Monday, July 16, 2012

Loooooooong drive to the next venue.  We're breaking it up into two nights on the bus, so that brings me here:



Tallahassee.

I found a Little Debbie trailer, which is sad, because if it was a Hostess trailer there might have been Twinkies.

Sunday, July 8, 2012

CLE -> MDW -> STL


After a car trip from the family's place, and two flights, I'm at a hotel in St. Louis, and I'm damn hungry.  Food is on the way, so all hope is not lost.

I'm on the summer shed tour of a rock band with a big following for their live shows.  I'm flying PA on this tour, and I'm pretty excited about that, because it's a bigger main array of J Series than the last tour I did, which was the first tour I'd done with this company, I'll have subs in the air, and we're flying some D&B V8s and V12s as a side hang.  I've never flown the Vs, so that should be exciting.

Before I worked with this company, I worked for one of America's longest running family shows.  A circus that travels by train, and plays arenas.  The PA at the circus was all Meyer CQ-1s and 2s, 600HP subs, and MSL-4s as long throw "delays."  That rig is all about coverage not power, so there would be clusters mounted to the lighting/act rigging truss made up of a CQ as a downfill, a CQ as a Main, a sub, and an MSL-4 as a long throw cabinet, so really the line array thing is actually pretty new to me.  When I was in school, I worked with some of the little JBL stuff, the VRX series, but that stuff is tiny and there's no way to set any sort of angles, so the splay you get with the boxes smashed together is exactly what you get.

Last month, the first tour that I did with this company, was a big learning experience for me because of that fact.  The guys in the shop can show you how to fly something, but you're just not going to learn as much about it as you will when you're out there actually doing the work every day.  My main gig on that tour was actually not flying PA, I was miking an orchestra every day, but I still jumped into that situation wanting to get some real experience flying Js before I came out here, and the FOH tech on that tour was very thorough in explaining to me the way he does things, and I learned way more than I can accurately quantify about the way this company does things, and how to safely fly not only Js, but Q Series stuff as well.

Tuesday, July 3, 2012

/Starter Pistol

Awkward overshare of a blog introduction...

At least, that's what this was until I ripped it to pieces for being so embarrassing.

Professionally, I'm an audio technician.  I've toured with one of America's longest running family shows, and with a variety of contemporary rock, pop and now hip-hop acts.  No, I won't say which company I work for, and no, I won't name any names of people that I've toured with because that's a great way to say something stupid and get in trouble for it when someone looks up the wrong thing on Google.

I also like playing games, and riding bicycles.  The games have been a lifelong thing, but there was, as is common for a lot of adults into bicycles, a bit of a gap between childhood, and when I became interested in bikes again in college.  I'm not in very good shape, but that's a bit of the motivation for the bicycle interest.  Here's a healthy hobby with cool gadgets that I can use to live a less sedentary lifestyle  at home.