rehearsal woes

Ok, so I run the audio for Paula Scriva Dance Studio recitals. It's alot of fun, mostly. Paula opened a new studio in Robinson this year, and so the recital is at Moon High School (near Robert-Morris University). When dealing with a new venue, you sort of expect things to be a little rough until you get used to the staff, equipment, etc.

Today's rehearsal, however, was a complete nightmare.

They have a massive sound board. 24 channels, and a rack with a fairly complicated equalizer and FX box. I've run previous recitals right out of a PC, straight into the rack. Boards are new to me. This one had been vandalized recently (a rival school's students had cut all the cables,) so I expected the worst.

I ran the mini stereo line out of my sound card with a 1/4" adapter into one of the channels on the board. I then spent the whole day trying to figure out why most of the vocal tracks were weak or missing. We hooked up a subwoofer to one of the monitor channels, and that seemed to help a little bit for Sinatra and such, but still something was missing. We wired, rewired, fiddled and tweaked the thing until I thought I was going to give up and go home.

Finally, thinking maybe it was a product of the vandalism, we contacted a service tech to come out and take a look. As it turns out, the board connectors were all mono jacks. Man, did I feel like an idiot. He gave me an XLR splitter to 1/8" and we were good to go. I feel bad, because it was my fault the whole time, and the school had to pick up the tab.

Now I'm interested in learning my way around a board and a rack. If anyone has any tips on how I should get started learning this on my own, feel free to send some my way. I'm not able to drop any cash on this endeavor just yet, so keep that in mind.

-mixmaster eGaTS signing off-