Day 0: Preproduction

Dallas, TX

A little bit warm (95deg) and taking full enjoyment of the sun. By that I mean 70spf sunscreen and hiding whenever possible. The usual scene as I leave the bus, “Where the he** is my stage?” Pick a direction and start wandering. Find a truck that might be it then follow it around till I learn that all my PA is in the mainstage truck. Go hang with the mainstage guys till they get to my gear in the nose, then borrow most of their hands to push it all the way to the other side of the venue (parking lot). Send the guys back and watch as my stage unfolds. Once the stage is set its time for some gear. Roll my gear up and get to work. First issue of the day, my power comes from a wing distro with needs to plug into a big power source with cams. What do you know, the solar stage doesnt have cams, what does it have you might ask? Just a two pairs of quadboxes. Interesting. One phone call later and I’m opening up all the racks (by that I mean the one and only rack I have) and rewiring their power cords into two power strips and two 5ft extension cords. Why not all on one power strip? Well these are giant amps which draw a lot of power, the most common max you can get from a household outlet is 20amps, but the max you can get from a household powerstrip is 15amps. I need all the power I can get hence running the subs amp straight to the wall, and splitting up the amps for the high frequency drivers amongst the powerstrips. This got everything running but then appears the second issue of the day: not enough returns for the monitors! Only three returns were left open on the drive snake for four monitor channels. A quick consult with the crew chief Tommy and mainstage FOH Babbyfood and it was decided that means two channels of something needs to share. Originally, combining monitor mixes was considered, but ultimately thrown out for running the 15″ lows in mono. With rat traps (as mains) there are 4 different sizes of drivers, add subs and that gives you a 5 way system. Subs are almost always run in mono since human hearing cant tell which direction low frequencies come from. Since the subs are 18″ drivers and the lows are 15″ I dont lose much of anything by running them in mono too. Just unplug the second drive line and switch the amp over to parallel. Made some loud noises then loomed some cables. On tour theres no time to set up cables one by one, or time to troubleshoot and backtrack one end of a cable to another. The solution is to tape everything together into big bunches. That and yelling at any stagehands with knives at loadout and youre good to go. As the sun gets low its time to throw some tarps over everything and call it a night. Time to back to the hotel for hotel shenanigans.

From 2011 Warped

Tomorrow, a rock show.