Prince

Ok so many of you have heard, but I've been asked by Rat Sound to be one of the audio techs on the upcoming "Welcome to Canada" Prince Tour.  Rat is the company I worked for on the blink tour.  Must have done something right.  Basically I'll be doing the same job as the blink tour, hanging PA.  Although this show has at least 3 times the amount of equipment that the last tour did.  Blink was 3/4 of a semi, this is 2 1/2 semis.  Blink, we had 4 techs, this one we have 10.  Blink load-in was 9amish, Prince will be 3am!! This is going to be a huge show.

I have just come back from California where we prepped all the equipment.  This was at Rat's new warehouse.  The reason the warehouse looks so empty is because they haven't moved in yet.  It was really nice to have all the room to lay everything out.  Plus nobody to bother us. We even prepped the truck pack by laying everything out in the order it loads on to the semis. 

From what I hear Prince is highly involved in the production aspect of the show.  During sound checks it is very common that he will come to FOH and change audio settings to make it sound the way he wants. He's highly concerned with how the audience hears his sound.  On top of that, one of his trusted keyboard players plays the show from FOH in order to monitor the mix from the audience. Control freak?

With that it is also common that Prince will interact with us audio techs.  This may sound cool, but if he doesn't like you for some reason, you can be fired in an instant. And from what I hear this happens a lot.  One quote is "You're nobody until you've been fired by Prince." There are essentially 3 FOH engineers on this show. One reason because there's a lot going on but also if he fires one of them the others can fill in.  One of the reasons Rat sound got the gig this year is because he fired the whole sound company on the last tour.  Already one of our techs was in musical rehearsals this week and was fired.  Unfortunately this guy was one of the only people who had experience with the stage layout.  Yeah, I think I'll keep my distance.

Speaking of stage layout, the set up is in the round.  This means audience on every side.  The picture of his symbol here is the stage setup.  The band sets up in the white part of the circle and I suppose prince runs around the rest of the shape.  The stage is 80 feet long and we have 36 monitors scattered all over.

Rat's old warehouse is a stones throw from the L-acoustic warehouse in Oxnard.  L-acoustics is the speaker company that I've been using since 2002.  One of the main reasons I've been able to do these tours is because I've been highly trained on their equipment.  For those of you who know me, other than the Apple headquarters, this would be my Mecca. :)


























From what I hear the schedule is subject to change at a moments notice.  It already has changed several times.  Everything is last minute.  I just got this last night.  Sounds like it should be an interesting experience.  Plus musically the show should be absolutely amazing.  My worship pastor Kerry told me the website for the tour says "You better bring your foot spray 'cause this show is going to be funky!"