Falling Edge did a great show at Canada Day yesterday. Although we only had 30 minutes (including setup and teardown time!) we performed full versions of I, Awake and Crippled by Fear to an enthusiastic audience. After the live performance we were invited to do a video shoot of these 2 songs in Kiwanis Theatre. This is where things got interesting. During teardown from the live show, one of the cables connecting Chris’s pedalboard to his amp got broken. There was no soldering iron to be had at the theatre, so Chris tied the wire on with one of his finest knots. To everyone’s shock, it actually worked! (no one was allowed to go near it afterward). Apparently the video crew had been having more than their far share of technical issues throughout the day as well, and by the time we got there, the left bank of speakers had died, leaving us with only one side of audio coming through the PA. We also had to contend with an intermittent and unpredictable (and loud) crackling sound coming through the entire PA, monitors included. We were told that these discrepancies wouldn’t actually make it to the video, so hopefully they don’t. As the band worked through the sound check, more and more bugs showed up, like a “now you hear me now you don’t” hum coming from Chris’s guitar rig and unsteady volume (from barely audible to heavily distorted) coming from Jim’s hookup to the PA.
We managed to get a few of these issues corrected, and by the time we were ready to do a soundcheck, everything was actually sounding pretty good…until Chris tried to switch channels on his amp and found both of them on – at the same time! A quick check revealed that the other cable connection to his pedalboard had also failed, so he was forced to do the shoot without channel switching.
I, Awake went fairly smoothly, but as we got to the 3rd section of Crippled by Fear Steve’s keyboards disappeared from the monitors. This was kind of strange, since the keyboard level in the monitors had gotten increasingly louder as we progressed through I, Awake. We were forced to stop, as no one could hear Steve anymore (including Steve) until the problem could be straightened out. The crew got the keyboard levels righted and we started Crippled by Fear over. Everything went off without a hitch, until the last few bars, when we noticed a sudden decrease in volume. In keeping with the theme of the day, we lost power to the entire PA (including the monitors) and the video gear. Evidently we had tripped a breaker somewhere. There was some disagreement over who was responsible for the outage; Chris thinking he was strumming away too hard and Steve insisting he was hammering his (velocity sensitive) keys with a little too much zeal, but in the end we never found out who was to blame.
We still haven’t seen the video, but the producer was hoping that most of the song was captured and that the files weren’t corrupted in the blackout. We won’t know for a few days at least when the video editors can sift through the footage. With the live show and video shoot over, the band will return to rehearsing our existing material as well as Minstrel in the Corner, which we had started before we got word of the July 1 show. We should also be able to get some drum tracks laid down in the next few weeks.
Falling Edge