Andy Coates Blog

Finally I am back on the blocscene after quite a while away where i have spent the last 6 weeks in Leeds working on a theater production in a bigtop based in the grounds of Harewood house called Carnival Messiah. It was quite surreal coming to work each day, walking into a bigtop and to actually feel like you were in a conventional theater! The technical aspect of the whole project was headed by Graeme Nixon of TechSpecand a team of freelance and casual staff which took around 20 months of planning to produce 2 weeks worth of shows for the public! I was working as part of the sound team where we had allot of expensive kit to play with, hold on for a second whilst I put on my anorak and list what gear we actually had! LOL. On front of house we had a huge Yamaha PM7D mixing desk which was driving a D&B Q-series speaker system with a few C series boxes used for delay/fills etc. On the other end on stage we had another Yamaha mixing desk, the M7CL (AWESOME mid size desk!) for monitors which were also D&B max 12's so the band could hear themselves! For the actors we used 30 trantec S5000 radio transmitters and receivers with DPA and MKE mic heads to mic up the lead actors and some of the strongest chorus singers. On-top of this we also had 6 channels of Sure SM58 hand head radio mics for the principle singers too! For the run I was system tech and looking after the radio systems whilst dropping onto the monitor board when needed. A few people have asked me "what did you actually do during the show, surely once everything is set up you can relax" oh how I laughed! For that reason here is a brief rundown of a typical show(and its something else to write about away from blogging!)

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Showday!

5.00 - Arrive on-site and have a cup of coffee!

5.05 - Power up the sound system, eg desks, radios, amps, show relay

5.15 - Check show relay is running (speakers to dressing rooms, green room etc)

5.25 - Sort radio packs from previous night, take out old batteries and put in new ones, switch on listen and switch off to each one to make sure they're operating correctly, fix any problems with a team of 2 mic runners Katie and Leon!

6.00 - Have a cup of coffee!

6.10 - Talk to Glen about any sound notes from previous night and sort them.

6.15 - Actors come to collect their radio mics.

6.45 - Jouvet (pre-show begins) Make sure via intercoms that Katie is ready for one of the hand-head radios to be collected.

7.15 - showtime, monitor all radio mics, double check that packs are working for any solo parts, singing or speaking.

All during the show we had to contently monitor that each radio pack was working i.e RF signal was not dropping, make sure we were getting audio, and fix any issues. Ontop of that, mics had to be collected and dropped of from different parts of the theater (bigtop) which we had to plan the logistic of it in technical rehearsal's!

10.30 - Show ends, collect in all radio packs and double check we have them all. Save any notes from radio script, power down system and probably be out of the tent by 11.00pm

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And that was a typical showday in a nutshell, lots of monitoring, and making sure things were in the right place at the right time etc but pretty much straight forward. Then on the final day of shows (sunday the 30th of Sept) we did 2 shows matenee and evening. Then straight after the show all ofthe sound was stripped down which consisted of 100's of meters of speaker, signal and power cabling, many mics, may stands, more cable, more mics, even more cable etc! Finally at 8.00am the following morning we had stripped out all of our sound gear (20 hour shift that day!).

Money For nothing!

So here I am now back home with my first blog post for about 6 weeks! In that time i have not doe any blogging and was happy to see that during this period my adsenseearnings had accumulated to over $100 and it shall be payday soon! Woo Hoo! Also I earned $25 commission from TEXT LINK AD'S for doing nothing, 5 people directly signed up to e-lottery through my Euro Lotterywebsite earning me a healthy weekly commission. Not blogging for this amount of time has gave me a good insight in to what 4 months of blogging can acheive if it is left alone for a while! The most refreshing things about it is that money earned whilst not blogging truly has been a residual income which is one of my main aims with this blog, to entertain, inform and create a nice residual income! Keep checking back as i will be doing a full rundown of earnings and stats from "NOT BLOGGING" lol.

Andy

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