Last night I was the sound engineer for the Prefuse 73 show. It was held down at SMOM in the Second Ward. All things considered, it went pretty well; slightly over two hundred people turned out, which is a pretty good turnout for hip-hop events in Houston. On my end, however, things got slightly insane.

I went out there Thursday night to get the sound system set up. Things went really smoothly until I discovered that the amplifier that was going to drive the mains was only outputting on one channel. OK, we can work around that. We'll just get another amp. Oh, and by the way, Mackie mixers suck. Did you know that if you run a signal into the tape output, it will crossbleed into the tape input? Clearly, the two circuits should be isolated from each other, but they're not...

Before the show, one of the subs decided to stop working. Great. Isolated the problem to a wonky cable. Then we ended up with a hum in the mains. Turns out that one of the amps is either not grounded, or the cables are bad. (Seems to be a common theme). I get rid of it in one speaker by using yet another amp. It's low enough to not be super noticeable, though, so I let it slide in the other speaker. There's not really anything I can do anyway.

But the real kicker is the tech rider. The tech rider that we were sent asked for one microphone, eight DI boxes, 31-band stereo EQ for the house, and four (4!) 31-band EQs for the monitors. What the hell?!? Well, we wired that shit up for them. Then they showed up, and Scott (Prefuse 73) had no idea that the EQ was on their rider. John Herndon of Tortoise (A Grape Dope) brought along a drum set. Umm, one mic isn't enough for that. And in the end, we only really needed four of the DI boxes, and probably could have gotten away with less. The guys were really cool, though, and very easy to work with. They were laid back, and very understanding of the situation. In the end, they all told me that the sound for this show was way better than what they had had the night before in New Orleans. Anyway, their tour manager is going to make the appropriate changes to the tech rider for future dates, so at least no one else is going to have to deal with that...