Summer of 2024 I got involved with Purple Summer Theater Company for their production of Carrie. My role in this show was to run the soundboard, set up and maintain the mic system we had rented, and work with theater staff to optimize the sound system.

This show posed an interesting challenge as it was the first musical I had to run with an analog board. It was a Mackie Fx30v3, a 30-channel fully analog board. While otherwise in good condition, multiple channels' "on" buttons didn't work so I'd have to control them with the fader to mute them.

For Carrie the theater company I was working with rented 18 pairs of receivers and transmitters. This was the most I'd ever had to manage in 1 show, with a broken soundboard no less. I was in charge of setting up and maintaining them when we first got them and packing them up properly when the show had ended. In Carrie the main character (Carrie) gets fake blood poured on her at the end... This was a massive headache to make sure we didn't lose our protagonist's mic from the stunt. After experimenting we decided to use 2 condoms on the pack so no blood would get into it and we replaced her actual mic during the previous scene to one the theater we were in let us borrow.

One unique aspect of this theater was that the mains were behind the set, with 2 fills at each end of the room. The theater being small meant I didn't have to push the mics very high anyway, but it was a tough balance since the mains were always projecting into the mics. Luckily there was 0 feedback issues. The light op that worked at the theater helped me EQ them to fix some issues we had with the space.

It was also during this show that I improved greatly upon my script and cue process. At this point, I use numbers based on the channel, receiver, and mic number to cue me in and different shapes to indicate what action needs to be done. (Circle is ON, Square is OFF, Triangle up is RAISE, and Triangle down is LOWER) I also started using colored tape and sticky notes to turn on groups of mics since the analog board didn't have DCM grouping.