The band graced the Circus Tent with a completely new and improved set list, which also included some stunning new tracks. But of course didn’t neglect to open the set with their ever powerful “Howrya Folk” and slip in “Be Easy” somewhere in the middle!

Music by The Eskies has the creativity, musical talent and catchyness that will see them sneaking into the charts very soon.

Unfortunately, I had to reset my “time without analogue desk” counter, as the Front of House mixer was the Midas Venice 320. A fine console, but an analogue console! However I don’t mind this time, as I would have done anything to mix the gig anyway!

Keep your eye on The Eskies. Get to one of their gigs if you can!

http://www.theeskies.com/

Listen to “The Eskies – Be Easy“

A good friend of mine, Pat Nolan (Barry in Fair City) is joining a team of over 100 (motorcyclists, pillion passengers & support) to tackle the infamous / historic “mother of all roads” – ROUTE 66.

2,448 miles of unforgiving highway crossing Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California.

The gig was to help them raise funds for Temple Street Children’s University Hospital in Dublin. It was held in The Mill Theatre, Dundrum and it was a night of music, magic, comedy, acting, and much more! Phil Cauly was the MC, and welcomed guests such as Pat Fallon, Dana Davis, Brendan Burke, Dave Duffy and many more! Was a fantastic show.

Unfortunately though, the theatre only had an analogue mixing desk – the Allen & Heath GL2400. Nice desk, but an analogue desk! Although it is like riding a bike, I would obviously never forget how to mix on one of these bad boys. But I did miss the features. I missed having everything I could possibly need at my finger tips. I missed having a screen telling me exactly what is going on with my system. I missed having an EQ section that would do what I wanted it to do, rather than be confined to the bandwidth and frequencies that the EQ on the board had.

The show still sounded great, but it made me realize that investing so much in digital consoles was worth every penny.

If you made it along to the show, thank you very much for your support. However, if you could not make it – you can still support Pat by donating to this very good cause at http://www.mycharity.ie/event/patnolansevent/

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!