We have trod upon this ground before, but I keep seeing things that make me remember that it is not usually the big expensive whatever that sends a show south. It is usually something small that just got overlooked. Here are a few recent examples.
The first was a bonehead move on my part. I was playing out and trying to get a good audio recording of the gig for demo purposes, and do so without having to ask the house sound guy to change anything he was used to doing or use any unfamiliar gear. A lot of thought and wiring went into building a rack that could feed the house, provide our PM mix (which actually freed up the house guy who had been running mains and two monitor mixes from a sideof- stage position) and feed an Alesis HD24. Got it all done, but failed to really think through the internal routing of the mixer until — of course — I was driving home from the gig. So I ended up with a pretty unusable recording. At least I know how to do it right for next time. I think. Ask me when I get home from that one. The second example was a sound company whose owner reads FOH who called and told me about a gig where they were having issues with the high-mid line array but not the subs. His crew assumed that the problem must be the brand new, very expensive cable looms for the array and spent several hours troubleshooting that area only to find…nothing. The owner asked if the drive rack had been checked and was assured it had. It turns out that most of the drive rack had been checked — but not the custom I/O panel, where a $4 XLR connector had one conductor disconnected, and that screwed everything. Finally, and this has little — OK, nothing — to do with audio, but it is just too good to pass up.
Around the corner from my house is a fairly exclusive gated golf course community that has 20 or 30 big palm trees out front. The last two Christmas seasons they have decorated them the same way, much to the delight of those of us whose minds are perpetually gutter-ridden. You know how at the top of a palm tree between the trunk and the fronds there is an area where the old, dead fronds have fallen or been cut off, leaving a kind of brown knob? Well, this particular variety of palm has a very pronounced and rounded "knob" under the fronds. (Some of you can no doubt already see where this is headed. Heh. Headed.)
They light those palm trees with what is called "net" lighting. Not a strand of lights, but a net that wraps around the trunk. They use a white light net on the trunk and a red net for the knob. There are no lights actually in the fronds themselves, and there lies the "little thing" problem here.
Another similar setup a few miles away does have a few strands of lights in the fronds, and it looks OK. Even if you miss those strands at first glance, these palms have a "knob" that is far less pronounced, and if you mistake them for anything, it would be a bunch of upright giant wooden matchsticks.
But at our gated enclave, it's the other kind of tree and no lights in the fronds. Well, as you approach the area on a very dark street it is very easy to miss the fronds entirely, in which case what you see is, well, a forest of phalluses. Tall ones, thin ones, thick ones, short ones, curved ones — something for every taste. But make no mistake, these do not look like palm trees in the dark. In fact, after seeing them lit up for two years, it is hard not to see the same forest in the daylight. A few strands of lights in the fronds would have made their intentions much more clear. Or maybe this is the effect they were after. You never know with squints.
Besides the already stated "it's the little things that can make or break ya" idea, there are two things to keep in mind here. First, this may be the only time in history that a sound guy has issued a call for more lighting and, finally, never trust the details to a lighting designer.
Hope your holidays were busy and good and you are ready for a rockin' 2007. Let's have fun out there…
