Pop Shield

Anyone who has ever accompanied me to a pub quiz will know, I can be a right pain to be with if the house sound is wrong. Which – let’s face it – it generally is. 

I become distracted, distant and fidgety right up to the point where I’ve finished lurking around the end of the bar and surmised exactly how the bad mic is connected to the house’s cheap sound system and where the basic gain and EQ controls are to be found. 

My ‘party trick’ is to sneak in, whilst the quiz-leader is otherwise engaged at the opposite end of the pub, to dabble in a spot of vigilante engineering. If anyone on my quiz team starts clenching their teeth, or putting their head in their hands, I remind them that this is for the greater good, and simply must be done – by whatever means necessary. 

Usually it’s a case of just popping in a sneaky HPF button and backing off on the mic gain a notch. If it’s an especially lengthy pub for the quizmaster to circumnavigate, there’s probably time for me to cut some lower mids and top it up. 

A few weeks ago, I was on holiday on a volcanic island. The climate was wonderful and the surroundings were beautiful. I spent day one sitting by the gorgeous warm pool oscillating between Rapture Face and Pub Quiz Face. Under the palms, languishing in a recliner, I had resorted to wrapping a beach-towel around my head. Not to dry my hair, but to lessen the ear-splitting impact of Aqua Volleyball commentary being screeched into a handheld radio mic, interspersed with lossy files of cranked up bubblegum Europop being played through an unreputably-branded PA monitor via Bluetooth.

It was clear I could no longer jeopardise my hard-earned holiday happiness in the hands of this madness.  It was time to call on someone who knew what they were doing a bit more than this lot. And, as luck would have it,  I had such a person about my person. 

Stick ’em up you hotel staff punks because here comes the gain-lovin’ criminal…

I get to work. First off, find a table behind the speaker on the terrace to sit at. Next, proceed to analyse the situation, making a mental note of any inputs and outputs to the system.

Bingo. 

• Master volume maxed out 
• Mic gain concerningly high 
• Treble control maxed out
• Bass control maxed out
• Karaoke echo dialled in 

With no reps in sight, I immediately do the honorable thing, which is to reset the tone controls to 12 o’clock. This fixes the distortion within the speaker immediately.  The subconscious relief of a resort full of visitors is a palpable fantasy in my mind. 

Next I turn my attention to the playback level and mic levels. I turn off the echo – which I deem unnecessarily, unless Elvis is making a comeback to replace this overexcited man running the aqua class. 

Fit Guy comes over to the amp. Uh oh. I stick my nose in my novel, with one eye on him as he cranks up the bass control and the playback volume pot and walks away. Fair enough, no one was really vibing off being cajoled into remembering the moves to the Macarena at the comfortable levels I’d backed it all off to. 

Next off, another rep comes to pack the pool PA away for the day, to make way for the (thankfully superior) evening entertainment rig.  I watch like a hawk as she inexplicably turns the tone controls fully to the left,  leaving all the other gains and masters up. She switches the unit off, recoils the power cable, packs up the mic receiver and wheels it all away.

My work is done, until tomorrow.

And so, the rest of the week I can allow myself to crack on with the busy task of doing nothing. Relaxed in the knowledge that I can spare the ears of the hotel residents any time I choose to. Which I consider amounts to a pretty good Busman’s Holiday.