Heading to India

The sky is getting dark outside the plane and the sun is setting with a deep orange glow on the horizon. Wow… I should have said that in a James Earl Jones voice….

It is 7:00 am in Phoenix, and I have been traveling for 24 hours now. I got home from the LA Hilton Show around 11:00 pm Saturday night. I unpacked my small suitcase, re-packed a larger one, and then finally got to sleep around 1:00 am. 

The alarm went off around 6:00 am and I was out the door by 7:00 am.

The flight from Phoenix to Newark was un-eventful, and I landed in New Jersey around 4:00 pm. I hadn't eaten really all day, so a couple of slices of east coast pizza were in order.

I exchanged some US dollars for Indian Rupees and now have a wallet stuffed full of 500 Rupee bills.

Around 6:00 pm Rick showed up at the airport and we went to a little tapas/wine place and got some more food. 

After that we headed to the gate and got on the plane. Rick was supposed to fly in economy, and boarded that way to his seat. However, eventually, he got the upgrade and was moved to Business Class before we took off. 

It is 12.5 hours ahead of Phoenix time when I land in New Delhi. So, the plan is to get some sleep and then tomorrow morning we have a 7:00 am train down to Agra. 

I think the train ride is about 2-3 hours, and we will sight see around Agra, and maybe see the TaJ Mahal at sunset. Hopefully, I will get some internet access, and be able to upload some photos.

Tired but hanging tough

I got to LAX around 11:30 am and went directly to the counter to see if I could get on the 2:15 flight to Orlando. The woman at the counter was pretty nice as she told me that all the early flights were sold out.

Ugh... So, I was at the airport 11 hours before my scheduled flight. 

To make a very long story short. I hung out in the airport terminal until my flight left, and landed in Orlando this morning at about 6:30 am. Fortunately the hotel had a room for me and I checked in and jumped into bed for about an hour and a half. We loaded in and worked till about 7:30 tonight. Then we had some dinner at the hotel bar, and I am now going to get some sleep. 

Basically, Yesterday my schedule was 6:30 am yesterday morning till 7:30 pm tonight with about an hour of sleep on the plane, and an hour and a half this morning at the hotel.

Surprisingly enough, I did pretty well all day. Now however, I am going to pass out. 

Good Night.

The Long Stretch

Last Thursday I flew to Burbank and caught a $65.00 cab ride to The Langham Hotel in Pasadena.

It used to be the Ritz Carlton of Pasadena, so I can't complain about the accommodations.

We loaded into the ballroom at 8:00 am and it went very well. The gear for the show came out of Phoenix, and it is being provided by my good friend. The setup was good, we had everything we needed and didn't have to sit around and wait the vendor to run back to the shop to bring back the stuff that they forgot, like we did in Tampa about 2 weeks ago.

This is a pretty long show, 5 days of show, plus rehearsals. While we did start the week out with rehearsals, there were no more rehearsals after the first show day. 

On Sunday morning we had opening sessions.

And then after some change overs for break outs, the client went to the hotel bar area, where they were having a private superbowl party. 

So, being professional AV Techs, we streamed the superbowl to the ballroom system and then raided the client's bar for food and drinks, and 5 of us watched the superbowl on a 10' x 30' High Def Screen with a JBL Pro Sound system including 18" subwoofers.

Monday Tuesday and Wednesday were pretty chaotic. The client didn't give us any info on the show, and so every day... every session, it was a guessing game as to what was going to happen next.

While there wasn't a lot of long hours or late nights, it was pretty stressful work because we didn't know what was going on. So, I am feeling a little beat up from it all.

Today is the last day of the show, and it is supposed to end around 9:30 or so. I have a flight at 10:45  pm tonight and I am supposed to land in Orlando tomorrow morning at 6:20 am and go right to the hotel to start a load in for another show.

I am going to try and fly standby on a 2:15 flight which gets me into Orlando at midnight, so at least I will get a couple of hours of sleep in a real bed. Wish me luck!

The show in Orlando should be pretty straightforward.  I get to work with some old friends, so I am looking forward to that. It is a quick turn-around show and I will be hopping on the last flight out of Orlando to Phoenix. I land at 11:00 pm and go straight to the hotel where I will load in the following morning. The show there is from Sunday to Thursday, so another good long show.
Hopefully at some point, I will get to swing by this house in Phoenix that I call home, and maybe do some laundry.

The Audio guy's personal Tech Kit

I have been working on a show this past week with a couple of good Audio tech's and curiosity got the best of me about what they carry in their tech kits.

For those of you that aren't in the business, What I am referring to as a "Tech Kit" is all of the gadgets that you would bring to a show to help you do your job, basically the way you want to do it. 

The company you are working for brings the main equipment, but there are always things to bring to make your life better. A good example would be a good pair of headphones. The company might bring a set of cheap headphones in their audio work box, but as the A-1 or A-2, you are going to want to have your own good set. 

Tech kit's develop over many years in the business. Young guys in the business start out carrying a messenger bag or a backpack. And that works just fine for a while. Right up until you start bringing smaller pieces of equipment with you, that just don't fit well in a messenger bag. The process then becomes, you carry a messenger bag and throw those other things in your suitcase. Eventually you will be walking through an airport and see one of your colleagues rolling a Pelican 1510 or a Pelican 1560 through baggage claim. You might ask them, "what's in the case?" and when they tell you it is just my tech kit, you realize that the backpack you are carrying that is about to rip your shoulders off, just might not be the most efficient way to do this anymore. 

You will go and buy yourself a Pelican, SKB, or Storm Case and empty your backpack into it. Then and only then, you realize that you don't have enough stuff to really justify the size of the case you bought. 

So, you start adding stuff to it. This process goes on for months if not years. Eventually you hone down your tech kit to the right case, with the right tools and gadgets. Then you see someone else's tech kit and they have something supercool and probably expensive in it, and you want it in yours too. 

So, the more of this story is, that with time and experience comes a pretty cool tech kit, that never seems to be completed, but is always pushing itself closer to the mark of being what you really need on a show.

With that, I thought I would post what I am carrying in my tech kit. For a while now, I have had my tech kit in a SKB iSeries case because it was just a little bit bigger than the case I really wanted to have it in. Last night however, I figured out a way to put it in the Pelican 1510 that I wanted to have it in, and I will see how that works out for me. The SKB and Pelican 1510 are essentially the same case, the only difference is that the SKB case doesn't have a handle on the top of it, just the side. This is a huge fail and while you might not think it is a problem, this one little handle really makes a huge difference in the ergonomics of using this case. 

Inside the case, I have the padded divider bottom and the lid organizer and:

2 Marantz PMD 660 Audio Recorders
Cables for Recorders (The cables, adapters, and power supplies for the recorders are in a little pouch)
2 Dsan Laptop Sound port DI's
Pelican 2360 LED Flashlight
Gerber Diesel Multiplier (this isn't my favorite tool, but I liked it cuz it was black)
Nite Ize Pock-its Belt case for flashlight and tools
1 Leica Disto A2
1 Shure Mic Bag with Sharpies, C-Wrench, Pencil Screwdriver, Blue LED Flashlight Spare Gerber Multi-Tool (Gerber Method)
1 Shure Mic Bag with 10' 1/8" stereo to Mono 1/4" plug cable
1 Shure Mic Bag with DBX Reference Mic, Clip, and USB cable for Digi-design USB interface
1 DigiDesign Mbox 2
1 Pair of Sony MDR-7506 Headphones
1 Whirlwind Q-box
1 USB Passive Hub
1 Display port - VGA Adapter
1 Micro VGA Test Generator 

1 Box of Breath mints
1 Organizer of Misc Audio adapters
1 Back up Flashlight (Pelican 1900)

2011 so far.....

I have decided to move to the Phoenix area. After I got back from the east coast from getting stranded there during the holidays, I started packing up my belongings. I put a trailer hitch on the Jeep and rented a small trailer. then I drove a load of stuff down to Arizona and started working. I have about 16 days of show this month not counting shop time, so that is a really positive thing.

This past week was spent in the shop with a couple of hundred feet of 1" steel tube cutting, welding and grinding away. Jonny and I had to build three foot by three foot cube frames. Once they were built and all the welds had been ground smooth, we sent them off to be powder coated. 

Jonny and I cut 20 pieces of plywood and painted them white. and then when the cubes got back from powder coating, we had to cut and attach wood strips to the insides of the cubes. We cut white spandex into strips, and wrapped the cubes with the spandex and stapled them onto the wood strips. 

The final product ended up being ten 3' x 3' cubes wrapped in spandex and we will put a LED light fixture in the bottom of it and light it from the inside with different colors.

It was a lot of work and we finished it up just in time to get them loaded on the truck and headed out to Palm Desert.

Saturday Morning, Audra took me to the airport at 5:00 am. I was going to park there, but she told me no and while I was completely willing to park my jeep there, I was pretty happy when she wouldn't take no for an answer!

My flight was on Delta and it left at 7:00 am and I landed in Atlanta around 12:00 noon or so.

I got my bag and took a taxi to the hotel and started setting up the show. 

One of my old friends from the Seattle days is the Director of Operations at this hotel and it was really cool to see him. He came down at the end of our setup day and brought a bottle of The Macallan 25 year old Scotch. That was a wonderful treat, and was very generous.

 There was a huge party at the hotel last night where 2500 people came in drinking and dancing till about 2:00 am. This translates into probably 1000 of those people  staying in the hotel and stumbling back to their rooms talking too loudly... banging on the wrong doors and screaming at each other down the length of the hallway at 2:30 in the morning. Needless to say pretty much all of us on the crew didn't get much sleep last night.

Fortunately the show didn't start until 2:00 pm today and while I am still feeling sleepy, it will end soon enough. Tomorrow is day two of the show and will most likely end around 3:00 pm. We will strike the show and then I am scheduled to get on a plane at 9:45 pm. 

I will land in Phoenix at midnight and then at 8:00 am on Tuesday morning, I will drive to Palm Desert and join a show that is in progress for the rest of the week.

America's Favorite Past Time

The show is in the truck and as Jonny said it in his Facebook post. Peace out Florida!
Yesterday the general session ended at 9:30 am and it was game on. We had about 20 people working to pack up all the equipment plus whatever Mike had on his lighting crew. So, you can imagine the energy in the air as all these people scurried around like a small army.
Once the stage was cleared, the lighting truss came down and the set was unbolted.
It was a pretty fast strike, and just about everything was pretty much in it's case around noon.
We pushed the gear that was ready down to the truck and they started loading it. The 11 breakout rooms were still going and finally they ended, so a crew of guys went on to strike them. Meanwhile our AV sub rental vendors showed up, so we had to rush and get all of their equipment ready to go. When the break out rooms were struck and the equipment started rolling into the ballroom, I started sorting it and putting it back where it belonged. Front of House cables in this case... PCS Microphones in that case...  wait.. where did that EQ case go? ""Will someone go get it off the elevator, it wasn't supposed to go until it was full."
It was good work though. I have no doubt that as the show gets unpacked at the shop in Phoenix, there will be a lot of cables that didn't make it exactly where they were supposed to go.
We finally had sent everything down to the truck that was ready to go, and now we had to wait for the two last rooms to finish. About 6:15 they broke and in about 40 minutes we had struck them and were rolling the equipment to the truck. When we closed the doors on the truck in Phoenix, Eric said that he thought this truck was the most packed truck he had ever sent out. When we loaded it this time, we disassembled some scaffolding and tightened it up even more. This was because we wanted to get 22 more cases on the truck. All of the projectors that were rented out of Houston had been shipped out to Orlando at a big expense. So, if we could pack the truck tighter and get the Projectors on the tail, Jonny could stop in Houston and save some money. It was very difficult to figure out how to put the last pieces of this puzzle together. It was like we had 10 feet of truck left, and 12 feet of equipment to put in there.
We finally got it to all fit, and closed the doors to the truck.
A few of us staggered over to Blue Zoo to meet a few of the guys for a drink, and that was nice, but all of a sudden my body said "Stop sitting here and get some food and then go directly to bed" Fortunately I had the common sense to listen to it. Evan, Allen, Jonny and I went over to "The Fountain" restaurant, and I got a bowl of chicken noodle soup. While I hadn't really eaten much all day, I was so tired, I just didn't feel like I could eat much of anything. The soup was good, and at the end of that, I went back over to Blue Zoo to say goodbye to the guys.
I went back to my room and packed, and then fell into bed exhausted around 11:00 pm. I set my alarm for 4:00 am and then called the front desk for two wake up calls.
This morning, Jay, Eric, Allen and I shared a van ride to the airport and got on a plane headed for Phoenix. I feel right asleep once I got on the plane, and have no recollection of us pulling away from the gate or taking off. I woke up about two hours into the flight.... Flying coach is no fun. US Airways isn't horrible, but when I fly United, most of the time I get the upgrade to First Class. Even when I don't get the upgrade, there is Economy Plus Seating which gives you an extra 5 inches of leg room and it just doesn't feel so crowded.
On the positive side, US Airways has Wifi available on the plane. I am currently writing this little story at 35,000 feet or somewhere way up here.
In a few hours, Allen and I land in Phoenix. We will relax at Eric and Audra's today and tomorrow hop in the Jeep and drive back to Folsom. It has been a solid month since either of us have been home, and I am really looking forward to being able to get home.

There was really something special about this show. First of all, I have to say thank you to Rick for having me on it. We basically just rocked out the AV for America's Favorite Past time.  It is pretty cool when you get the chance to be involved in something as big and as cool as this is.
Rick has over time put together a very cool team of people. When we first see each other, we greet each other with big hugs and it is always really good to see each other. Not many people would say in their lives that they were really excited to see their coworkers. Even our clients comment on this. Our MLB client mentioned that she thought it was pretty cool that we all hugged each other.
I also want to say a special thank you to Eric for bringing Allen and I down to Phoenix and giving us a months worth of work, putting us up at his house and feeding us Chili Cheese Coney hot dogs with  Jalapeno peppers at 9:00 am in the morning for breakfast. It has been a great month full of laughs and hard honest work. Lastly, thank you to Audra Gilbert. Eric's wife Audra is amazing. She takes amazing care of us throughout all of this madness. Home cooked meals, rides to the airport... Rides from the airport. Audra is a wonderful host and she and Eric have become close friends.

Major League Work

I am working on a show in Orlando for Major League Baseball. While it is a nice change from all the Pharma work that I normally do, it is a massive show and that means a massive amount of work.

For the last three weeks, I have been working in Phoenix at my friend Eric's shop prepping gear, doing little shows here and there in the Phoenix area, and getting the shop ready to make this show happen. About 1400 feet of 1' x 2' steel was purchased in 20' and 24' lengths, and three of us made an assembly line. I measured and cut the steel, Jonny welded it into frames that were 10' x 4' and 8' x 4' with 2' blocks in the center. Once they were cut and welded, Allen ground all the welds smooth. 

Then we had to drill holes in strategic places to connect the pieces to each other, and build carts for all of it to ride in. Once all of that was done, which took about 3 straight days, we had to build a podium to match and a table.

We set up some lighting truss out in the parking lot and flew a couple of test pieces of the set to make sure that it was all going to work.

 All of the steel went to a powder coating company, and a couple of days later, we picked it up and continued to to build on the set. We had to rip pieces of wood into 1" wide strips and attach them all around each set piece and inside the podium. In the midst of all of this construction, emails are flying through cyberspace changing the big picture plan all around us. Equipment was being purchased. Gear was being rented like mad. Eric, Jonny, Allen and I were pulling the show, labeling equipment, packing stuff in cases, and getting all of this madness ready to be loaded onto a 53' semi truck. While Allen and I were building stuff at one of the shops, about 200 feet away, Eric and Jonny loaded the tractor trailer. The load was packed floor to ceiling, front to back, and there really wasn't a bit of room left in the truck when we closed the doors. 

We had a nice BBQ at Eric and Audra's house with some good friends, and then Jonny left around 5:00 am in the truck and drove for the next 4 days across the country to Orlando. Allen, Eric and I all flew to Florida, and on Friday morning, at 7:00 am, the truck doors were opened and the set was rolled into the ballroom and assembly was started. we worked for about 2 hours on the set and got a good jump on getting it together when the rest of the crew arrived, and we all started to unload the rest of the truck. This seemed like it took forever and was a tremendous amount of work because there was so much equipment in the truck. The push from the truck to the elevator and from the elevator to the ballroom was pretty long, so everyone was pretty tired by the time everything was offloaded.

We divided into teams and everyone worked very hard putting all of the pieces of this huge show together. We had about 40 people working like ants moving equipment around and unpacking cases. It is always exciting to see how a truckload of boxes comes to life and through the talent of many diverse technicians, it grows into something so large, you would never believe that it came out of road cases.

Through out the day, the lighting, audio, video all flew up in the air on lighting trusses, as well as our creation, the set.

Once, the entire set was hung from the lighting truss, long sheets of vinyl were stapled to the frames and stretched tight.

When it all finally was put together, and lights were focused, video projectors were aligned, the set came alive.

Photo: Courtesy of Mike Steighner

While it would seem like that is entirely enough work for anyone to do, the main ballroom is only a portion of this project.

The following day we started on the break out rooms. We have 11 rooms with full audio, and video systems that have to be put together. We spent the entire day scurrying around with a ton of gear and about 16 people setting up these 11 rooms.

The setup day we worked about 13 hours, day 2 was about the same, and today we finished up the breakout rooms and had rehearsals going all day and most of the evening. Today was about 13 hours as well. Evan and I ran around the entire day from room to room and floor to floor troubleshooting problems, delivering cables and equipment to technicians and fielding questions from clients. I am pretty exhausted and tomorrow will start the first official day of meetings for this show.

It is a great feeling to work with a world class crew and be able to be a part of something so enormous.

More to come......