Short Illustrated Gig Stories
That’s not how volume control works.
A guy walks up to one of my speakers on a pole. It looks like this:
This clutch locks the extendable pole at its current height.
He starts dialing the clutch to the right, as if he were lowering the speaker, but he’s standing right under it. I leap across the set and stop him before the speaker comes down on his head.
“Stop! What are you doing?”
“It’s too loud. I want to lower the music”
Lav is all you need
I’m prepping for a panel discussion. I’ve got the lavalier mics laid out at the tech table.
They look like this:
We provide hearing assist devices for audience members who request them. There are a few regulars who know to ask. Sometimes they just help themselves.
The hearing assist devices look like this.
A gentleman walks up to my table and says, “This hearing assist pack is no good, I can’t hear a thing”. And hands me a lavalier microphone pack. I hadn’t even noticed it was missing. I hand him the correct device. He puts it on, “That’s better”
Fair enough, they look similar. He had stuck a microphone in his ear.
Now I have to clean his earwax off the lavalier mic before I clip it to a VIP’s tie.
When I clip a lav on people, 30% make a joke about turning it off when they go to the john. That never happened in real life.
The closest was in a landscaped garden. I heard a concerning sound coming from one mic, but that person had wandered off & was standing next to a fountain.
To get a clean look for tv cameras with no cable showing, you clip the lav to the collar and drop the cable down their shirt and pull it out the back. Or get creative - I was miking an actual astronaut, in full jumpsuit. I clipped the mic to his collar and asked where can we get the cable back out? He shrugged and unzipped his fly.
We’re prepping for a panel discussion and the producer is losing her shit because Salman Rushdie is late. She calls him - he’s at Logan Airport, but doesn’t see his driver.
She gets off the phone and I say, "Would you want to stand in an airport with a sign that says “Salman Rushdie” ? ”
In this podium mic setup:
Those 2 mics aren’t Stereo, it’s just to pick up the person speaking whether they stand left, right or center.
Some people grab one and speak way too closely on it. that’s when i’m glad I have two. The mic they’re mauling becomes a decoy. I turn it off and the other one sounds good.
In soundcheck, the performer asked me to brighten his monitor, but the club had put a plexiglass cover over the EQ, to keep people from messing with it. I said, “just a sec I gotta open up the EQ”, but he must not have heard me. From where he was standing, it probably looked like I was turning a knob, but I was just unscrewing the plexiglass cover. He said “Yeah, that’s better”. I hadn’t made an audio change. “A little more?” I asked, and gave the rack screw another turn. “Yeah, right there” he said.
I worked a very loud rock club around the corner from Fenway Park. Mixing a band is irrelevant when their own stage amps are deafening. I’d put in foam earplugs, then my AudioTechnica Headphones over them. Then I’d unplug the headphones. I was just using them as an additional sound barrier, but it looked like I was listening.
Cupping the mic is an audio abomination. Don’t make me get out the barbed wire.
On loadout, if 2 different crew coil the same cable from different ends and they meet in the middle, that’s called “Lady and the Tramping”
fellow A1s and A2s, drop your story in the comments below, for inclusion in the next collection.