Back Ups / Workaround Solutions

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Bit ashamed to admit this.

I got to my venue last night, and just as I was pulling into the venue, I thought, bugger, I've forgotten to put my backup mixer in the car, I hope I don't have a problem.

Well, a fantastic / disjointed night (due to the football) ensued for a load of medical school graduates (if I have my time again, I'm either going to become a doctor or a classical musician, and for those that have worked with any string quartets, will get the jist......

So, it gets to about 11pm, dancefloor is rocking, having an excellent night. at this point I notice that my radio mic is still plugged in and I wanted to plug in my cable mic.

I unplugged the xlr on my radio mic and then i'm not quite sure what happened next the music stopped either when I unplugged out of the back of my radio mic unit or when i dropped the XLR onto the mixer. Or it was just coincidence......

Everything went very quiet, very quickly, and my mixer lit up like a xmas tree (denon DNx500) all the meters on each channel and on the master came on and stayed on.

Slight panic ensued for a few seconds, switched the mixer on and off, and it lit up again, with no sound output.

So i grabbed some cable adapters, unplugged my laptop from them mixer and then patched them into the main PA system and put a mix on that I've done, all in all I think I was without music for less than 90 seconds (which felt like about half an hour at the time). I got half the pa playing and then patched the two sides together to give me the full sound output again. (I think i had the setting wrong in PCDJ which meant it was mono, but only out of the left channel. I then spent the last hour very nervously Djing off the laptop without any other kind of backup


I'll openly admit to anyone that I'm a fool because I forgot to put the backup mixer in the car, but am also quite proud of the fact that I managed to workaround the situation so quickly and get music playing in under two mins.

[Shaun]

Fair play to you in keeping a cool head and finding and implementing a workaround so quickly. That's what separates the men from the boys.

[djdave01]

several years ago i had a mixer go on me, at the time i was using cd's. all i could do was connect one cd player directly to the amp. had to put up with 20 second gaps between tracks as i changed cd's.

Nowadays, i use a laptop, and carry spare cables which would allow me to connect the laptop directly to the HK or Mackie systems, but i never had a spare mixer with me, maybe i should.

[WWDJ]

but i never had a spare mixer with me, maybe i should.