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Our first gig with the ilive system was at the two-day
folk'n'fusion festival in hildesheim, last week of October. The festival has a small bar-stage and a larger ballroom-stage, with many bands playing. We play here every year, and this year we started on the ballroom-stage on Friday, then played a concert for kids in the bar-stage on Saturday and finally played Saturday night again in the ballroom.
Normally, we spend much time on our sound check, and then some more time on writing down all mixing desk and outboard settings. This year was different, we brought the mixrack as part of our backline and just placed it on the stage. We also brought our own cabling and microphones and everything was pre-programmed. From the mixrack, an 8 channel snake carrying left, right and aux 1-4, connected our system to the house system. Initially, there was some ground-loop problem which is irritating. A 2-channel transform-box was inserted on left and right, and we found some channels on the house snake that has significantly less hum for the monitors. Gijs and Edwin performed some tests on Saturday to figure out whether just a cable without the ground connected, or a DI with ground lift could fix the problem. It turned out that both solutions were not really working. Perhaps this wasn't a ground problem, perhaps it something else. The house system had problems with phantom power not working on channels 17-32, so perhaps something else was really wrong.
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Gijs working on the effects on the macbook
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Our gigs were great. I just asked the band to play and used the tablet to set a room-mix (I always start with a rough room mix before doing monitors). All gain, channel-EQ, compression and gates were already programmed, so getting a main mix was easy. Then, I went on stage and fixed the monitors. This system is awesom :)
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Mixrack on stage
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Next to doing our own sound, I help the festival by running sound in the bar. This year, there was an GL2400 mixing desk which I've used for the friday bands. On Saturday, our mixrack was already downstars for the kid-concert of the Gonnagles, and I decided to just use this for the other bands this evening. Doing sound for bands you don't know on a tablet is a bit scary, but since there was enough time for soundcheck, everything was great. I had a chance to actually use test the system in a new situation with various bands I didn't knew. One band, Evelyn Kryger wrote about their experience:
"Während der nette holländische Tontechniker (selbst Musiker bei den Gonnagles) mit uns Sound checkt, räkeln sich eine Handvoll Festivalbesucher auf alten Sofas. Alles wirkt ruhig und entspannt, nichts deutet auf das hin, was eine Viertelstunde später auf einmal losgeht: Der Raum füllt sich schlagartig, die Luftfeuchtigkeit steigt unaufhaltsam und der Lärmpegel ebenso. Dann geht es los und was in den nächsten 60 Minuten folgt ist der Wahnsinn!!!"
Translated to English: "While the friendly Dutch sound technician did our sound check, a handful of festival-goers lounged at the old sofas. Everything is relaxed and nothings indicates what happens next: suddenly, the room fills up, the humidity and noise level rise. Then 'es geht los' and 60 minutes of madness follow!".
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Evelyn Kryger on tablet
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There must have been a lot of people in the bar, and I had a hard time walking around with the tablet. But, I was able to get trough and do sound from many different locations with my tablet. It was a wonderful experience, doing sound for (i guess) 200 people using nothing more than a tablet and pen. One thing was a bit scary: at one point the wireless connection dropped (I tested the 5ghz network, which is not ideal for going through a lot of human bodies) and I had to wait almost 2 minutes to reconnect to the ilive. Those seconds were very scary, but nobody noticed a thing. At any time, my normal laptop was connected to the mixrack using a cable, so I could have made my way to the stage and change things from there during those 2 minutes.
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Evelyn Kryger in the bar
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