On Saturday I was asked to babysit some DJ’s that were playing at Voodoo, I was there primarily to make sure their DJ’s didn’t destroy the new PA on it’s second outing. And just as well the Voodoo management asked me to come in, as if their sound tech was in charge, our speakers would be in taters now. Let’s face it, almost 13,000 watts of amp power running through a 9,000w speaker system, not a good combination for the speakers. As the night went on the DJ’s progressively turned up the levels on the DJ mixer, and I lowered the volume accordingly on the sound desk, and counteracted any EQ changes they made to keep the sound as balanced as possible. At one point I simply turned the horn amp down to less than quarter power as the sound was so harsh coming off the DJ mixer, I had already turned the high end on the desk EQ to minimum and it still sounded atrocious. You would think that DJ’s would have some idea of what sounds good through a sound system, but it seems now, why change anything at all, the engineer will tune the rig up so it sounds at its best, surely that’s what’s most important? Maybe not, I don’t know much about dance DJ’ing, maybe volume is more important than sound quality to them, I think that is probably true as 90% of all dance nights I have been to sounded awful, just a loud mess of sounds. Then there was the microphone cable breaking incident, two cables and one microphone, luckily it wasn’t our microphone, but the MC really didn’t have a clue, what part of plug your microphone into this cable is difficult to understand? I had to physically take his microphone and plug it into the mic cable that ran directly from the multicoil, eventually after two mic cables, I realised that it was his microphone, so swapped one of our SM58’s for his microphone, complete with new cable. Then he decided to insinuate I didn’t know what I was doing stating that having the pre-fade listen (PFL) system activated stops the sound coming from the PA, I simply couldn’t be bothered to argue. As the old saying goes, never argue with an idiot, he’ll drag you down to his level and beat you with his experience. So all in all, it was certainly an experience and I earned my £35 for seven hours work, although I should be paid danger money for having to listening to that type of music at stupidly high volumes for that length of time, although I spent most of my night in the bunker (engineers booth) with earplugs in, and my ears still hurt at the end of the night!
Earlier in the day Argyle went down to their first defeat in 7 games at Home Park to Birmingham City. I expected this game to be difficult, but I still expected to get something from the game, even if it was only a point. Even Birmingham manager Steve Bruce said that Plymouth deserved something from the game. Maik Taylor was hero of the day for the Brummies denying the Pilgrims on multiple occasions, including two wonder saves to deny Akos Buzsaky and Barry Hayles. The visitors took the lead in the 75th minute off the head of Radhi Jaidi. It’s easy to say that Plymouth should feel hard done by, but I won’t say that, all credit to Birmingham for defending well and taking their opportunities when they came up, but at the same time its’ disappointing as an Argyle supporter. This result sees the Pilgrims drop to seventh in the table, but it’s not a major issue as 8 points cover positions 1 – 8 in the league, I am still confident of grabbing a play-off place come the end of the season.