First off, I usually run the sound for the UNI graduation every spring and fall. When I got there and started doing sound check's I could tell something wasn't quite right. But there's not a whole lot you can do a hour and a half before it start's considering you have to wait till the last minute to make all the final adjustment's. The speaking mic's you can get all preset cause there's not much adjustment you have to do to those, but when you add a the band into it, and they wait till about a half an hour before hand to warm-up. You've only got a short amount of time to tweak everything in and from there make minor adjustment's on the fly.
Well when you're in control of a sound system that will play very loud, and you have to adjust it just right so everyone can hear but not get blown out of their seat's, it help's to have a second person out and around just to radio you in and recommend some level adjustment's.
Anyways I had heard a little "crackling" noise during the first ceremony but it wasn't too noticeable and seemed to go away. I thought at first maybe the wireless mic may have been picking up some interference, and shut that down as soon as I could. I was more worried about setting the system into feedback cause the last time, I wasn't able to work it, and someone had taken my place and I guess shot it into feedback alot.
With the first ceremony out of the way and it went ok, I did some checking during the two ceremony's, and everything was working ok. We did a few sound check's with the different speaker's that would be at the second ceremony. Worked well.
So the second ceremony started and about 5 minute's in, I heard the cracking noise again. I was beginning to wonder if one of the horn's diaphragm's had blown. But that just didn't seem right. As if went on, that noise seemed to get worse and was noticeable to others. I was trying to find if it was coming in on one of the input's to the mix console, so I could isolate it and shut that input down, but it wasn't coming in on one input. So the worst came to my mind. The mixer. I had one of the employee's of the dome there with me and we started talking about what was going on and if we could figure out a way to fix it on the fly without interrupting anything. Just then, the output of the mixer went out. It was working but all the low end, and the high end and most of the lower mid end was gone. It almost sounded very "electronic". So the worst has happened and we still had about 45 minute's to go. Well, we had kind of come up with a worst case back up plan, and no this was the only choice. One of the guy's took off running to grab one of the little mixer's they had.
We worked out a 20 second stop thanks to the Marshall of the ceremony. He's good. But I hot swapped mixer's and got the speaking mic's functioning again, but didn't have enough input's to mic the band again. Plus nothing was set again. The guy's where giving me S*&^ afterward about the whole thing. But the dean did come up to me and thanked me. All you can do is apologize. Which he was so nice about it. He said hey I'm glad you where here, if not we would have lost everything and my guy's wouldn't have been able to getting anything else running so fast. Even with his word's of praise you still feel bad. But what do ya do? A crowd of 3000+ and all eyes where on me.
A couple of the guy's afterward offered to take me out for a beer afterward just because it turned into such a bad day and I really had to think on my feet and do some fast tweaking and all, but I don't drink. Oh well, I guess. I've put in some picture's of the two mixer's and the sound cluster and everyone that was "looking" at me in the time of crisis.
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