Percy's
Percy's Cafe Bar & Live Music
About
~Overview~
Summer 2023 I moved back home after university and got in touch with my local music venue and asked if I could come along and help out with the live bands.
They were more than happy for me to come along and help.
I ended up going more or less every weekend and helped out and in the end I was mixing down live bands by myself.
My Role
~Sound Engineer~
My role was second sound engineer, the venue already had a main sound engineer who I was learning off and eventually I was mixing down the bands by myself.
We had 3 bands a night in which we did sound checks for and mixed their set live.
First we came in at 6pm to set up the stage ready for the first band to come in at around 8pm. I would introduce myself and we would proceed to do the sound check of the first band then so on.
The first band went on at 9:30pm and the last band would end at 11:30pm.
Percys main genre is Rock and Indie and with the venue being so small this can cause some difficulties with frequencies.
Nevertheless, we did as much as we could and the bands were always happy with their set!
Audience Participation
~Megaphones and Microphones~
Percys is a very small venue and with a small audience space the bands love to get the crowd involved.
A lot of the time the vocalists would jump into the crowd and hand the microphone to a random audience member. This meant that during the set we needed to take extra careful of keeping an eye on levels!
On many occasions we also have bands bring on megaphones so we need to keep an extra eye on levels again so not to give feedback.
Angles
~How a tablet changes everything~
During my time working at Percys I learnt how helpful. using a tablet is during a live music set.
The sound desk at Percys is above the stage so when I do sound checks and mix down the band during the set I learnt how different it sounds to the audience.
So I was given a tablet that was connected to the desk and was in control of changing the levels from an audience point of view.