As you expect, we had a difficult night. The set up/soundcheck took over three hours (when we set up and run our own sound with the band's PA, it takes an hour and a half). They had to hold the opening of the doors while we continued dealing with feedback. Bad channels on the mixer, bad channels on the snake, bad cables…ouch! We probably would have never played the gig if it hadn't been for Greg Lee and Ganesh Giri Jaya taking over and plugging everything in for them.
The weird thing was that a third sound guy (who seemed to know something about what he was doing) did finally show up and help solve things, but as soon as the party got up and running, he left (or fled). Any issues that came up after the first twenty minutes were basically left unfixed.
So anyway, that was weird. I don't know who was to blame for that, but it made things difficult/slightly embarrassing.
Mark Dannells at sound check...
The smoke machine worked really well. We were totally fogged in at one point.
As far as our performance, I can't really say. The stage sound was a mess--there was a big low mids roar--it sounded like we were playing next to a giant dishwasher. On top of that, the monitor mixes were forever changing--in the first set, Bencuya's keyboards got louder and louder on stage. In the second set, vocals would completely vanish from the monitors mid-song. I wonder what it was like out front?
I guess things were OK. The party attendees seemed pretty happy right from the first note; they even demanded an encore. Yahoo!
May we never play this room again…
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