Tour Prep with Augusto 👷🏼‍♂️

What's up everyone? Augusto here reporting on some technical work I've been doing to make our lives easier on the road.

This big box full of cables is our beautiful In Ear Monitoring Rig which we put together for our first tour last year. This rig has the dual function of allowing us to hear ourselves, the backing tracks and the metronome when we are playing, as well as sending all of our instruments' signals to the front of house engineer who mixes the live show. It is an essential piece of our live show as it gives each player complete control of what they want to hear when on stage (we can control our own mix through our phones) as well as connecting the live band to the computer and backing tracks through the metronome.

Each night, before and after the show we set up and break down the rig, which includes connecting and disconnecting a great amount of cables and making sure all the connections are going to the right places. This leaves a lot of room for technical errors and takes up a lot of our time, specially during set up. So we though it would be good idea to replace some of the bulkier cables with thinner low profile cables which will allow us to keep everything connected and save us a lot of time during set up and tear down, as well as minimizing the risk of technical errors. It will also make the rig lighter which our backs will appreciate after two weeks on the road.

It turns out low profile XLR cables are very expensive and we needed around 20 of them, so we went ahead and bought the separated parts to try and assemble them ourselves. So here I am, learning how to solder cables with a very low budget set up. I am using a candle and a clip as my holders and some kids scissors to cut the cables plastic cover. 😂

So far I have survived and the cables seem to work properly but if any of you have any experience with soldering and want to share a few tips they would be very appreciated.

Hope everyone has a great week and hopefully see you soon at a show! 🙏