BACK from a LONGGGGGG WEEKEND
Started off with the Nokia Launch at PICC on a friday night... with Francis M, Kitchie, Rivermaya, Pinikpikan and Bamboo...
I haven't done TV mixing for a long while... so i got to the venue early enough and found my childhood buddy Rards Corpus... teaching a class from CCP, i'm glad because Rards has been doing a lot of live shows for the past couple of years and is qualified to teach the younger wannabe techs.
It was my first time to use the new Yamaha DM2000 digital board, and i fell in love with it... i have always been a fan of Yamaha boards since they came out with the O2R. This board has a lot more features such as assignable inputs and outputs, bussing and Matrix outputs. Evertything in a compact board which is like three times smaller than the old analog boards i used before.
We were doing double band setup that night with something close to 40 inputs and i was able to group them into two groups on the third layer of faders on the DM.
The mix was not as good as i would have wanted more time to eq and balance properly but it was a crazy hectic show... so i hope it turned out OK... hehe
Saturday i was in Araneta Center for the Fra Lippo Lippi show... this time i was familiar with the DM's eq and i had more time to balance and shape my sound as we were only doing one band... what a relief! Unlike friday night which featured an all pinoy band lineup... Fra lippo had three local musicians joining them onstage. Beth Martin on second Keyboard, Soc Mina on bass and Noel Mendez on guitars.
I believe my mix for this night was better than the friday night job... except for a flub on one song wherein i had to look for the nylong guitar input because it was not marked clearly on the DM's readout. Meaning they must've placed an input on a mislabeled channel on my mixer. I did manage to get half of Noel Mendez's nylon guitar solo on the only song he had one.
Otherwise it was a good recording with a modest audience ... in fairness to Fra Lippo Lippi it was raining on that night because of typhoon Caloy.
Sunday i was back in Araneta for the Paul Anka concert featuring an all american band with an all american crew.... The FOH engineer wanted an analog board and asked for Midas.
Luckilly Rards got the board and other equipment. It was a great day to be with my childhood friend whom i haven't seen in a long time. We were both busy in our own current line of work ...
I have always viewed Rards as an older ...yes older brother. We do share the same passion for music so we were really glad to be together watching the american musicians and crew going about their work. We were comparing notes on how the american crew were doing their job ...
Paul Anka did have a great show that night except for an occasional feedback on his monitors... He had multiple monitors on stage ... even a monitor under the acoustic piano... which the boys of Soundcheck kept refferring to as an "ass monitor" hahaha . Way too many monitors for me... as he already had soundfills onstage.
The sax player whose name i can't remember right now was an elderly band leader who had brilliant arrangements of Paul Anka's songs. He wrote a lot of good songs apparently for luminaries such as Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis, and Barbra Streisand.
I loved the band ... with an incredible tight Brass section.
I wasn't able to take pics as i was kinda busy working that night.
If i were only younger i wouldn't mind doing live sound work again.