01: An Introduction

Aside from my work with Metric Halo, I'm the advance sound engineer for the national tour of the Broadway show Wicked. My job is to go to the venue the day before the regular crew and start loading in cable and speakers to speed up the load in the next day. We have a very tight schedule- I do the advance on Monday, we load the rest of the system on Tuesday, rehearse Wednesday and have our first performance that evening. Aside from a 34 cabinet PA system, there's 30-some channels of wireless mics to be dealt with, communications, video, and then there's the orchestra pit…

The other part of my work on Wicked is doing technical support and system tuning. We have one hour of quiet time on Tuesday night to tune the system to the venue, which presents a real challenge. We strive to make sure that the thousands of people that come to each performance can hear every word and note- and my MH gear is a huge part of our success. I've been using SpectraFoo and my MIO interfaces for five years in a variety of ways, and I'm going to start writing about them here.

Some of these entries will be tips, some will be stories. I hope they'll be interesting :) My hope is by talking about what I do with SpectraFoo and the MIO I can spark an idea for someone else. So sit back, and let me tell you about this theater I worked in…

Allen