Evaluation for Grant (Gigs/Tech'ing)

In this evaluation I'm going to tell you how the shows went altogether.
My responsibilities were:
- Setting up equipment for the main stage
- Spectating the sound ( to see if it sounded okay or not)
- Using the mixer's

What went well
- The set up of the equipment was all set up correctly and were in the right place
- The volume of the performance were on point, nothing was too loud or too quiet it was all perfect.
- All of us had good communication skills while spectating the areas.

Thursday
This was the day when East Kent college came to perform. We had to Rig up the instruments/mixer/microphone and so on.  One of the things I did I set up the acoustic drums with Danilo, the microphones for the sax and the Key-tar.
I also helped out with the soundcheck too.

This was our first time Tech'ing for another band. I mostly did the mixer with Elliot and I was also spectating around the room just to check whether the sound volume is right, if certain instruments are loud enough or not. I would tell Elliot and he would do the mixing. I also did some of the acoustic stage, which I wasn't that familiar with at first but I got used to it.

There was no Technical problems, that issued here.

Wednesday
This was the day when Level 3 Music & Music Production, had a gig. I helped out with the soundcheck, by playing instruments such as the electronic drums and the Juno.Elliot wanted to do the levels as I was playing them. I was mostly spectating the room and shouting at that Yemesi's vocals were too loud.

There was only one problem which was the Reverb wasn't on for the acoustic stage and we couldn't figure out why it wasn't working, So we was unable to resolve this, but in some of the performance's we didn't really use the Reverb.

Thursday
This was the day when it was the level 3 music gig. We held sound checks here again. We had to set presets for the main stage on the mixer, so it could be easier for us to manage on the main mixer ( main stage ).

There was one technical problem that was happening which was on the DJ mixer, when Baran was performing the backing track wasn't playing for some reason so we had to wait for about 5 - 10 mins while Kieran was sorting it out.
Friday
I mostly did the acoustic stage, I found using the mixer on this stage much easier than the main stage because there wasn't that many controls/knobs to touch/turn which made things quite easy. That was one of my responsibility to do. Also I had to spectate around the stage, which means I had to do a lot of moving around in the crowd to check whether the vocals / guitar was too loud,too quite or the FX (Reverb) was too loud. I was also in partner's too, so I did the spectating while my partner was doing the mixing, I'd tell him/her whether things are okay or not.
One of the artists vocal range was very dynamic, so I had to control the fader on the mixer manually, I couldn't leave it one play otherwise whenever she got louder then the overall volume of the vocals would be too loud.
I also did some of mixing on the main mixer (main stage) when things needed turning up or down... although sets on the mixer were already saved it made life much easier and it saved us a lot of time.

Technical Problems issued + solved.

-There was a couple of things that did go wrong in the show. In the first couple of performances on the acoustic stage the reverb wasn't on at all. The reason the Reverb wasn't on was because the FX output volume was either turned down or it wasn't on at all. We sorted this just before the show went on again.

- The last show everything was going perfect except that on the very last performance of the night... as soon as the guitar played it almost blew everyone away off the stage because it was so loud - it was roaring. Kieran tried to mute the guitar/turn the fader down on the mixer but it was still very very loud. It seemed that it wasn't the mixer it was the amp and the pedal, the amp volume was turned all the way up + when she pressed the pedal while playing it increased the volume as well. We was all panicking, Sashani had to run to the back and turn down the amplifier.

Conclusion
I personally think that the show went really well because everyone had a brilliant time especially me. We got great feedback about our engineering skills upon the stage from the performer's and audience.
In my opinion for future reference I would like to do more controlling on the main mixer so I can get the hang of it a bit more... I'm already used to controlling the mixer for the acoustic stage.
I did learn a few things, I learnt that you must be 100% engaged with the sound and not to be distracted by other little things, things such as your phone. I got distracted with my phone quite a lot so to resolve this I had to switch it off. I learnt more about the mixer as I got to use it a bit more (mainly for the acoustic stage) and how to mix manually on stage - controlling the volume of vocals/instruments and fx.
Although things did go well I wasn't that happy with my input in the group this is because I didn't get to do that much, sometimes I wanted to do more which means I wanted to try and use the main mixer more so I can become confident with it... even when Elliot wasn't on the mixer and it was just me and my partner I still didn't get to use it as much which was really disappointing. In future I would like to use the main mixer more so I can become more confident with it.

Theatre gig evaluation.

This is how our battle station was like (after it was getting packed up), as you can see it is quite small only because we could only use a small space. We surrounded the instruments and players with the speakers facing them. There was also a lot of wires at the edge near the speakers, we had to cover some of the wires with tape for safety reasons. The Juno Synth and the keyboard were next to each other, we didn't want there to be that much space between only because it was decided to keep everything in a small space. However, there was a bit of an issue when keyboard player's had to switch over as one of player's had to stand in the little corner and wait for his turn.  We got to set up the the di boxes, stereo di , Instruments (Piano, Ass, Juno Synth, amp < even though we did not need it as one of the guitarist didn't show up )

There was some issues that we just had to deal with, one of the player's from the group couldn't make it as she was ill (Electric guitar player) and the one of the group didn't rehearse properly, so they had to improvise throughout the performance and it went really well. We got to communicate with Elliots group more this is because they were in the studio rehearsing more than the other group.                                  

This is the tape Gaffa tape that we used to tape up the wires just incase it gets damaged.

As I was explaining before, there wasn't that much space for the piano player's to stand up to wait for their turn. One of them had to stay in that corner (where the blue door is) while the other was in between the piano and the juno synth.

This is the wall box. We plugged the XLR's into it which went through the dimmer room and where we patched the instruments into the mixer.

Over here is the mixer. The Allen & Heath ZED 22FX. In the picture there's a orange tape on channel 3 the reason is channel 3 had a malfunction, it wasn't working properly there was fuzziness and awful distortion coming from the speaker because of this channel. So we moved it to channel 11.

our instruments were on this mixer.

Instrument channels: 

- Piano Channel 1

- Juno Synth Channel 2 

- Bass 2 (Jake's bass) Channel 14

- Bass 1 ( Andre's Bass ) Channel 11

- Mic Channel 13

On the channels Aux's, each of them was being controlled by 3 monitors this was a good option for us that we chose....HOWEVER! There was one disadvantage, the 3rd aux send was a pre send so when the main fader of the channel was turned down it wouldnt be in the monitors

After setting up for about 2 hours, the set only lasted for 10 minutes! It was a good a performance, we managed to pack up almost everything.