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borntohang

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Everything posted by borntohang

  1. borntohang
    Nyatoh is actually a different species with a similar name. If I was doing a bit more gigging and could justify a third bass I'd have one of those desert sand P's to match my Late 50s sunburst. Only new instrument I've bought in years (as opposed to the many many used ones...) but glad I did.
  2. borntohang
    Cathy Dennis also wrote a top flight of cheeseball pop tunes with 'Toxic', 'I Kissed A Girl', 'Reach For The Stars', and 'Sweet Dreams My LA Ex'. They might not be stone cold classics, but I bet the residuals are nice. Rob Davis was in err... Mud. In fairness he also worked on Toca's Miracle which is a bit of a banger.
  3. borntohang
    Gibson has already had a set of London offices and extensive showroom (with a venue underneath it) for a good few years. Agnesi was working out of there when I went. It's not open to the public though so I guess they see the value in having that collection working as advertising too. I can't imagine the M&M store in Leicester Square makes much of a profit either, but it's good promo.
  4. borntohang
    With festivals (or any show too big for the stage amp to not be in the room) I always went DI to FoH, then IEMs for direct monitoring and whatever backline amp was there just for rumbling the floor a bit under my shoes and rarely turned up enough to trouble the front row. Even with good gear and crew you can't trust house amps or mic'ing to be consistent so I wanted whatever was travelling to FoH to be as self-controlled as possible. Aguilar 410s and Ampeg fridges seemed to be the rigs of fashion so I got fairly good at dialing them flat, or at least knowing what colour they would introduce to my monitoring sound. I always used a VTDI so your Tone hammer would work, but if you need your amp to get that tone and you can physically carry it with the rest of your gear then personally that would be the route.
  5. borntohang
    Worth noting I had a Mastotron clone which hated my Spectracomp. Wouldn't play nicely with it engaged at all and presumably didn't like the impedance it was being fed.
  6. borntohang
    I suspect being after the Spectracomp is flattening the peaks such that it won't trigger consistently. Try it without the comp engaged and then again with the comp volume boosted above your normal level (not sure what toneprint you're using but an easy fix in the app).
  7. borntohang
    MIJ Squier purchased on this very parish a couple of years back. Bought this as an attempt to transition up from short-scale Mustangs and Jaguars; loved it so much that I ended up buying a 34" P to try and now this sits in the case. I've been threatening to sell it for a while but every time I get serious a session pops up that it would be perfect for and I end up keeping hold... Such are the whims of the musician. This is an MIJ 'A' serial which I believe means 85'-86' but has obviously been refinished in a snazzy two-tone purple/green combo. You'll love it or you won't, but both shades are very nicely done. There has been a repair to the wood of the headstock near the E tuner which has been professionally repaired under a previous ownership and caused no issues since. Can do the thumpy Mustang thing with flats and roar with rounds so I will include sets of both medium scale flats and rounds cut to size plus a soft case which fits tidily. Would prefer not to post but I'm in Doncaster and travel around the country often for work. Have a variety of high-quality tube amplification you can try it through at high-quality volume if you pick up from me. Selling at price I bought for in 2019 so considering inflation it's practically a bargain! DM me for more pictures if you want anything specific.
  8. borntohang
    Ambi-sinister. Poor lefties do get a bad rap in Latin...
  9. borntohang
    The VT needs a little more tweaking for guitar sounds than the Tech 21 preamps designed for it, but yes you should be able to get something usable. Luckily you can save the presets too so won't need to change them between instruments. I'd recommend some kind of ambience or reverb in the loop as it might be quite dry-sounding out front.
  10. borntohang
    I find the key is you can't usually afford to be fussy, or only take gigs you feel are artistically rewarding, at least until you've earned a rep. Once I got over that mental hurdle things improved! Luckily I do enjoy nearly everything I play these days and there have been some very rewarding times, but ultimately if the Wiggles called up tomorrow and I didn't have anything booked in then I'd be learning 'Fruit Salad' with all the actions before the call ended.
  11. borntohang
    I got an MIJ Squier 32" after years of playing Mustang shorties to try out something different. It's great - so good in fact that I ended up buying a long scale P and now it sits in the case. The folly of man!
  12. borntohang
    There aren't many musicians on the scene without a side job right now - for some the side job might be teaching students and for some it's YouTube channels, or publishing music to spec (I know a few who make a decent wedge from getting incidental music onto Love Island and such). You really can't turn down a gig either - I played with a small orchestra last Saturday and all 22 of us either already had another gig next day or picked one up over the course of the evening. My foray into full-time lasted about a year, but was derailed hard by 2020. I'm lucky enough to have a side gig that's involved in the industry and the rest of my 'work' is gigs and crewing. We have a mortgage but no kids and my partner also effectively works self employed so we get to pick our time off. Touring was rough on our time together for a while, but I have settled into one or two small tours per year which don't stretch over a week or two. Have to do lots of three day runs though.
  13. borntohang
    I work at Hiwatt, not for Los Bitchos! The amps they're loaning came from our workshop though, which is always nice to see on TV.
  14. borntohang
    They do, yeah. Not much of our stuff onstage in geenral this year but we had LB playing in the warehouse this morning. Some nice lingering shots of the backline too, thank you very much Mr Beeb Cam Op.
  15. borntohang
    Great aren't they? The genre is a variation on Cumbia.
  16. borntohang
    The festival themselves are great about the clear up - the fields are pasture for the rest of the year so there is an entire economy of workers and volunteers there for days afterward to make it liveable for cows again. Unfortunately some of the punters seem to have the idea hedonism also means conspicuous consumption. Last time I worked there was a chap at my gate who had bought a banger car for a couple of hundred and stuffed it with five-man worth of camping gear; the other four in his group came up in a separate vehicle and they were planning to abandon the whole lot, including the beater car, and travel back in one vehicle so they didn't have to pack anything up . He claimed it was cheaper than petrol for two cars, but considering the price of the festival plus all the gear I could only conclude that some people have too much money and very little sense. I kept seeing that photo of the guy who had built an IKEA double bed in his tent in the news and wondering if he was going to bother taking it away again today. The general culture of the festival is really against that sort of behaviour, but apart from weighing people in and out to try and track/ban offenders I'm not sure what else could be done about it.
  17. borntohang
    Fred Again's stagemate was briefly my tour manager. Good to see him back on the artist side and doing well; he was far too cool (and occasionally too much of an instigator of chaos) to be a TM forever. My old man is at his tenth Glastonbury this year at 71. Still enjoying himself but takes a camper instead of a tent these days. Not spotted him on the footage yet but I keep an eye out.
  18. borntohang
    I caught some footage of Sledgehammer a couple of days back and they sound great. Gabriel actually looks like he's having fun! And yes that vegetarianism seems to be working for Levin. I'd be happy looking like that now, never mind at 77...
  19. borntohang
    I think there's bands that could have maybe got away with a couple of cheeky cracks about being a rock band billed on a pop festival, but RB aren't them.
  20. borntohang
    Basically except the exposure is heavy Radio One playlisting either side of the show plus your set on iPlayer, which is an actual reliable way to make a bit of cash! Same setup as Glastonbury really - labels pay for their big artists to do it at a loss because they know the benefits are ultimately worth it.
  21. borntohang
    Big Weekend doesn't pay fees. The Radio One play that comes with it is the prize, and really he should have known that they were going to be playing to a bigger stream audience than any they'd get in person. In mitigation, RB are about to start a headline arena tour this week. Having been in the same position where you're about to do your biggest ever shows and then bomb in front of somebody else's midday festival crowd I can at least sympathise with them being tempted to throw a small paddy. I got on with it though because I'm a professional (and also was getting paid my session fee either way). 😜 That said, I also know a stage manager who has never said a single negative thing about any band ever, no matter how guff they were, and after one show with RB he claims they're both derrières, so perhaps there's something more going off there...
  22. borntohang
    Honestly if I was running tech for a circus of likely half-deaf dudes playing a song or two each while trying to maintain some kind of flow to the schedule then I'd probably just chuck a couple of wedges down too. I wouldn't take my IEMs to open mics for the same reason... RAH is definitely about the biggest size I'd be comfortable with stage monitoring and no isolation at though - I bet the acoustics are good in there but you'd still be fighting the back splash.
  23. borntohang
    Effectively what we're doing, yeah. We take our own DIs for the same reason we take our own mics - not reliant on whatever the venue happens to have. Plus a bunch of those are stereo or particular set units for things like the acoustic.
  24. borntohang
    We tour with a pre-rigged stage box, full mic setup, and a desk so all the house gets is our CAT5 cable and it's ready to go. Levels are set in pre-production and stay the same for the whole tour so mixes should be stable apart from accounting for mic position on drums. Monitors are on wireless feeds coming from stage box and FOH can control them for tweaks as needed - our backup is a couple of wired belt packs and long XLRs that I can hot swap out to replace any of the four main feeds in a disaster. I run from the fifth 'tech' mix which goes to FOH, Lights, and Backline (me) and just has the basics of guitar, click/cues, vocals, and talkback so I can listen for any issues; the other two are obviously in front of the PA so apart from click this is mostly for my benefit. If the house engineer really doesn't want to use our desk for some reason (only been an issue once) then our FOH guy will run sound for the support that evening and they can sit out. We're lucky to have a good team and headliner leverage, but we've done plenty of festivals the same way and it seems increasingly common for them to leave desk space on the tower to run your own setup.
  25. borntohang
    My main ampless gigs have been on the tech side so this is one I can actually field. Short answer is it barely takes up any time - I just go around and replace the mics with a DI using the same XLR to stage-box and then FOH recall the appropriate scene for levels. You can even leave the amps in place if you're using the amps later and don't want to mess around with mic positions. Ideally given a headline scenario (which it usually is) and freedom to make the other bands work to OUR spec then our DIs have their own stereo XLRs at the front of the stage so I only have to run the minimum of cabling, but we can work with either.
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