cheddatom

Hah, it's not rock music he hates, it's the human race

Friday night we played a small local festival. Our guitarist did a quick line check on both his DIs (one acoustic, one electric through a Pod) and everything sounded fine. Half way through the first song his acoustic started cutting out. He swapped all of his cables for spares but it kept happening. Despite that the soundman refused to believe it could be anything to do with him. We figured as the electric had been fine at the line check we'd just abandon the acoustic and do the whole set electric. Nothing came out of the monitors. Again the soundman was no help at all. We plugged his Pod into the guitar amp on stage to get some sound. It worked but we couldn't hear him properly at all. Despite all this, we seemed to go down very well, loads of people singing and dancing etc. Saturday night was an even smaller festival, but this time without any of the technical problems. We all played really well and loved it so much more, despite a rather lukewarm reaction from the crowd!

I saw this last night as I follow Yussef Dayes on Facebook, it's well worth a watch

yeh, brilliant album!

I'm in 6 bands. It's just first come, first served, however one of my bands is pretty successful and the band leader books gigs months in advance. We have bookings up to November 2019. This means the other 5 get to pick from my very meagre list of free dates, and they turn a lot of stuff down. I wouldn't mind if they replaced me or got deps or whatever but they don't seem bothered

I started playing guitar when I was 8, picked up bass when I was about 15 and loved it, played bass in bands for 5 years until our drummer went home to Ireland, then played drums since. In the last few years I've really got back into guitar and started playing in a band. I find that years on bass and drums has really tightened up my sense of rhythm. I wish every guitarist would do it! So many can fret womble but few can really groove

I played (drums) with CreepJoint on Friday. It was our first gig for over 2 years and it felt so good. Our new material is IMHO brilliant. Hopefully plenty of people will check out our new album off the back of it I then played bass and made weird noises for my crazy heavy band Heavy As Balls. I don't know what it is about this band but it always goes down so well. We're basically a jam band but we've just put an album out. The idea is that we jam until one of us plays a riff that makes us all go AEEEUUUUUUGH, due to it's heaviness. Then we base a "song" around that, the idea being that we have to either come up with a heavier riff that fits with the first idea, or somehow make the first idea heavier. It's supposed to be so ridiculously heavy that it's funny. It's heavy as balls. Oh, and we wear masks and robes and have lights on our guitars and on the sides of our faces. We gave out a load of masks before we played and most of the people I could see from stage were wearing them and either head banging, or laughing, which is the desired reaction. It's a shame our drummer's going away travelling for 9 months as it'd be ace to do a run of gigs.

We've done videos for some of the tracks, I'll post them in the hope that someone will listen!

I've never put as much effort into an album as I have this one. I play drums, and recorded and mixed it. I'd love some feedback! I'll try to put links to Spotify and Amazon here https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07GLCYNBJ/ref=dm_ws_sp_ps_dp

It's the British way. Instead of politely asking them to move, just get too close to them and say "oh, sorry, sorry"

Just read a few posts about people not moving - it's so British to just set up your gear around people without actually asking them to move. I've asked loads of people to move and never had a single problem!

I totally agree with this, but it seems common, at least in my area, for these people to do awful set-ups, or set up to their preference rather than the customers' etc. I have a few bad examples of service from 3 different guys in my area

I finally got around to listening to it this morning. Not as exciting as I was expecting and the dirty bass sound at the end was awful! ...I think I'm just jealous of his studio and gear

I get it, and I'll check out the video tonight, I suspect it's pretty good ...but standard FF arrangement is verse-chorus-verse-chorus-chorus-chorus-chorus-chorus-chorus-chorus-chorus-chorus-chorus-chorus-chorus-chorus-chorus-chorus-chorus-chorus-chorus-chorus-chorus-chorus-chorus-chorus-chorus-chorus-chorus-chorus-chorus

3.5 minutes?! I wish! Since the first album Foo Fighters have had the flabbiest arrangements in history! Even worse, they actually extend the songs when they play live, repeating choruses over and over.

OK, you've convinced me to try, I'll order a pair of 5A... can't wait for DrumChat! I don't know anything about drums really. I have no idea what difference the material used makes to the sound, or why I like certain drums.

Hah, I actually play in a heavy band too, and regularly break sticks with that band, hence all the emergency purchases I've been using some of these for the heavy band: https://www.thomann.de/gb/pro_mark_txmhw_matt_halpern_sign._stick.htm My mate gave me a few pairs. They're very thick but I really like the sound. Don't like the price though! Shall we start StickChat.co.uk?

If I want strings I can never get what I want in any of the 3 local shops. The stock is very limited. In fact I've gone back to using vic firth 5A sticks because that's all I can get in shops and always leave it too late to buy the Promarks I want. Anyway, Rhythm House in Hanley is a great shop. Friendly, knowledgeable staff, and loads of 2nd hand gear to look through. They'll even do part-ex So, I'll go into a shop for emergency sticks, or for a look at 2nd hand gear, or to trade in some of my gear.

Thursday afternoon we played "almost acoustic" at Rebellion festival. I'm on drums and the suggestions are "snare and brushes" or Cajon. Instead I took my snare, hi-hats, crash cymbal, and a kick drum contraption I made out of a tupperware tub, pedal, EQ pedal and noise gate. The soundman didn't look very impressed when I gave him the jack to DI but the audience loved it. Best reaction to a gig since we played the Arena stage at Rebellion a year ago. The following day we did the Pavillion stage with our normal full setup, and it was good, but somehow not as exciting as the Almost Acoustic thing - probably because we were just winging that one. Someone posted some footage on Facebook, I'll try to share it here: Last night I played bass for my mate down at the local open mic and that was just as much fun as having hundreds of people cheering for you!

I'm sure the easiest way is to just mute the instruments you want to play live and then export that as a backing track. I did this with a band I play drums in. I muted all of the guitars and lead vocals, panned the entire thing hard right, put a click in hard left, then exported the album. I put these exported mp3s into a play list, give the soundman the right output through a DI, and listen to both left and right through my headphones while I play drums The problem with triggering sounds is that the tempo might have shifted, and if some of your sounds/samples are quite long they could then sound out of time, even if triggered at the right point

of course, but I have spares for the MOTU and the card, I even have a spare desk... but yeh at some point it'll all break. I think at that point I'll get a digital desk

It does in my studio! I built a PC about 5 years ago. I have a MOTU 24IO that I wanted to use so I got a motherboard with an old style PCIe slot that'd work. 6 core 3.5GHz AMD CPU, 16GB RAM. I put windows 7 and Cubase 6 on there and I haven't updated anything on it since. I've installed a couple of plugins which is a bit of a pain sometimes, depending on their license method, but other than that it's fine to keep offline. I find I spend more time learning how to get better at the basics, and less time trying out all the new shiny toys I have managed to push it right to the boundaries of it's capabilities, but that was with a whole album in one session file, 150 odd channels, 20 odd reverbs, same delays, probably 50 compressors etc. and running Izotope on the master bus. It still handled it but there's the odd glitch on playback (not on the exports obviously) When I get the money to build a new system I'll do the same again - including windows 7