The Night The Board Fried
It started out like any other Saturday night prior to a concert. We arrived about an hour and a half before the start. We unloaded the equipment, sat up the PA system, did a sound check, and got ready for the service to start.
On this evening there were to be a couple of other artist on the program. The emcee was on the stage getting things started and all of a sudden there was a sizzle. It sounded like someone had just dropped an egg into the frying pan to fry it. That lasted a few seconds and then pop!, pop!, pop!, pop!, pop!, … It sounded like a machine gun. Greg ran to the system and powered it off. I went to the stage to assist. We smelled smoke…you’ve got to be kidding…our board had fried just as the service was starting.
There was a house PA set that the first two artist were going to use so they got things started while we looked into what we could do with our system. You see, we were very spoiled to using our own PA set. We have split tracks that one channel fed to a single aux send for our piano player. We had an aux send for one in-ear monitor, another aux send for a different in-ear monitor and a fourth aux send to the stage monitors. We tried to talk ourselves into it being a bad power strip and/or some loose power connections. We replaced the power strip and secured the cords and then we waited while we listened to the others sing.
Now it was our turn and we powered the board on. It came on! It looked and sounded normal! Then just as we were starting the music we heard the sizzle again and the board went off…yes it was fried.
There just happened to be, in the audience on this evening, a former member of our group (that also happened to be my cousin). We asked him to man the board of the house system and we quickly found channels for our keyboard and tracks. It took only about 3 minutes to move those things over to the house system. We then did one verse of a song as a quick sound check to let him set some levels. We did our part of the evening service on the house PA. Boy, was it nice to have him in the audience on the very night that the board fried! 🙂
