There is a National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, South Africa, held each year, and my company got the contract for the “Blues/Rock” venue for a few years. This was quite a challenging venue, takes about a 1000 PAX with a squeeze, and with the best of South African bands showing their stuff over a 10-day period. A band, whose name I won’t mention, requested a DAT recorder/player on their rider. DAT at the time were just starting to make inroads.
We agreed in the end that they would bring their own as they were only with us for two days, and we were at the festival for 12 days running. Our expense to hire in a unit for 12 days was too high. Comes the sound check earlier that day — they never brought the DAT machine but said it would be okay to use a CD player for a backtrack. Three girls, dancing around, singing to a back track. A very boring and uninteresting act, but easy. In the meantime, my crew manages to trace a DAT belonging to the local radio station and they agree to let us use it. Comes the gig, the girls do their routine with a DAT this time…show starts….no vocals…or practically none…a little wisp of it here and there.
As FOH engineer, I am now onto my on stage monitor engineer asking if he sees vocals in his mix. He has nothing either, except the odd little hint here and there. The punters are yelling — “VOCALS!” While this is going on, I have a huge bouncer type / band manager standing next to me at FOH saying, “LOUDER!”
Eventually, in desperation, I just pull the vocal faders down and push up the master. I hear soft vocals getting a little louder as I do this. Suddenly dawns on me — the girls are miming! When we rehearsed with the CD track earlier, they really were singing, and now they are miming to a very poor vocal mixed track! No one told us! I gave the mix over to my assistant engineer and went back stage for a whiskey, my nerves a bit tattered. This was the most embarrassing show I had ever done. I could not believe they had done this to us!
Lyndon Dunbar
The Sound Generation
Cape Town, South Africa
