Hi folks,
Happy New Year to all of you.
I'm curious how everybody's New Years eve gigs went. What you were doing, where you were, what went right, what went wrong blah blah blah... I always like to hear about other gigs as there is always an interesting idea, a new approach, or at minimum an amusing incident
in there somewhere.
As for me, my band was booked in Garmisch in southern Bavaria, right up against the Austrian border at the recently completed Edelweiss hotel
which belongs to the US Armed Forces Rec. Center.
http://www.edelweisslodgeandresort.com/ We were playing in one of the facilities restaurants called Zuggy's Base camp, think wood everywhere, old skis and mountaineering hardware on the wall. This is the Edelweiss's first New Years party so there was some pressure on us to make it work.
We setup on Friday around 1pm and had lots of time to sound check and tune. At my last gig (a Christmas party I DJ'ed) I noticed that one of my subs (JBL MP418p) was pretty feeble and was clipping its inputs. Now it was really dead.
After some mental gymnastics, I soldered up a pair of Speakercon panel connectors to about 3 feet of 16awg wire and bypassed both subs internal amps and drove them with a PLX3402 that was assigned to the mids. (Tops now in passive mode being driven by a PLX3002) This amused me in hind sight as I had just spent a bunch of time setting up my tops for biamp, and it was all for nothing. I must say though, that the PLX could push the snot out of those subs, the kick had never carried that much energy before. I'm not sure if the internal Crown amps are not up to the job or both are in need of a good warranty repair. Either way, they are going to the local repair facility once/if I can talk to the JBL Warranty folks. (The subs are American 120v models that are technically out of warranty since they are outside of the US even though they are still within the three year period.)
The gig itself was a hoot for the band. We are finally enjoying playing together and I think the crowd picked up on that energy. I did have a problem after midnight (when the crowd had diminished a good deal causing a room acoustic change) when my Sabine feedback suppressor started acting up a bit. I had it on the mains between the mixer (Yammie 01v96) and the crossover (Behringer Ultradrive) but the signal level there is lower than it wants to see. Looks like once it filled up its dynamic filters, it wouldn't release them until a really bad ring pops up. So it happily let some low level ringing go on for a while until I could make a dive for the mixer
(mixing from stage) and toss a notch filter in. Next time I'll probably use the Sabine as an insert as I typically only have problems with the lead singers mic (he needs lots of gain) or maybe a drum overhead.
The sleeping arrangements, in contrast to the nice new Edelweiss, were pretty minimalistic. Since every hotel room in town was booked, we ended up renting a very rustic (read, rundown) mountain lodge buried up in the woods just outside of town, sleeping on bunk beds in sleeping bags and sharing communal showers. On Saturday evening, after sleeping in and recuperating from the festivities, (Clear mountain air is great) we made a big meal of pasta and salad, built a huge fire and drank a case of excellent Italian red wine, while passing around a guitar into the wea hours to totter off to bunk bed bliss.
Now its back to the day job and I still have to unpacked the van.
ciao
Simon