Banff Springs Hotel – Serato and Thanksgiving

I loaded the element once again and headed out to Banff with a solid cube of sound equipment. What a familiar yet beautiful drive.
This time I made sure to pack the speaker and microphone stands on the passenger side. This way I could still have an open casket, in case something should happen.

I arrived at the palace that is the Banff springs hotel and couldn’t help but think of The Shining. The looming mountains made me feel tiny and alone in a city where I knew only the DJ I was there to meet, whom I had spoke to only through email.

After unloading the gear into one of the ballrooms for a wedding reception.. alas, the technics 1200’s I brought were not working properly with Serato!
Apparently they were not grounded correctly as Serato could not make any sense of the signal being sent from the turn tables to it’s inputs.

In case you are wondering what serato is, it is a piece of software that allows DJ’s to bring there entire music collection with them on a hard drive instead of in vinyl or cd’s. The software enables them to mix with real turntables (ideally) or cdj’s as if the tracks were on the tables themselves except the tracks are routed from the computer and are only manipulated with the turntables.

Luckily the in house audio visual company at the hotel had a set of tables for a ridiculous price. If I had known perhaps it would have been worth it to go back to Calgary for another pair.

After everything was sounding great I took to the streets along with a thousand other people who thought it would be a good idea to head out to Banff for the long thanksgiving weekend.
My goodness.
There were people everywhere and they were taking photo’s of the most ordinary things like, a Starbucks, a pumpkin, a time to cross signal etc.

I grabbed a bite at wild bills saloon. All their staff seemed to be from Australia. I imagine they come for the ski-ing/snowboarding and stay over the summer. (those ozzies and Kiwi’s and their extreme sports)

I purchased some salted licorice.
Checked out the social network for lack of a better option and crashed for a bit in the back of the car.

Another adventure. Complete.