cheddatom

Burslem is pretty much dead. I doubt this will do anything to help but but if it's going to attract Rayman all the way from Macclesfield you never know!

Yeh we definitely won some new fans. It would have made sense if we'd picked up another gig in London, which was on the cards, but didn't happen in the end

We drove from Stoke to Margate on Saturday. 5 hours with a couple of stops. Olby's Soul Cafe is a brilliant venue! Great PA and the engineer was brilliant too. Unfortunately the choice of some unknown band from Stoke to headline a night in Margate didn't work out so well. The old story of a local support band bringing most of the crowd, then taking them with them after the set. All that way, writing off two full days, to play to less than 50 people... still, at least we got paid and had a laugh

Duffy's bar in Leicester on Saturday night. It was rammed and super sweaty. I'd annoyed the sound engineer yet again! This time I moved the drum monitor before he'd arrived. It turned out this monitor was knackered, and rather than fix it, he'd found just the right angle to balance it on a bar stool and keep it working. It'd been working for months apparently! After the show I politely recommended that if he didn't want to fix it, he should put a "do not move" sign on it. Anyway, I played without a monitor and it sounded fine on stage. Great gig!

Yeh it was definitely a successful gig! This soundguy normally works at the other local venue, which was his excuse for all the problems, although both venues have the same desk... Anyway, issues with the bar and door staff mean that our fans would never go to this venue again (even longer story!), so it's not going to be an issue for us in the future

We played at The Sugarmill in Hanley (Stoke) on Saturday night. It's our first headline gig here and the local venue so it felt like there was a bit more pressure than usual, that plus the lack of gigs since November, and it would be my first time on BVs, all gave me some nerves When I arrived, I greeted the soundguy. We're on first name terms and I thought we were pretty friendly, but the first thing he said is "what ridiculous gear have you brought this time then?". I explained it's just my usual stuff but he seemed really annoyed for some reason. I set up the kit and the whole band were ready to go in 10 minutes as usual. Then the soundguy spent 30 minutes plugging everything in. While he was mic'ing the kit I showed him my nice new cymbal. He's a drummer so I thought he'd be interested. He said "oh, so that'll be dominating the whole room then!". I said "not really mate, it's the way you play them" to which he replied "Yeh, which is F&*KING LOUD!!!". I asked if he'd ever done the sound for us before, and he confirmed he hadn't, so he'd have absolutely no idea how loud I'm going to play my cymbals. I just let it go. So, all mic'd up, he tried to get sound. He had the main outs from his mixer routed to the centre vocal wedges. I explained that it all sounded weird and that my drums shouldn't be feeding back but he just cracked on, sweeping EQ on the drum mics for a solid 15 minutes. Bass was checked just fine, but guitars (just DI'd) sounded weird and kept feeding back. I asked him to turn the stage monitors off just to check there wasn't an issue, and this is when he finally figured out the mains were routed to the two centre wedges. Half an hour to who knows on the phone and he reckoned it was sorted, so we went back on to sound check. All fine except the lead singer can't hear himself. There's sound out of the centre wedges, but it's quiet and muffled. The soundguy told me I needed to play the drums quieter. I explained that it's never an issue and we play similar sized venues all the time. He finally came up to hear the vocal in the wedges and agreed it sounded wrong, and so after another long phone call figured out that he should have used a different cable for these wedges. FINALLY everything worked and we did our check in less than 10 minutes, but from setting up to completing sound check was pretty much 2 hours. After this check the soundguy approaches me to tell me that my bass drum is a nightmare. "oh, what's the problem?" I ask and he complains it has "no top end". I screwed up my face and said "we're not playing metal mate". Then I went home to change and try to forget the sound check The actual gig was awesome, loads of people in, loads of people singing along, an encore... just an awesome gig all round. A couple of my mates were there, and they said it sounded OK but that my vocal mic was muted! All that practise and all those nerves for nothing!

A wonderful session of lead vocals yesterday. This singer hates headphones and asked if there was a way to record without. Some engineers would refuse, others would try to set up a super accurate out of phase monitor system, I just handed him the SM7b, put my earplugs in, and turned the monitors up loud. He was nervous that it wouldn't work as he's never seen it done like this, but I know the guy, and he's LOUD, so when I played it back with the vocal solo'd, you can hardly hear the track at all, just his screaming voice! Ditching the headphones really loosened him up and we got some very "live" performances

Something about the smell of them makes me nauseous but I'd rather not impose my weirdness on clients... will do the "no hot food" thing though

It's a bit of a weird setup, very little chance of any spillage

The problem is that I'm addicted to tea, and constantly have a brew on the little coffee table in the control room

The band played lots of Dua Lipa, Lizzo, Bruno Mars etc at the last wedding I went to, it was great!

There's a kitchen but it's small and no seating... I'll buy some stools and print some signs

The drummer on Saturday dropped a terrible fart in the control room, flat out denied it, then asked where the toilet was and disappeared for 20 minutes 🤣 The smell of energy drinks and rustlers burgers really gets to me, and this is the diet of the modern greebo. Subsequently, the greebos have corresponding BO. I try to avoid these bands but it's tough when I've not met them before, and I need the money. Would a sign saying "No hot food or energy drinks in the control room" come across as rude?

He's one of my best mates, but honestly without bias he is my favourite drummer to watch. The guy's an absolute monster and capable of so much more than he shows with Static Dress, impressive as that is. His youtube is pretty cool https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLscwUeSlpdZdDUa86tx46g/videos

I really don't get why they don't just program the drums for this sort of stuff. Loads of producers replace/layer samples and it's all so quantized and consistent it might as well have been programmed, and surely would have been quicker and cheaper! My mate is the drummer in an up and coming metal band Static Dress and they make a point of leaving his real performances alone. I personally think it helps set them apart

I take the same approach, if the band are up to it

Another day, another session, drummer turns up without a ride, no worries, I'll loan a cheaper one from my collection, even though I specified to bring cymbals. Wants to play to a click but can't do it. Hits one of my clip on condenser mics and tries to fix it himself, won't admit to hitting it. Thankfully the mic is fine else the session fee would be wiped out! Oh well, it takes all sorts and I've got to pay the rent!

I'd have let you record on the street! Whatever it takes to get the best performance is my mantra

Mix notes/revisions can be good. I once had a band record 4 songs with me. I'd double tracked each of two guitarists' rhythm parts. Guitarist A was hard left and slight right, guitarist B was hard right and slight left. The band sent me a 4 page PDF document of mix revisions, one page per song. For each song, they'd just copied and pasted the same 4 bullet points. One of the points was "The guitars should be stereo". Having explained the concept of "stereo", and after explaining that it's not possible to turn up every component in a mix, I thought we were making real progress. I was pretty happy with the result, then I got another message "Now that you've mixed the instruments correctly, we can concentrate on the vocals. We'd like you to give them more of a hard rock edge"

great points there BRX On the first proper session I did as a bassist, the engineer wouldn't let me use my own distortion pedal. That was a big influence on my attitude to the whole process. I'll basically do whatever the client wants, within reason. I've done whole albums in a day, recorded totally live, and I've spent several days all on one single. I don't want to impose my views/sounds on other people's music

Loads, I really don't mind the instrument faults, I have decent guitars and basses for people to use, and spare strings. It is tough when they can't play what they've written though. It can be so frustrating for the player, and obviously I want to offer to play it myself, but don't want to offend or patronise. It can be quite a tense situation. Quite often the parts will get simplified.

A keys player, it was a "live" session to be fair, and he needed a fair bit of room. I didn't mind making more room for him! I just figured musicians would know not to move mics in a recording studio

I was working with a metal band once, and the drummer insisted on tempo changes for every different riff. Basically he wanted the tempo for each beat to be as fast as he could possibly play it. I tried my best to get them (the whole band) to agree to a more consistent tempo but they wouldn't be told. This same drummer then went out of time with the metronome. When I stopped the take he asked why I'd stopped it, and I explained that he'd crossed the bar and was nowhere near the click. He said "the click must have gone out of time"

My guitar was on a guitar stand next to me in the control room. I use it to work out notes when I'm tuning vocals. I was doing that with this guy's vocals. I'd put it down for a minute while I carried on synchronising the double-tracked vocals, and that's when I heard him playing it behind me. No big deal it just seemed a bit rude. If it was on a stand in the live room next to the other studio instruments I wouldn't expect anyone to ask before playing it

It wasn't the drummer!