tape to make it an aesthetic matching the crust punk venues of the Ohio hard-core scene my dad played when I was a child. 

The power amp for the audience speakers was also placed on the flight case. Luckily the stage was about 4.5m wide, as the speakons I had for it were 5m long. I then taped all the cables down along the front edge of the stage to avoid any trips or falls. 

I added power drops along the back and stage left, as all the power sockets in the walls were on stage right. I also had to run last minute for extra power leads to get energy to the sound desk. The desk wasn't given with an IEC cable, so I then also had to run back to my studio on Shandon street for one, plus some extra cables and adapters to be safe. 

I then set up the onstage monitors, one centre front stage, and the other on top of the bass amp facing the drummer. The power amp for these speakers was placed stage right under one of the light stands where it was by a power drop, and also out of the way, again avoiding trips and falls. 

As this was only a 400w studio amp, the speakers and amp both required 1/4inch jacks so I had taken guitar leads to power it. I've used them on up to 300w amps before which for a short duration I deemed safe enough off that experience. The speakers were only rated for 100w rms anyway, so the PA wouldn't even have been used at full volume.

I then set up mics and began sound checking after the drummer had placed her kit onstage. The desk's LED indicators were dead so it took a while to figure out what the problem was when no sound came out of the monitors onstage, however I remembered that during the initial testing in the studio I had to crank the amplifier to about 50% power momentarily to kind of kick start it. After trying this the speakers crackled to life and ran away perfectly.

There also wound up being a problem with the desk that I had overlooked, the aux outs were 1/4inch as well, and I didn't have male XLR to jack adapters, only female xlr to jack. To try and get sound into the musician monitors I placed a microphone over an audience monitor and used said adapters to plug the mic into the onstage amp, however this low voltage was rejected by the amp and wouldn't give me any output.

I order to bypass this issue the other band offered an extra bass amp they had brought. One of the guitar leads was just long enough to reach stage left from the desk, so we angled the bass amp backwards and fed the desk aux into it. I angled the amp's EQ towards the highs to avoid any mud, and it worked well enough to hear ourselves. We then sent just vocal and guitar to this for my own performance, and added keyboard to it as well for the headliner.

The mic I had placed on channel one for main vocal also had a minor problem with it's output level being too low, so we swapped it with the backup vocalist's mic. Then when set at the same gain and fader volume they were at good relative levels to eachother.

I didn't have tape to label the desk, so after making absolutely sure the sound engineer knew the channel list inside and out we went on with sound checks.

1- Main vocal

2- Backup vocal

3- Drummer vocal

4- Guitar

5- Keyboard DI

6- Bass DI

No drum mics were needed as this is a small venue and there was a singers group downstairs that we didn't want to disturb. I had spoken with the man who runs this event beforehand who said if the acoustic drums were the loudest thing onstage we would be fine and not disturb them. 

Once sound checks were over I checked that everything was good with all musicians, the door was covered and had a €50 float. Before going on I realised the final song on the setlist was one I still had a small bit of trouble remembering lyrics on so I wrote down the first 2 words of every verse section to jog my memory, and we then hopped onstage, thanked the crowd, and started.

The performance then went off without a hitch, other than one point where I got tongue-tied on the second verse of the final song. We had last second swapped places in the setlist for Breed and Everybody, as Breed was easier to sing and made a nice warmup to overcome the nerves. Then by the time we got around to Everybody I was comfortable and able to nail it. 

Any audio problems throughout were handled brilliantly by Yordanka the sound engineer, and the levels in front of stage were loud enough to need earplugs, but at the back of the room were comfortable listening without, and also were perfectly audible on all fronts and well EQd. 

The headliner (Other Mother) also played brilliantly and had no issues with their sound, afterwards they thanked me for having them, said they had a brilliant time, and to let them know if I ever wanted them to play again.