Rough Trade: Spunge, Downcast + others

17/10/21 - RoughTrade Spunge + Supports (Downcast):

I shadowed and assisted Fiona Riches in working a show at RoughTrade for a few bands on the last leg of their tour. The main band, Spunge, had their own touring engineer. I assisted in setting up monitor wedges, patching on the stage box, setting up microphones. Labelling cables and learning the ‘over/under’ coiling technique. The console used was a Midas M32. Through my current familiarity with console interfaces I was able to approach the desk in a similar fashion to rename and adjust channels, eq, compression, phantom power and phase inversion. We encountered a small technical issue with the output routing to achieve sound out of the 4th bus send to the monitor wedge. This was rectified. As the band was ready to soundcheck, no signal was coming out of the front of house PA, when no settings were changed, so as a quick solution the show file was reloaded from the last save. The work and people on this job demonstrated the importance of maintaining professionalism in tense and uncomfortable situations. This event also encouraged me to be self aware and know when to step back to let other professionals work, in some instances where the stage area was too crowded.