Can you hear me now?

This Friday evening and all day Saturday I have to do sound for a large Christian women's' conference. My wife is playing bass in the band providing the music along with several other local ladies. They are sounding pretty good, if their practice yesterday is any indication of what they will do this weekend. I did the sound for them last year and had a lot of fun. This year they said there will be more food: that's ALWAYS a plus for old fat guys like me.

One of the things the ladies want in their sound is some reverb on the vocals. My newest sound board doesn't have that built in, and I don't have a separate component that takes care of that. I did have, however, an older board that had effects built into it, so no problem, right? Wrong. When it comes to sound equipment there's always something ready to go wrong, and rest assured, it will go wrong at the worst possible moment.

I went out in the shop this morning and set up the old board with an amp and some speakers to make sure everything still worked. It started to work...but then it stopped. It was at that point that I smelled something that wasn't quite right. Things that don't smell right in electronics are bad...very bad. Last year the power source for the old board died and evidently when it croaked it damaged the old board. There I was with an old, dead board and no effects.

What to do?

I called up to the Medford Guitar Center to see what a digital effects component would cost and was told anywhere from $199 up. Well, looked like the ladies weren't going to be getting any reverb this year. But, as I was putting away the equipment I remembered that several years ago I bought a small, eight channel powered mixer and, as I recalled, it had reverb effects built into it. Hmmm, time to experiment. I wondered if I could simply run the vocals through the powered mixer and into my new board and then send it to the amps and speakers. I could also run the guitars just through the main board as I didn't want reverb on them. I called a sound man friend of mine to verify the legitimacy of my idea and he said it should work just fine. So, I pulled the equipment back out, set it up and yep...it worked like a charm! It's a bit of a work around, but the ladies will have their reverb and I won't be out $199 that I didn't have to spend. I haven't used that mixer a half dozen times since I bought it, but it's sure gonna come in handy this weekend.

Yeah buddy!