PA shambles

John_A

Played a festival gig last week, we were early on the bill, asked if they had a DI box to stick my helix in to or did they want to use mine, reply was 'were not allowed to plug anything else in you'll have to use the supplied amp'  So disabled my cabs in the Helix and went in to the FX return of a knackered Fender combo.

Did a 5 minute sound check and asked why the monitors weren't working, reply 'we don't know ho to turn them on, it's hired gear'

Got through the gig, but it was awful!  Have another festival gig this week, hope it's all a bit better

maltingsaudio

Sounds like a budget thing, we are putting on a festival but can’t afford decent PA crew, as long as we have a cider tent and hog roast all will be fine 

Danny1969

That's bad but I had worse on Saturday night ... at least for 5 minutes

We were on at a lovely Theatre in Maidenhead. Great venue, great PA, nice FOH engineer and lighting tech. Did the soundcheck, got all our ears sorted (whole band is on IEMs') then buggered off to the dressing room to get changed and have a drink. 
Come showtime we check with comms to get clearance then come onstage, ears already in to start the show in front of a packed house. Straight away I can tell there's a problem ... I can't hear any spill in my ears ... I can't hear the intro noise the drummer has started on his SPD. Everything is muted .. I think any second now the FOH engineer is gonna unmute everything and we can start but no, everything stays muted. Another 20 seconds go by ... everything is still muted. The audience know something is wrong but don't know what. Another minute goes by. We now look completely stupid... a bunch of people stood onstage just standing there doing nothing. Another minute goes by and to us a minute feels like 10 minutes. There's a bit of laughter from the audience, I spose it looks quite comical. Another minute goes by in silence, can't even see the engineer ..he's out front somewhere but god knows where as he's on an iPad for the first couple of numbers to check the mix in different positions
Finally we have to shout "everything is mut'ed" and boom 10 seconds later audio comes on and the audience claps.

The engineer came in the dressing room at half time and apologized. He had set up some mute groups and although channels were un muted he forgot about the mute group. Nice bloke and an easy mistake to make but that was the worse 5 minutes onstage in my whole career so far I reckon