Dave Rat - Roadies in the Midst

Toronto and back in a shed again. Well, last night in Montreal was quite amazing, packed house of pure exuberance. Truly a fun show that finished off a pretty rough day. Long bus rides, border crossing into Canada and we lost a roller. So there we are parked with whizzing traffic roadside in the dark wee hours. Two busses dividing up the delirious human cargo of the third. Passports, blankets and pillows staggering through the gravel. Losing four hours on the front end of load in makes for a push to get the show up and the show must go up and go up safely. Other than one of the crew from the dead bus forgetting his shoes on the broken bus, it went well enough.

Getting in the familiar groove. Each day I remove more console labels, and have been mixing in full darkness for the last several shows. It takes me a few shows to learn the setup and this is my first tour on an XL4 console, so I embarrassingly had to light and label, I have been giving refining my mix strategy for this tour.

I am looking for an almost 'cartoony' sound, not sloppy, just a bit saturated. A little too much of this and then a little too much of that. And vocals, lots of strong clean distinct vocals more on top than usual. Every word spoken between songs is as much the show as the songs, I really want clear defined and 'understand every word' intelligibly. All leading up to a lot too much of everything for Travis' no holds barred flying spinning drum solo, at which point I get to unleash the full power of this K1 system. Fun stuff!

Also, unlike Peppers tour, real estate for the mix position is not an issue so we have sprawled out into messy little mini city.

Our support acts keep changing throughout the tour but Panic at the Disco was around for bit and will be back

Fall Out Boy hangs with us for a while

and Chester French

And Hey, may as well feature a roadie of the day. Meet Daniel, also sometimes known as Satan. If you let your guard down you may as well lay down cause its all over if he catches it. Oh, and he is the awesome drum tech that gets Travis' world running smooth

Finally, what is really important with any production is making things happen. Inevitably, there are going to be last minute changes and requests coming from the top. We as are professionals, of course we do all in our power to make these things happen. For example, when the band requested a specific song for walk out music and that they also are able to hear it on stage, well the orders get rushed to front of house so we can make that happen.

Dave Rat