I had my second workshop session in The Engine Shed today and it was great fun. I arrived about 3min late as I got a little side tracked setting up the 5.1 control room for the studios but luckily I didn’t miss anything. When I got up on the stage Gary had got his drum kit in and was starting to set it up on the drum riser, there were flight cases everywhere, speaker wedges all over the place, and a few lights dotted around. It was at this point I noticed that the mixing console wasn’t anywhere to be seen so I thought we were going to be doing placement, and setup today….wrong.

We had to get the console out of its flight case, set the console up, wire it up with power, and get all the FOH connections made so the audio could be sent to the other console, and set the stage up. Setting the console up was an awesome thing to do as we really did get a sense of how much really goes into a live gig with regards to cabling, and equipment. After we had setup the console we were tasked with setting up the mics for the drum kit. A mass of people rushed towards the mic case and that area started to get very crowded, very quickly. I decided that I would get the stage boxes out and start sorting those out, turned out we needed 9 inputs for the drum mics, I used a 12-way stage box for this but only connected the first 9 inputs.

Seeing as I was stood behind the desk I was nominated by Harry to conduct the setup of the drums through the monitor system. This was great fun, I’ve done this a few times before but never with a system of this power before, and this was just the stage monitor rig, not even the main venue PA. The sub unit for the drum monitor was the same size as the venue subs I’ve used before and the sound of the kick coming through that was amazing. Once I had all the gains setup, the gates running, and a little EQ we moved on to setting up the FOH console and system.

Joe took over doing the desk and we moved to the FOH system, my god that thing packs a punch. We setup a channel which enabled us to talk to the stage using the monitor system and started to setup the levels for the FOH system all over again just like I did for the monitor system. After we completed this Gary had a bit of a jam on the drums and we cranked the level up. It really is awesome hearing the sound of a PA with an empty venue and the drums going.

Popularity: 8% [?]