BigRedX

I can only remember two places I have played where the location itself made any noticeable difference to how I sounded. One was a place I used to rehearse in with my dad rock covers band. It was full of reflective surfaces. Absolutely nothing I did to the EQ or positioning of the bass rig made it sound even half way decent. In the end I told them that it didn't matter that the place was free to use, if I couldn't tell what I was playing, practice there was pointless and could we please move back to the previous room which at least had a carpet and some furniture which controlled the sound. The other was an octagonal church hall with the stage along three of the walls. This had the effect of project all the sound out into the middle of hall. On stage everything (especially the bass) was quiet. Out in audience it was deafening. These days I go direct into the PA and use the foldback to make sure I'm in time and tune with the rest of the band and the backing track. The PA does the important FoH sound for the audience.

Practice for the sake of practicing? I think I stopped once I was able to string a series of chords together on the guitar without having to stop strumming - about 50 years ago. Since then I only practice if I come up with a part that that my fingers can't do reliably and repeatably, or so I can play our songs whilst also moving about on stage.

IME it very much depends on the band and how good the person doing the stage patter is. In many ways I'm with @Lozz196 in that most of time I want the talking between the songs to be kept to minimum. Announce who you are before or after the first song, if you have a new single out mention that before you play it (or album before you play the title/lead track from it). Announce who you are again at the end and thank the audience for coming. And that's all most bands need. However the singer from my current band is very good at communicating with the audience between songs we let him even though the default setting for most Goth bands is to say nothing and "let the music do the talking". I think because of this having a talkative front person sets us apart from lots of the bands that we play with and has definitely worked to our advantage. Having said that, IMO if you are going to say something on stage make sure that the audience can understand you. In The Terrortones, Mr Venom who was very good with words used to do quite a lot of talking between songs. Unfortunately most of this sounded like Elvis through a 70s British Rail Tannoy system so almost everything he said was completely incomprehensible to the vast majority of the audience. Also remember that if you are engaging in banter with audience members most of the other people in attendance will only be able to hear half the conversation which doesn't make it very interesting for them. The worst band for this I have seen were Fleet Foxes who engaged in endless banter between themselves and with members of the audience at the front much of which was off mic. I'm sure it would have worked fine for an acoustic set in an intimate venue with an audience of 50-75, but in a big 500+ capacity hall most of us had no idea what was going on. And when some of these inter-song interludes were almost as long as the songs themselves it didn't make for a very entertaining gig.

The way I look at it is, For live use, I'll take the convenience of having all my effects in a single device where the setting for each song (and the changes required within each song) can be accessed by hitting a foot switch or any supposed sonic superiority of individual pedals. That the sounds are the same every time I plug in and I don't have to worry about earth loops or noisy PSUs or individual pedals not playing nicely with each other. Also I can have exactly the EQ/distortion/chorus/delay setting I want on every single song (and change them instantly within a song) without needing multiple instances of each pedal or scrabbling around on the floor to make changes between songs. I have just four connections to make - mains via a proper IEC connector, MIDI and signal in and out. I'm set up and ready to go in under 5 minutes. Before I get my first programmable multi-effects unit in the late 80s I had a huge rack case full of non-programmable devices all controlled by an unwieldily set of foot switches and often serval minutes of fiddling between songs to set up each device with the right settings. I don't miss it in the slightest. In the studio I'll use whatever is required to get the perfect sound for the recording, but most of the time the plug-in version effects unit I use live (Helix Native) is more than adequate.

There's been a change of venue for our Manchester gig on Saturday:

Unfortunately not. This was the band mentioned in my first post in this thread that ended after me and the replacement singer had a blazing row. We did have a lot of management and record company interest and had tracks included on several compilation albums. The original singer's replacement was very nearly the daughter of a famous musician. However I did calculate a while back that the increased share of my songwriters royalties had already more than covered my portion of the costs of buying the original singer out.

The OP has at least 4 different EQ modules on their Boss GX-10 plus whatever tone controls are part of the various effects modules. That should be plenty without the need to spend extra money on something that appears to do the same job but less well.

Active DI Boxes powered by phantom power are fine if it's for your own PA. For use with an unknown PA where phantom power may not be available or may only be activated in groups of channels where it may not be appropriate for some of the other equipment connected, it is safer to use a passive DI box. All the problems I have encountered with signals from DI'd equipment not reaching the mixing desk have been down to active DI boxes. Replacing them with one of the passive DI boxes that I always carry has sorted out the problem every time.

One thing that no-one is taking into account is how less relevant "The Charts" are nowadays compared with 50 years ago especially in the UK. Back in the 70s anyone with even a passing interest in popular music would be watching TotP on a Thursday night and probably taping their favourite songs off the top 40 show on Sunday. If they were really keen they'd also be listening to the brand new chart run-down on Wednesday morning. These days does anyone even care? As well as the demise of TotP there has been a massive fragmentation of genres which means that there is no longer one (or maybe two) overall defining musical trend at any given time, which means that now songs from almost any gene have the possibility to be popular and not just what is currently flavour of the month.

Based on previous year's posts in the "How was your gig" thread it appears that quite a few us are likely to be playing this. So I thought for this year everyone playing could add the venue and time they will be on to this thread. To start us off Hurtsfall will be playing at The Berliner, 6-8 High Road, NG9 4AE at 3.00pm. Tickets for wristbands to get into the venues after 6.00pm are available here. Before 6.00pm it's free. It's also my birthday that day (if that counts for anything).

I was in a band that bought out an ex-singer's share of the song writing with a proper legal agreement and money changing hands, just so there would be no come backs should anything we wrote whilst she was in the band be successful.

Still not passive and phantom isn't always available on some PAs or can't be activated on a per channel basis, which might make some setups difficult to cable. Passive DI boxes are great because you don't have to worry about issues like this or batteries going flat. hey can sit in your equipment bag until they are required and you know they will be fine. I have 6 channels of passive DI I take to gigs for my band. That's one for everything we need and a spare. I wouldn't contemplate an active DI device unless I was in charge of the non-battery power for it.

It might if you could actually buy one.

Depending on how it is set up, you can either quantise to the nearest semitone or use pitch bend information to achieve the precise pitch being played. Controlling synths by using pitch detection has always been too much of a miss IME. Admittedly the technology has come on a long way since the early days, but at some point you are always going to run foul of the laws of physics which says that the very best pitch to synth systems still need at least one and a half wave cycles to accurately detect the note being played. On a bass guitar this means that you will probably be able to detect the latency in any note with a fast attack below open D. This is why you find lots of slow attack sounds being favoured in the demos of such systems. On top of this you need to have a much cleaner playing technique, because ghost notes, struck muted strings and lots of other things that are not noticeable in normal playing are going to introduce glitches into your synth part. When I first started looking at guitar synths I quickly discovered that modifying my playing style to suit was going to take longer than learning enough rudimentary keyboard technique to be able to play the sorts of parts I wanted to on a synth.

In so many ways this is an exact reflection of some of the graphic design jobs I have worked on. Even when the client thinks they want something new and different a lot of the time they finally decide that what they really wanted was what they already had. I once worked on what was supposed to be a major packaging redesign of a range of crisps for a well-know manufacturer of said products. For several months various options did the rounds, but what finally went into production was so similar to their previous bags that unless you placed the old and new ones side-by-side most people wouldn't have even noticed they had changed. Some of my colleague were despairing about the situation and ranting at every opportunity. I just smiled, did what I was asked knowing that every revision back to something that looked more like the original design was a couple more hours pay for me.

This is why I have completely given up on the traditional bass rig. Fine if you can guarantee to always be using your rig, but at multi-band gigs with backline sharing this is hardly ever possible. Using multi-effects I had got to the point where my rig was simply there to make my sound loud enough for me and the audience to hear, and for any gig where the bass was going through the PA what most of the audience heard was very much down to the sound engineer. Even if I bypassed the pre-amp of whatever bass rig was at the venue my sound was still being shaped by the cabs, so I've stopped using other peoples bass rigs and now go straight into the PA from my effects - currently a Line6 Helix Floor. That way I have eliminated as many uncontrollable variables for my sound as possible. For the very few gigs where there is no PA support for the bass I have an FRFR cab, that has the dual advantage of not only being far more neutral sounding that an typical bass rig, but will also fit in places on stage where there is no room for an amp and cabs. On stage so long as I can hear that I am in time and in tune with the rest of the band I am happy. I've stopped obsessing about getting a perfect sound on stage, because for the majority of gigs I do, it's simply not going to happen. Maybe if my band starts playing 1000+ venues on a regular basis I can be a bit more diva-ish! FoH I'll have a quick listen to check that my sound is in the ballp[ark of what I'm expecting and it usually is, mainly due to the sorts of gigs we play the sound engineers know what sort of bass sound I'm aiming for. And if they don't I'll play them some of my "guitar" patches and soon sorts them out! TLDR: my sound comes from the Helix. On stage I just need to be able to hear myself and the rest of the band. FoH I trust the PA to do the right job.

I've completely given up trying to get synth/filter sounds out of the bass. Even if I had devices capable of the sounds the extra amount of practice I'd need to put in in order to trigger them reliably in a repeatable fashion simply isn't worth it, when I can either play it myself on a keyboard where it will sound right every time, or hand it off to our synth player or to the backing track, who can play it even better than I can. I'm lucky in that I now play Bass VI, so if I really want a synth sounding bass I can give it to an instrument better suited to it, and play something in the guitar register instead. If I was in a band with a more traditional line-up I'd probably bring a keyboard synth for any songs that absolutely had to have synth bass parts. IMO getting the sounds right for a song is as important at rehearsal as finding the right notes to play. My band spend at least as much time in the practice room fine tuning our synth and effects sounds and the balance between the different ones we use as we do working out what to play on a song. Both are equally important, and it is essential that the sound changes are right and properly balanced and the rest of the band need to appreciate that. I find that I can get close to the right sounds on my own at home, but I know that everything will need adjusting once the rest of the band is playing and we factor that in when getting a new song ready for performing to an audience.

I see depping for bands the same way as I see my graphic design day job. I am there to serve my client. If I think that they are VERY wrong I will politely suggest an alternative. Once. If my client chooses to ignore that advice I will produce them exactly what they want without further comment, take their money at the end and thank them for it, and ask what other projects they have for me. I won't have a moan about it, because it's not worth the effort. I might even use the work in my portfolio if the client is an impressive enough name or if their brand is relevant to attracting potential new business. It's gratifying when I do produce something that I can also be proud of from a creative PoV, but first and foremost I do it for the money, so I can pay the bills. However I think it is telling that the one piece of graphics work I have produced that will live on in the public domain after I am gone is something that I did for myself and not to any client-supplied brief. So, for me music is too important for me to waste my time playing songs I don't enjoy. Aside from the fact that I'm simply not talented enough to take on any depping job, I don't want to do that. I've played in covers bands enough to know that for me it's a route to hating songs that I used to enjoy. If I was good enough to be a dep I'd play the songs, take the money and leave it at that.

In the end it's what works for you, but personally I would never entertain the idea of non-programmable pedals for live use again. You should be able to do what you need with what you already have provided you are prepared to put in the effort creating and organising the presets and then having a couple of technical rehearsals with the band to fine tune them. It will also depend on how complex the EQ changes need to be. Most of the bands I have played with have required fine tuning of the EQ for every song in order to get the bass to fit into the right sonic space created by the other instruments also changing sounds for each song. And that doesn't cover any mid-song EQ changes required for when the bass needs to be more or less prominent. Without programmable EQ I wouldn't be able to do any of this.

If you don't want to play songs that you don't like write your own.

Our next gig is on Saturday 27the September in Manchester at Fuel The Music. We're supporting the excellent St Lucifer:

Friday night saw Hurtsfall's first proper headlining gig. This was at Liquid Light in Nottingham, which is first and foremost a brewery that has a bar and occasional events such as gigs and film nights. I discovered the place as it used to be home to the best vegan burgers in Nottingham. Unfortunately they seem to have moved on and there was no food on when we played. The PA is something else - it looks home-brewed but sounds great - see the photo of support band St Lucifer: There were plenty of people about while the bands were setting up and sound checking, but only a few of them opted to come inside once the actual gig started which was a bit disappointing for opener Joshua Todd, but luckily for the us and St Lucifer it filled up as the evening went on. I don't think the location helps, although it's close to the city centre, it's on an industrial estate and quite hard to find if you've not been before. With it being our first headlining set we were able to play for longer than our normal 30-35 minutes, and dusted off a couple of songs that we haven't done for a while. While it would have been nice for a few more people to have been there, once again we were competing with a goth festival in Morecambe and some of our audience were definitely in attendance there. Still it wasn't band for our first self-organised gig and we sold a decent amount of merch afterwards. Hopefully I'll be posting some more photos of us playing later in the week when they appear on social media. Next gig is also with St Lucifer in Manchester on Saturday 27th September.

Done. However your left handed, right handed, ambidextrous question requires an option for those of use who do some things left handed and other things right hand, but can't do the left handed things right handed or vice-versa.

Message In A Bottle is from 1979 and Born to Run from 1975!

Thanks for posting those two set lists. As I suspected they are quite heavily skewed towards the first half of the decade. @hiram.k.hackenbacker I hope you do "I Think We're Alone Now" in the High NRG style of Tiffany's version otherwise it's technically a 60s cover and "Video Killed The Radio Star" was originally released in 1979 [/pedant] ;-)