Yes, that’s right. The following weekend, I worked for the Pope in Yankee Stadium. I was hired by Clair Brothers to mix the symphony. It was my job to turn the 80 input symphony into 14 submixes for the rest of the audio mixers. It was a great experience, for sure.

On April 7th, 2008 I was fortunate enough to be at the first show Stone Temple Pilots has done in almost 6 years! Even better is the fact taht I was working the show and had the opportunity to record the whole thing! Did I mention we did 2 days of rehearsals, as well?

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My life has been blessed with the opportunity to travel the world and experience all sorts of wonderful and exciting people and things and a few shitty ones (you know who you are). When I casually talk about my experiences, people outside the concert industry are typically interested and usually say things like, “I wish I had the chance to do that”, or “you’re so lucky”. They’re right, I am lucky. Those who know me, have probably heard me say several times that I’m the luckiest guy I know.

Being involved with Farm Aid over this past weekend was no exception. I was working the concert as one of the system engineers. I was responsible, along with others of course, for the overall quality of the sound that was enjoyed by all of the concert attendees. The main sound system was powered by roughly 250,000 watts. There were over 100 speaker cabinets. The wall of sound, or black cloud as it’s nicked named by users, was over four stories high! Talk about the ability to rock out and I was lucky enough to be one of the two people with my hands on the master fader of the whole thing! Now that’s a feeling of power!

We were onsite for three days. The last of which was the show day. We had twenty one bands perform, including Willie Nelson, Neil Young, John Mellencamp, Dave Matthews, Montgomery Gentry, and a host of others. The logistics of such a show are overwhelming, on stage. Trust me, that’s a lot of gear and a lot of things to plug in! It wasn’t flawless and there were fire drills, those are to be expected. That’s why I have a job, because I can help put out the fires. Overall, it was a good show. Most all of the bands sounded good. Most of the guest engineers did a good job. Some were more prepared that others, some sounded better than others. The ones who were the most prepared, didn’t always fair the best. Funny how that works. A unexpected couple of stand outs, were Guster, who won the prize for best sounding band of the day in my opinion and Montgomery Gentry. The engineer for the latter, wasn’t too familiar with the digital console he ended up mixing on. With a little help from me in the beginning and the benefit of a solid band, he landed on his feet and had a very powerful show.

As is common in most things, you can simultaneously exceed some peoples expectations, while falling short of some others expectations. Life is subjective and your perspective is yours alone. My perspective is that I had a great time and thoroughly enjoyed myself and got paid to do it! I’m the luckiest guy I know.