Holiday season

For the next three weeks, my life mostly revolves around providing a wonderful holiday experience for families in the Sacramento region. This season we're doing a pseudo-Panto / musical version of Cinderella, which means our seating is filled with tiny girls with long braids and tiaras who still think being a Princess is their number one goal in life. My job, amidst the chaos, is to wrangle the noise. Or, more 'officially', I'm the live mix engineer... in a one person sound department.

I have twelve of twenty some cast members in body mics (8 Sennheiser XSW 12, 4 Audio Technica System 10) and use some area pickup to support the ensemble/chorus numbers (3 Crown PCC-160's). Additionally, there's a four person / five instrument (Keyboard, percussion, violin, electric bass / trumpet - yeah, he plays both bass and trumpet, unusual combination, isn't it?)... and while the space isn't really large enough to NEED the band reinforced, they are mic'd or direct lined so I have some control over their volume (and just to have them in the mix so the band and voices sound 'together'). All that is run through our old fully manual Allen and Heath GL3300. Because 'most' of the mix isn't stable until we start doing tech/dress runs (and we only have 1 before we start having audience present), I never have an opportunity to create a prompt script (my hands are busy on the controls at the times I would need to be writing down level changes), So the full mix is done, from memory and based on the live quality in the room on a fully manual board.

So if I happen to sound a little brain dead at any point in the month of December... you know why.

Fortunately, you don't need me to do much more than introduce the next couple week's content releases. And now that that is mostly automated, I should be able to do that even in the midst of my live mix stupor. :)

For this week, we have a bit of holiday fun from Bek: please enjoy "Silver Ghost, Golden Angel"