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Oct. 16th, 2004 11:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
numberoneblindgod damn was that the longest fucking day ever.
Today was a community show... we got there at 9 AM. the band was supposed to show up at 10:00 AM. instead, they showed up at 1:15. so basically we spent the morning doing nothing and then all went and got lunch, all of us thinking "goddamnit we could have slept for another 3 hours". so finally the drummer shows up, and then the sound guys (because I guess we aren't good enough, they hired in people from Indiana) who proceeded to dismantle our sound system and make us carry in 15 bajillion speakers/amps/cables/etc. for theirs... then we did nothing for another long time while the sound guys did their thing. not until 4:30 or 5:00 did the rest of the bands (the drummer played in both) show up. then they spent an hour and a half doing a sound check/setup.
problem? no tech rehearsal as far as lighting was concerned. guess who was running lights? yeah, ME.
so basically me and Alex built a dozen random presets -- blue lights, amber lights, red lights, green lights, flashy downlights, flashy background lights, etc. -- and Alex got a rough setlist from the guy with supposed song order and whether they were fast or slow or whatever, and I pretty much ran lights flying by the seat of my pants. because there was NOTHING planned. we just wrote in the presets that we hoped would work for each song and hoped for the best.
then, halfway through the third singer (because the opener was four different girls singing their karaoke-competition winning songs) the entire set of amber uplights goes out. OHCRAP.
all of them going out is special. see, the lights are on 3 different circuits, all patched into one dimmer (#16, as it were). earlier the ones off to the right had gone out, but that was a circuit problem which is easy to fix -- usually just means a bad cable. but no, all of them went at once, so it HAS to be dimmer. so Alex runs up to where all the dimmers are to see if the breaker had gone on that one, but it hadn't. looked like it should be fine. so we send the two backstage guys over to the patch bay (where we assign which circuits go to which dimmers) and they open it up only to be greeted by a giant plume of smoke.
buuuut nothing looks wrong with dimmer 16.
instead they start insisting there's something wrong with dimmer 1, even though I know damn well there isn't because it's up and working fine (and remained that way all night). they check all the circuits for the lights in dimmer 16, the circuits look fine (which as far as I'm concerned they should, since there's no way all three went out simultaneously of their own accord). so we just said fuck it, unpatched everything from dimmer 16, and ran the rest of the show without amber uplights, heh.
still don't know what was up with that.... very weird, and therefore probably very, VERY bad.
the rest of my night sucked too, heh. there was the part where the MC didn't show up and the audience started walking off and we couldn't bring lights up because I didn't have a preset ready and there was no one for the spots to pick up, and the performer turned off the mic so then when the MC did show up his mic didn't work... then there was the part where I fell down a short flight of stairs carrying three drums (saved the drums but fucked up my ankle and my arm rather badly -- great!). and the part where I had a panic attack while driving home.
so yeah. I'm really fucking sick of today.... sleep now.
Today was a community show... we got there at 9 AM. the band was supposed to show up at 10:00 AM. instead, they showed up at 1:15. so basically we spent the morning doing nothing and then all went and got lunch, all of us thinking "goddamnit we could have slept for another 3 hours". so finally the drummer shows up, and then the sound guys (because I guess we aren't good enough, they hired in people from Indiana) who proceeded to dismantle our sound system and make us carry in 15 bajillion speakers/amps/cables/etc. for theirs... then we did nothing for another long time while the sound guys did their thing. not until 4:30 or 5:00 did the rest of the bands (the drummer played in both) show up. then they spent an hour and a half doing a sound check/setup.
problem? no tech rehearsal as far as lighting was concerned. guess who was running lights? yeah, ME.
so basically me and Alex built a dozen random presets -- blue lights, amber lights, red lights, green lights, flashy downlights, flashy background lights, etc. -- and Alex got a rough setlist from the guy with supposed song order and whether they were fast or slow or whatever, and I pretty much ran lights flying by the seat of my pants. because there was NOTHING planned. we just wrote in the presets that we hoped would work for each song and hoped for the best.
then, halfway through the third singer (because the opener was four different girls singing their karaoke-competition winning songs) the entire set of amber uplights goes out. OHCRAP.
all of them going out is special. see, the lights are on 3 different circuits, all patched into one dimmer (#16, as it were). earlier the ones off to the right had gone out, but that was a circuit problem which is easy to fix -- usually just means a bad cable. but no, all of them went at once, so it HAS to be dimmer. so Alex runs up to where all the dimmers are to see if the breaker had gone on that one, but it hadn't. looked like it should be fine. so we send the two backstage guys over to the patch bay (where we assign which circuits go to which dimmers) and they open it up only to be greeted by a giant plume of smoke.
buuuut nothing looks wrong with dimmer 16.
instead they start insisting there's something wrong with dimmer 1, even though I know damn well there isn't because it's up and working fine (and remained that way all night). they check all the circuits for the lights in dimmer 16, the circuits look fine (which as far as I'm concerned they should, since there's no way all three went out simultaneously of their own accord). so we just said fuck it, unpatched everything from dimmer 16, and ran the rest of the show without amber uplights, heh.
still don't know what was up with that.... very weird, and therefore probably very, VERY bad.
the rest of my night sucked too, heh. there was the part where the MC didn't show up and the audience started walking off and we couldn't bring lights up because I didn't have a preset ready and there was no one for the spots to pick up, and the performer turned off the mic so then when the MC did show up his mic didn't work... then there was the part where I fell down a short flight of stairs carrying three drums (saved the drums but fucked up my ankle and my arm rather badly -- great!). and the part where I had a panic attack while driving home.
so yeah. I'm really fucking sick of today.... sleep now.
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Date: 2004-10-17 01:57 pm (UTC)I'm glad you survived it though.
Atleast you know how to do presets... I did a show with like 40 light cues at the theater once (I'm frickin serious, the director was crazy) and I had to do them Manually...
But... my guesses is we get to try to figure out what is wrong with the lights in class this week.
::holds you:: just think.... finally PAID CREW! ^_^