BigRedX

But the size and number of drivers in a cab are only part of the overall sound of the cab. Every cab I have ever owned has sounded different. Even when I've owned cabs by different manufacturers that had the same combination of drivers in them they sounded very different. Not surprising really considering that the cabs were all different sizes and the drivers while being the same diameter had different technical specifications. So why do we keep defining the sound of a cab by the number and size of drivers it contains?

Thanks. The illustration was based on two photos, one where I liked the expression and the other which captured the "hair" better. I did a Google image search on the finished version (before I added the googly eyes) and neither of the inspiration photos showed up, so I considered that a job well done. I also did illustrations of the band in the same style to go on the back cover...

Probably somewhere in between...

IME no ethernet cable is as robust as a good quality Jack or XLR lead. I have jack and XLR cables that I made myself in the 90s which have been in use continually for gigs and rehearsals over the past 30 years that are still going strong, whereas the best ethernet cable in a similar environment lasted about 12 months. As you have discovered the typical office ethernet cable is completely unsuited to the rigours of gigging. It's designed to connect a device to a wall-socket in an office and never be touched again until the device is replaced. In the days when I was using a rack mounted BassPod with the Floorboard footswitch unit I was going through a cable every 2-3 weeks. Eventually I bought two very expensive Van Damme coil-able ethernet leads with heavy duty shrouds on the plugs which were supposedly designed for gig use. Each of these lasted about a year at which point they would stop being coil-able and then fail very shortly afterwards. Luckily for me the failure of the second cable coincided with me replacing the BassPod with a Helix Floor. I deliberately chose the floor version of the Helix so I wouldn't have to deal with ethernet cables in a gig situation again. A coil-able cable with heavy duty shrouds would be the minimum spec I would go for and I would always carry a spare. As soon as your lead shows any sign of less than 100% reliability chuck it in the bin and buy a replacement. Be aware that plugs with some of the chunkier shrouds do not always fit snugly in some sockets, but the locking mechanism on un-shrouded plugs will break with moderate use rendering the connection unreliable. If I was using ethernet cables ideally I'd like them to be fitted with EtherCon plugs, but they only work if your equipment is also fitted with the corresponding EtherCon sockets and for some reason very little supposedly gig-worthy equipment with ethernet connections has these.

The bassist in on of the bands we find ourselves playing with a lot has a Kemper. I don't like his bass sound much, but he and the rest of the band do, and anyway it's all subjective.

Different processing? Sit differently in the mix with the different instrumentation? It's the same vocal track. Also for a "pop dance" mix you'd expect the vocals to be a bit more prominent in the mix. Matt Pop also did us an instrumental version of his edit mix. We've been considering dropping this version into the set for selected gigs.

Unfortunately you can't just look at your audience. You have to know them and that doesn't happen without actually trying to sell them stuff first. Plenty of "younger" audience member are interested in buying vinyl. Also as I said previously it doesn't matter how big a proportion of your audience are small and skinny, the people who buy band T-shirts tend to be size L and bigger. At our last gig we sold all the size L T-shirts we bought with us and nearly all of the size XL.

As a band you make a lot more money from a T-shirt sale then you would from music on physical media. Sad but true. In October last year my band did a run of 100 T-shirts in two designs. We have already made enough money from sales to cover the production costs. We won't break even on any of our CDs until nearly all of them are sold.

It's not so much viruses but as has been said executables that are likely to be the problem. A less than scrupulous band might include something that would make your computer stream their Spotify catalogue 24/7 in the background. Having said that most short run CDs are on CDR these days. Even if you have them duplicated by a commercial outfit do they actually check what they are producing? Most of the services will ask for a DDP file which could have pretty much anything on it. And even big labels aren't immune from including undesirable files on their manufactured CDs. Anyone remember the Sony Records root-kit that was supposed be for copy protection in the early 2000s?

IME having speakers at head height or at least pointing at your ears rather than your knees is always going to make it easier for you to hear yourself. Until I changed to an FRFR wedge, the best rig I had for being to hear myself was a home-made Bi-amped set up. Not specifically because it was bi-amped, but mostly because the arrangement of cabs and amp/effects racks put a 2x8 cab which contained the treble component of my sound at head height. Everything also went through the PA so the bass side cabs on stage were essentially stands for the rest of my equipment.

This is very much my thinking too. For the bass I rarely use any of the amp or cab sims and when I do it's normally a guitar one chosen for the sound it produces in context with the other instruments in my band. I've yet to use the Helix with the guitar, but as I'm selling my guitar amp this weekend that will change in the next few weeks. However given that there (IIRC) over 100 different amp models in the Helix I'm sure that I can find one or two that make my guitar sound howe I want.

As someone who has played in many bands where the drums are produced by non-human means and has shared the stage with lots of bands with human drummer this used to be a massive problem back in the 80s and 90s and we were always having to ask the drummers in other bands to turn their snares off so they wouldn't rattle along in sympathy with out backing track. However this thread made me realise that I can't remember the last time I had to make this request, so at least the drummers in the bands on the small bill as us are clued up to this now.

Only the most naive of users would put a USB stick from an essentially unknown source into their computer. It's positively begging for your device to be hacked at turned into part of a bot net.

This.

Have you watched "Mr Robot"?

I have an AirTurn pedal. It's fine if you use it with one of the recommended apps. However should you want the pedals do anything else other than step backwards and forwards through the pages on one of the supported apps, the interface is less than intuitive. Also on mine the actual foot switches are no longer as reliable as they should be in that I am now getting phantom double-presses.

Thos figure are only for artists who have signed away most of their streaming royalties to their record label. Based on my streaming figures, for independent artists who are getting 90-100% of their streaming income, a sale of a single physical copy of a 10-track album on CD at £10 is the same as about 350 people streaming all the tracks.

It's actually closer to 6 years since the previous post, and having read through what I posted back then, things IMO have changed very little. 1. Unless you already have a large and fanatical following or a video that has gone viral on YouTube, you or your band needs to be actively gigging in order to sell any physical product containing your music. My previous bands that were doing really well with sales of CDs and vinyl sell almost nothing now that we are no longer performing live. Each song gets a few hundred streams a year and occasionally I'll get some PRS songwriter royalties from radio play but that's it. As an example, I don't think I've sold any physical copies of anything by The Terrortones since 2022 and before that it was only a few sales each year before that since the band stopped gigging. 2. What you can sell at gigs will depend very much on the genre of your music and the age of your audience. You need to look at what the bands you are playing with are selling in order to make an informed choice as to what format(s) will be best for you. In my band's genre - post-punk/goth, CDs still sell decent quantities, vinyl doesn't appear to do as well. 3. On the other hand IME you do need to have some physical product available to sell at gigs even if it's just a CD single. From experience as punter, if I enjoy a band's gig I'm likely to buy at least one of their CDs (which is my preferred format) at the end of the evening. If they don't have any music for sale in a physical format then at best they might get a couple of Apple Music or Spotify streams when I add their tracks to one of my playlists, and that's assuming I still like what I am hearing sometime in the next few days when I get around to it. Also as a band you need to stick around until the end of evening and be prepared to sign copies in order to maximise your sales. From experience a lot of sales don't happen until all the bands have played when the audience will decide what they are going to spend their money on. Some more hard facts: Since it was released 6 months ago, my band have sold almost 50 copies of our CD single, all at gigs. That's compared with 10 Bandcamp download purchases and almost 7000 Spotify streams. However we need to sell 75 CD singles to break even on the manufacturing cost. For on-line the single has just made back it's aggregator fees, and overall for all our releases we are just about in profit, but that's only because the less popular on-line only releases are being propped up by CD sales and streaming income for the tracks that are getting 40+ streams a day. Even then, that's only because the recording and packaging artwork are all done by ourselves. If we were having to include studio time, mastering and sleeve design in the costs we might never reach break even. We are currently working on an album for release later in the year when we have enough completed tracks to justify it. Whilst IMO it is possible to get away with small runs on CDR for single, an album needs to be properly manufactured in order get the longevity required (CDRs get less reliable as time goes on and you'll be lucky if they are still playable 10 years after you bought them). As a baseline the manufacturing costs for an album on CD in a Digipack with no booklet will be in the region of £700 for 300 copies which is generally the minimum run for replication with glass mastering. You can save about £100 for the same quantity in a Jewel case with a 4-page booklet. That's a unit cost of £2.00 to £2.50 which means each copy should make at least 100% profit. Things are less viable for small bands when you look at vinyl. 300 copies of your album on vinyl is going to be at the very best at least twice the price of the same number of CDs, and if you want either a gatefold sleeve or printed inner sleeve then you are looking at closer to three times the cost, which bumps up the sale price for a similar profit margin. Even if the profit margin is acceptable, and you think your audience will pay more for vinyl, £2k to stump up in advance may well be beyond what a lot of bands can afford. And again that's assuming that there are no recording/mastering/graphic design costs or that the you are simply going to write them off. On top of that vinyl takes 3-4 times as long to produce as CDs and there are various compromises that need to be made in terms of audio production, album running time and track order, to get the optimum audio quality for the medium.

Fake amps and cabs as stage props are fine if you have a nice big truck/van for all the gear, but since my band ditched all our backline we've been able to get the whole band plus all our gear for playing live and our roadie/merch seller in a single estate car. In the days when I was still using a big bass rig the only thing that took up more room in the van was the drum kit.

Thanks for all the kind comments. The original mix is actually a re-purposed version of something I wrote back in 1984 for the synth-pop band I was in at the time.

I suspect that at least some (if not most) of them were empty lightweight boxes just for show. There's nothing wrong with having an image and the wall of cabs is almost mandatory in some genres.

Exactly. One of the many reason why I no longer use a bass amp and cabs and go straight into the PA. The big rig might have looked impressive on stage, but for most of the gigs I played it was at best a personal monitor and a lot of the time simply a big, heavy and expensive stage prop. It seems completely backwards to me that the bass players who benefit most from having expensive amps and cabs are those who are technically on the lowest rung of the gigging ladder playing pubs with a vocal-only PA. That's an observation and not a slight on those playing pubs, but from experience the bigger the venue and stage the less important the personal amplification for the bass player becomes (see my experience above). Only when you get to play really big venues where there is room for acoustic screening around the backline and the cabs can be isolated and mic'd up, do expensive rigs start to make sense again. For me any spare cash would be better spent on studio time for the band with a great producer.

Poster for our next gig:

Absolutely. The whole point of having your own Sound tech is to have a good one who knows how your band is supposed to sound.

A lot of the time the most cost-effective thing bands could do to improve their FoH sound would be to employ someone as a sound engineer for all their gigs rather than spending more money on gear. I've been in two bands in the past that had their own dedicated FoH engineer and the difference it made to our live sound was massive. The engineer for one band even used to attend rehearsals so that he was completely knowledgable about the new songs we had written and were rehearsing for inclusion into the set.