Enjoy! And don’t forget to click the Share button below if you know others who underestimate the work involved!!

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On the 5th of May 2010, AMP Sound Systems was booked to provide the PA system and crew for a show by the Dublin Glee Choir in The Bank, Newry. I knew this would be a great gig, so decided to engineer it myself. My day went like this:

It all starts the night before at the warehouse...

...cases are picked and loaded...

...the D&B Max12's will be used as monitors...

17:22 – All the equipment is pushed into the venue

17:46 - Speakers are positioned

17:52 - The backbone of the wiring is installed

18:21 - A rough layout of the stage is created

18:21 - Mic stands placed on stage

18:22 - Stage coming together

18:28 - Mix position is set up

18:33 - Things start to get patched in

18:50 - Studio Manager is connected...

...and the show is loaded

20:15 - Wiring on the stage is complete

20:15 - Connected. Now to start tidying up.

21:20 - Leads tidied up and taped where required

21:20 - The band arrives...

21:25 - ...and sort out their positions

21:29 - Souncheck starts

21:41 - Rough levels are set and a song is run

21:56 - Final adjustments before the doors are opened

22:22 - Mix position tidied

22:23 - And show is saved as a backup

22:23 - Then lots of muted channels as we wait...

23:13 - Time to check out the controls of those rather cool screens!!!

23:13 - And say hello to the DJ who was playing music dangerously loud

00:23 - Quick check that I am receiving signal on all channels

00:25 - And the place starts filling up

01:05 - The choir arrives on stage

02:17 - Starting to get loud now!

The last photo of the stage, as we were too busy packing up the gear to take photo's!

04:03 - Yes, that does say I will be home at 5:59 AM!

04:17 - On the A1 just about to leave the North of Ireland

04:18 - How depressing - the sat nav says turn left in 92.1 km!

04:41 - The fact that the sun is coming up just makes you realise that it is in fact the next day...

...so its Red Bull time!!!

05:47 - The sun is fully up now, so I just want to go to bed!

06:16 - Does this really need an explanation???

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This one should be obvious…. if it is 19″ wide, and has rack ears, it really should be in a decent flight case! If you have not got that far yet, bookmark this page and come back when your delivery arrives! Even the ABS Plastic racks are fine. Just some sort of protection for the equipment inside is absolutely necessary.

Along with protection, flight cases save time:

Power

You can have all your mains wired up before you take the lid off the case! You don’t have to do anything fancy with this. A plugboard on the inside of the rack. When you need to set up, you just drop the power cable out and everything is immediately powered up!

Or you could take this a little bit further. We have cut all our IEC cables to the exact length that is required (obviously leaving enough slack to route them neatly). This stops the back of the rack from getting cluttered up with lots of cable bunched up.

Looms

Realistically, if you have more than one signal cable coming out of the rack then you should use a loom. Looms take many different “cores” or cables through one lead, which is a lot neater. We have 16 compressors in a rack, and all the inserts go through one loom. Can you imagine 16 seperate insert leads coming out of the back of the rack? It would be a nightmare.

Patchbays

When you have everything inside and plugged in, it can get difficult to get at the stuff you need. Patchbays are a great way of keeping what you need to touch on the outside. You shouldn’t (hopefully) need to touch your power connections ever again, so they can be left. But inputs and outputs work great on a patchbay. See my example below!

Cable ties

Cable ties are very handy to neaten things up – but be very careful! Don’t go over the top! Leave yourself some slack in case you need to change something quickly. Make sure you don’t have to strip the entire rack just to change a fuse!

With this warning in mind – go have fun with cable ties! Tie mains power together up one side of the rack. Tie signal together down the other side.

Now lets see a nice rack!

I snook a camera into the warehouse to bring you these exclusive photo’s…. Enjoy!

Loom for signal, small patchbay for antenna inputs, 16A mains power input and output

There is a lot going on in there, but with a few cable ties and some smart thinking, it can be kept nice and neat!

Cable ties are your friend - but can turn on you!

All our network connections for WSM (Wireless Systems Manager) go into a hub stuck to the top of the rack. Out of the way, but we can still see status lights.

A simple patchbay for outputs from an amp rack

Flight cases make the rack look good from the front too!