Last night I arrived at work to find that the people that hired out the venue had their own engineer. But neither myself or Phil were willing to let her loose on the rig especially when I found out that she is in her second year at Deep Blue Sound. Frankly she wouldn’t have been able to cope with the sound rig on her own, Deep Blue don’t teach live engineering, they skirt over the live sound engineering issues which is why no venue will touch Deep Blue Sound graduates as they are taught studio engineering, which is a million miles away from live sound engineering. I think she’ll make a very good live engineer, but she needs to learn how to engineer live sound and what all the various equipment does, specifically how to deal with feedback, something you don’t get in a studio, there aren’t any speakers to feedback through in the recording rooms, only studio monitors in the sound booth, which obviously wont need anything other than a talk back microphone. Anyway, she has the right idea of how to engineer, for example, if something isn’t loud enough, bring the other instruments down, rather than boosting the quiet channel. I think she got a lot out of last night, learning a whole new way of engineering sound. But it does show that Deep Blue Sound are churning out loads of so called “qualified engineers” that actually don’t have a clue. Kelly who was with me last night saw red lights come on the compressor and assumed it was bad, which to me means that Deep Blue hasn’t taught her how to use compressors properly. I would be interested in attending a couple of Deep Blue sessions to see how they teach engineering. I’ve been seriously unimpressed with the Deep Blue students I have seen engineering in live venues so far. I am a firm believer in sound engineering being something that you already have an aptitude to do, it’s more of an art than something you can learn.
I had a scare this morning; I turned on my computer, it gave one long beep and turned itself off. I think “hmm, let’s try that again” – with the same result, now I am thinking, shit I hope my computer isn’t knackered. I took the side off the computer to see if I can spot anything obvious, which I couldn’t. So I started a process of elimination, removing the 512MB stick of RAM, no difference, then removed one of my 1GB sticks, still dead, I removed the final 1GB stick and replaced it with the other 1GB stick, and suddenly it sprang into life. So I deduce that the 1GB stick of RAM was at fault, but not wanting to lose 1GB of RAM, I put it back into DIMM Slot 2, and it wouldn’t boot again, so I moved it to DIMM Slot 3, and it worked fine. Then just out of interest to check if the slot is b0rked or not, I put the 512MB stick in slot 2 and it worked fine. So all that I did was move the RAM around into different slots and that fixed the problem thankfully, I would have been lost without my computer!
