D8 Skills #3 | Unit E | Gig Rehearsal
Today, we did a gig at college and had 9:00 to 11:00 to set everything up which is exactly what we'll have on 2nd Oct at Sixty Million Postcards. We did well and it went extremely smoothly. There are only two things that I took note of where we could have improved:
- We should take time to make sure the stage layout will work well with ALL bands.
- We should make sure to ring out the PAs very thoroughly so that we have more headroom, especially on the vocals; they needed to be pushed higher.
An issue we encountered was that the electric keyboard was producing a hiss. We replaced everything we could except the keyboard including the DI box, XLR cables & location of getting power. The keyboard still had the hiss. We realised that the volume knob on the keyboard didn't make any difference to the hiss, so as a last resort, we turned the keyboard's volume knob to the max, and then turned down the gain on the mixing desk. Although this didn't eliminate the hiss, it greatly improved the signal to noise ratio and made the hiss unnoticeable during the gig.
A considerable amount of my time was spent untangling XLR cables which is a little ridiculous. Luckily when we visited Sixty Million Postcards, their XLR cables were neatly wound in circles and hung on hooks which will allow us to spend our time most effectively on the day.
