What a crazy few days! First show of the tour, Bamboozle Left and Vegas!

It’s been a fun, and tiring few days. The first show was in Mesa, AZ, at a very nice outdoor amphitheater. We loaded in on Thursday(for a Friday show) for our final rehearsal before the show. It went very well, and sounded great. But, come show day, the weather gods decided it would be fun to toy with me and kick the wind up to 20-30 mph with gusts up to 50 mph. Needless to say, it was an interesting day. We had to gaff tape mic stands in place to keep them from blowing over, and we had to weigh the guitar boats down so they didn’t blow off the stage! Needless to say, I knew the show wasn’t going to sound amazing. Every time the wind kicked up, the guitars would just disappear. It was a nice natural phaser sound on the whole mix, and I couldn’t turn it off no matter how much I wanted it gone.

But, the wind was actually one of my lesser worries come line check. I ask Grieco to hit the kick, and it’s not there. Hmmm… It’s showing up on channel 16, thats not right! Ok, I’ll tell the Clair guys to swap their tails and that should fix everything. Nope! Kick is gone, and snare is now where the kick should be. This isn’t good… I run up to the stage to figure out what’s going on. We fumble around before finally figuring out that the Clair snakes are set up as a 14 channel standard, while our ATL snakes are 12 channels. Swapping their tails put everything 2 channels off. So, we swapped everything to the proper way and got the show rolling. A crisis was averted!

…Caution: Sound Nerd stuff..

The Midas Pro 6. Fall Out Boy is 1 of 3 to have this console in the USA. It’s so new that it’s running on Beta software and has no offline editor. However, in typical Midas standards, it sounds great. The board is very well laid out, and easy to get around on. I’ve got 2 shows on it now, and I feel like I can do anything I want on it. Though, I do have a few complaints:

-Only 16 faders. It would have been great to have 24 faders so I could keep everything on 1 layer and not have to flip through a few pages to get what I need.

-Buggy. We’ve had a screen go out, a few functions stop working and VCA’s that wont assign to anything. I figure most of these issues will go away as the software gets updated, but it’s rather annoying currently.

-Scene functions. You have to save your stuff about 5 times to really save it to the console. I much prefer Yamaha’s method for saving scenes. It’s a lot easier.

However, with that said, I have to say, it’s a great sounding board. The comps are very transparent, the gates work well, and the built in effects sound good. Though, there is no tap delay at all in the console.

It’s a good board all around, but I’d still much rather have a Digi Design Profile…

…End Sound Nerd Stuff….

Before we could get into the groove of shows, we had to get a Festival out of the way: Bamboozle Left. It was a pretty cool festival. It really reminded me of Warped Tour. Rat Sound provided a Midas H3000 at FOH, and a V-Dosc PA. I was very pleased with everything at Bamboozle, and for an outdoor festival with no line checks, it really sounded nice.

Tonight we were in Vegas, and I’m finally getting a system down. I can prepatch most of my stuff before we go on, only leaving the drums and front line to worry about during the change over. This was a “smaller” room at a capacity of only 2,600. But, the PA installed in the room could have covered 26,000. We had 48 JBL VT4888DP’s, 20 JBL VT4880DP’s and Clair brought in 8 BT218’s for some extra LF. It was an insane amount of PA for this room, and it sounded great. Someone must have had a lot of money to throw around at this install! The show went very smoothly and sounded great. I couldn’t has asked for much more!

And how about a picture of Fall Out Boy:

And that’s all for now. Back to the world of Rock and Roll….