1692 miles down, 690 to go.

We’re on day 2 of our 3 day trip from Maryland to Arizona for 3 rehearsal dates and the first show date. The crew headed out Saturday afternoon to start the trip, and we’re expected to arrive at our destination around 6am tomorrow morning. It’s been a fairly peaceful trip out west. In order to make our deadline, we hired 2 drivers that alternate driving all day. They take 8 hour shifts driving straight through, with almost no stops. We’re currently in the middle of no where. I think we’re in Texas, but there’s absolutely nothing around.

We did take a pit stop earlier in the day so the bus could gas up and Matt could play with the cows:

We’ve all been sitting on the bus trying to keep ourselves occupied with whatever we can. I’ve settled into the bus, and gotten everything in it’s place. Well good enough anyway… Everyone else is sitting around playing video games, watching TV, listening to music, and doing whatever they can to keep busy. Sadly, internet and phone coverage has been pretty crappy out here…

We went with a new bus company this tour, and I must say, it’s a pretty nice improvement so far. Have a look:

It’s a pretty snazzy looking bus. A nice upgrade over the old bus we had!

Thats all for now…

Back to the world of Rock and Rollllllll….

Only a few days left to go before the next tour, and I’m no where near ready. This week has consisted of:

1. Taking care of Roxanne: She had her wisdom teeth pulled on Tuesday, and I’ve been taking care of her and nursing her back to health for the past 24 hours. She is doing well, and feeling better!

2. Finishing up All Time Low’s new In Ear Monitor setup: We have quickly out grown the old system, and it was time to move on from our beloved Crest XRM20. We decided that a Yamaha LS9-32 would best suit our needs:

Caution: Sound nerd stuff:
Going from a completely self contained monitor setup to a separate rack and console was quite the change. Our old setup allowed us to leave everything patched all the time, so it was very simple. Now, with the new monitor board, I have to patch it every day. So, that means 28 input channels, and 11 outputs. I knew that would get annoying quick, and it really wasn’t something I wanted to do every day, so I set off to make my life easier.

My solution was to change the passive spit on our current panel from XLR to a pair of Whirlwind W1 connectors. A W1 connector basically take 12 channels work of XLR and converts them to a handy little multipin connector:

They plug together:

And then the other end fans out to XLR:

This makes for a nice neat and fast setup. Instead of having to plug in 24 single XLR’s every day, I only have to plug in 2 multipin connectors. The only downside to this fun system is the assembling process. The back of the connector looks like this:

39 connections less then 1/8″ apart from each other. Talk about working in cramped spaces! It took me a solid 6 hours to knock out both connectors. That’s a lot of soldering!

But, the complete patch panel setup turned out pretty nice:

And, the cabling is very neat:

My final project for the week involves packing, something I really need to do. So, until next time….

Back to the world of Rock and Roll….