borntohang
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Everything posted by borntohang
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The very definition of "on-stage brawl"
borntohang replied to Happy Jack's topic in General Discussion
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 very definition of "on-stage brawl"
borntohang replied to Happy Jack's topic in General Discussion
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I'm not sure I've ever been this angry before
borntohang replied to Dankology's topic in General Discussion
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. -
Botox and Fillers (would you) audition related
borntohang replied to police squad's topic in General Discussion
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Hearing loss/ ear protection on live gigs?
borntohang replied to Tradfusion's topic in General Discussion
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. -
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.
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Today I've destroyed the tip of my left middle finger.
borntohang replied to Jackroadkill's topic in General Discussion
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. -
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%.
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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...
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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.
