CMU School of Drama


Wednesday, February 22, 2023

System Troubleshooting

John Huntington: Troubleshooting is often a daunting challenge, but it needn’t be. In fact, I find it fun (as long as no one’s breathing down my neck). Because every system is different, there are no real standard ways to troubleshoot anything, but I’ve developed a basic approach which seems to work in a variety of situations. I’ve included it here in case you might find it useful.

2 comments:

Ava Notarangelo said...

System troubleshooting Is something I've always had A very weird relationship with. The first time I've had to deal with system troubleshooting was when I was in 9th grade and I was running the mics for the fall Musical. opening night, the entire soundboard just decided to freeze for some reason. Not only was it my first time troubleshooting, but it also would have been the first time that I would have run sound for a show, period. This was a super daunting experience, As both myself, and every single teacher I was with had zero idea what to do. although it made sense as to why I wouldn't know how to troubleshoot the system, it was in general just a pretty awful experience, mostly because I felt helpless not understanding enough about the system to have any idea what to do. Luckily we ended up getting the system to work mid show, but it was still a really unfortunate experience for me.

Gemma said...

System troubleshooting is a really important (and often extremely aggravating) part of the load-in and tech (and sometimes performance) process. I appreciated that the first step of this article said to not panic - as that is occasionally, in my experience what happens first. Although sometimes I haven’t always had all of the requirements this article included as necessary first steps to troubleshooting, having a basic understanding of the system and how the signal flow works is essential. I really like how the steps on troubleshooting are broken down and explained in a concrete, detailed way. Sometimes articles on how to troubleshoot are extremely vague which is very annoying. With every show that we work on there’s always something that goes wrong (although I’ve thankfully only had to troubleshoot a system problem once mid-performance) - and it’s important to understand troubleshooting in order to be able to be efficient and accurate in your work.