pounce
November 10th, 2007, 01:50 AM
ya know, as nice of a place as i work at, there are some quirks to it. it has personality. maybe it's because the venue is over 50 some odd years old. so there are some remnants to it's thinking from the fifties that doesn't jive with the productions coming through.
one thing is the electricity. a little funky. i can have a totally clean system one day, and the next time it can be dirty if the wrong thing gets plugged into the wrong place. unfortunately, this often means that lighting packages coming in might interfere with the rest of the system.
what i'm saying is that it's a delicate balance. and it's damn tricky to determine what is causing trouble when trouble shooting average sized and bigger gigs here. many times there is no trouble. yesterday there was a little 60 cycle hum in the recording feed from the patchbay, but the matrix out from the board was clean. so i ran a homerun from the board to the video dudes and that was cool. however, when the gig was over i checked again and the recording feed was clean. so something, rental lighting, video, who knows what affected the sound that day.
it just seems to be a more delicate balance here than i expected. i'm getting better and better and fixing or circumventing trouble, but i would have to totally rewire everything here, including the incoming electric service, to assure clean new runs and clean power. right now it's a bit of a mix. it's not all separated, so things can get funky at just the wrong time. finding the problem can be a real bitch.
anyone else at a venue with gremlins? i don't suspect everyone is really in that perfect scenario of perfectly working infallible completely maintained equipment. i'm most of that, but it's still not infallible. mostly because of the weird electricity in the building in my case. and because there is a lot of rf interference around here. it's an rf warzone, downtown right by some of the radio and tv broadcast towers. so you have to watch that stuff.
what gremlins do you guys fight at the venues?
one thing is the electricity. a little funky. i can have a totally clean system one day, and the next time it can be dirty if the wrong thing gets plugged into the wrong place. unfortunately, this often means that lighting packages coming in might interfere with the rest of the system.
what i'm saying is that it's a delicate balance. and it's damn tricky to determine what is causing trouble when trouble shooting average sized and bigger gigs here. many times there is no trouble. yesterday there was a little 60 cycle hum in the recording feed from the patchbay, but the matrix out from the board was clean. so i ran a homerun from the board to the video dudes and that was cool. however, when the gig was over i checked again and the recording feed was clean. so something, rental lighting, video, who knows what affected the sound that day.
it just seems to be a more delicate balance here than i expected. i'm getting better and better and fixing or circumventing trouble, but i would have to totally rewire everything here, including the incoming electric service, to assure clean new runs and clean power. right now it's a bit of a mix. it's not all separated, so things can get funky at just the wrong time. finding the problem can be a real bitch.
anyone else at a venue with gremlins? i don't suspect everyone is really in that perfect scenario of perfectly working infallible completely maintained equipment. i'm most of that, but it's still not infallible. mostly because of the weird electricity in the building in my case. and because there is a lot of rf interference around here. it's an rf warzone, downtown right by some of the radio and tv broadcast towers. so you have to watch that stuff.
what gremlins do you guys fight at the venues?