There is only one topic this entry, an overview of yesterdays events at “the Phoenix remembrance service” at Voodoo. It was a long day for me, I was at Voodoo from 12pm and didn’t finish until 2:30am, so it was certainly a long one. But it was the heart stopping moment during the final set of the night that panicked me the most when I was in the DJ box adding some more smoke to capture the lights and create a better atmosphere when I heard and felt an immense low end thump and all the lights went out. The whole PA and lighting system went down simultaneously, first thing I am thinking is that sound engineer Rich was pushing the system too hard and the system had gone into protection mode. But it turns out that the main fuse for the system had tripped and later found out that a plug wasn’t fully inserted into the socket and because of Rich’s (Redemption Unnamed bassist) and his huge rig causing massive standing waves, the plug worked further out until it arced causing the trip switch to kick in. We managed to get the power back on, but were down monitors and two banks of compressors, I couldn’t do anything about them until after the set had finished as I didn’t want to chance tripping the switch again. Luckily nothing was damaged in the incident, although we are down one drum monitor at the moment as that wasn’t working from the outset on the day, and I don’t think it was working for the Eleven Lives Left gig last Saturday either as the drummer kept on saying he couldn’t hear it. Initially I just thought that it was that like most drummers they have problems picking out sounds over the drum kit, but now I think that it was that it simply wasn’t working! I have my suspicions of who damaged the speaker over driving the amp, so that is only speculation but he is the only person that used the rig other than myself or Phil, and both of us are almost anal about watching out for red lights. The problem is that with the monitor amps they don’t have the same protection circuits as the modern amps we have for front of house sound, and a red light means its doing damage, not a warning like their modern counterparts. Even with modern amps, it’s not recommended to run the red (clip) lights for any length of time as one of two things will happen, the speaker it’s driving will be damaged or the amp will simply go into protection mode and stop working; either option isn’t very desirable!
Enough shop talk, I hope that you all had a good Christmas and wish you all a very happy and prosperous new year. I am personally quite excited about my opportunities for the new year, things have started to work out for me late this year and next year should be even better. I feel like the work I do is appreciated, which makes me feel good about myself and I enjoy the work I do, which is completely different to the way I felt at the start of 2006.