I have a lot of friends named Bob. My little-brother friend Bob is taller than me and weighs in right around 500 pounds. When we stand together we look like the number 10. BigBobbyD I call him and he calls me dangrigor, all one word. We are best of friends and share a passion for expensive audio equipment and all things stage and lights. BobbyD does big sound and stage lighting. He has some very cool toys.

Follow up:

He is destined to own a nightclub. That has been his dream for as long as I have known him. I have no doubt in my mind he will make this dream come true. That’s what BobbyD does; he makes dreams come true. Bands, DJs, venue owners, they all have a dream to be really loud and well lit. BobbyD rolls up with his trailer, bass booming from the 5 12s in the back of the purple pearlescent Suburban and makes their dreams come true.

There is a huge new venue in town, right on a main drag near the baseball stadium on the east side of the lake. It is a brand-new building that holds a bowling alley, a big arcade, a restaurant and 3 big event rooms. They offered BobbyD a pretty good deal on taking over one of the rooms. He has been doing sound there for others and has done a few of his own shows to some success. A few weeks ago he asked me to help with a Thursday night show with a popular local DJ. At the last minute this DJ actually called to say he was going to be late so a friend of ours filled in. He did a great job. My job was visuals, big screen, cameras and graphics.

We really wanted to show off what we can do. When we combine all our equipment we can do a hell of a show. I brought a bunch of cameras and a computer and a big screen. We set the screen in an arch and sent 4 cameras and computer graphics to a projector behind it. We lit and shot the DJ and the crowd and mixed in trippy graphics and special effects that react to the music. It was a great show.

Technically everything went pretty well. My biggest challenge was fitting everything in my truck. With the van down I needed to scale down the system and make it portable. So I had to leave a few things out of the mix but had enough to put up a good show.

We were a little disappointed with the crowd but for a first night with little advertising we did pretty well. BobbyD was very happy. The management loved it and once again found out that BobbyD delivers. They liked it so much they asked him to do sound for a live music event the following day. He in turn asked if I wanted to help. All my stuff was there so I said yes.

So we spent the morning moving all the stuff from one room through the kitchen and into the ballroom. Neither one of us really wanted to hump all that equipment so locals were hired to move all the big stuff while we coiled and uncoiled cables and started all over in the big room.

While BobbyD set up the sound I set up the screen and some cameras and we were ready to go. I had a camera center stage up high on the truss, a long shot from the booth, a shot over the mixer in the booth, a crowd cam on the dance floor and the computer to play with.

5 punk bands, all from out of town brought in a pretty good crowd. Young and talented and full of angst, this great bunch of kids came in and rocked the house. They loved seeing themselves on the big screen, some for the first time. The crowd, drawn from as far away as San Diego, had a great time.

Some of the effects were very cool, mixing analog and digital equipment for a really unique look. We essentially had a portable TV studio set up. It was easy to make everyone look good.

More importantly, we took full advantage of our system and I learned a lot, as usual. Not surprisingly, trying to plug an HD video camera into a 1970s switcher isn’t as easy as it sounds. Mixing that signal with a standard analog signal is another thing entirely. To make matters worse one of our frame buffers was on the fritz, resulting in some occasional out-of-syncness.

The Grass Valley 100 we use probably cost $60k when it was new. I got it on eBay for next to nothing. I have learned that I can take advantage of its limitations and use them as effects. Most of what goes up to the screen is a montage of moving graphics and live video. A “wiggle effect” when two signals are out of sync seems like part of the show when you put it to music. An out-of-sync transition wipe that jumps at the top of the throw works great when it happens on the beat. Boom!

There is a life-lesson there I suppose.