It was yet another live gig, and another under attended gig, which baffles me, three bands for £3 or £2 with a flyer and hardly anyone made the effort to come out. It’s so frustrating for two reasons, I would like to see bands get a decent crowd as they deserve and secondly the sound would be so much tighter with a couple of hundred people in the room, even 50 people stood at the front of stage would make a massive difference. Anyway, the sound was good for Misericordia and Redemption Unnamed, not so good for the first band on, Crestfall who were unlucky to be the first band to be played through the new set-up in anger, so suffered while I ironed out the little quirks in the equipment. But Redemption Unnamed and Misericordia were more than happy, infact Misericordia said that it was the best sound they’ve ever had, which is probably true as they haven’t had much experience of other venues/engineers. I know that there are better engineers than me in Plymouth, but in my defence they have been in the game a lot longer than me, I have been engineering for three years and some have been engineering for more than 20 years. Sound engineers get better with experience, so the more gigs you engineer, and more venues you have experience of, the better your understanding of how live sound works. I have learnt all my skills by watching other engineers, and learning by trial and error at gigs, so all my skills are practical, I may not know all the technical terms, but I know what sounds good. The problem with many engineers that graduate from Deep Blue Sound is that they have no practical knowledge of live engineering, so in 90% of cases make a complete hash of the sound. I’m sure that they’ll make excellent studio engineers, but it’s a completely different game-plan for live engineering. Luckily for me, I have some top equipment to work with now, so I don’t have to compromise on the sound quality because of the limitations of the equipment. Enough of the sound engineering babble, at the end of the night it was a good night, shame a lot of people came in near the end of the night, but the small crowd certainly made up for numbers in volume level. There’s another gig tonight that I will be engineering, featuring the The Damerels, Ghost and Eye and The Prima Donners, I certainly hope this one will be a little busier than the last couple of live nights at Voodoo!
Of course Saturday was football day and Plymouth came away with a hard earned point from the Walkers Stadium in a 2 – 2 draw. Plymouth twice had to come from behind to grab a point from the fixture with [sure to be] legendary striker Barry Hayles scoring in the dying minutes of the game to deny Leicester all three points. Iain Hume gave the home team the lead on 29 minutes, but that was cancelled out by Lilian Nalis’ goal two minutes later. Levi Porter gave Leicester a 2 – 1 lead with 15 minutes to play, but the ever present Barry Hayles spoilt the Leicester party in the dying moments. It’s a good result for Argyle, bouncing back from their 0 – 1 defeat last Saturday to Birmingham at Home Park. This leaves Argyle unmoved the the Championship, still sitting in 7th place, with West Brom ahead on goal difference, but Cardiff have extended their lead to 10 points over Argyle. Unless Plymouth can string a number of wins together, we can all but write off winning the league, but a play-off place in certainly still on. Plymouth have been very consistent this season, but need to win more matches, instead of drawing matches all the time, there has been too many “2 points dropped” games this season, Argyle need to convert pressure into goals more frequently, especially if we get to the Premiership, we’ll need to do better!
One thing that has been bugging me of late is my damn computer, it keeps on powering down when I use it, and powering up in the middle of the night for no apparent reason. What’s bizarre is that sometimes it wont do it for days, then it’ll do it several times in one day, I have had the machine in bits trying to find the cause, but everything looks absolutely fine from a technical point of view. The only thing I could think it could be is a dodgy power supply, but that was replaced about 8 months ago. It’s very frustrating as I can’t do any work on the machine for the fear of it switching off without notice and losing all the work I have done. At first I thought it could be a heat problem and the system is shutting down to protect itself, but that doesn’t explain the powering up from cold on its own, I have to switch the power off at the mains to stop it disturbing my sleep at night, maybe I will just have to bite the bullet and buy/build a new PC! I best plan the bank robbery then!!!
Finally the countdown begins today, it’s officially four weeks until the greatest band on the planet, Iron Maiden perform live in Cardiff, which I will be in attendance, thanks to my Icelandic friend Tomas who will be joining me at the gig and terrorising Plymouth for a week, and I personally can’t wait, it’s going to be a week of partying hard!!!