This time every year, the summer outdoor gig season becomes upon us, and our attention is distracted by the “extra” things we have to drag along to do outdoor gigs. For the new local sound companies who have been used to club and hotel indoor gigs, all it takes is one or two nightmare outdoor gigs before lessons are learned.
Hopefully in this piece, we will drop ideas to prepare for those bad weather gig days.
Bag It
Taking a good look at your trailer pack, and you should imagine everything in the trailer out of the trailer and being rained on. Not too bad a deal for quality road cases and work trunks, but do you have covers for your stage monitors and mains speakers? Now further imagine having to “operate” or do a gig in a rainstorm. Can you open those racks with proper ventilation and drive those stacks without soaking the woodwork? The best solution for speakers in wet weather is to bag them. I have been fortunate that my mains speakers (tops and subs) were shipped in clear poly bags, which I kept for wet gigs. Not only for these gigs, but bagging speakers in the trailer pack lets the poly take the road rash, and not the epoxy finish on the speaker enclosures. If you do not have access to large clear poly bags, consider getting a box of 55 gallon drum trash bags as an alternative. Yeah, they are less fashionable, but still get the job done.
And the same size poly bags can be applied to open racks of amplifiers and portable power distros in wet weather. The trick is to secure them from gusty winds, but still let the gear ventilate as well. Some amp racks do allow the front and back covers to tilt open for partial weather resistance, and getting clever at using the covers plus a poly bag might be the perfect solution. Just remember practice this method before the weather comes upon you.
Cover It
At Monitor Beach and FOH, you should have invested in the proverbial “E-Z-Up” tent roofs to give your consoles and outboard signal processing some weather protection. Now E-Z-Up is not the only tent roof brand that is usable for gigging, but the E-Z-Up brand is easily found at various supply stores and in many catalogs. The challenge is to recognize that there is the $500 professional quality tent roof, and then there are plenty of $200 look-a-likes that may not last through one good rain/wind event.
These tent roofs are typically sold as 10-foot-by-10-foot sized items and come in typical colors of white, blue and red. The good news is that they can be handled by one person, both in hauling and setup/tear-down. And the good quality tent roofs come with sack/bag with sturdy strap handles to haul the tent roof and ground/earth stakes.
While you are procuring your tent roof, make sure to acquire some theatrical sand bags or other weighty contraptions to hold the tent roof in place in gusty conditions. Even though most tent roofs come with earth stakes, your locations may not allow staking. Using road cases, beverage coolers, and work trunks do work in a pinch, but you may not always have those items near or the method of attachment is not very well thought out. Also, bags of ice make good temporary tent roof ballast on the legs, but again make sure the attachment methods are sound, and not just a good waste of gaff tape.
I think much less of sheets of clear poly and blue tarps, then I did back in my musician days. While these handy covers are better than nothing, most of my “rain events” come with gusting winds. And these gusting winds love poly and tarps as sails, so if you do not have a tie-down strategy, you are going to get wet as you become the tie-down of last resort. Nylon ropes or bungee cords on tarp grommets are great methods of securing, but you better have something on stage to tie onto.
Juice It
The big Cam-lok equipped electrical feeders are by nature weatherproof and mostly waterproof. But check your smaller feeders or sub-feeders when the rain begins to fall. Good cable planning should mean that there are no “extensions” in your sub-distro feeders, so that one end connects to your Portable Power Distribution Unit (PPDU) and the other goes into your amplifier rack without an interconnect in between. Whether twist-loc or straight-blade, the National Electric Code (NEC) requires all outdoor interconnections to be weatherproof and at least six inches above the ground surface to handle torrential rain conditions. So if you have extension cords and the like, make sure you have some elevated device with a rain covering at each interconnect.
