Dave Rat Blog - Home and Away

Yay, home at last and not for a second unhappy with the awesome adventures of travel. Happiness is found in contrast. Life is change and the same with non living things as well and nothing ever stands still.  Everything is either growing or dying, building or crumbling, brightening or dimming.  Nothing nowhere nohow is in a perfect state of stability.  Only the illusion of stability exists when we look at things for relatively short time frames in relation to the life span of the entity in question. If we take this concept that everything is in a constant state of flux, to heart, and apply it to our own humanly selves, we could look at it as we are faced with a decision: To grow or fade, to learn or stagnate.  To stop doing new things is to turn the corner toward fading. Without sadness we would not know what happiness is, without challenge is boredom.

Anyway, babbling ramble aside, looking forward to being home is partially what drives me to find adventures abroad. The adventures make 'away' worthwhile and home too long leaves me longing for adventures and round and round again.

On my way to Rat this morning after awesome fun surfing (but brrr 40 degree cold), I heard an interesting interview about our ability to focus

In my sound seminars, I talk about the importance of keeping the bigger picture in focus while paying attention to the details and I though this was a very interesting observation of human nature. Perhaps this explains why we as sound engineers tend to get so caught up in trying to make perfect sound while overlooking the true purpose of the live event we do sound for.

Here is a link to some more info:

In Plain Sight

and now let's travel back in time to last week in South Africa. Our current and very cool cool Monitor engineer, Mark Vanderwall lined up a crew outing to Lion Park!

And while waiting for the tour and looking at things I saw these

 The craftiness of creating with whatever tools are available is very cool. The ancient art of basket weaving but using telephone wire and creating a wide variety of colorful items. 

More telephone wire art

So once we got going, as expected we saw Zebra

And lions coming closer

And catching bits of flying meat from our caged truck

And really close, this is not a zoomed picture!

As if that was not close enough, say bye bye caged truck and hello to a purring cheetah!

And the little ones are just too cute and no where near as scary.

And here's the crew, caged truck and all

Yay! super cool and check it out if you are ever down in Jo-Burg

Lion Park

But tour is not all fun and games, we are out here for some serious business of making a ton of noise and gathering masses of humans together for good time.  Check out this massive 100,000 capacity venue.  It holds around 85,000 for a rock show and it was either sold out or really close to it.

And from above, actually this is a little mini model version

From the inside

And was super happy to have a good sized L-Acoustics K1 system.  Here you can see them strapping in the sub arrays as well. 32 K1, 30 V-Dosc, 32 SB28's plus dV-docs and Kara underhangs, some deck staked dV-dosc, 3 delay clusters each with 8 V-Dosc and 3 SB28 in cardioid config and a shit ton of dV-Dosc hung around the upper perimeter decks.

And just to be safe and since there were no noise restrictions, I lit that PA up and drove it hot.  Hey, it was just delivered the week before and it was a brand new K1, no better person to break 'er in than I!

Ok, I get the idea that they do not want carts parked there but the stadium also owns carts as well. 

"what? we sold all our golf carts again!, aaargh"

The band right before peppers was Die Antwoord

Flea went out and played a song with them but I did not grab a pic, was too mesmerized or in shock, not sure which, they were as interesting as catchy as disturbing

http://www.dieantwoord.com/

 Next up off to Cape Town, not really but this blog is already so long, I'll split it in two.  Also, I really need to get some actual work done too

Oh, and as a closing note, Robert Scovill's blog post is an interesting read I recommend

http://www.splnetwork.com/blogs/run-your-lives_the-lawyers-are-coming

Rock on!