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.