The Tech Week Sickness

Tech week is a long process, the last year I have only had one show where it truly was a "hell week" but then you are talking about a MASSIVE show that I had been working on for 9 months.  It never fails that when you reach tech week on a show, the tech week sickness starts around the cast and crew. My tech week sickness is generally after tech week is over.  I think that this sickness comes from the lack of sleep and the lack of proper nutrition and food during the long week.

For a tech person, the sickness comes from where you are working. Theatre's are a dusty, dirty, contaminated public space. No matter how clean you keep your tech booth the rest of the theatre will still be dirty. That seat that you have by your board, how many people have sat in it and when was the last time the arms were sanitized. Door knobs are handled by how many people? Even the seats for audience members… think about those.  There are a lot of people that come in and out of the space, wood it cut in and around the space, things are painted, hairspray is sprayed. So there are many fine particulate that are floating around in the space. I worked in one space that in the 9 months I designed for them, they never once changed the air filters, thats not only a health hazard its a fire hazard.

My tech week sickness this time around came the week before tech week, and the week before I even loaded into the theatre. I was on spring break for school, and let me tell you this thing knocked me out. It lasted 18 days total.  It was terrible. It woke me up and made me start taking vitamins again.

Welcome

Welcome to the first post of my new blog. I'm a senior theatre design major with a focus on Scenic, Lighting, and Sound. Last semester I was the lighting and Tech director for Shrek the Musical and Scenic and Sound designer for Other Desert Cities. I'm currently the on call TD for Jonesburough Repertory Theatre, basically anytime they need tech questions or a last minute designer or help with something I come in and do what I can.  Over spring break this semester I will be lighting designer for Spring Awakening with Glasgow Theatre Company. This past week has been a busy week on the phone with the JRT and with a friend in Florida who just bought the same board that JRT had purchased over the summer.

I think its a beautiful board called the Behringer x32. A completely digital board with automated sliders.  The x32 has the ability to take in 32 inputs and output a lot more than that.  At the JRT I have it set to take 14 wireless mics, 2 keyboards, guitar, and a bass. The Outs are set as L and R mains and mono stage monitors hung inside the upstage side of the proscenium. With a full band on stage I have 3 more monitors on stage digitally patched to take the same feed as the stage monitors.  The awesome thing about this board is that with it entirely digital setting up each of these is a a 5 minute job. Just plug and patch and play.

The x32 has a lot of interesting features that makes it much more user friendly.  There is an iPhone, iPad, and iPod app. This app actually runs the bus sends which is how I set up my monitors and what I have spent the majority of my time working with this week.  With a bass, guitar, and 2 keyboards sent to bus send 1, its a routing or patch to whatever output I need it to be at be that a 1/4 inch cable or a XLR cable.

The x32 also has many effects built into the board.  It has a massive processor built in that you can patch into each individual channel or on a bus send and route each channel to send to that bus send.  During Shrek and USO I had 3 different processors running at one time on separate bus sends. The board also has the ability to record directly from the board, so you can save a version of your mix to use later or record a cue to hold for use in a show later. It can play each one back but I wasn't a fan of the interface to do that. Instead I use MultiPlay software.

The best and easiest feature that I found wad the cue system Behringer has created. The ability to save levels and patching and mutes and even labels on each fader, the board can hold 100 cues, but you can save more on a flash drive and load a new show on the flash drive. You can also run the board from a computer mess with levels and save all from the computer. This is one of my favorite boards to use. However the only big complaint that I have is that I wish it was available in a full size instead of the compact version were only 16 of the 32 channels can be seen at a time.

-photo credit from the Behringer website-