borntohang

The upright has the advantage of being immediately visually interesting to audiences in a way an EB isn't and also being a very physical instrument to wrestle with. I'd suggest stealing moves from keyboard players who are similarly stage-bound - you can practice playing with exaggerated arm movements without affecting your dynamics.

Musicians in charge of their own monitoring have an unfortunate tendency to mix to the loudest dynamic of their instrument instead of the quietest, or to aim for a level where the instrument "sits" neatly in the overall mix. In my experience both generally lead to you leathering it all night or gradually turning up. Ideally you should be able to hear yourself clearly at all dynamics over everything else and break away from the idea that your IEMs should be a balanced band mix like the audience is hearing. I realise that as someone with FoH experience you probably know this already, but your drummer probably doesn't.

My partner politely requests that I keep the gear encroachment to one guitar in the living room and the rest stays in the studio downstairs, arguing correctly that as we have an entire room dedicated to music kit it seems a bit unfair to then start slowly moving it into the rest of the house... We also have an arrangement where she comes to one (1) gig per new band at which point her supportive duties are considered fulfilled unless something particularly interesting comes up. She once took a train across three countries by herself to see me play in Amsterdam so it's not like she's not interested, but if she came to every gig I did she wouldn't have time for a job. I was also away on that particular tour for two full months leaving her to look after the homestead solo - support goes both ways and unfortunately there have been times when I've not been great at it in the past. Hopefully doing better these days!

Musical wallpaper but one of the few major acts putting their money where their mouth is. Massive gesture and will be worth a lot of money to small venues.

Have you check the colour codes for the SD pickup are wired correctly to the diagram? Stock pickups and SD probably won't have exactly the same colours.

Without second-guessing any legal issues about who owns the bandname, Perry is still kind of the draw for Janes. Was still the draw at least, until recently. They've had a rotating bass seat, couple of drummers, and Navarro sat out the last few runs while he was ill, but Perry has been the driving personality as well as having a distinctive voice and stage presence. Also, although I said I wasn't going to second guess, considering his past clutching of the royalty purse strings he probably owns the name too. 🙄

The openers for the tour are a young UK band and this is their third tour cancellation this year, by my count. Not good for the finances and one of the things that finally did my last lot in (the cost of losing US/EU tours due to 2020 rather than a crazy singer).

How long are your drones? If they're shortish samples and you don't need keyboard functions then just get the MPX8 - the only downside is long files (anything over a few seconds) take a long time to load between kits. For short loops and percs, or if you only want 8 samples and don't mind the boot-up time, it's great.

Being over 35 (I'm being kind) ages you out of most "we're gonna be the new Oasis!" youth bands who still think they can make money from original music. Don't go answering those ads with the "I look younger than my age/I'm still 25 at heart/I can be like a mentor until you find a younger player" routine unless you really like sympathy. Age still matters to the record industry and unless you have some past success you can spin into a Scene Legend type gig it's probably not happening. You should be more sensible by that age anyway... Once you're over that mental hurdle and are just happy with making the music you want to, preferably with some pay involved, then you can keep going until you physically can't stand the late nights any more. If you're prominent and competent in any niche genre for long enough you'll probably never struggle for gigs. Everybody else has been weeded out by the aforementioned late nights and you've hopefully got a reputation for not being a total van monster - reliability is key over talent and nobody wants to take a risk on a young hotshot who ends up throwing their TV out of the window when they're served the wrong temperature of latte.

Spotify doesn't actually pay a fixed fee per stream - their monthly ad and subscription income is pooled and then 70% is distributed to artists based on the percentage of those monthly streams they get. If every other artist on Spotify mysteriously disappeared for a month but your song stayed online and you got 20 streams, then technically you would be entitled to the entire monthly artist revenue. Obviously that's a silly scenario, but if this guy was gaming billions of streams then other artists would absolutely have got less money then they would have done otherwise. Probably not enough that anybody is losing their house over it because frankly they still pay naff all, but it's still pissing in the pool.

We had a band get in touch asking for a support and they billed themselves as Stones N' Roses. Apparently they are the UK's premier Stone Roses, Guns N Roses, and Rolling Stones tribute.

Bank of England inflation calculator says that's £110 and £145 equivalent today. £450 tickets would have been £284 in 2008, just for comparison. I'd advice nobody goes any deeper down this rabbithole as you'll just depress yourself.

Same issue as Spotify really - they pay shit for beans but you have to engage to be on footing with the rest of the market.

We get multiple enquiries a year about buying a Noel-associated custom amp that runs for somewhere between £4-6k depending on what options you want. I think we've sold three or four in the five years I've been here. Oasis is big money territory in the same way the Grateful Dead fanbase moved on to be silicon valley whizzes.

There are enough people for whom £500 is pocket money that they'll sell at that price. They'll sell at £5K too if I'm honest, because there is a stupendous amount of money out there and the people that have it don't worry about small change like that. It'll get bought by some corporate group who want to give their high-fliers a Christmas bonus and then write it off against expenses. The corporate suites will be going for decent five figures a night I imagine.