D8 Skills #10 | Unit E | Gig Rehearsal #2
Today, we carried out another full rehearsal for the gig we're doing at Sixty Million Postcards which is now just two days away. The gig didn't go anywhere near as well as our first dress rehearsal.
Things that went badly:
- There was not enough headroom in the vocals due to not having rung out the PAs properly. We took way too many frequencies down on the graphic EQ which was basically equivalent to simply turning down the whole mix. When we got to 3 faders down and were about to pull down a fourth, we should have stopped and instead gone to the source (onto stage) and fixed it there, such as repositioning the microphone to reduce feedback. This resulted in the vocals being drowned out by everything else. The vocals should have been the clearest out of all the instruments.
- The small stand that we used to mic the kick drum with kept flopping down making the kick inaudible through the PAs so we had to swap it.
- All the bands had drums playing except for one solo performance; vocals and keys. The snare drum had been left on therefore we could hear it fuzzing during the performance, even though all drum mic channels were off, which was distracting.
Things that went well:
- During my past experiences of setting up for a gig, I also found it incredibly hard to be heard by people, especially while the bands were in the room, so this time I decided to plug in an SM57 (there were no more SM58s available) straight into the back of the mixing desk and keep it next to the desk all times so that I could communicate with anyone I wanted to at any time. All I had to do to be heard was press the 'ON' button on channel 14 and speak. This worked very well and made the whole setup process more efficient.
