Oh Yippeee! ... ... oh CRAP! My first "big" gig

Posted: Fri Feb 11, 2005 9:00 am

<< Just because you are doing things in a school or church does not mean that all the people working there are honest.>>

I hear you, Tom. I'm sure that's got something to do with what happened to my "lost" AKG 422. Someone took it that shouldn't have. Even if it was "left behind" or pilfered, it's the kind of thing that someone would have immediately picked up and handed to someone in authority and said: "This obviously belongs to someone." I watch EVERYTHING like a hawk nowadays, esp on the way out. It's all too easy for something to "grow legs" and dissapear.

We don't have quite the same # of hassles with overbooked halls and grumpy custodians here, but it's close. I suppose one good side of a union hall is that once they're able to charge for the extra hour (and fully know that it wont go into another after that) they tend to "help" you get out fairly quickly. That way THEY are out all the faster.

Your sticky fingered custodian reminds me: Does anyone mark their cables? The sound system at our local union hall has very nice cables - color coded for length (at a glance) and embedded name-tags under clear shrink tubing. We NEVER mix up who's whose there.

Posted: Fri Feb 11, 2005 9:28 am

JoeH wrote:

Does anyone mark their cables? The sound system at our local union hall has very nice cables - color coded for length (at a glance) and embedded name-tags under clear shrink tubing. We NEVER mix up who's whose there.

I have a few cables I picked up used that have simple wrap-around tags that are easily overlooked - but the cables are bright blue, so they're easy to keep an eye on.

The rest of my cables I made myself - they have color coded ends (not for length, but for IDing connections). Both ends also have the length and "Cheap Tracks" under clear heat-shrink.

Posted: Fri Feb 11, 2005 9:35 am

JoeH wrote:

Your sticky fingered custodian reminds me: Does anyone mark their cables? The sound system at our local union hall has very nice cables - color coded for length (at a glance) and embedded name-tags under clear shrink tubing. We NEVER mix up who's whose there.

Yep, I do. I use either Monster Cable or Mogami home-rolled and needless to say, they are rather expensive. At the beginning of 2004, I had:
8 x 50' Monster (500 Series)
10 x 50' Mogami (Neglex Quad)
22 x 25' Monsters (500)
18 x 25' Mogami (NQ)
6 x 15' Monsters (500)

At the end of the year, come inventory time, I had:

5 x 50' Monsters
9 x 50' Mogamis
15 x 25' Monsters
15 x 25' Mogamis
6 x 15' Monsters

I'm guessing that's somewhere in the neighborhood of $500 of lost/stolen cable.

I've been marking my cables with a standard label maker for a while, but it doesn't seem to stop the problem. Of course, I do this with stands too, but I seem to always lose a few regular (not tall) boom stands a year too.

Oh well... tax write-offs Evil or Very Mad

J...

Posted: Fri Feb 11, 2005 9:42 am

Karl,

I just checked out your site - that's a cool site!

Also, I saw that you did some work at Warren Central HS... I used to go there - I lived in Castleton and went to Belzer MS and Warren CHS! Small world!!!

J...

Posted: Fri Feb 11, 2005 9:50 am

Guitar Centers had a BIG sale on microphone cable straps and we brought them out. Ours are BRIGHT YELLOW so we can tell, almost from across the room, if they are ours. We to have a BIG letter "B" on all of our cables, stands and all of our cases are marked. It is the little stuff that seems to grow legs and disappear. (Buy the way the microphone stands we almost lost both had big "B's" on them so I knew they were ours.)

One additional point is that having someone else with you is really important. Then one of you can watch the other's back and answer questions and fend off possible time wasters while you are trying to setup.(Most of the concerts we do are open to the general public so we get a lot of "tire kickers" coming over to us and asking questions, which we are always happy to answer but my intern can be answering the questions while I am finishing up the setup which works GREAT!) It is also important to have someone else around if you need to go back to pick up something you forgot or when it comes time to strike one person can do the microphone tear down while the other is doing the equipment tear down so no one is away from the equipment for long periods of time.

-TOM-

Posted: Fri Feb 11, 2005 11:17 am

Cucco wrote:

Karl,
I just checked out your site - that's a cool site!
Also, I saw that you did some work at Warren Central HS... I used to go there ...

Thank you.
It is a small world. "bumped" into another local on a different forum just a few days ago.

That concert at Warren Central was one of my first recordings - 8 tracks - I was recording with Cool Edit Pro. CEP records all tracks to a TEMP file in 64k chunks all intermingled in a somewhat random fashion. The PC locked up at the end of the concert and all I had was a 10GB TEMP file. I REALLY didn't want to lose this recording. I ended up writing perl scripts to strip 8 tracks out of the temp file, but try as I might I could not figure out a way to successfully analyse the end of one chunk and the start of the next to determine which track it belonged to (are you following me here?)

The end result of the data recovery was 8 tracks - each track had chunks of data from different mics. Any one channel was a herky-jerky mish-mash of channels - but all 8 recovered tracks added up to make a useable mix (for the most part). I could not mix it - I just had to live with the levels as recorded.

Here's a short clip from that recording where they played ragtime on the Theater organ - a duet with the organ and piano.
http://www.theatreorgans.com/cicatos/Organs/warren.htm
http://www.cheap-tracks.com/mp3/organ_ragtime.mp3

I don't track with CEP (or Audition) anymore.

Posted: Fri Feb 11, 2005 1:15 pm

That's a very cool track, Karl. I enjoyed it a lot. As a keyboard player and gadget freak, theater organs have always intrigued me. The idea of so many sounds coming from one place, put together as one big pseudo-symphony is amazing.

But still, (or is it me?) Do you find a few odd moments here and there when some of the sounds coming out of that beast are terrifying, as well? Hehehe...maybe I've seen too many circus/killer clown/horror movies, but there are moments (esp during all of those "string" passages that just give me creepy chills up my spine! hehehe.... Twisted Evil

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