The Gaming Outpost

As I was headed for the last leg before bed last night, around two in the morning, the phone rang.  It was our drummer John, wanting an update.  I am not complaining about the lateness of the call, as I did tell him that between midnight and three in the morning was the most reliable time to reach me, and he does work until eleven when he’s working, so it makes sense for him to call me then.  However, just because that’s the best time to get me doesn’t mean it’s a good time.  He always says, “I caught you at a bad time.”  I always answer, There are no good times.  I try to pressure people into using e-mail to contact me.  I can get to it when I actually have time, and can interrupt my response sometimes for hours at a stretch while I put everything else in place.  He’s older than I, and was technophobic before that was a word, so he likes talking to someone as close to in person as he can get–which for us is the telephone most of the time.

In any case, when I cut the call short at forty minutes (I believe two and a half hours is closer to his typical conversation, and on one of the first calls we went nearly twice that) I promised that I would somehow let him know the outcome of today’s tech work.  Gray Vanaman of Audio-clear, to whom we already owe so much, took a couple hours out of his afternoon to help me fix a few problems.  I was right about the problem with the P.A.:  it was something simple and stupid that I just did not know about the mixer, which was that all channels have to be assigned to a secondary or they don’t get to the mains.  In other words, we have a functional P.A. now.  Since that took him all of five minutes and he was there anyway, he also tackled the problem with the Ampeg V4s–beautiful classic bass guitar speaker cabinets, four twelve-inch woofers in each, but they have the old four-pin amphenols Ampeg used on all its speakers back in the day.  He replaced these with these newfangled connectors–NL4s, I think he calls them–and made me a pair of patch cords that will connect from the standard phone outputs of my amplifiers to the NL4 inputs.

Already several people have been impressed by Adam’s bass guitar set-up, as he has the classic Ampeg B-15, one of the best portable bass amps ever made, fifteen inch woofer in the cabinet, paired with the external Ampeg V4 bass speaker column, and it sounds wonderful.  I’ll be using the other V4 with my amp; I’ve a few things to set up to get that working, but it should be good to go maybe even by tomorrow evening.  I expect to have more trouble fixing the vacuum cleaner than I will setting up my equipment, although I’ve lost a needed switchbox and am going to have to buy the components to build another (something of my own invention that no one else has).  But I can work without it for the moment.  I’m just hoping I have enough patch cords to connect everything.

Rehearsal tomorrow; hopefully it will go well.

–M. J. Young

As mentioned, I picked up a very nice rather powerful power amp yesterday from Grey Vanaman of Audio-Clear.  It is now on the floor in my living room with some of my other equipment, somewhat surreptitious for its small size.  Between now and Thursday night I will need to add to it a rather large mixing board, a pair of mikes with stands, two compact but noticeable speaker columns, and a pair of self-powered monitors, all of which will be considerably less surreptitious.  I worry a bit, because that is nothing compared to the planned addition of another mixer with built-in amp and the two large cabinets, one with four tens and the other with four twelves, each large enough that I anticipate using them as tables for the two mixers, which will be added to power my instruments.  My basement might have been large enough at one time to host a band, but it has been sectioned in various ways which make that impossible unless I oust someone from a bedroom.  On the other hand, we will never fit all of this plus two drummers (or likely even one drummer) in the living room, so I probably ought to be more concerned with how I am going to get all of this plus my son’s equipment and my son into the back of a compact car.  I’m good, but given that he will be using a good sized amp (my old Ampeg B-15) plus another column which matches the one with the four twelves, I think neither a Neon nor a Saturn will do.  I will probably wind up moving gear in the pickup truck, which means dealing with weather by means of a tarp, a handful of come-alongs, and a box of bungies.  Rain will not be my friend.

It is ironic that I have had vans for many years, but none of them when I also had a band.  I always wanted a van particularly so that I could transport equipment for the band, but the two have never managed to fall together.  Ah, well–better to haul equipment in a pickup than to haul trash in a van, I suppose.

–M. J. Young