It was my first live production ‘workshop’ this week at The Engine Shed which was really great. We first met Harry who would be our tutor for these sessions. He’s worked at The Engine Shed since the day it opened after doing a radio degree.

When we first walked in non of us had any idea what to expect from this session. The first part of the session was a sort of informal get to know u so Harry could get an idea of our experience and what we wanted to do after uni.

After this we moved on to a few essential things we need to know to work in live productions. Things such as the correct method to lift a flight case on top of another without messing up your back, or damaging the equipment. This was pretty simple and obvious but still essential to know.

We then went on to learn about he different types of power, power cables, and power connectors used by nearly all PA companies. This included the difference between 3 phase power and 1 phase power, and the use of both of these types of power. Included in this was how the different cables and powers break down into standard 13amp plugs and multi-adaptors.

Once we had kinda grasped the idea of how the power works and how much we would need to do certain things we moved to looking at the different kinds of audio cable used. These included XLR – XLR, 1/4″ TRS – 1/4″ TRS, and also looked into multicore cable. The multicore is one chunky cable and is used for getting the signals into the console without having up to 48 individual cables running. With multicore you have 1 big cable which terminates in a breakout box, this can then be sent down to smaller satelite breakout boxes to different areas of the stage. I found this really interesting as I use a breakout box in my studio to record but I’d never thought of having that break down to smaller boxes for each instrument for example.

While learning about the cabling we were asked if we knew the correct method of coiling a cable. Absolutely no one volunteered to have a go, one person admitted they had no idea how to and eventually Garry did it and did it right, to my relief he did it he same way I did so I knew I was doing it right. We all had to grab a cable and coil it just to prove we could.

Things then moved to mics and mic placement, which was an interesting topic as I didn’t realise how many mics The Engine Shed actually have themseleves. They do seem very biased towards Shure and AKG with the favourites SM57 and 58 being there, also the 414B, and Beta 52.

This then brought us to havin to design a stage layout, and a rider for a band the way we would set it up. We were given about 20min to do this I think, and once we’d done that we went over to the console to set it up for this band.

The console is a 48 channel Yamaha M7CL digital desk, and is a pretty impressive bit of kit, if a little intimidating at first. We were taken through the main things with the desk, all of which I pretty much forgot instantly, but when it came to using it things weren’t too different from the Yamaha 02r96 I have used before, only this one is touchscreen. Once we had put our plan into action on the desk Harry asked us to do a task on the mixer just to see if we could remeber how to do it, I could do that no problem so all was good.

In all it was a good first workshop of how things worked and what was what, I really want to get into that desk a little more as there is no outboard units and to me that’s just brilliant. Everything seems to translate pretty easily from the studio to live so I don’t see this being too much of a hard unit at all, and it should be pretty fun I recon.

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