Mike Sokol: If I were trapped on Gilligan’s Island with Ginger and Mary Ann and needed to step in for the Professor and set up a sound system, I’d make sure I had my Whirlwind Cab Driver with me. I take it along on every gig and install, and use it just about every time.
Why? While it’s a pretty humble-looking box (painted up like a taxi cab – “Cab Driver” – get it?), it makes pink noise with every kind of output connector and voltage level you can imagine. Not only does it output noise on 1/4-inch TRS and XLR outputs with adjustable volume levels from mic to line voltage (for confirming snake connections, crossover patching and monitor paths), it also has an on-board amplifier of a watt or so that drives both Neutrik SpeakOn NL4 and NL8 outputs with individual switches for wiring pairs plus/minus 1, 2, 3 and 4. So now you can use it to directly test full-range, bi-amp and tri-amp loudspeakers for blown drivers as well as any quad NL8 to NL4/NL2 monitor splits.
Cab Driver also includes a pair of banana jacks that have enough voltage swing to drive 70-volt speakers directly. This means you can sort out the 70-volt loudspeaker feeds going to all the huts on the island (or hallway loudspeakers in the church you’re setting up). Plus there’s a cool impedance test when you push a little red button on the back that tells you if you’re driving a 4-, 8- or 16-ohm load. It’s just the handiest and most useful piece of live sound test gear I have in my gig case. Every guest engineer I show this to wants (and usually then buys) a Cab Driver, which is the best testament of all. So Skipper, I’m ready for my 3-hour tour…
Christopher “Sully” Sullivan: En route to a gig in Aukland, the plane crash lands in the South Pacific and I find myself marooned on a desert island. After first checking myself for wounds and the universally feared Fiji ticks, I set out to explore the area for food and water. Suddenly, a break in the foliage reveals a dilapidated, yet somehow functional club hosting bands and 99-cent PBR (Pabst Blue Ribbon beer).
This venue’s sound tech was recently ingested by a local reptile, and the crowd cheers when I emerge from the palms with my backpack… which just happens to include the only things I need to get a gig going: my RME Babyface bus-powered USB audio interface, an iSEMcon iSEMic 725TR measurement mic with SA-XBF adaptor, and a Macbook with Smaart and Jriver installed.
With these tools, I quickly tune and correctly polarize the PA and then spend the next seven days at the venue mixing Moravian trance house music. After each show, I’m carried off on the shoulders of locals and feted as a god by the island king. Thank you RME for being bus powered.
Craig Leerman: It’s the Whirlwind Qbox line tester. It can verify that a signal is present at any point in the chain, send a tone, act as a headphone amplifier, and a pair of them can be turned into a basic comm system using the built-in mics. I’ve used Qbox to check dynamic mics, send a signal into a DI to verify it’s working before the backline showed up, find the correct fan connector in an unlabeled snake system, and once it even became a mini backstage monitor so I could hear the show when I was an A2 doing wireless mics at a corporate event. Of course its main use is for me to show the video folks that I’m indeed sending them a working feed and the problem is on their end!
Christopher Grimshaw: It has to be a familiar mixing desk, something that I know inside out, and with plenty of input and output processing. A set of EQs on the outputs mean that I can tweak the main PA and monitors to suit the event (or even just to smooth out the rough edges), and familiar channel processing means it’s easier to get things sounding great. If nothing else, the desk can also just serve as an FX box where you know how to get that particular reverb.
The desk that’s currently fitting the bill is my QSC TouchMix-16 – I take it to every gig. It sounds great and packs a lot of handy features into its usefully compact chassis. It’d be nice to have physical faders, of course, but the size-to-performance ratio is perfect for me.
Mike Sessler: When I was volunteer mixing at church, I brought my own vocal mic, snare mic, earphones, headphone extension, and laptop with Smaart on it. I didn’t spend a long time in the Boy Scouts but I heartily embrace the “Be Prepared” motto. That probably explains why my backpack weighs 18 pounds…