Decibel Onslaught

I’m sure someone, somewhere, reading the mention of drumsticks in this post is left wondering just what show requires so many.

Well, tonight I had the chance to see the show in action.

Ten enthusiastic Japanese drummers beating the hell out of a variety of skin-covered drums for a couple of hours – what’s not to like?

Actually, it was a little more refined than that. While assorted sizes of drums made up the majority of instruments, there were also some shamisen (the 3 stringed lute like instruments), a couple of flutes and even some hand cymbals.

The company also remembered that they were putting on a show so there was a lovely comic element to it – a show down on ever increasing drums, a cymbal exchange that reminded me of the matrix ping-pong video and even catching the audience out with hand clapping. I’m not explaining the comedy in any more detail – as one listserv I frequent is wont to remark:

“Taking apart a joke is like taking apart a cat.

The first thing you get is a non-working cat …”

The show didn’t grab me quite as strongly as Taiko drumming has in the past – but then, I was watching from the sound box at the back so I wasn’t subjected to the full decibel onslaught.

If you want to see (and hear more), here’s a clip from Youtube -

Yamato Drummers

The morning after wake up call

It’s the morning after,

… After a two week session of cable management, kit management, anger management, early starts and long days, of shows with encores that stretch on for aeons, of bad diet and infrequent breaks, and bad TV in the breaks, of trouble shooting real and imaginary problems and of packing up and going home and loading cases and loading cases onto trucks and rescuing stray cables …
I’m looking forward to a lie-in and a few days absence of work.

It’s about 8.00am and it feels like it. My eyes are still closed but I’m aware of a repetitive tapping noise. It’s been going on for a few minutes. It sounds like, well, it sounds like wife number one on Messenger.

That’s the thing about sleep – you can close your eyes and, unless your curtains are threadbare, very little visual information is going to impact, even if your brain is conscious. It’s very hard to close the ears though. For the most part, they continuously pick up the sounds around you and it’s up to the brain to deal with them.

If you’ve lived with someone for a while, the brain can learn to ignore certain sounds. Husbands learn quite quickly to listen without hearing what wife number one (two, three …) is saying so as not to distract from pondering more important things like chocolate BUT (and this is the skill) to store the last few sentences in memory in order to respond appropriately when required.

That little trip to the loo that she does at around 3.00ish most mornings – that also goes into the same category. As long as the brain doesn’t register a loud crash, scream or ping and it does register someone shuffling back into the bedroom after a couple of minutes, it doesn’t think it necessary to disturb the sleeping process.

Someone tapping away on the keyboard for several minutes does disturb that process – it’s a pseudo-random repetitive noise which the brain latches onto the non-repeating part and pulls you up from the catching up of sleep process.

Then there’s the shuffling of someone whose not quite awake not bothering to walk properly and the slow rustling sounds of someone putting on their clothes, or the clink of change.

For those interested, wife number one is heading out for one of her weekly swims at the local pool – Messenger is there to check that a friend is coming along with her.

Finally, there’s the gentle thud of footsteps and the front door closing as she departs (no farewell kiss, mind!)

Now, I actually sleep best during the morning. Suffering from semi-somnia (part-time insomnia), bruxism (teeth-grinding) and snoring (loud) as I do, sleep can be something that happens to other people.

It does seem to be mostly tied to nights that I have to get up early to got to work the next day (typically) . So days off normally mean a better nights sleep. But the best sleep normally seems to be during daylight (one too many overnight get-outs maybe) from around 9am to about 11am.

I’ve entered this state and am dreaming happily away when I become aware of a presence. This isn’t a presence in a dream, or some dimensional apparition though. For one thing, I am aware that my dream has “paused” and this presence is on the physical plane.

For another thing, it smells of chlorine.

There are many ways of being nicely woken up – blearily opening one eye to see a manic gleam an inch or so above you is not one of them.

It may be wife number one but she has slightly damp hair which is brushing against your skin and she only has one thing on her mind – leeching body heat.

I remember at a bedsit I stayed at for a few months while at college, there was a dog that got lonely on Saturdays when the home owner went out. My door didn’t lock properly and the dog – Max – learnt how to open it, wander into my room and rest his head on my bed in front of my face.

It’s impossible to sleep with someone staring at your from close range – it doesn’t matter what time you got to bed that morning – it was never more than a minute or so of Max resting his head before I awoke.

He didn’t touch me, didn’t whine, didn’t even breathe on me but just his presence was enough to wake me. And waking up early on Saturday morning (every Saturday morning) to an elderly dog is one of the more ‘interesting’ memories from college. I learnt fairly quickly that doing it with a hang-over only made it less fun – for me at least. And he wouldn’t stop until I had actually sat up.

At that point, he’d go and lie on the rug, mission accomplished. He had someone to keep him company until his owner returned.

I think being woken by a chlorine smelling, slightly damp, slightly manic, heat-leecher is moderately worse.

Particularly the morning after.

(actually, I’m very fond of wife number one. She’s kind, considerate, thoughful, what’s the next word on that list … oh yes, generous and lovely)

(is that enough,wife number one? Let the cake go, now. Please?)

Cable propagation

Another year, another Flamenco Festival (a quick mention of last years here).

I’ll get the kit list out of the way first then add a few general comments afterwards.

[shop talk]

Same as last year, we have a stack of Q1 and Q-subs powered by D12 amps with our EAW speakers taking a rest. A little extra sub power is provided by a pair of B2s powered from A1 amps and there’s a pair of Max12 speakers helping on front fill duty. I haven’t really had much chance to get out front and have a proper listen this year but I trust that it’s all sounding okay out there …

Four pairs of C6 (P1200 amps here – four of those in a rack are blooming heavy!) are hung from our booms at ear height for side fills and a dozen more Max 12 (powered by a mix of Lab.Gruppen and Yamaha amps) get called into use as and when needed – not as often as you might think in fact.

Monitor duty this year is performed by a Yamaha PM5D-RH – which everyone seems to be picking the basics up of very quickly. Thus there’s no outboard onstage and monitor world is made up of the amps, a large KT DS400 splitter rack and a dozen channels of 3035 receivers.

Again, the radios are seeing a lot of service this year with the DPA 4066 in use for every show and the ME104 doing a fair amount of instrument duty. A pair of Beta 58 UHF aren’t getting much of a look in, though they are serving quite well on cajon duty.

Wired mics include the usual Neuman KM184, and some KSM105 for the dedicated singers; Beta 98s clipped onto most of the percussion (not many ‘palmas’ mics this year – maybe the clappers have been in training). A few SM58 for backing vocals and a single 416 for ambience marks the entire mic collection this year – we are definitely getting less variety than we used to.

The floor has 25 PCC160 underneath this time around – these have been wye-split down to only take up 15 channels – though this didn’t help much when we had to pull up the floor for one day only then return it back the next!

Out front, our Midas is back to it’s normal FOH detail with a rack worth of dbx 1066 and 166XT compressors, and KT DN410 parametrics. A couple of DN360 graphics and a single of each of a PCM70 and TC M3000 on effects (with a PCM80 and our SPX990 enjoying the view). For those who like the shiny factor, a pair of Avalon 737 tube compressors was added after a couple of days.

A pair of Sony CDP-12s were also out there – mainly for sound check and announcement and most of the engineers had their own laptops with RTA and playback software onboard.

And for those who prefer the digital side of things, one show insisted on having an Yamaha LS-9. Fitting it at the sound position was something of a challenge but we got there. Luckily it was only the 16 channel version …

And for the final show, another 8 channels of wireless were added – although these were an EM1046 rack with SK5012 transmitters, rather than the 3063 tx units in use for the rest of festival. Extra DPA 4061 and 4066 mics added to use every channel of wireless bar a single Beta 58 (I’m not certain we ever used the two Beta UHF together)

[/shop talk]

It’s funny but writing out the kit list for the last couple of weeks doesn’t really seem to do justice to the amount of work that goes into setting up and running it in a festival environment. A day of set-up prior to any of the companies coming in certainly helps. Keeping a company in for more than one day also allows time for either lie-in or setting up for a piece later on in the festival.

Having a hires list that wasn’t fully up to date wasn’t helpful but the hire company know that these couple of weeks will involve a lot of me calling up for last minute requests (“I know we have twelve floor mics? Can we have ten more? And another effects unit? Today?”) and they are near enough and large enough to manage this kind of thing.

There are some thing though that perhaps we’ll be trying to avoid doing next year -

Not everything was marked so a couple of the turn-arounds took a little longer than we were happy with. None of us hold with the idea that people should only be allowed to do certain jobs (within reason) but it’s unlikely that everyone will know everything that’s happened. Just sometimes, you are working on something that was set up by somebody else and it just takes that little bit longer to work out exactly what’s going on. A supply of Sharpies and tape for next year …

And, having to have a separate FOH desk for one day can be a challenge if the main desk can’t be removed and the space allocated is a little tight. That was the same show that insisted on removing the flamenco floor (custom made this year) and all the floor mics underneath for a single performance.

If ever a show should have been on the last night and not mid way through …

I believe that the lighting rig (all generics: fresnel wash; PAR colour and profile spot) was re-hung three times over the two weeks – surely a bit of planning in terms of stage layout would have helped with that.

Some things you just can’t avoid – finding out as one show is packing up that the percussion for tomorrow’s show may have gone missing means that some extra work is needed to help get them sorted. And we found that some of the older mics electronic shielding was starting to fail – so replacements are needed.

But then, having a couple of the companies not supplying paperwork until a day or two before their show (and after the festival had started) wasn’t particularly helpful. This was the same company who requested twenty-two channels of wireless two days before their (sunday) show so they could do essentially a musical.

By the time we had properly sound checked all those wireless mics (and completed the focus, and hung the many extra soft goods, and rehearsed the changes), the lass who served as our translator/backup monitor engineer/stage sound tech had an hours worth of run-through to learn the mic moves of a two hour show. Bearing in mind that there were no monitors and only sidefills were used, we were left wondering why the FOH engineer, who knew the show, didn’t just send a couple of feeds from spare auxes (there were five or six free on the Midas for that show).

A cut-off date for riders, I think, and a “sorry, too late” there after. (actually, based on the business we work in, I can’t see that one happening too soon)

And I think every department had to deal with a company that had a relaxed view to taking meal breaks – these shouldn’t be optional.

That’s not to say every sudden thing caught us entirely off-guard – we found out that BBC3 were coming in to record one of the performances only a few days before they appeared. It was, however, a simple matter to put their splitter on top of ours and use the isolated outputs to provide a feed from every channel which they converted to optical and sent it down a fibre optic to their OB truck. We barely noticed them that whole day other than to chat every now and then.

The shows themselves went very well and were well received by the audiences. I still can’t get over the amount of kit needed for what is essentially an acoustic performance – I would like to witness a flamenco unplugged show at some point.

I may be biased there …

Still, it’s mostly over. The clean-up was a little messy. Cable does have a habit of propagating if you leave it along for too long and two weeks of live events mean that there’s a lot of cable left to do it’s own thing. And having to come in the morning after a get-out is always a little painful. (is that my physio calling?)

With the second truck pick-up (too much kit for one), the day after also involved hitching a lift in the truck with one of the guys from the hire company visiting our second theatre space to have a talk about a potential new purchase down there.

Meeting the guys down there striking the surround speakers and returning them to delay positions:

“Morning”

“Morning, what time did you finish last night?”

“Two am. And you?”

“Half one. We did start at eight”

“Hmm – longer out than us. What time did you come in for the show?”

“Two pm. And you?”

“Nine in the morning”

“Normal theatre hours then?”

“Yep”

Stopped to talk purchase options with them and hire company man then nicely head out to box office to pick up a delivery of drum sticks and stagger back to the stage.

Stagger? Carrying drumsticks? How heavy are drumsticks?

Well, according to the delivery label, 200 drumsticks weight 18kgs (that’s about a stageweight and a half in theatre money). And the 500 sweatband that came with them were another 9kgs. And the box had split (a trail of sweatbands behind me)

And when I get back to the stage, I then find that that theatre has borrowed some three-phase cable which I can now return.

Joy.

You get some funny looks on the bus carrying 30metres of 32A TPN+E Ceeform …

Getting back to the main house, I was just about to finish things off when a delivery of flight-cases arrived. And by which I mean actual flight-cases.

Good news: our monitor amps, desk power supply and sound playback system now have cases to live in.

Bad news: fitting rack nuts without the proper tool is a real pain in the, well, fingers. Only two scapes and a blister …

A final bout of paperwork and I clock out – and, as is my want after Flamenco, that’s a week away from the office.

I’m setting my alarm for the weekend …