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borntohang

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Everything posted by borntohang

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. 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.
  11. 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.
  12. 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.
  13. 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.
  14. borntohang
    I think I'm officially classed as a multi-instrumentalist now as I get calls for guitar, bass, and keys, so I have started over at least three times plus dabbled in a few other instruments where I'm not totally fluent but have learned to play one or two tunes for a specific gig. Obviously playing within the fretted string family is easier than jumping to sax, but I find that once I can play a few chords/scales on something I can work the rest out as we go and I am by no means an unusually gifted or intuitive player - average at best and a lazy student to boot. A significant amount of musical information and ensemble-playing skills are transferrable between instruments, so you're in a much better position than a true beginner and should catch up very very quickly once you've got a bit of technique together. You already know the theory, your brain knows the relationship between note intervals, you know how to fit into a group context, and you have lots of gigging experience. The rest is just about getting your weedy sax fingers to catch up to the speed of your hench bass brain. Incidentally, horn players are nearly always in demand as they collectively tend to expect payment and mostly work on the session pro basis (turn up on the night, read from the dots, leave before teardown with cash in hand). There will be plenty of ensembles/bands happy to take on an enthusiastic amateur with previous experience in a band situation.
  15. borntohang
    You might not be able to deliver blistering chromatic runs quite as fast any more, but I seriously seriously doubt it's a career-ending injury for you. There might be a bit of adjustment time and you might have to rely on your index and little finger more, but you'd be surprised how quick you can get back to a point you're happy with it. Incidentally from my time working in a venue I saw enough young and beginner bassists using one fretting finger and one plucking finger to play perfectly well, and they didn't have your years of experience to fall back on.
  16. borntohang
    I don't know what Album charts he's looking at as I don't know when the clip was recorded. but 12-18th July there were either two or three bands formed this century in the top 40 (Maroon 5 were active but not under the current name until 2001) and the previous week there were either one or two (M5 strikes again). I don't think that's a particularly shocking conclusion for singles either though. Young people don't generally buy albums so the album charts are weighted to the elderly; labels prefer solo artists because they're cheaper to run; nobody can afford to be in a band on the pennies it pays non-songwriters; none of these rules apply to Taylor Swift who dominates the charts so completely they're going to have to create a new one for just her and Ed Sheeran to fight over. Incidentally I did some math earlier and out of the 184 weeks this decade, 79 had a band at number one in albums and 45 of those were from this century. I do disagree with his reading of 'band' as it includes Take That and Steps, but excludes Springsteen and Paul Weller; if you're prepared to branch out to 'solo artists who primarily work with a live band' you get another 20 or so which just drops you over 50%.
  17. borntohang
    I was about to say yes, the very same but looking at the lineup to find the year they clearly never played... I DID however see Simian Mobile Disco who famously had a hit collab with Justice, which must be where I got all this from?? My brain actually made a little comedy brakes-screeching car crash noise reading through the lineups and realising I had created an entirely false memory. I distinctly remember the cross hanging over the stage and everything. Bizarre moment! SMD were very good. They had this brilliant stage setup with a central console of synths, right...
  18. borntohang
    I saw Justice at Summer Sundae about a decade back. They had a brilliant stage setup with a central console of synths and sequencers that they both walked around with the glowing Cross logo hanging above it all - looked like some Star Trek/horror crossover. Very enjoyable and perfect evening festival closers.
  19. borntohang
    Squier VM or CV 5s are both nice quality. Sire are probably a little more spec for the price, but don't hold resale quite as well.
  20. borntohang
    Melvin has been back as a director for Glastonbury Events since 2022.
  21. borntohang
    Glastonbury is organised by Melvin Benn/Festival Republic who do all the big festivals and (from working on the staff side of these festivals) have a generally excellent grasp of crowd dynamics which is why crowd crushes are luckily so vanishingly rare compared to the size of the huge crowds wandering around these gigs. Sometimes you can't predict whether an artist will catch a moment, sometimes you're hamstrung by what's happening with the rest of the line-up negotiations, sometimes they can only do a certain time slot due to other scheduling issues. There is also a difference between people feeling unsafe and the stage actually reaching rated capacity - ideal world you don't want either to happen, but A is unfortunate whereas B is an immediate intervention like the Sugababes shutdown. I will say that of the dozen or so festivals I have worked Glastonbury is uniquely difficult to police because of the site layout and size. Leeds/Reading is easy as you have two big open air arenas and two tents with plenty of wide open space between and exits from every side of the stage; Glastonbury is anywhere up to 20 stages of all sizes and some of the passages between them are pretty narrow for the size of the crowd movement.
  22. borntohang
    They're really driving the price point down on these - there was also an Active 5 and 4 string with blocks & binding neck and 2 band EQ. On the six string side there was an affinity Jaguar for £279 which looked pretty neat.
  23. borntohang
    My old man has been going as a steward for the last 15 years or so - albeit staying in a camper rather than a tent now he's the wrong side of 70. He just wanders around to catch random stages if not given guidance so I usually send him a few things to check out. Sent him off to Heilung this year and got a "what the hell was all that?" message back. I thought they were a weird lineup pick at first, but actually I've realised they're perfect - you want to wander round a stage you've never seen before, slightly wobbly on cider, and find a tribe of Scandinavians leathering drums with human bones over a drone backing. Glasto moment. He set off at 10PM last night and got back to Yorkshire at 5AM this morning, which isn't bad. Last time I went with him the flooding meant we spent 5 hours queuing to even get out of the car park.
  24. borntohang
    Brian knows Nash quite well (he seems to know half of the industry, because that guy is a crazy gearhead) and Gaslight use a bunch of his kit. I briefly met up with them on the last UK tour and Ian mentioned that Brian had commissioned Nash to build two 335s for them after the Horrible Crowes album - apparently the only two he's ever built. Ian got a red one and Brian got a white one that ended up getting smashed up somehow.
  25. borntohang
    I've been on Tidal since Neil Young took his back catalogue off Spotify (I realise he's on again now) and it's been good. Migration of playlists was as simple as using an app to transfer it over and the catalogue access has been 1:1 so far. I don't use the FLAC stuff for streaming so can't comment. Also don't know if my 0.00005p or whatever Tidal pays over Spotify per stream makes much of a difference to anyone, but every little helps. My main complaint is that I can't contribute to the communal playlist in the band van any more, so I just make myself inconvenient and get somebody else to add songs for me. 🙂
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