Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

A quintet of Playford Spice musicians had a wedding gig Saturday. (I think the only other with a blog is silmaril but will link others here if I'm mistaken.) On the whole the gig went well: the groom said good things about us, the bride said lots and lots and lots of good things and repeated most of them a few times, assorted guests said positive things about us with big smiles, and even the caterers chimed in with praise. The biggest frustration was a wee bit of disorganization -- last minute edits to the program, a bit of uncertainty about who else was supposed to perform when, sorting out cues for music during the ceremony, and finding out while we were setting up that we needed half again as much music as we had prepared ... which are really not unusual types of glitches for weddings, nor an unusual number of glitches for any one wedding, so it was neither the most amazingly tightly-organized wedding I've played at nor the most confusingly disorganized. *shrug* (Oh, there was also some confusion and much delay in getting the band fed, but at least the caterers didn't make us eat outside in the rain[1].) The biggest loss was that one of my bungee cords went missing -- not really very high on the catastrophe scale. So: on the whole, it went rather well. I got to play with folks I like but don't see often enough, the people who needed to be happy with us were happy, and there were no disasters to speak of. A good day.

Still, there were lessons to be learned:

• Don't mic an ashiko (nor, I'm guessing, a doumbek?) from the front just because there's already a mic there: the dums just wind up sounding like teks with reverb, not properly lower-pitched dums (or to put it another way, there's no boom in the dum).
• When my pain meds wear off during teardown, the correct response is not, "Well that's okay; I hurt now but didn't have any problems during the performance, and we're almost done here." Rather, it should be, "Oh right, I still have to drive home and unload the car, so I'd better take another dose."
• I could've used about fifteen more minutes of setup time[2]. Ten more minutes, and I would've gotten a proper level set for the bowed psaltrey (we set the level on that mic with a recorder while the psaltrey player was getting dressed); fifteen would've let me connect up to record the whole performance, as well (recording was the lowest priority, so I set it up last ... during a break after we'd started playing).
• I need to bring a different type of earphones. The ones I used let in enough environmental sound that I had trouble telling what I was hearing from the mixer and what I was just directly hearing from next to me on stage. This left me feeling insecure about how good a job I was doing with the mix, and whether I had a good overall volume level for the room, until I got off the stage at one point and a guest immediately complimented us on the sound. *whew*
• Normalizing the per-channel pre-amp gain to -3dB, instead of 0dB as the mixer's user manual directs, works pretty well. (This was something I did in response to maugorn's complaint a few days earlier that I tend to trim the mics too hot coming into the board when I do it by the book.)
• The serpent doesn't need to be close-miked after all -- getting a mic sortakinda close but off-axis is good enough for live (but not really recording-quality).
• When running a mono house mix, I should use the 'left' and 'right' channels as submixes, so I can kill all the mics on stage with one slider while leaving the toast/announcement mic live, instead of zeroing each stage channel and then trying to remember where to set them to when we start playing again. (Need to verify that the "mono sum" output behaves the way I expect for this to work.)
• Folks seemed genuinely surprised that neither the DJ nor the band had a wireless mic to use for toasts/announcements. Fortunately the mic I did put out for that got used entirely from the head table, so the requirement to roam without trailing a cable never came up. (I had put a nice long cable on the toast mic just in case.)
• A surprising(-to me) number of people seem to have, as their first instinct upon picking up a microphone, switching it off if there's a switch on it.

Allowing myself a brief tangent regarding mixers ... I think I would feel quite comfortable with a proper 12x4 mixer (as opposed to a 4 mic + 4 stereo, nominally 12-channel) for live mixing from the stage, with either 8-channel still handy for spare channels at gigs where there's any chance that I'll need more than twelve (which shouldn't come up often, if we're talking about the kinds of gigs where I'll run sound while playing). We used eight channels on Sunday, so an 8x2 mixer was enough -- I just get a little nervous when the plan ahead of time has the board completely full, as it doesn't leave me any room for surprises when I get there (as it was, the reason I had a channel left on the main board for the toast mic was that we ditched the separate serpent mic). But considering how seldom I need to do this, getting by within the limits of one 8x2 mixers or a pair ganged together will remain reasonable for quite a while. (When I first saw a 16x4 mixer I wasn't really sure what the point of the subgroups was. The 24x8 made sense for 8-track recording, but I didn't get the point of subgroups for live sound right away. After a few gigs where they would've made things a bit easier, I understood.)

And though I didn't get any good recordings (as I said, 'twasn't a priority), I've a couple more thoughts after listening to what I did manage to record:

• I should play mandolin more often. As much as I still really want a mandola (viola-sized/tuned version of the mandolin), I find I like the sound of the mandolin more than I thought I did.
• I should definitely strum on mandolin more often.
• I need to work more on my breathing.
• Even though the sackbut pointed at a recorder mic did produce some clipping (I forgot to turn that channel down before the fanfare), it still sounded okay -- I think the sound going directly from the instrument into the room may have been more audible than the copy coming out the speakers anyhow.
• When it's amplified enough to be heard, the oud boosts the "medievalishness" of the blend, coming across like a sort of agressive lute (which is fitting, since a lute can reasonably be thought of as a softer, fretted oud). But I should have boosted the bass a little on it, as the low notes, which sounded plenty loud to me while I was playing, seem to get lost. (I played the oud into my recorder mic, from a greater distance than the recorders. In hindsight, I should've tried putting the condenser from the 12-string on it and seen whether I could get away with the coil pickup I usually use on the 6-string (which I didn't bring to this gig) in the 12-string[3]. But that would've pushed us back up to nine channels -- including the mic out on the floor for toasts and announcements -- and I would've had to cable the spare mixer into the setup ... which I was prepared to do -- I can turn these two 8-channel mixers into one 13-channel mixer very quickly, or a 16-channel mixer with a little more trouble -- but it's just as well that we got by on eight channels even though the spare deck was powered up and ready just in case.[4])
• I need to write a story in which one character has an excuse to warn another about a third, saying, "She's dangerous with that recorder, man. She'll break your heart with a well-timed trill."

So: Saturday went well except for having been stupid about pain meds toward the end and having unloading the van at home be more difficult that it had to be, as a result. Then yesterday was a pretty much lost day, as I'd pretty much expected (I'd planned to visit my mother if able, but wasn't counting on being able ... the vicious headache[5] was a surprise, but the muscle and joint pain and general fatigue were not). I finally resorted to inhaled theophylline[6] to deal with the headache and a mild bout of athsma, which helped a lot, and today has been an ordinary everything-hurts day instead of an exceptional everything-hurts day. Getting to rehearsal tonight is unlikely but I haven't entirely given up on the idea yet since I'm doing so much better than yesterday -- this is a codeine-might-work level of pain, today, if I time it right. But I'm still definitely feeling the after-effects of Saturday's effort and Sunday's migraine.

I can wish for a body that didn't take so long to recover from a day like Saturday, but Saturday itself was good.

[1] Something that actually happened to HCB once, since immortalized in a verse of "Mrs. Murphy's Band".

[2] More time was not logistically possible, because as it was, I arrived before there was anybody around to unlock the doors to the hall. Having everybody else there to help me carry stuff in the moment the doors were open might have bought me an extra five minutes, maybe -- I already had gear out of the car and bungeed to hand trucks by then, so it wouldn't have saved much more than that.

[3] I don't really like to use the coil pickup in the 12-string because I'm not really happy with the balance between the main strings and the octave strings when I do that, but maybe I could've put up with it for one evening -- I'd have to listen to that sound again to decide. When I was shopping for guitar transducers I quickly decided on the Dean Markley Pro-Mag for the 6-string (it seems especially well matched to that particular guitar), but none of the eight or so coil pickups I tried on the 12-string really made me happy so I switched gears and got an Audio Technica AT831b condenser which came with a soundhole clip. A coil pickup with twelve individually adjustable pole pieces (or twelve pole pieces spaced right for my guitar and factory-set to heights that give me the balance I want) should work, but when I was shopping (several years ago now) there weren't any clip-in, soundhold pickups that fit the bill.

[4] To be more precise, the spare mixer was mine and the much nicer one I used is on long-term loan from fidhle -- rather more effort to transport than mine (mister hand-truck is your friend), but a bit easier to use.

[5] As I tweeted yesterday: "What's one step worse than a 'killer headache'? A 'serial killer headache'? A 'terrorist headache'?" I'm leaning toward 'terrorist headache', and IIRC realninterrobang agrees.

[6] That is: I dumped the contents of a teabag onto a scrap of paper, rolled it tightly, and smoked it. It sometimes helps with migraines even though it can give me a headache if I didn't start with one -- I usually drink 'decaf' tea, and keep the regular stuff around specifically for use against headaches once in a blue moon. I smoked it this time instead of drinking it to speed delivery, and to get as much of it as possible to my lungs for its airway-soothing effects. And no, I don't know offhand whether anybody else does this.