Things Will Go Wrong.
Originally published at The Null Device Blog. You can comment here or there.
You’re on stage. This show is great. The crowd is eating it up. This will be the defining moment of your musical career.
Hey, what was that popping sound?
Where did the vocals go?
Oh…oh, hell.
It’s an inveitability. Play enough gigs and something catastrophic will happen. Laptops will crash, mics will short out, cables will die, the monitors will explode, the guitarist will have a strobe-light-induced seizure…something is going to go wrong eventually.
In these cases you have two choices: stop the show and get offstage, or deploy a backup plan. I’ve always preferred the latter, although there are cases where the former is really your only option.
What constitutes an onstage backup plan? In an ideal world, like the world that a lot of larger bands live in, you just have identical gear you can just swap in when something goes wrong. Open up any of the big touring band interviews in SoundOnSound and you’ll see rigs that have two of everything, and there are copanies that make gear specifically for the purpose of sycnhronizing for seamless failover. Unfortunately, most of us don’t have that luxury. I certainly can’t afford to keep a second cloned laptop at the ready if mine goes out. However, I do keep an iPod with all the backing tracks and the appropriate patch cables at the ready. It’s not optimal, but it’s to my mind better than not performing. I also keep things like backup mics, backup DI’s, extra batteries, and spare cables in a bag just offstage. While the soundman may have a bunch of these things, he may also not. I prefer not to take chances, and these are reasonably cheap investments.
I also keep needle-nosed pliers, electrical tape, a small screwdriver, and a soldering iron in the bag. This is obviously not something one can use onstage - “hang on, let me resolder this broken adapter…” - but quite often technical problems manifest during setup or soundcheck, and you have some extra time to rectify them. Not everything can be fixed, of course, but it never hurts to have some tools ready. A screwdriver can be the difference between a great show and not performing at all.
For the electronic artist, it is good to remember that hard drives are cheap. Stuff happens on the road that is generally not conducive to the proper functioning of a laptop. Keeping a cheap backup drive with all your important stuff on it handy is a Good Thing. Again, not something you can do on the fly (“GOOD EVENING CLEVELAND! Are you READY TO give me a few hours to RESTORE from this BACKUP!?! WOOOOO!”) but it can at least mean the difference between cancelling a gig and cancelling a tour.
So what about the band members? You can’t keep a spare singer handy. You can, however, keep throat lozenges, decongestants, ibuprofen/asprin, pepto, imodium, and other such OTC rememdies around. They don’t take up much room. And when you need them, you’re really, really glad they’re there. While it’s not the greatest thing in the world to perform with a band stuffed with indigestion meds, the alternative is far worse.
I’ve also learned - the hard way, mind you - that all this preparedness does you no good whatsoever if you can’t get at it in a hurry. If you’re in the club about to go onstage and something breaks, or you suddenly feel that imodium is necessary (ahem), it won’t do you any good if those things are locked in the van in a parking garage behind the venue. This also raises the issue that every band member on the road should have extra underwear packed. Just sayin’.