D8 Skills #151 & D9 & D10 | Unit E | Sound-checks

Today, during Andy Ford's soundcheck, he mentioned to me that he wanted the strings taken out of the backing track, so I bounced out the track without them and sent it to Aleks, the mix engineer.

Lilly, a singer who's going to perform three songs, each with a backing track, only had the tracks on YouTube. She asked me whether I could get the tracks into mp3s... I said yes and did it for her, again sending the tracks to Aleks, the mix engineer. I used an app called Audio Hijack which has complete control over all audio in my MacBook and can route/record/whatever I want with it, so I used it to recorded my output from YouTube. I then trimmed the beginning and end in Logic Pro.

After a singer, Jason's soundcheck, he asked whether I could send him the recording I made of him so that he could hear himself back. I did this.

The lighting technician we have working with us, Charley, who is very familiar with the Jellicoe Theatre, showed us some headsets we can use to communicate with each other. These turned out to be VERY useful for communicating with the floor technicians while music was playing (and even when it wasn't).

We realised that the monitors weren't routed correctly, so the mix engineer and I sorted this out. I spoke into a microphone at the bottom while listening to which monitor it came out while Aleks, the mix engineer, routed my vocal into each monitor and swapped the cables around so that it was correct.

During the soundcheck, I neatly copied the input list from a picture I had on my phone onto a piece of paper that I stuck next to all the tech riders on the wall behind us in the booth so that it was easily viewable at all times.

While talking to DJ Skyline 808 after his soundcheck, he asked whether he could have a fan on the day because he got very hot. I said yes and got one with the lighting technician, Charley. The technicians we got the fan from said that the theatre's air conditioning was off at the moment and that we can turn it on for the day. We decided on doing that instead, but took the fan anyway to have in the booth.

Lastly, the event manager asked whether he could use my sound recording equipment including my Focusrite Clarett+ 8Pre interface and MacBook Pro running Logic Pro, plus my video recording equipment including my camera and lenses. I agreed as I'm no longer using my MacBook and interface to record a room recording.