Saturday night and another night in Voodoo; but for a change it was actually busy and I actually enjoyed the night. The night featured two of Plymouth’s finest bands in my opinion; Lemanis being supported by The Dharma Bums. I didn’t really have to do much; I actually was playing sound monkey for a change, I was there to deal with any dramas that might have arose on stage. I was there in the soundcheck mainly to help setup and give Rob (who was the engineer on the night) advice on the system and the Lemanis sound as I have engineered many Lemanis gigs before and already know a lot of the pitfalls of engineering Lemanis live. Rob did an excellent job considering being thrown in at the deep end; 12 piece band, five vocals, sax, trombone, trumpet; violin, cello and many other bits and bobs. All 22 available channels were in use; it’s a lot to keep track of, especially when things start going wrong! And this is where the title comes into play; four sound engineers in the house and we were all baffled by the lack of output from the left channel of the sound desk; after thinking there’s a short in the desk, tapping various parts of the desk to try to fix the short. I had a brainwave and thought what was the last thing plugged in and realised it was the headphones; so I unplugged them and it suddenly fixed itself. When we plugged the cans back in it was fine; never heard of anything like that before. It must have been some sort of weird situation of a little bit of solder left inside and was in the right place to complete a short when the headphones was plugged in. Then again nothing really surprises me anymore when it comes to the Voodoo Lounge, nothing works quite as it should do. It’s what I refer to as the Voodoo effect, everything that’s installed or used in Voodoo breaks for some inexplicable reason, shredded speaker coils, subs not working for no discernible reason! cables stopping working despite not being touched since soundcheck; I swear that place is cursed! I have no explanations of what causes all these bizarities to happen! Never mind on Tuesday I get to DJ some good ol’ cheese music for a McDonalds party, which I will really enjoy; it’s not often I get to DJ chart cheese music, giving me a chance to try my hand at mixing again, not something that I can really do with alternative/rock/metal music! Not that it stops me trying, managed to get some pretty spot on mixes last Wednesday night!