I was helping out at a small festival at the weekend.

To cut a long story short - punters beer and mixers don't interface in a good way and we could only stop the ensuing feedback by pulling the mains plug.
luckily the active speakers had 3 mic channels and a line in so we got everything replugged and the band were playing within a couple of minutes.

In the studio you often get a second try if problemns arise, but live is a different story

Worst gig I've ever been involved with was some guys with laptops making 'random experimental music' basically noise torture.

- I couldn't tell if the PA was working properly because their stuff consisted entirely of glitches white noise and buzzes.

I'm sure that many of you will have some good / interesting stories ....

One springs to mind. It was a 4 hour drive each way, and when we arrived the landlord was rather merry as he had quite a bit of luck on the Grand National this afternoon. The organizers were rather wary of his condition, but there wasn't much that could be done. He let in a load of underage people who had turned up to see the gig, and who, in all fairness, behaved themselves as far as I could tell. All was fine through the two support sets, but around 15-20 minutes into our sets, the drunken landlord had a hissy fit as there were so many underage kids there (he had let them in, and his staff were serving them) that he decided he wanted to stop the gig.

He stormed up on stage and demanded to our drummer that we stopped. When I turned around to see what was happening the landlord and the drummer were engaged in a heating swear-fest, and the drummer didn't miss a beat! We carried on without stopping, until the guy decided to cut the power. Only the PA went off however, so we made a hell of a lot of loud noises and squeals for a while beforeleaving everything to feedback.

8 hours drive for 20 minutes ain't fun.

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Bill Withers while Tom Waits, and Stan Getz

Probably...small festival I was on patch, monitor engineer leant on the recall button, had failed to turn recall conformation on and recalled a blank patch, phantom was powered from stage so half of the instruments were lost out front and the 8 way monitor mix, graphic eq's for the wedges, gains etc...
nice...
happened a few times though...i'm sure he's learnt his lesson now though

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Live Sound and Studio Engineer

always press "lock"...

Hell, always save the patch -and then press "lock".

>

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planet nine
lincoln, uk.

yes, I generally didn't get on with him...or his love of feedback, so was quite happy to see him sh*t himself for 5 minutes

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Live Sound and Studio Engineer


Edited by PaulEvansMusic.co.uk (11/05/10 09:06 AM)

I had some fun on a gig when the sound engineer said,
im off after this last band plays and im taking the sound system with
me!,so we had to set up, upstairs on this really poor pa that was meant just for the djs , it was set up really bad and everything sounded really distorted and nasty.I think i blew the speakers!

Another time I was playing behind this curtain to start with, as the people in the hall were doing some kind of strange autumn procession to the center of the room, then eventually the curtain came up and after about 10 minutes or so, another band came on and set up while i was playing and then proceeded to do a sound check,grrr it P*ssed me right off.

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A gentleman is a man who can play "jump" on keyboards, but chooses not to

For me it was having 40 minutes to set up a complicated act for WOMAD where we were recording 48 channels and had over 30 open mics on stage, many of them on very quiet acoustic instruments with only line checks of course.

There was a lake between FOH position and the stage, so I was stuck at the desk, while the poor (but wonderful) monitor engineer set the stage using looms we'd made up prior. Just counting down the seconds as each source came on line knowing that on the hour we'd go live regardless of where we were at.

Last source kicked in with 10 seconds to spare and we were live!

Survived rather well considering, though I'd have to say it wasn't the most relaxed gig I've experienced.

Oh and then there was the woman who covered me in chocolate sauce .......... but that's another story.

Bob

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www.bickerton.co.nz

We turned up at a gig in 1979....we were a 60's band, and the venue was expecting a Glen Miller tribute show....when we explained that it wasn't possible the manager was quite stroppy and pressed us more and more so our drummer went into pisstake mode and told him that Glen Miller was definitely out as we weren't 'In The Mood"

I have not so fond memories of running across a festival site one time (in the mud and wet) to take a DI box off the band on the acoustic stage as the PA company hadn't specced enough for main stage....not fun! as i fell flat on my face in the mud pit in front of the stage .

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Cheers, Ben Gummery, Techie

Dublin. 2004. Celtic Tiger in full swing. We got to the Venue on time and began to set up. The House engineer met us and let us in, appeared to turn on the desk and then disappeared for about two hours. As doors were opening shortly we called the manager, concerned as we were past due a sound check. Engineer appears in a most displeased mood. We later found out he was a coke head and we were evidently disrupting him from his partying - which we were paying for, incidentaly.

Sound check and mic set-up seemed fine, but he disappeared again only reappearing when the venue was half full.

Support act went on - nice band, good guys.

When we went on our monitoring was all wrong. Couldn't hear anything but a thundering drum kit. Overall sound was a tinny nightmare as the engineer (I assumed) struggled with the desk.

Audience didn't appreciate the sound but I can't blambe them. We managed to rescue the second half of the show by taking a break and asking the engineer to leave the desk alone while I did a quick balance for the second half.

We later learned a Parlophone scout was in the audience - not that we would have signed with those hams anyway - and left quite unimpressed.

After the show the engineer came up and tried to start a fight with me but I beat him off with a sturdy SM58.

Left us with a bad vibe only moderately abated by copious amounts of plain porter in the backstage area.

Shudder.

At least one outdoor gig a year with horizontal rain and no "plan B". Probably the worst I did sound for was another outdoor for full wind band - turned up with everything except the big box of mic stands. I had only five or six stands for what is normally about a 25 mic mix! I found a couple of mic clips to fix to music stands and with the few stands I used stereo bars to get as many mics up as possible. Not the best mix ever!

It was a weekend festival in the west of Ireland and I was employed as the monitor engineer for the main stage. There wasn't a single redeeming factor to the whole weekend. I'll try to make this as quick as possible!!!
On arrival the first job was to errect the infatable stage cover. The person who was on production,p.a. company, stage manager, my employer and owner of this had only got it new and never put it up before. To cut to the end of this mess i'll say that trying to put an inflatable cover at the top of a hill in the west of Ireland is a most stupid Idea (my eployer could have chosen the bottom of the hill to have this stage it later turned out!) So it blew away and riped. Stage scrapped so a trailer stage rig had to be called in. After having only enough time on opening night to do the headline act we were told that there would at least be bed for us in the village...... we walked through the lashing rain and mud to arrive to an empty B+B! myself and the FOH for the second stage (another almighty mess)had to sleep on the floor of a transit for the weekend!! The other FOH guy slept in his car.
There is too much more to tell about the weekend to write here with
P.A. problems, stage management, staffing..... all due to inadequacies of the employer.
Needless to say I've never worked for him again.