It’s one of those quiet Sunday mornings that so often results in me feeling like slowing down and writing to YOU. Yeah you.
Yesterday was an exercise in problem solving and tech gremlins. Just… amazing how many things were amiss. Someone contacted me about how they couldn’t signup for the VOM… and I go to trouble shoot and realize ilyAIMY.com is down. Looks like they’ve actually changed something substantial about their hosting so I hope it’s something simple like “oh, we upgraded x and just need to change the settings on y” – but tech support’s clueless and I spend the next hour and a half of my Life working my way through the next couple of paragraphs while listening for the “ding” of incoming tech support messages.
Some of which were under my control, some not. Getting up, trying to print programs for FocusMusic, the printer getting really tetchy (humid weather + double-sided printing = sticky paper). Testing a bunch of my cables and things because the last time I was Island Pride Oasis I couldn’t get one particular angle due to a failed cable. Traffic mounting as weather piles in… trying to solve the recurring problem of playing bumper music for the show….
I’ve tried playing it off my computer, but that causes problems with outgoing feeds. I used to play it off my phone, but the new one doesn’t have a headphone jack. I’ve tried using a Bluetooth dongle but playing music via Bluetooth off my phone while also using it as my mixer causes strangeness. I bought a little mp3 player for this ONE purpose but I guess I bought something too cheap and it died after two or three uses.
Sigh.
I bought a Zoom recorder recently for interviews and it occurred to me I should be able to play files off of IT so I dump a wav on there (it doesn’t do mp3s). It doesn’t see it. I rename it to the Zoom file convention. It still claims there are no files. I resave the wav to 24/44.1 which is the format it’s set to record and it STILL doesn’t see it.
And so I go old school and run a cable from my computer to the Zoom and literally record an hour and a half of music via an analog connection. It’s stupid, but it works.
It’s somewhere during this process that we also get ilyAIMY.com back up and running. Huzzah!
Driving down Gaithersburg, battling traffic that’s probably mounded in from some place where there was a flash of rain. Listening to the news it sounds like people are joyfully flinging their cars into one another willy and also nilly. The sky is dramatic in a way that you don’t expect at three in the afternoon, like an early sunset. I know whatever I’m facing traffic-wise is nothing compared to what Kristen’s dealing with on the way to HER gig, but I drive stick so I figure that when we bitch about it later it’ll kind of even out.
Showing up at Island Pride Oasis in Gaithersburg, MD – I must admit I tend to be pretty cavalier about walking in and taking over. I direct table set up while laying out tripods, I bring in load after load of gear, slowly staging at my table, on the stage, in the back of the room. I run the ethernet cable from their router noting that equipment’s changed which is something of a relief because there seems to be a LOT less plugged in (I sometimes have to hunt for a spot) and then slowly I make rounds around the room. Tripods, laying out cables, plugging things in. It’s a painterly layering of gear when I’m alone. Relaxed and pleasant.
As usual, one camera position fights me. I swap cables, connectors, cameras, channels. No amount of logical replacement seems to get me a camera on stage right. And this frustrates me. I also realize I can’t connect to my mixer and have to set up my router. Between these two back-up solutions it means my layouts are getting a little tangled as I pull cables OUT of their trenches and move camera 3 and lay a router and its accoutrements on TOP of my main nest. I know on my best day my cable management leaves something to be desired costing me time and a clean stage aesthetic – and I quickly realize this is NOT my best day….
Lara rolls in about half an hour late, but that at least means I’ve not only set everything up but also fixed all the problems I was having. She’s got a more-complicated-than-solo-singer/songwriters-generally-are set up and for all that she’s just two channels, we go through a detail-oriented check of guitar, guitar with boost, guitar with percussive loop, vocal, vocal with loop, talking over vocal loop… and her in-ear monitors keep causing angst. We test it all with IEMS and we test it all with my monitor wedges as a back up. It’s fine. We’ve got the time. Her attention to detail doesn’t frustrate me, but it DOES make me worry that no matter what I do she won’t be happy!
But she seems happy – and I remember all the times when I do NOT take this time for MYSELF and suffer for it. Lara’s sort of being a spectacular example of how patience pays off. Things are dialed in.
Juliet Lloyd to the fore! She’s relatively simple. Strangely, for all that Lara’s setup is more familiar to me (vocal, acoustic guitar, interesting pedal board), Juliet’s is actually somehow more similar. Stereo mix for the keys and the way she uses the microphone is much more similar to myself so that goes quick. I now get to start my hard-won bumper music!
People are arriving up to an hour early so we wrap up and I actually get a chance to sit and eat. I’m monitoring ticketing, making sure no-one’s having problems – and then pretty much on time we kick into the show!
And the show’s marvelous. Juliet’s a FORCE. A great opening set. I worry about doing too many closeups on her face while she’s performing, but she has a spectacular emotiveness that I want to make sure translates to home viewers – when she mentions later that she also does some acting it kinda makes sense.
A very quick strike and on to Lara’s set… and I don’t think we were THAT deep into the set before the internet just DIES. I run out to the router to see if something’s gotten unplugged, check the cable to make sure no-one had… dragged a table across the cable or something? Everything’s physically solid – and then I realize that all the TVs in the bar are blank and even the point-of-sale is down. Total ISP failure.
Nothing I can do about THAT.
I text Heather and ask her to hop into the back end of StreamYard and explain to folks what’s gone amiss as I go through a couple of refreshes, and generally hope that signal will return to Gaithersburg! I’m assuming this is a weather / wind-related outage and fear it won’t come back…
Realizing I’m not recording local audio since I had to switch up how my computer was connected to everything when I put the router into play – I pull the Zoom out of the mixer, swap the cables around, and record the line outs from the Focusrite so that I’ve got a local recording that I can piece together. Twice in one day I’ve been faced with taking a high tech digital source and a high tech digital recorder, connecting them with a shitty analog eighth-inch connector.
But it’s WORKING.
After a couple of glitchy false starts we DO swing back. Signal’s dicey enough that I downgrade our outgoing resolution. The focusrite disconnects, reconnects, disconnects. The outgoing interface latches to the wrong device. I probably lose about three songs total to just general chaos and then get everything up and running again. A couple of songs later and I’m confident enough to upgrade back to HD broadcast and everything remains solid through the rest of the night.
Now – I don’t expect ANYONE to care about any of this. I just often feel more accomplished on the nights when so many things go wrong and no-one in the room notices (though the webfeed contained a couple of people that texted people in the room, so my travailles didn’t go ENTIRELY unnoticed).
It was with a warm-glow of triumphant exhaustion that I load out and ready myself for the drive home, only to encounter a closed highway almost immediately. And not just closed, but closed with half-a-dozen firetrucks and perhaps twice that many police cruisers. Possibly the most emergency vehicles I’ve ever seen lit up and converged in one space ever. Wracking my brains as I’m routing around the chaos I think that may be literally true that the emergency response here is bigger than I’ve seen for any other accident, shooting or fire that I’ve ever witnessed.
It’s about 11pm and I feel like I’m struggling to get home as accidents swirl around me, cars fly up I-95, trucks change lanes erratically.
Fortunately… parking is easy tonight. The cat’s in the window. Kristen helps me load stuff back into the house. My long, long, long day is finally done.
No-one else needs to care. I just thought you should know. Not even that. I just need to remind myself sometimes that when things get rough I still manage to persevere.
Notes : if I see someone’s got an IEM base that doesn’t have an antenna plugged into it, that’s PROBABLY the problem! Also, I think the Institute of Musical Traditions camera I’ve been holding on to has it’s wi-fi functionality enabled. This puts out a remarkably broad-spectrum signal and may be responsible for some of the weird bouts of interference I’ve been facing at various gigs. I’ve got to read a manual to figure out how to shut that OFF!