Had a pretty full-on weekend... a party at my house on Friday night so consequently had a pretty late night. Al and I were doing PA for the Back-Up Trust fundraising dinner on Sunday at the Birmingham Hilton. 600 people but I think we managed to get a pretty decent sound for the band and speeches that everyone could hear clearly - even at the back of the 45 metre long room. Event finished at 2am and was back home at 4am - very thankful for the extra hour from the clocks going back. Spent most of Sunday just chilling and recovering... except for unloading all the gear and returning the hire van.
After a meeting with the person who looks after all the IMI graduates I've updated and sent my CV to her as there might possibly be an opportunity available for me in another part of IMI. Will have to wait and see if anything comes of it, but think I'll practice my smug, I'm leaving face just in case I need it soon.
Sorry, but I couldn't resist the photo opportunity...Since we hadn't used the big Martin Audio rig for a while, Al and I thought it would be sensible to test it out before the gig last Saturday. I'm not sure my neighbours thought it was such a sensible idea to carry out this testing in my lounge on Saturday morning.
See some more photos from the gig on our website.
The Bath Place gig went well - lots of compliments about the sound which is always encouraging. The Shanade Morrow Band and Phat Controla both gave great performances.Last night was the first outing of the pair of linked Yamaha 01V mixing desks giving us effectively a 32-channel digital desk, which worked really well.
Was also pretty pleased with the new lights, so all in all, a good night (only down-side is my back is aching a bit today after the long day of heavy lifting!)
Al and I are doing sound for local band Phat Controla at Bath Place this Saturday. Should be a good gig - especially if you like your music quite literally phat.We're looking forward to playing with the big Martin Audio rig again. Bad news is that the monster Crest Audio CA12 amplifier we bought off eBay a few months back is not going to be fixed in time (we bought it as "spares or repair" in the hope that it could be fixed, but apparently it's proving to be a bit trickier than the repairers originally thought). This means we're going to have to use the Peavey PV2000 amp on something and the dream of running a front-of-house rig purely off Crest CA-series amps will have to wait for another time!
The gig will be the first outing of the new lighting rig so that's a bit exciting. We've now got 8x LED PAR 56 , 4x PAR 56 and 4x PAR 16 lights. It will be good to see how well the LED PAR cans cope, but the fact that they run completely cool, you can have them automatically colour cycling and all 8 of them will only be pulling 160 watts makes them a very attractive alternative to the normal 300W PAR 56 lights we have.
I'm doing PA for Jaffa Rose's new EP launch @ The Jug & Jester, Sunday 8th October. The event starts at 7:30pm with support provided by the very talented Kristy Gallacher and Justine. Why not pop in for a drink and have a listen to some quality local music?
Went to Cannock Chase with Paddy, Chris and Ben last weekend. Managed to get two bikes in the boot, the other two hanging off the rack on the back and all four of us quite comfortably in my car.I hadn't been to Cannock since we used to go with the Warwick Mountain Bike Club and that was way before they had the 7.5 mile purpose built "Follow the Dog" MTB trail there. I was quite impressed - ok, it's not as challenging as Coed y Brenin (where I was again a few weeks ago), but for a local trail that you can get to, bomb round, and be home again by lunchtime (ish) it's pretty good. The trails and terrain is a bit similar all the way round - mostly quite sandy soil single-track trails winding their way through tightly packed trees - but fortunately this is my favourite type of trail so I was happy :)
Annoyingly I somehow managed to rip my back tyre (how is that possible with Kevlar bead tyres?) Luckily it didn't puncture - I only noticed it when I saw the inner tube poking through the hole while washing the bike afterwards!
Yeah - haven't really kept up with this blogging thing very well (not that many people actually read this, so doesn't really matter that much!)
Loads of stuff happened since last post... Beach Mission, Greenbelt, a couple more weddings, MTB weekend away in Wales, some One Nation gigs, the PLASA show, and a few PA gigs too...
