D8 Skills #152 & D9 & D10 | Unit E | Event Day

Today was the event day. Firstly, I helped a drummer who'll be performing bring in his own and his band's equipment:

I set up all my equipment so that it was all ready to go early. I then discovered that the recording of the interviews had not been organised. This was frustrating because I'd previously offered to fully organise and run the recording of the interviews but had been told not to because another team were going to do it.

This morning, I took responsibility and set up my audio and video recording equipment, the Logic Pro project, plus the interviewer's iPhone on a tripod as a secondary camera. A few others came and helped. I then taught the interviewer and somebody else who'd often be able to be in the room how to set gain on my interface, record into Logic Pro, and use my camera.

After this, I went back to the booth to help with the final sound-checks since I'll be on the desk for a few performances.

During the final sound-checks, I noticed one issue... two channels were very distorted even though they weren't peaking on the desk nor sounded distorted coming through the PAs. After finishing the test recording, I listened to the audio files outside of Cubase and they sounded fine. Shortly afterwards, I discovered that when I unplug and replug my headphones in the laptop, it sorts out the issue.

Throughout the whole gig, the recording process went completely smoothly with no issues. While being very attentive to whether the presenter was going to go on stage to speak, I chose my timings to stop the recording, save, and start again without missing anything.

We'd made a program schedule the other day which was helful today:

During Olaf's performance, Aleks, the mix engineer, left to get ready for his performance. I took over being the mix engineer for Aleks' performance and the first 5 songs of Andy's performance (since Aleks was having his interview). Towards the end of Aleks' performance, he spontaneously called up a drummer to jam with him. I swiftly responded and brought up the drum channels. In between Aleks and Andy's performance, I anticipated that the presenter would go on stage to speak, so I brought up his microphone beforehand so that there was no delay. I also played some music from a playlist I'd created for the event. One of the songs in Andy's performance had a backing track, which I had ready to play during his whole set, and knew exactly when it needed to be played. My time on the desk went totally smoothly, and I left Cubase recording throughout the two performances instead of stopping to save which minimised my workload and therefore minimised any chance of a mistake occuring.

At one point when I was covering the mix engineer while he went to the toilet, the presenter announced that my music was about to play so I rapidly plugged in my phone and played two of my tracks when he stopped speaking.

There was one point when the lighting technician was unexpectedly not in the booth and the presenter went on stage needing light on him. Luckily, another lighting technician had earlier today shown me how to turn the lights up for when CØDA performs since he's in the band and wouldn't be able to do it himself. I went to the lighting desk and slid up that fader which I knew what it did.

Throughout the event, I kept an eye on how much space the SD card had left on the camera in the booth. The event manager had left me with another SD card to swap out when the one in the camera got full. I swapped them when it was about to run out during a changeover.

After the event had finished, I copied over all the files from the MacBook onto my memory stick: