BigRedX

As someone who understands the various musical notation symbols but can't actually sight read, when you are practicing how do you know if you are doing it right? If you have even a passing familiarity with the music your are trying to read then it could be argued that you're not always actually reading but relying on previous knowledge of the piece along with some musical conventions that you have picked up along the way in regard to key etc. And when you have a new piece of music to practice your reading from how many times can you use this before much of it becomes playing from memory rather than playing from the score?

Tiny photos. What's up with that?

I really can't why anyone would want to use 2.4 when 5.8 is an option.

Unfortunately that's the price you pay for latency low enough to allow real-time wireless audio transmission.

And of course the sound will change again a soon as the venue fills up with audience.

IMO there are two important things: 1. You need to practice your reading on things you actually want to play. IME nothing puts people off learning quicker than having to do something they don't like. 2. You also need to practice your reading on tunes that you don't already know how to play and ideally are not familiar with. If you know or have some idea of what you are supposed to be playing you'll find that you are by-passing the actual reading. Also if I found that I need to be able to sight read I'd learn both the bass and treble clef.

Since room problems are a mix of frequency and time domain problems and EQ is a frequency domain solution this method only works for audience members who are stood at the point where the microphone was.

The heaviest piece of kit my band take to gigs is the 3U rack case that holds the computer and associated devices that supply our backing. Since this case essentially replaces a drummer plus their drum kit and another keyboard player, synthesiser and stand, and means that we can get the whole band with our instruments and merch plus our roadie/merch seller in a single estate car I can put up with the 17kg weight.

Track 11 on this page is the only publicly released recording of my second band The Perfect Party. Contrary to what it says on the page the compilation was released in early 1982. The song was written a year earlier by my previous band and a very embryonic version of it appears on our third cassette album "Do Modern Atoms Wear Fashionable Clothes?" This time I'm actually playing bass although most of the bass part is played on G-string and it never goes lower than bottom E on the guitar. Believe it or not this recording had CBS records interested in signing the band until they heard our second more polished and less quirky demo and decided that Wham! would be a better choice.

Lost In Music by Giles Smith

Musically? Probably very subliminally. Much of our early music (including these two songs which were composed several years before we committed them to vinyl) stemmed from both our inability to play well enough to be considered prog rock as well as the fact that we had very few conventional rock band instruments. I didn't have the album in my record collection, but it was definitely to sort of thing that at least one us would have been listening to in the 70s; we tended to favour the less well known bands. The band name comes from The Pretty Things song "Cries From The Midnight Circus".

Here's my first band The Midnight Circus with our only appearance on vinyl as part of the "Angst In My Pants" various artists double EP. This was recorded in 1980 at a 4-track studio behind one of the musical instrument shops in Leicester. Multiple warnings: Weedy sound, no bass guitar on the first track, dodgy lyrical subject matter (we justified it at the time by claiming to be sarcastic). However John Peel liked it enough to play on his Radio One show... And Johan Kugelberg rated the EP 34 in his Top 100 DIY Singles in Ugly Things magazine saying: "...and extremely do it yourself DIY frenzy from the Midnight Circus. Who in "Silicone Baby" and "Hedonist Jive" have out-poignanted a tow-truck full of Aimee Mann's and Michelle Shocked's edgy humanity and funny as shit to boot..." There are older recordings out there in the public domain. We were asked to contribute to Angst In My Pants as a result of our first album "The Bland Craze" which was released on free cassette (you sent us a C-60 cassette and a SAE and we returned the cassette with our album recorded on to it alone with a cover made from a folded A4 photocopy. We distributed about 150 of these so I am sure some still survive.

If I had a bit lotto win I wouldn't buy any musical gear. What I would do is buy a comfortable band transport and employ someone to drive it for us. I'd also book us a couple of months in a top-class studio with Trevor Horn producing.

TBH there was so little to choose between the 4 versions that for a stand-alone single release any of them would have done the job admirably and picking one in that case would have been almost entirely subjective. It was only because we wanted our original mix of the song to stand up along side the dance remix that we eventually chose the one that had a slightly higher average loudness. We'd all heard the master that our synth player had done before this competition but neither myself or our singer correctly identified it when listening to all 4 versions. I was expecting our master to sound slightly weedy compared with the ones that we had paid for but this was not the case at all. It was one of those situations when you can't help but wonder if a professional could be doing a better job, and in this case the answer turned out to be that what we were doing was equally as good. The single will be available to download and stream on Friday 25th April and on CD at our gigs.

But one of the advantages of email is that there is a written record of everything. Can you record a Teams meeting? And then that has it's own privacy issues in that all the participants would have to consent to being recorded, and one person declining would scupper the whole meeting. Can you even take part in a Teams meeting if you don't have a microphone or webcam attached to your computer?