Miscellaneous - TDK Cross Central Festival Part 2

  by Philip Vincent

published: 22 / 10 / 2006

intro

In the second episode of a three part article in his new series 'Tales from the Sound Desk', professional sound engineer Philip Vincent writes about a nightmarish evening working at the TDK Cross Central Festival, which took place at Kings Cross Freight Depot in London in August

Shoot forward eight hours from where we just were. In this space of time I have sweated my own body weight, have eaten a frankly rank Thai vegetable curry, have had to carry two sets of turntables through a criminally overcrowded venue and explain to DJs how to use their own mixers. It’s now roughly midnight and the asshole engineer has returned to ready himself before the band's set. I arrive back at the stage just before he does and ask the crew running it whether they have left his band's decks and the rest of their gear left plugged in as they were at the soundcheck. They assure me they have so I tell the engineer that everything is where it is labelled on the desk, ask him if he is okay and then make to leave. At this point he says in his squirrel like tone “You are doing their monitors, right ?” Now for those of you who don’t know at gigs of this size you usually have two mixing desks, one called the front of house desk which mixes just the sound the audience hears, and the other called the monitor desk which mixes what the band and artist hears. On this job, however, we have one desk doing both jobs, mainly due to the budget (hey, ain't everything). In this kind of circumstance usually the band's engineer will do their monitors as well. but this guy, no, he is far too big for that. If we flick back eight hours to this band's sound check you may remember we had an issue with their in- ear monitors and that that issue never got resolved as the band decided that they had had enough and wanted to leave the stage to do something much more important than make sure they would be able to hear themselves during their set. So skip forward eight hours again and little old me here is well and truly shafted. It is also at this point that their engineer turns to me and again in his squirrel-like tone says “I am going to try the in-ears again. If they don’t work, I am blaming you for it….(He then continued to rant on that they had been working...)” “Okay” I said and proceed to resend the units signal. Both base packs are getting signal but once again only one of the receiver packs is getting any audio. I now start pleading with him to let me check the frequencies are correct and once again he says that it isn’t that. It has to be something else. By now I am seriously, and I mean seriously hacked off with this guy. A big part of this industry is being calm and reserved and I usually am one of the calmest, but this guy is really beginning to get me. I lose it a little bit and start repeatedly asking him what frequency the belt packs are on until eventually he tells me. I then go to the base units and start going through the menu until I get to the frequency selection. Whilst I am doing this he is physically trying to pull my arm away from the unit saying that if I break them I will pay, saying to me that “You call yourself an engineer” and just generally being excessively rude. Lo and bloody behold, the frequency settings on the base unit aren't working and do not match the receiver pack. At this point I want to grab the guy's head and slam it into the base units LCD screen and show him that that everything which I have been saying it is since 4pm is actually what it is, but instead I turn and say; “The frequencies didn’t match” (Take the high ground and all that) We then test that monitors they work, give them to the artists to sort out the mixes they want and eventually after some more screwing around on behalf of the engineer the band starts. What happens next I have tried to block out from my memory as it one of those times that, as somebody who works in the event industry, I just want to cry. It would take too long in continuous prose to explain what went wrong during the next hour and a half so instead I will bullet point it. -The amplifier that was driving half of the onstage monitor speakers blew up at some point early in the set. We didn’t find out about it till the band stopped their set and told the crowd “how shit the sound company are” -Both in-ear monitor packs mysteriously stopped working (which I later found out was because the artists had turned them off, but again I wasn’t allowed to look at the packs to check this) -The radio microphones that were being used all ran out of batteries and no one had thought to buy spares so I asked one of our crew to go to the stage and plug in 4 wired mics. He comes back from the stage and says he can't plug any mics in as he doesn’t know where the leads go. I actually laugh in his face at this point and ask him what the fuck he is doing on the job . He then takes me to the stage and shows me he is trying to plug in the wireless mics with cables, which is impossible. -The needles on the one set of decks the band are using break. -Finally the band's sound engineer is driving the main rig so hard that the decks that are still working start feeding back through the main system meaning that at certain times during the set the noise of what God knows what comes shouting out of the system. Secondly the protection circuits on the in-house sound rig start cutting in causing the entire system to turn off randomly Well, dear reader, that nearly takes us to the end of the first day of TDK Cross Central and the end of this instalment of 'Tales from the Sound Desk'. In the next one you will hear how the first day ended, the general ease and enjoyment of the second day and the wonderful world of GAK orders.

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