borntohang

I've successfully improvised an emergency belt from black gaffa several times. The trick is to pull a length long enough to wrap round your waist and fold it over onto itself so the sticky sides are inside, repeat with two more lengths on both sides for sturdiness, and then create a 'buckle' connecting the two lengths BUT ONLY AFTER YOU PUT IT ON. You do have to cut yourself out of it afterwards unfortunately and it's not a particularly load bearing band so not worth it if you have slim hips and heavy trousers - I haven't got a solution for that yet but I imagine a similar set of improvised braces could work. Careful not to get it on your chest hair.

XR18 with an external router for us. Only one plug extra and means we can all run our own monitor mixes without fighting the venue WiFi. We use the Mixing Station app which I don't love but is fine - if any of you aren't technically savvy spend some time setting up the view pages so nobody accidentally adjusts the mix when they mean to adjust an aux.

Comes from "detained under Section X of the Mental Health Act", where X is a different section of the Act depending on the reason for detention. I think you guys use '5150' for roughly same thing.

We played a little festival somewhere down south (I can barely remember where to be honest) and ended up with a midday slot on the main stage. There were in fact two main stages which ran consecutively so there was no downtime and the audience didn't have to move. Nice site but as we pulled up a band that shared our management were heading out looking like they'd just been kicked in the collective nards and gave us a sarcastic "good luck" on the way past, which was not auspicious. It was a family festival with a real mixed line-up and we had not been pitched well, so our audience was mostly kiddies playing twenty-five-a-side in front of the pit barriers: at one point a misplaced volley came up onstage and I had to hoof it back which got the biggest cheer of the set. We were pretty dispirited by the end and even more so to see the much larger crowd of parents gathering in front of the other stage for Dr And The bloody Medics, so we packed up and booked off sharpish. I was driving the van and remember pulling a slightly narky take-off out of the main gates with a muttered "...never coming back to THIS disaster again". Sadly, we had to sheepishly crawl back through security fifteen minutes later when our singer remembered they had left a custom mic stand behind the stage instead of packing it away. Nothing really wrong with the festival, just a bad match, but so far it's the only show where anybody has ever asked me for their ball back mid-song.

Roswell do a P in a MM size case. EMG do P soapbars. If you just want a cover then I've not seen anything available as stock, but this would be a good opportunity to make friends with somebody with a 3D printer. It's a simple enough design to put together. If you don't know anybody you could try a makerspace.

It has the same layout as the Stomp, so you can do it but it's a little trickier than just plugging in. You'll need to assign a Y split as the first block, then pan Input A to L100 and B to R100; B should then be on a parallel path with the 9 blocks able to be split between them. Mix block will need to be panned A to L100 and B R100 too and you'll have to use mono effects or they'll recombine at the output. If you want two stereo paths you'd need to use a Loop Send block to send the output for path B to the Loops and then set the Mix block to have 0dB of Path B in the signal.

Douglas Adams had a routine about how there are infinite planets but we know that not all of them are occupied, so there must be a finite number of inhabited planets. Any finite number divided by infinity is as close to zero as makes no difference, so the average population of the universe is 0. Similarly, having worked in a venue for five years and toured for another fifteen or so, my working theory is that there are an infinite number of shit bands and consequently zero good bands - any bands you might think are good are a statistical outlier and should be excluded from the study. Jokes aside I don't think you should be forced to lower your expectations, but it's worth acknowledging that by their late twenties most genuinely ground-breaking stellar musicians have either given up in favour of the the day job or are already in a full-time successful band (or more likely six bands). The ones looking for a new project are likely to form it with old bandmates or friends with good reputations instead of taking a risk on JMB strangers. You don't have to give up, just be aware of the playing field and that it might take a while to find a group that really fits. Much like online dating, you're probably going to have to kiss some frogs in the hope they might eventually be transformed into something vaguely resembling a deposed royal.

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.

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.

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.

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.