Happy Jack

We've just played six gigs with three bands on two different instruments at two venues in four days. Will re-engage with Basschat later!

Real world difference in size & weight of active cabs isn't what some people think. 15s are bigger & heavier than 12s, 12s than 10s, bit not that much. Future proof! Go 15s!

Have you tried looking in the "Live PA" section?

“The Gibson Garage in Nashville has had an extraordinary impact on the music scene in addition to becoming a global music destination and we are thrilled to bring the Garage to London.” A shop selling over-priced, badly-made guitars is now a "global music destination"? In your dreams, mate ...

Posted this week by Ron Carter ...

Given the number of times I've been told by 'those who were there' that the bands used to get the same money then as today - only it went WAY futher then, of course - it was quite a relief to hear that this 4-piece covers band was going out for £43. 😱

Terrific and very honest 1976 documentary. 29 minutes well spent.

Comment dit-on "Barefaced" en français ? Demander un ami... 😉

Given the age group, I'd suggest start by researching skiffle. The songs the skiffle boys chose to 'rock up' in the 50s were largely established popular songs from the preceding 20 years.

The Glitter Band. Oops.

Yes, I wondered that too ...

It happens to the best of us ... and yes, that IS Ringo Starr at the back.

It has taken me FAR longer than it should have to realise that the LiveTrak series will work only with iOS. Me and my bands are totally Androided ... there's no way we're going to move over to ruddy Apple just so we can buy a particular mixer. It's a shame because @Silvia Bluejay and I have a LOT of Zoom kit and we really rate their stuff, so it's really silly of them to turn iOS into a ghetto for this product.

"This product is currently not available for purchase."

There's a long-established saying in English ... form follows function. So, what's the function? What will you use this second amp for, and where? Bedroom practice, studio recordings, pub gigs or football stadiums (yes, I know its stadia but many people don't), whatever your answer it will inform the advice you will receive.

Nice one @ratman, do you also use the record-multitrack-to-USB function at all?

Understood, but once you get past £500 (the XR18 seems to be £579 at the moment) you're not in cheap territory and the £845 for the Soundcraft actually looks like VFM to me, given the functionality and ease of use. Our XR18 is still working fine and we're in no hurry to dash out and buy another wireless mixer, but I'm getting our Plan B ready for the day after the XR18 dies. There's an old-school Yamaha MG12 in the back of the car to deal with the gig where it actually happens, you understand ...

I've read through this thread with great interest, but like @Al Krow I'm reluctant to spend well over £500 on a wireless system. And I can't really avoid mentioning to @peteb that the weakest link in my chain is ... erm ... well, me actually. With my rock'n'roll band every gig is a doubling gig and I need something different to be happening at the amp for double bass and electric bass. That means that wireless solutions get doubled, doubled in number of units, doubled in cost. Much as I'd like to go the Shure route, buying two of those buggers is a bridge too far. I've had easily the best results (out of the many, many solutions I've tried) with the X-vive U2 units. They're cheap enough that running two pairs of them isn't much of an issue, the rechargeable batteries are always good for a 3-hour gig plus encores with much-reduced 'green' issues, they're tiny and really simple to use, and they work just fine at 80%, maybe 90% of the gigs I play. But every now and then we get something like last night. The editing here is designed to draw the viewer's attention away from the issue so watch for me getting all distracted. At that point we were 35 minutes into the first set and there had been no issues at all. So what happened? Well we can't know for sure but I did notice that a group of half a dozen youngsters came into the Club pretty much then and sat quite close to the band, mobiles in use. An easy finger to point but I don't recall anything else changing. At the end of the set I shifted to cable leads for the rest of the gig, and this morning I put a Line 6 receiver that I had knocking about (once owned by @PaulKing) on my pedal board so that I can shift over to it mid-set if it happens again. The combined cost of both sets of X-vive stagebugs PLUS both high-quality cable leads PLUS the Line 6 wireless unit is still less than the cost of the Shure ...

How dare you stand in front of the singer? Bassists! Know your place!

Happens to me all the time. By far the most frequently-asked question is, "Is that a cello?".

Yes, but that thread runs to 13 pages, very few of which deal with serious rivals to the XR18. 🙂

No one else is asking, so I will. What about the alternatives to the Behringer XR18? As near as I can make out, the Midas MR18 is identical and one is a clone of the other. The Mackie DL16S seems curiously limited for such an expensive piece of kit (paying for the badge?). The one that catches my eye is the Soundcraft Ui24R. It ain't cheap, but it seems to tick all our boxes. Does anyone have any experience with any of these? Or any that I've missed?

@Silvia Bluejay and I bought an XR18 about five years ago and have since used it at about 250 gigs with Silvie as sound engineer sitting out front with a tablet. (It would have been more, but there was some sort of virus thingy going about for a while.) Once you have it set up and fully operational it's great, but by God! do you have to go through some hoops to get there. The built-in router is (was? five years ago?) notoriously unreliable so the first thing we needed to do was to buy a bog-standard home-use router and plumb that in to use instead. Then we needed to configure it to do what we wanted to do, and neither of us is a trained PA person, so I found some very helpful How-To videos on YouTube and did an absolute monkey see monkey do operation to get our XR18 configured EXACTLY the way the guy on the video did it. Hey ... worked for me. 😉 Bear in mind that at no stage during this operation did I have a clue what I was doing, which means that I've never since dared to fiddle with any parameters or settings at all. Then we needed to have an appropriate app to control it on the tablet. It came with an app, natch, but that is (was? five years ago?) notoriously unreliable so we immediately upgraded to X-Air Pro. The app is a perfect match for the XR18 because once you have it set up and fully operational it's great, but by God! do you have to go through some hoops to get there. 🤣 The user interface is a farce and utterly counter-intuitive ... nothing works the way you'd expect. But eventually you get there. And then come the benefits. Lots of them, including having the band on stage with backline but turned down to sensible levels, always having a perfect mix for the audience, having the right volume for the venue song by song and set by set (as the crowd grows or shrinks, changing the ambience in the room), and of course being visibly very professional and impressing the hell out of pub landlords and venue managers. Silvie now runs the XR18 with a 3-piece rock'n'roll band (two vocalists), a 3-piece covers band (three vocalists), and a 5-piece soul band (four vocalists + sax). Selecting the right Scene to use at each gig takes seconds. Heaviest use is obviously the soul band, which needs 12 channels. Only the drummers routinely have monitoring, though we sometimes do that for the lead vocalist in the soul band too. Although the XR18 is controlled by a tablet (with a smartphone as the emergency fallback) the laptop next to me on stage is always hard-wired to the XR18 too ... there is no wireless/router/hacker/EMP catastrophe that can kill our PA entirely.