Happy Jack

There's some bargains there, to be sure, but if you price-check a few random products they're mainly available at those prices on t'Net anyway. Just saying ...

The instant I saw that Sabine, I thought "hang on, I know that ..." Great piece of kit, that is.

Have you got any empty Marshall 8x10s floating about? They'd look great against the back wall of the pub ...

If memory serves, those hangers are held together with a couple of 1/2" pins. I wouldn't stand under that, if I was you ...

You allow other band members to touch the PA?

Touche, Monsieur Pussycat ...

Aaaaaargh! Really? Ah well, that means that mine is now vintage, rare and pre-Brexit.

Like that routerboard a lot - very neat indeed. Presumably the antennae are inside? If that works, why do so many routers have the external ones?

And then, of course, there is the Crazy 8 ...

I should also mention that the four plugs you see in use on the frontplate (Main Output L/R and MP3 Input L/R ch.17/18) were custom made for me by @obbm and can't be found in the shops! The aim is to leave as much pluggery in place permanently as I possibly can. Saves time and reduces frustration & aggravation at gigs. Those angled plugs allow me to put the cover on with everything remaining where it is.

Oh alright Stew, I'll rise to the bait! Let us start with a simple illustration of a flightcase or - more accurately, if at the risk of potentially seeming to be pedantic - a rackcase. In this case (ha ha ha, did you see what I did there? Oh well, please yourselves) it is an 8U case, for reasons that will become clear. Now let's open the front, shall we? We're going to look through the rectangular window. "Aha!", I hear you say, "What's that peeping out from the bottom of the case?". Oh look, children, it's an extending shelf with an external router on it! How exciting!!! Just pop the aerials into the appropriate position, and Robert is your Mother's brother. Well that's what she told Mrs. Snodgrass from no.38 anyway. While we're here, take a moment to let your eyes feast on the elegant and decisive use of gaffa tape as an aid to reliable performance. By getting my settings right, and then taping over various flick-switches and a number of sockets I really, really don't want to plug into by accident, I avoid accidents. What's that you say, Sooty? You want to see what happens behind all this? Oh very well. So there you are, boys and girls. Play safe, and sleep well.

Pah! I can top that! Playing at a gastropub last year, a place with the oh-so-fashionable oversized globes for lightbulbs. It's a rockabilly band so I'm on DB, but I play a Precision for a few songs in the middle of each set, and usually for the encore(s) too. We get a bunch of encores, which is nice, but then it's game over and time to swing the bass over my head as I remove it. There's a loud explosion, rather like a grenade going off, and an area about 6' square gets showered with thousands of tiny, very sharp fragments of broken glass. God knows what pressure was being used inside that bulb, but it was a really impressive end to the gig. The landlady was SO pleased, too. Luckily it was a wooden floor and could be swept. I hate to think what would have happened if it had been carpeted.

Delighted to see that 14 of those songs I have never heard. Seriously.

Slade dummer Don Powell departs Dave Hill's Slade, starts Don Powell's Slade https://www.loudersound.com/news/slade-dummer-don-powell-departs-dave-hills-slade-starts-don-powells-slade

And what does it sound like? It sounds like this:

Nah ... it'll never catch on.

Great to see this becoming a regular gig ... certainly looks good on the CV!

Disclaimer: I know nothing about any Apple products. All comments are based on use of Windows and Android. Use the external router every time you use the XR18; avoid the internal router like the plague. Routers tend to be very light & flimsy ... velcro it (like a pedal) to the top of the flightcase. Better still, mount it permanently inside the flightcase; Cat 5 networking cable is simply not designed to be plugged / unplugged frequently and will break. Use it with a laptop connected hard-wired (NOT wi-fi) to the XR18; you really do not need the aggro of a loss of wireless signal midway through a gig. Use the laptop to establish all connections & initial levels as you set up each time, then use remote devices (phones & tablets using wi-fi) to control the board during the gig. Establish a clear, logical sequence for plugging everything together and powering up the system; then stick to it at every gig. If at all possible, buy the upgraded Mixing Station X-Air Pro app to replace the free one that came with it; it's better and it's only a fiver or something. Remember to make the app purchase part of your 'Family' so that you can download it onto multiple devices. Allow for several days/weeks of pain while you get to grips with the utterly non-intuitive interface for, e.g. customising the layout for your screen. Be prepared to write down step-by-step instructions to ensure that you don't re-invent the wheel or start from scratch every few months. If you're anywhere near Harrow, come round for a tutorial. Go easy on the plug-ins and FX to start. It's a very clever piece of kit but it's worth starting with everything pretty vanilla until you know what you're doing. Be particularly careful when messing around with Compressors and Limiters, and tread extra slow if you decide to start by using the supplied pre-sets ... they don't necessarily do what you thought! A disaster, then? Far from it. Once you've cracked it, you should find the XR18 completely reliable and trouble-free. If (like us) you have a @Silvia Bluejay to sit out front and control FoH sound then these units are not only bloody marvellous but they also impress venue managers and confuse the hell out of punters. Be prepared for some good apres-gig stories.