Business Conference

Well, this weekend I'm helping out some friends from church with a business conference by the airport. I went into this never having done conferences outside of church based meetings. Wow! What a change! Not having the pressure of bands and live video is really relaxing. I chose a loadout based on what the initial discussions of what would be happening during the conference. By the time we setup, and began tuning the PA, I knew I had brought way too much gear. We went from 3 floating wireless mics and a LAV; to a wired podium wired mic, and a LAV. The room: more than half the size I was planning on. Ya, I had way too much PA. I'm running the LAV and al the other mics through DBX DDP processors and I have a DBX 2231 on the LAV as well just to ring it out for different speakers. PA has a DBX DriveRack feeding it, and that's it. I needing to have 2 recording splits off the FOH console as well as a video feed for a guy taping from the back so I brought an old Yamaha analogue desk: MC24/12. Nice little desk although I wish it had recallable mutes. Anyways, today is day 2 and so far so good. Everyone is very impressed with the sound and the error free operation of it. I'm guessing that their past experiences have been pretty bad. Do any of you ever do small conferences on the weekends? What's your loadout?

House of Blues

Well, Tuesday night I saw One Republic at the House of Blues Dallas. The show sounded really good. At FOH they were running a Klark Teknic DN9340 Grapic EQ and a DBX 4800 series DriveRack. Awesome punch and alot of mid-range clarity. Something I find alot of smaller venues lacking these days. What DSP do you use at FOH?

VENUE Plug-In Action

I've always been an AUX-fed EFX kind of guy. Maybe its due to the fact that I learned on an analogue system that was wired a certain way and never changed; but recently with the VENUE I've been trying to free up some of our AUXs. The VENUE offers up to 16 FX returns and so I would have enough room to work with. Something I didn't know is that you can route the input off of one of the 4 available inserts on the VENUE, and then patch the output to the FX returns. All digitally of course. Yet another cool feature that makes the VENUE system worth every penny! If you already were aware of this awesome feature.....good for you hot-shot! Anyways, if you have any other creative ways to setup your FX plugins please leave a comment and et me know.

JBL VRX Arrays Anyone?

I'm curious to hear what some of you think about the VRX series from JBL. They also make a self-powered version of these as well. Our youth group meets in the school gym and I'd like to eventually move to a line array to get audio in the back of the room a little better. With the the point and shoot boxes we're running now, our sound is at its best up until FOH. Anything past FOH gets swallowed by the gym. I know.....gym swallowing sound instead of reflecting it everywhere you don't want? Yep. We have this weird rubber style floor and there is significant sound paneling around the entire walls of the gym. Recently our numbers have been increasing and now most of the kids have to stay in their seats due to room down front filling up. So now our focus is shifting from tweaking for worship down front to worship around the entire gym. Although I would prefer to go M'elodie series from Meyer in here, our budget isn't that large quite yet. Most of the reviews on audio blogs are very mixed. I can tell you this: we like to keep it at 105db at FOH usually during worship. So anyone with live experience with these cabs let me know how they stack up! Side note: anyone ever play around with the QSC WideLine array? Specs look pretty good, but haven't gotten to hear one in person just yet.

LOST Season 4

This show just gets deeper and deeper every 10 minutes that it plays. Does anybody just think its going to end without ever telling us about who Ben really is and what the crap that black smoke is? That would suck. I personally believe that at the end of the day, the whole island is just going to be some awesome super-secret government project to operate in different parallels of time. Or something like that. The minute they found all of that money and those passports for Ben I thought,"wow this reminds me of The Bourne Series." Anyways, any of you out there more in-tune with the TV show LOST please feel free to comment.

Start of Something New!

Well, this is my first post on this blog thing so here goes:

Being the Technical Director of my church is a little bit more demanding than I imagined. Before actually being named TD; I pretty much functioned as one as far as the Youth department was concerned. Ok, so I manage 2 systems instead of one? Easy, right? Not hardly. Alot more expectations from the big guys to have things running perfectly in both venues even though you can only be in one at a time. That's where having a great crew comes into play.

My youth crew has consisted of 5 guys for several years now, but recently dropped to 4 due to one leaving for college. These guys are all heart. I've spent many a late night with these guys and they truly are great. We've got an event coming up where the youth group will pack-up and head to a hotel for what we call an Advance. I thought I would do something special for these guys and rent a Digidesign Profile for the trip. We have a VENUE back home in the main sanctuary and they love working with it. Granted our youth groups budget isn't high enough to purchase one, but I've got a guy giving me a great weekly rate on one. So with a month and a half to go; I'm slowy setting aside some personal funds to make sure we get that console. My guys need to finally come out ahead for once and have it easy. Would they kill me if they knew I paid for it? Yep.....but it's such an awesome console! :) Anyways, this is my first of many entries to this thing. All you fellow FOH or Lighting guys feel free to leave comments or email me!