If you want to stay cool, you have to know exactly what you’re doing.
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Want to use this image for something else? Great! Click it for the link to a high-res or resolution-independent version.Tomorrow morning will begin the process of The Great Gig playing a show we’ve been preparing for over the course of months. It’s an epic-scale undertaking involving a grundle of moving parts. Many of those moving parts are human. Many others are electronic. There are lots of ways for things to go wrong.
On The Great Gig, I’m variously listed as a technical director, producer, and FOH engineer. However you look at it, it’s my job to prevent things from going wrong in the first place, and if that fails, to un-wrong the things that have gone wrong, all with a view to making sure everyone else can do their job. That’s plenty to do.
I’m not nervous about it.
The reason I’m not nervous about it is because I feel a deeply rooted sense of knowing exactly how the show is supposed to work, and knowing how we get it all to work. I understand our audio and lighting signal flow, and how to get around failures. I can easily conceive of ways that we can route around problems or “degrade gracefully” otherwise. I’ve already troubleshot some problems in rehearsal.
I plan to stay quite calm throughout the whole process. I don’t know if I will be perfectly calm, but “calm enough” will do fine.
Intimate familiarity with your show, your gear, and how they interact is what breeds the ability to shrug off problems. The flipside is if the production is like magic to you. In that case – where you don’t understand what’s going on and how to keep it going on – failures and setbacks are apt to cause panic.
In the world of aviation, I’m convinced that the pilots who do the best work and survive gnarly situations are the ones who know everything about their planes. What the engines will do under stress, exactly what happens before and during a stall, the weird quirks in the fuel system, and so on. When something unexpected occurs, it’s just a matter of saying, “Oh, right, we can tweak this thing over here and make it home safely.”
It’s similar in audio. Luckily, nobody’s life is at stake if the FOH mix has a problem. Even so, being well acquainted with how to recover from a failure goes a long way towards making an encounter with that failure less frightening.
Stay calm, stay alive. Panic and die. Stay calm by knowing what you’re doing. Not just the procedure, mind you – know WHY the procedure exists. You’ll have a good shot, then.