Getting Ring of Fire ready to open was an amazing ride... and here are some of the things we worked out.

If you read the first installment - Adventures in Wireless - you may remember that two of question marks for me were the trumpet and the accordion.

The latter, the accordion, ended up being much simpler than I ever expected. Terry Nelson posted some great advice about mics for the instrument - but we ended up needing neither mics nor any kind of extra rig. The instrument in question actually had an installed pick-up, so a wireless transmitter was attached to the strap, and a right angle 1/4" to TA4F cable between the pick up jack and pack. A simple, clean solution.

The trumpet solution was one I never expected. The trumpet player attached a standard lavaliere mic element with lavaliere clip to the bell, with an inch and a half of the element extending to the front of the trumpet. He tied up the lavaliere cord behind the finger valves and the bell tube, and slipped a transmitter into his breast pocket while playing. The gain on the pack had to be rolled all the way out to keep the element from clipping, and as you might imagine (and as Kevin M Mitchell pointed out in his comment on the original post) we don't need much from the mic itself - the trumpet being plenty loud and played center stage. That said, this set-up COULD potentially get lots more sound if we needed it, or if the trumpet were played off stage. The player also has lots of mobility. Something I will certainly tuck away for later!

The other question that I hadn't resolved was how to help out the fiddle player. Thanks to the ingenuity of a designer for an earlier production of this show, the musical director sent me photos of a rig they had put together using the chin rest of the violin. The original set up involved some modification to a chin rest and a micro-sized wireless pack, for very handy "ride along" rig. We had to be a little more creative, as I don't have mico-transmitter packs in my inventory - so the rig we came up with is by no means as slick, but in the end was able to 'ride along' and prevent the fiddler from having to patch and re-patch the wireless transmitter to the instruments pick-up. With the help of my prop master, we rigged a Velcro sleeve to the transmitter to roughly attach the pack to the rest. A piece of looped elastic keeps it from moving, and a piece of felt protects the body of the fiddle from accidental contact with the metal mic pack.

Until next time cats and kittens,

Cheers!

~R