So, I am hired to design/set up a show at a high school and train the guy after me how to run sound. It’s a pretty simple setup for this show (four headsets, four floor mics and four choir mics plus tracks from a CD), so I figure with about three weeks to go until show, I should have plenty of time to set up and train this guy.
I show up to meet the kid and check up on the system. It’s my old high school (which got a new theatre about six years ago), and I pretty well know the system. Anyway, we head up to the booth so I can begin showing him around the CD player, sound desk, etc.
When we get there, I find the entire booth in disarray. I don’t mean in a messy “Oh that’s what every HS booth looks like” way. I mean there are knobs and sliders pulled off of the board and thrown around, patch cables out and thrown against the wall hard enough to leave indentations, and every amp, equalizer and comp has been SERIOUSLY screwed with. I sigh under my breath at “those darn kids and their devil music” and begin picking everything up, checking the patch cables, re-EQing the board and making sure they didn’t fatally mess anything up. So far, everything seems great until I try the Telex headset system. The thing comes on for three seconds and then goes out. I scratch my head and decide to leave it off until I have time to get behind it and check the fuse, etc. Anyway, everything seemed to be working fine (feeds sounded OK, and every channel on the board had power), but the kid had disappeared. I decide to go ahead and set up some front-fill monitors so the people on the stage can hear the tracks during rehearsals and hear the director’s god mic.
I get the monitor set up and can’t get anything through it. I decide to check the patching upstairs in the amp room to see if someone had mispatched it. Even worse, someone had actually ripped the patch cables (XLR to Neutrik) OUT OF THE TWISTLOCK END and left most of the cables hanging free. Two of the ripped-out cables had been unpatched and hooked into the Telex system. Yes, that’s right — the positive and negative cables were wrapped around each other and headed right into the telex head unit. I decide to check out everything else up there and find that all of the amps (mains and monitors) had been cranked to FULL power. The people at the school had been running the system with the amps all the way up and somehow “not noticing” all of the clipping, feedback, etc. I leave the amp room to talk to the director of the show and notice that to my left there are some ERS spotlights hung on the pipes (not out of the ordinary — we use them for side lighting or sometimes to project onto the cyc).
However, I notice one odd thing — the base to all of these is missing. Yes, these kids had stolen eight Ellipsoidal bases (I still haven’t found them, so I assume that they either took them or obliterated them). Also, in all of this “fun,” the kids had taken the time to climb up to the grid and totally cut off the zip ties and screw up all of the wires going to the choir mics (one was even wrapped around one of the counterweight pulleys, which luckily hasn’t been moved, so it was still intact).
Well, there wasn’t too much I could do that day. I reset the amps to the proper volume, but by that time everyone was going home, and I didn’t have time to do much else. I still had to check all of the lights (about 150 of them) to see exactly how many bases were missing, test the sound system (to see if they blew anything with the excess power) and basically start putting everything back together.
Sigh….
I clear out my schedule for the next couple of days and drive to the school at around 10:00 a.m. after a quick run to the music store to pick up more Speakon ends, cable and various other equipment. It seems that with every cable and every plug I fix, I find something else wrong. After rewiring the monitor patch cables, I find that they’ve reversed polarity on several of the speakers; after fixing that, I find that they’ve ripped a couple of wires off at the base of the rack. Luckily, it seemed that even though they had severely overpowered the mains for about four or five weeks, they hadn’t actually blown any speakers. (Don’t even ask me what kind of voodoo this school had going for them — I was utterly amazed!) This continued until I finally got everything fixed and back into working order, just in time for some type of PTA meeting that evening.
Over the next week or so, I was able to order all the lamps and most of the replacement parts for the lighting rig and got everything set up and ready to go just in time for the first technical rehearsal. I was extremely lucky that I didn’t come in a day before Tech (as they had originally told me to do). Everything turned out all right in the end (as things seem to do), and the show went off great. The school now calls me in to pink the room, do general troubleshooting and zero out the board every couple of months.
I can’t say that I’m complaining about such an easy payday!
Doc Davis
Jackson, Mississippi
