DJ Event: Mascarade Birthday Party

Freelance soundlabs was hired to provide entertainment for a combined fancy dress Mascarade birthday party in August 2016.

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This was a decent sized event with a large hall hired out for the night. It was an all ages party so musical tastes had to be catered for ages 4 - 70 years. I had already prepared lists ahead of time to cover this.

I was also requested if we could provide Karaoke which we had music for but had not test driven this using a Serato system. It turned out very easy to setup with Serato and I was able to load both my CDG Karaoke files and video karaoke files. With a selection of 1500 ready to go songs I thought we would cover most bases but as the night went on the requests were very specific and outside of the scope of what I had. Luckily I had mobile internet and every request was available on YouTube that I did not have so I was able to download videos on the fly for karaoke tracks and queue these up as the music played which worked seamless and had guests very impressed. Karaoke is now a optional feature that clients can request.

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Setup was simple as I was able to back the trailer directly to the door and wheel everything in. I typically test everything before I take it to an event but I was unable to this time and discovered the bubble machine did not operate. The fan had died and I was unable to fix it before the event so I had to make do without it which was a real shame because the kids normally love the bubbles. The issue was the fan simply died possibly because water got into it when it had been cleaned. I can repair it easily enough but have now ordered 2 replacements so it shouldn't happen again.

Because the hall was a large open brick building it had a terrible echo, literally 5 seconds for a hand clap to dissipate. I was a little concerned about the affect of this on the sound and when I first started setting levels I was horrified at how much it echoed and how little bass I was able to achieve. After 10 minutes of fiddling with the EQ I was no closer to getting the low end I was expecting from my system and I started to get a little worried... Then I checked my NS7III controller and found the filter knob for the playing channel was slightly off centre and cutting the low end. Once I adjusted that I was then able to trim the specific bands that were causing the most echo and the system sounded great. I was unable to drive it to the full extent because of the kids but it was more than enough to fill the hall with good sounding tunes.

I knew the details of the hall I was playing and planned ahead and bought a spitfire gas jet heater as it was a cold winter night and the place I was playing gets to freezing temp. The hall was suppose to have heating but it did not operate so luckily the jetfire was able to heat the entire hall within just a few minutes.

While everything went off great I still identified my setup times are far too long with much of my time wasted trying to either locate the correct bags with the cables I need or trying to make very long cables nicely bundled and shorter. I am now working on creating some custom cables for the speaker towers that are only a few meters instead of 10m since the speakers will always be installed in front of my table. Additionally, there are about 15 cables that connect the main console to the amp rack and other devices so I will set about making a bundled cable snake that contains all these signal cables in one bunch, prefabricated to the correct lengths. This will save a good 15 minutes of hunting cables and checking I have everything connected. 

I had such a good night and it was a great performance. 

 

Last modified on Friday, 19 August 2016 12:43

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