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EGGSFest is a summertime outdoor concert hosted by Sackville School to celebrate young musical talent within the East Grinstead Group of Schools.

My roles in the event this year included:

• Promotional design (Posters, adverts, tickets).
• Managing and setting up live sound equipment.
• Organising and delegating tasks within my class group.
• Performing in the concert.

It was an early start Wednesday morning at 7:30am. We started off by setting up the gazebo for food and drinks before moving on to the front of house tent where we would later set up the sound and lighting control. We used a local hire company HIYKON to hire out AliStage staging, along with a d&b line array system, digisnake and a Behringer X32 Compact mixing desk. EGGSFest took place on Thursday 11th July, but most of the work on the stage took place on the Wednesday prior. HIYKON arrived at 10am and had everything set up by 6pm. We then ran a quick line check and adjusted the EQ for the main FOH system. I had never used the X32 before so I had an hour or so just to play around with it and get acquainted with the controls.

As soon as I arrived with the rest of the setup team Thursday morning, we immediately started transporting equipment from the school’s music block to the stage. The first band sound check was scheduled for 9:40am, giving us just over two hours to rig lights, sound, and run a line check. Despite our best efforts, we ended up having to cut the line check short due to technical difficulties with the digisnake, we did however run to schedule for the rest of the day after this point. A link to my schedule can be found here. After each acts soundcheck, I saved the scene files to the desk to recall them later, I had an excellent assistant from year 9 that managed the sound when I had to be performing. Towards the end of the day at around 3, I recalled a programme from the desk to troubleshoot a problem with the Sennheiser MKH50 microphones that we hired in to capture the choir with. Unfortunately, this scene file was created before the desk was set up, so recalling it reset the routing, despite having this set up as a parameter safe. After 20 mins or so of panic, I disabled routing as a parameter safe and loaded in a more recent scene file which fixed the issue.

Despite the issue being resolved, I was reluctant to recall any more scene files on the night in case the same problem happened again with an audience. Fortunately, everything went to plan for the night, the students performed to the best of their ability, and the audience and choir had a brilliant time.

EGGSFest 2019 was a success.