Well, the Frugal Audio guy has been out of service for a bit due to health problems. Hoping to be back at work by December but that depends both on how I feel and what the doctors will allow.
Still, the last few months haven’t been without activity. Shows at the local venue included Gordon Lightfoot, Soul Asylum, Starship, Rare Earth, Martina McBride, John McDermott, Jeff Foxworthy and more. In addition, covering for an injured coworker kept me pretty busy over the summer with general operations and maintenance too. Also had some factory training on the Biamp Vocia system that’s being installed to handle paging & background music throughout the venue. The main room is getting a new L-Acoustics Kudo PA that I’m looking forward to working with when I get back.
Thanks to Audio Images for throwing a few extra days of work my way this summer. First at the Hard Rock Cafe in Niagara Falls and then at Kingdom Bound Festival. It had been many years since I last worked a major Christian festival. It was interesting to see what things have changed and what hasn’t. Also fun to see which artists and crew remembered me from years past. Got to catch up with a few old friends and made a couple new ones too.
The Frugal Studio is undergoing yet another software upgrade. Though it was only this past spring that I upgraded to Sony Vegas Pro 10, I decided to pony up and move right into version 11. They bundled it with some extra software and made the upgrade price pretty attractive. However, this also necessitated a move to Windows 7 64 bit. So far all the software installation, including dual boot with the old XP setup, has gone pretty well. Hardware upgrades will have to wait a while. but fortunately I don’t tax the system too heavily. I have added a total of 5TB of storage to the studio in the past six months. So, for the moment, there’s plenty of room for new work and to organize and backup older material.
Lastly, just this week I had the chance to get out and visit with the old boss, John Michael Talbot. In nearly ten years together on the road, we never played a date here in my hometown. Yet, JMT was able to book a few multi-day parish missions in my area this trip. We spent some time catching up and I stayed for the first part of the evening. It’s a much scaled down version of our previous tours. John Michael’s carrying a small Bose PA with no lighting. He, Viola and helper Peggy are traveling by minivan, no bus. It’s great to see them going at it and doing what God asks of them even in these most difficult times. Surprisingly, that little Bose PA doesn’t sound bad at all either! Things like that might just put guys like me out of business!
More updates will come as I have new info and the time to post. As always, if I can be of any help to any of my readers be it live event production, studio production, install design or anything else- please just drop me a line or give me a call.