Time to Crib, Again

After convincing about two dozen band techies that the PA is not yet switched on, there is more I will do before I let your friends on stage go for the mass slaughter! 

The show finally begins with the band techies half-convinced that I know what I am doing, while I’m fully convinced they have no clue of what happens at the console. Five minutes before the band goes live, a guy with long, curly, shabby, unkempt hair turns up with an attitude will put Roger Waters’ FOH engineer to shame. “Yo dude, sup!” he says. “I’m the next band’s sound engineer, I’m mixing for them today. Cool gear!” 

The first few times this happened, I wondered if these guys fell off trees around the venue once the speakers were run full volume. Anyway, most of them seemed dazed by the number of knobs on the console. A few guys who tried to be honest, actually made statements like, “Do you use all these knobs? I just mix at their practice session, so it’s one keyboard amp, one guitar amp and the whole five piece band plugs into it. But, don’t worry I’ll manage this console.”

Now tell me, if I let the console to them, who will console me and the audience? After a small conversation, I talk them into giving me instructions on the mix and I will execute them on the board, but hell no! I get instructions worse than what the band techies’. I have been asked to do all kinds of stuff, most of them sounded like they were talking about food. Here are a few:
1. Can I have a little spice on the guitar?
2. Can you make the vocals sweet?
3. Will it be possible to make the keyboards louder than anything else (while the keyboardist was not playing anything relevant), When I ask why, I hear “Because he is a good friend, I never liked the guitarist or the vocalist!” Talk about professionalism.

Well, I thought that after earning a degree, five years experience in the live sound industry and playing for a band for over seven years, I could do my job with ease. Lesson learnt: This field needs a lot of patience, and no qualification is ever going to teach you how to manage these guys!