Blue mountains music festival

2 weekends ago DB and I went up the Blue Mountains music Festival to do a live to air broadcast. The plan was to record a duo from England, While and Matthews, at 7. Then at 8:05pm go live with and Australian Folk/rock group called Bluehouse. Then at 8:30 ish we would playback some of the recording of While and Matthews till 9pm. It was a great plan, except that there were huge problems with the PA, so While and Matthews didn’t start playing till 7:45, meaning that there was no way that Bluehouse were going to be ready to play at 8:05 and we wouldn’t have enough recorded material by then of While and Matthews to play at the top of the show. So after some mild panic, we cued up a recording of a recording made the previous weekend at another festival to play at 8:05. In the meantime we recorded While and Matthews and edited up a section to play back at 8:30. Finally Bluehouse got on stage and then at 8:45 we crossed to them live to play out the rest of the show. So, not what we planned but it all worked out fine.

We split all the channels from stage so we could do an independant mix on an Allen and Heath console. Then the mix output was split 3 ways. The first split was to get to the ISDN encoder. This is a little thing we call the Glensound, which looks like a mixer and has an ISDN output for sending the signal back to the ABC master control. We had a line run over to the Clarendon otel, which Telstra had set up for us. Well, they installed the line, but we had to run it over to the backstage area, so DB was climbing the ladder hoisting the cable in the air so that it was off the ground and not in danger of tripping anyone up.
Split 2 went to the laptop with Wavelab for recording the music mix. Split 3 went to a portable hard disk recorder, to be a back up recorder and also to be primary recorder while we were playing off wavelab.

The presenter was backstage with us doing live announcements. DB looked after the music mix and I looked after the broadcast mix.

We stayed the night at the Clarendon motel. It was really nice to not have to drive back after the show. We got to pack up and then sit and relax over a glass of wine and not rush to get back.


The back view of the mess we made.


Starting from the left - laptop with Wavelab,
Little black box - sound devices USB interface for getting the audio into the laptop,
CD player,
Glensound,
underneath the glensound - rack of compressors and lexicon reverb.
Allen and heath mixer.