Lost Angels

my first gig 29.10.1977

 The first gig with a teenage rock band who out started out played mainly cover songs; later progressed to composing more and more own tiles.

 Special challenges / difficulties:

The time in which the band was founded, meant a very small budget and not a lot available equipment. At this time very little information existed about all the technical – especially sound- topics concerning live music, in German there was nothing at all.

 In 1976 some friends of mine had the idea to found a rock band. All my friends went to school at this time but I just started an education as an electrical installer. An idea was born in the band: "You are an electrician; you can take care of light and sound".

So I became a member of the band "Lost Angels" I started with the construction a switching-board made out of usesed switches and dimmers. I converted old party- and office lamps to stage-lights. Soon the design of dry ice fog devices and magnesium-flashes followed. Then we realized that singing voices amplified by a guitar-amplifier was OK for the rehearsal room but not sufficient enough for a stage performance. We went looking for something called "Gesangsanlage" in German: A compact speaker/amplifier combination built to reinforce singing voices. We bought one system built by "EVANS"; it also had an attached tape echo. I handed the lights and from then on I was also responsible for the sound and had to cope with that new high-tech device.

Pretty quickly I saw the creative possibilities and so sound started to fascinate me more and more. My effort to get more information about that wide field of sound, especially at live performances, first failed. Back then very little literature, which dealt with live-sound, was on the market and in German not at all. The first book I found was "A Practical Guide for Concert Sound" by Bob Heil. Heil was a sound engineer for bands like "The Who" and "The Grateful Death". The internet had not been invented, so there was no chance for a quick lookup of a word that I didn't understand. The first thing I had to do was to brush up my 2 years of English from school. That was the only possibility to be self-taught in that field. It took me nearly one year to find out what it was all about with that small book.

 With the increasing success of the "Lost Angels" in our region the venues for our performances were getting bigger. Our effect and light devices were OK for these locations, but our sound equipment was stretched to or over the limit. The whole band decided to look for a real PA-system within our very tight financial limit. The heart of that system consisted of a 12 channel mixing-board from the Italian brand "FAL" connected to the stage via an asymmetrical multicore-cable. The loudspeaker-setup on each side from bottom to top was a 15" "Martinbin", a 12" "Midflare" and a "RCF-Multi-Cell-Horn". At the beginning all that was amplified by my Sony HiFi amplifier. It had the possibility to separate the pre- from power-amplifier, so I could use that power-amplifier to drive the PA directly from the mixing-board.

In 1981 I left the band.

Lineup:

(partly alternating)

 

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