Warped Tour Milwaukee, WI

Another one bites the dust! Today was pretty uneventful. It rained on and off for most of the day and we ate some deep fried cheese at catering for lunch. I finally got some pics of the front of house setup on our stage. We play each day on the solar powered Kia "Kevin Says Stage". 

Meet Tom McNabb! He is the Systems Tech, or better known do-it-all sound tech for the Kia Stage. After more than 6 weeks of touring so far he seems to be on auto-pilot mode. The way he walks around setting up the sound system is almost hypnotic. He could probably do it blindfolded by now, no problem. By the time the band shows up him and the rest of the Kevin Says crew have set up the stage, backline, and PA. Tom is more or less ready to roll by 9:30am and is either either plugging in the last of the

 microphones or powering up the console, which is a Yamaha M7-CL. The first thing I noticed on our first day was Toms setup of the User Keys.

 Its the best mixing setup I've seen so far on those handy little keys. 

He also uses the top bank of faders for a "flip to fader"  monitor system using 4 separate mixes, and the bottom row for mixing. 

It completely eliminates any confusion between which mixing mode you are in, so you are never caught trying to raise the lead vocal in the PA, but accidently end up sending it all to the lead singers wedge and getting a nasty look. Awesome! The Rack, Tap, Delay, Mute All, Talkback, and In-Ear send keys are well thought out too. Everything you need is right in front of you.