The Big Pull

This has been a slow week with the electricians out until more parts come in, and the final acoustic treatment getting pushed back to next week. But today was pretty productive. Bob, one of our FOH engineers, came out and we pulled most of the new speaker cables from the amp room out onto the catwalk.

It wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be. The hardest pull was getting the cable to the balcony delays. There weren’t any strings pulled so we disconnected one of the existing delay speakers and used the cable to pull from the spool on the catwalk back to the amp room. Bob did most of the work. I tried pulling for a bit, but couldn’t get the thing to budge because the rings it was running through were packed with cables for our existing delays. Those cables will be going away in a month’s time.

I’m not a big fan of heights, so working on the catwalks isn’t typically an enjoyable experience for me. It took me almost a year of being on staff to walk across the front cat. I was only able to do that after we were given a tour of Willow Creek’s new auditorium earlier this year, and I blindly followed the rest of my team all the way up–all the way up as in up to where they rig their speakers which is above their catwalks. They were soundchecking at the time, and we were standing right over their line arrays. For some reason it was weirding me out at the time. The Willow catwalks are probably twice as high as ours–feels like it anyway. After being up that high our catwalks don’t seem so high, but it’s still uncomfortable for me especially on the third catwalk over the audience.

We also found some empty conduits running under the stage today that will work great for running the digital snakes for the Venue (which I found out is waiting in the warehouse now for us to take delivery) along with some CAT5 cables for controlling some of the equipment sitting in the amp room. Our stage is poured concrete; my advice if you’re ever building an auditorium is to not make your stage poured concrete. It really complicates doing anything in the future. Another thing you should do is to make sure you have some kind of a map as to where any extra conduits you put in go. We have an access panel with a whole bunch of conduits coming up out of the floor and no labeling as to where they lead. I think we finally figured a bunch of it out today, though.

Tomorrow we have one more cable to pull. I’m also hoping Art, one of the other FOH engineers, stops by so that we can get our new FOH booth plans finished. He’s going to be building it, and with the console sitting in a warehouse, I’d like to get that booth built so we can get the board in place and start learning it.