TEDx Talk at University of Nottingham
I was contacted and asked if I would like to participate in doing the sound tech for a TEDx Talk at the University of Nottingham on Saturday 18th March 2017. I attended the event because I thought it would be a good experience to learn how to do some live sound work, with rumours of being payed at once the video of the talk was released.
TED is a nonprofit organisation devoted to the spreading of ideas in the form of short powerful talks under 18 minutes long. The 'x' stands for the talk being an independently organised event.
On Friday 17th March 2017 me and Paul Finney went to the University of Nottingham to see what equipment they had supplied us with and see what sort of job we needed to do.
Friday 17th March 2017
We arrived at the University of Nottingham at 16:30 to see what sort of equipment we had to work with. We were left a small mixing console and some other supplies.
The gear we needed out of what was supplied was:
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The mixing desk
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Mixing desk XLR extender cables
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XLR cables
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The 4 Shure SM57s (none were used, but they were with us just incase)
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The 4 Shure SM58s (not all were used but we kept hold of them just incase)
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Microphone stands
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Jack cables
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DI box
The setup for the event was that we took the mixing desk to one corner of the room, and ran the extender cable around the edge of the room towards where the people speaking are. This meant that we didn't have a large amount of cables running across the room, and instead had only one.
From there, all of the microphones would plug into the box on the end of the extender as seen in the setup image.
We set up 3 microphones because we were aware that there would be multiple people talking during some of the talks, so thought it best to set up 3 microphones to use for talking just in case we needed them.
We were also informed that there would be a guitarist playing during a break which we would need to accommodate. We knew that it was an acoustic guitar, so set up a Shure SM57 ready to be recorded in while also having a DI box in case they had a pickup in their guitar (which they luckily did).
I took out the tape I brought with me to mark up the microphones so that we know which ones were which on the console.
We finished our setup at around 17:45 and headed off.
Saturday 18th March 2017
We arrived at the university at 12:00 which was an hour early, just so that we could check everything was working and troubleshoot anything that wasn't working on the day. This is important as if something did go wrong then it would be too late to fix it if we had arrived on time to start thew event.
Paul and I both brought some equipment with us to record the event for later use in the video they were making. As the mixing desk is an analogue desk, we needed to bring it through an analogue to digital converter to get it into our laptops. For this we needed to bring our audio interfaces so that we could record it into logic pro on our macs.
The equipment both of us brought was:
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MacBook Pro
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Focusrite Scarlett Solo audio interface
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Headphones
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Various colours of electrical tape
We hooked the Aux outputs of the mixing desk into each of our interfaces so that we could record the audio into logic pro, which meant we had a copy to piece together with the video footage from the camera crew.
The electrical tape was used to mark various different things around the room, such as microphones, cables and lights so that the crew knew what it belonged to.
We received a running order on the day of what was to be happening, so that we knew if we needed to change anything, which was really useful as we could then see what acts were coming on and when.
The event ran very smoothly with only small problems which were fixed there and then and moved on from quickly. This mean that the show could carry on and we weren't running around trying to solve a problem the whole show.
We decided to both record the audio into our macs in case something went wrong on one of our computers. This way we would have a second copy of the audio and could piece the parts together if necessary.
We finished at 18:40 and spent 20 minutes packing down.
Once it was all done we said out goodbyes to everyone and left. The camera crew have recently asked us for the audio file so we have sent it off to them and hopefully the video should be out soon.
The whole event was very interesting as I had never done a live recording before and found it to be a good experience and learning curve. I noticed that when something is live you need to be on top of everything going on otherwise you can be engulfed by all of the small problems that occur, which is really not what you want.
