I just got a call from a friend in New York. He is a systems engineer & shop manager for a medium size sound company there. He and I share a lot of "war story's" so here is one of his……
He just did a 3 day festival, on the third and final night the opener guest engineer blows the high mid's in the P.A. No not just a couple boxes…..ALL OF THEM! As my friend Willy Jay tells me the story, my butt clenches……… The opener shows up with a nice fx rack, a couple EQs and a couple extra compressors for the left/right. Seem's OK right? So Willy Jay figures the guys got some good gear, and has a good rep in the area so doesn't stand over his shoulder as much as he would with someone he doesn't know.
Willy heads backstage to check the amps, and check on the monitor engineer, steps back out and notices "somthin’ jus’ ain’t right." He gets up to FOH and the opener dude says “Hey, I think your amps on the high mids lost power!” OK. STOP. My first question is how long where you going to wait on Willy Jay to get back out here?????
Willy runs back to the amp racks, yup you guessed it they are on and signal is a flowin’…….. Willy checks the speaker cables praying they all went to crap, but no they are all fine too………He jumps up on the speaker risers with a meter and starts checking……Yup you got it again…..OPEN, NO ONES HOME!
Opener FOH seems sheepish, and has no explanation for what he has done. We have all seen this, he speculates maybe if you inserted the eq on the mains instead of running them inline this wouldn't have happened. Or maybe you should have set the limiters a little tighter, or maybe STOP! Maybe you should fess up! This system was fine for 3 days and 25 acts. We have 2 to go you treated it like it was someone else's and ruined it for the headliner and the sound company! So quit making excuses and passing blame! From here I can see a couple things you more than likely did.
1-Maybe while Willy Jay was checking the amps you cranked up your compressor gains for a little more SPL…..Seems like an OK idea, unless the P.A. was already running at 80-90%….HMMM!
2-Maybe you popped the pad out on the snare by mistake. That extra 20 dB of 500 Hz does wonders for High Mids…….
Willy has his share of the blame too. 1 Never let another man have his way with your woman, or your P.A. Just because he has a "good rep" doesn't mean he is always on his "A" game. It’s your gig to make sure that P.A. makes it thru the headliner and thru the next gigs as well. Sometimes "shit happens" but if your doing everything you’re supposed to do less "shit will happen." I wouldn't let him insert any of his crap on my outputs unless I knew the gear, knew him and was planning on being there from A-Z. Its a judgment call, and it is YOURS (Willy) to make. Maybe if you gave him less freedom and stayed with him this would not have happened.
I have two questions…….
1-How did you explain this to the headliner?
2-How did you explain this to your boss? Both completely innocent, and screwed to the wall…….
I ask all of FOH readers what would you do? How would you have dealt with this? Keep in mind you now have 20/20 that these guys did not.