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borntohang

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Everything posted by borntohang

  1. 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.
  2. borntohang
    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.
  3. borntohang
    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!
  4. borntohang
    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.
  5. borntohang
    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.
  6. borntohang
    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. 🙄
  7. borntohang
    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).
  8. borntohang
    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.
  9. borntohang
    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.
  10. borntohang
    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.
  11. borntohang
    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.
  12. borntohang
    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.
  13. borntohang
    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.
  14. borntohang
    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.
  15. borntohang
    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.
  16. borntohang
    August Bank Holiday is Mad Friday for techs: off the top of my head there's Leeds/Reading, All Points East, Victorious, Camper Calling, and loads of small festivals all happening at once. It's the worst weekend of the year for trying to hire competent techs and backline. Sorry to hear about your show - we've all been there at one point or another sadly.
  17. borntohang
    A keyboardist I work with is into recreational botox. He looks great, in a gameshow host kind of way. He also works out, looks after his hair, and dresses well, so that goes much further than a jab every few months. He's into rave culture so he's not nearly the only one in his social circle who partakes. Irritatingly I also know a very youthful sextegenarian who spends all his spare time at sex parties, when he isn't dating thirty year olds, and he was an alcoholic amphetamine lunatic for three decades. Yoga, dark chocolate, and a buzzcut every two weeks apparently. He's also a brickie who speaks three languages and is on first-name terms with a dozen rockstars, so I think he's just an interesting guy who would be popular even if he didn't have the physique of a fourty year old.
  18. borntohang
    I liked the KZs but yes, found them bright. For the price, excellent with Comply tips and would recommend. I didn't dislike the brightness for cutting through a mix but it started to bother me on more mellow sounds. I've gone to 535s with custom molds now which was probably overkill compared to just buying some bespokes, but I still use the KZs with Bluetooth adapters for casual listening.
  19. borntohang
    Assuming you mean the PW-1? That looks great but yes, shame about external power. I actually do a couple of keys gigs that I wouldn't hate it for as it could just sit on my rig and I'm not dancing around, but even phantom would have been a better option.
  20. borntohang
    That actually looks interesting as I could run a parallel output from my DI and mix from stage, but shame about the size. I also found this, which appears to be very similar to the P2 but with some added bells: Fischer Amps In-Ear Stick No details on exactly how the limiting is set, but I might drop them an email.
  21. borntohang
    XR18 for the shows I'm controlling and already have one on my aux, but I do a fair bunch of festivals and other dates without that kind of control. Luckily the monitor crew are all going to be pros at that level so I'm not as worried, but at 2AM when I'm sat listening to the fridges buzz in my ears I feel like it would be worth the investment just in case! I'd rather spend a bit more money than be constantly paranoid and consequently keeping my monitoring lower than I need.
  22. borntohang
    Can anybody recommend a wired belt pack with a built-in limiter function? I'd like to upgrade my P2 at some point and not had much luck finding anything on the same kind of footprint. I am probably overly paranoid about sudden spikes as I am often mixing my own feed anyway, but I've been experiencing a sudden and unexplained increase in tinnitus over the last year so I'm wanting to bulletproof my in-ear setup to prevent it getting any worse.
  23. borntohang
    5 strings or any kind of extended scale. Love it when other people use them so I buy one, inevitably end up using it like a four string because that's what band leaders want, and then sell them on a few months later. I stick to synth or octave for the rare subby stuff I do these days. Same goes for active basses if I'm being honest with myself, but that quest continues in the hope I'll work out what to do with one.
  24. borntohang

    Tone sock

    borntohang replied to Clarky's topic in Bass Guitars

    I was gratified to see that his signature bass also ships with a personalised tone sock in the case. I can respect a man who persuaded them to budget that into the build costs.
  25. borntohang
    Just as a heads up, don't equate wearing hearing protection with total invulnerability. I have been wearing plugs diligently since I was 18: gigs, clubs, loud pubs, even the theatre at times. I wear triple flanges with 20dB filters and custom mould IEMs for the stage. Unfortunately I'm still suffering from tinnitus in both ears which has increased a lot in the last year. A quick trip around the ACS noise exposure calculator tells me that ACS Pro 20s take your exposure at 112dB to just 2 hours, which isn't a lot when you consider soundcheck, a show, and possibly watching other acts. I know that's a very rough guide, that your exposure is probably not going to be at 112dB for the full evening, and that it's possible that I'm just genetically disposed to hearing damage as both my parents wear hearing aids now, but just something to consider.
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