DJ'd a Wedding, Interesting Problem arose

I've never seen this before, but I'm also not doing gigs every night, or every week for that matter. I was set up on a platform:

Click here to see Setup

The platform is made of carpet and metal, no big deal. Well I had arrived 2hrs early to setup and make sure everything was right. As I was playing music i walked off the stage, came back on and touched my one of my MIDI controllers (Hercules RMX). Well as soon as I did static discharged from my hand and it shutoff completely, however the sound was still playing which I could still control from my DaScratch. I had to shut down tractor and reinsert the USB to start it back up

This happened again, but the volume increased, it went into a 1/16 loop and created a deafening noise. I had to yank the USB cable to stop it, then plug it back in and restart Traktor.

So now I had to make sure to ground myself (touching the metal on the chair or my lamp) before touching my mixer. Annoying and kinda scary, but oh well. THEN I noticed that whenever someone touched the handrail to the stairs on the stage, the speakers would pop and click very subtly. This would happen even if the person was on the tile floor and never stepped on the stage to generate the static.

Through all of this I managed to DJ and have nothing go wrong, and only I noticed the clicks (of the people I asked).

My laptop was plugged into a grounded surge protector, and all my equipment besides the speakers/amp is USB powered.

Any ideas on what happened?

Dont know if this matters but this gig was done in the mountains. Both the MC and I were getting frequently dehydrated on that stage also...

 

Hello Serius,

Regarding the grounding of the DJ Console Rmx itself, you can ground the Rmx casing and avoid further electrostatic issue in the following way:
- on the rear panel, remove the screw attaching the aluminium cover (close to the USB port)
- wind up a thin coper or steel cable (360 degrees) on the screw, and fix the screw again in its original position on the aluminium cover
- wind up the other side of the copper cable to the ground screw on the input 1-2.
This should prevent the static discharging of your hand when touching the Rmx.

For the pop in speakers when anyone touches the handtrail to the stair, it means the power supply of the speakers/amplifier is not grounded, so for security, an electrician should check the grounding of the power plugs in this room.

 

That's a genius idea!
Thanks, I'll try that out