Audio Technician & Stage Management: Managing Audio and Resources
- U1346353 | Joao Neves
- May 14, 2017
- 2 min read
As an Audio Technician, Joao took an active role throughout all the performances. From managing resources to developing strategies and alternatives.
For each of the performances is noticed the care of having all the necessary equipment ready to perform the live electronic act. This allowed an enhanced activity during setup and rigging, taking the lead on decision making and management of the available resources.
In a progressive way, this role was developed along side with the professional practice developed during the work placement, as technical assistant at UEL. Therefore, good knowledge of the venue and resources enforced a quick setup of all performances, as also boosted the logical thinking, regarding the known availability of equipments.
The patchbay was difficult to understand, but the extended practice and the acquired sense of signal flow within a major system acted towards a full understanding of the system allowing virtually problem-free setups.
The major role came at the time of the Final Performance, where the number of proposals was high and problems with the booking of the rooms hindered the performance, firstly to be during the day of 05/05/2017 from 10AM to 10PM. Consequently, the event was separated in a series of 2 main events plus 2 independent events, to allow all the performance to take place.
For these performances, the stage management came together with the technical support, once the public profile of the events demanded evidence of professionalism.
The technical team collected information from the proposed acts as it can be found on each the responses to the template created for this specific end.
Image 1 - Technical Specification Sheet - Example

It was extremely time consuming correcting the collected results, where the forms seemed mainly filled-up in a hurry, or without paying attention, yet there was some outstanding ones that went further than the requested, explaining details of stage setup, booth setups, video details, light details, etc.
Once all the corrections were made. I got to a master list of equipment that the technical team needed to have available for these separated events, and forwarded it to Stephen Rolle and Jono Bell to put together the specific bookings.
From a mere point of resource management, I choose to group the Performances, once on the first day 05/05/2017, there was just 4 / 5 acts, this was not implemented. However, for the performances at FUEL Festival on 11/05/2017 the strategy was to have the Band based performances to open the live electronic performance sessions, following by the DJ-based performances, while FUEL's night show started to be prepared for more bands to perform, giving enough time to reset the room and sound-check every band.
On 05/05/2017, some issues with the chosen stage mixer, which is used to overcome the lack of availability of Direct Injection Boxes, alerted for the FUEL event, where we swop it for a second Allen & Heath GL2400 on the 11/05/2017.
Further work comes from Pawel Spica while helping me throughout all the performances to maintain a constant feed of multi-angle video evidence of all these performance events.
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