Al Krow

Yeah - that's going to be tricky if you're standing at the back and your bandmates are turning themselves up during the gig and getting louder and louder during the gig causing things to become unbalanced, rather than them having the discipline to leave their sound levels where they were at sound check. Sounds like a band chat is needed to point out what's happening, and see if you can get them on board? You're pretty good at recording gigs so that should hopefully help in getting the message across? And maybe another option is for you to stand nearer the front? You were sounding pretty good and in balance on that clip you posted recently with your new DJI camera - was that at the start of a gig? Good luck!

I've now got a set of Sonicfoam tips for my KZ ZARs based on your recommendation thanks Alex - they seem pretty good value (as are the ZARs). And I'm hoping your enthusiasm for IEMs rubs off on my crew when you're depping for us on Friday! 🙂

I kinda get what you're saying. The key point for me was what you said in your post - the band who sounded terrible had "no real out front mix". That sums up the issue in a nutshell! The starting point for any gig has got to be how the band sounds out front to the audience i.e. the FoH mix, right? Sorting out what it's sounding like on stage / via monitors or IEMs is then a separate issue which is obviously also important. Do you guys play a song at, or close to, gig volume during sound check with one of you out front listening to what the FoH mix is sounding like? We've found our FoH sound has been improved a lot by putting as much as we can through the PA - the guitar is finally not stupidly loud and in balance with everything else. We're also getting much less feedback from not having backline. The most common complaint we used to get was "your singer can't be heard over the band", that also now seems sorted, so all in all a very positive journey. In the main line-up for the band 3 of us are using (or planning to use) IEMs and the guitarist who's not keen has a small monitor for his guitar and is standing pretty close to a PA speaker which gives him pretty good monitoring for the rest of the band.

IEMs make really good sense when you have a silent stage, or at most acoustic drums and no backline, and put everything through the PA to get a really nicely balanced FoH sound. It's pretty common in the function band scene. If you're using backline then, agreed, there's much less need for IEMs for the instrumentalists. The vocalists obviously need to be able to hear themselves and be heard by the band but a small stage monitor should deal with this. I don't think how good the two bands you mention sounded had anything much to do with one using IEMs and the other not though? Much more likely to be down to how good the two bands are. As you said, your mates (i.e. the better) band use IEMs when the need arises - I'd be very surprised if IEMs made them play / sound worse.

"will be great"...and won't be cheap! But then if folk are prepared to pay 3Leaf prices then fair enough, there's demand for a quality filter (although did anyone mention EBS recently? 😅) That thought then just made me wonder how common filters are on pedal boards? We're probably going to agree that drive/fuzz will be be the most common effect, but would filters come in second? Or get pipped by chorus and octavers? Dunno! (I'm not thinking of EQ and compression/limiters as being "effects" in this context).

Sounds great! Guessing being digital it will come with the ability to store several presets, which would be ideal when playing with different basses and swapping between up and downsweep?

Had a Stomp (twice!). Will defo be checking out the MS-60B+ ie the souped up version of the 2013 MS-60B

[Deleted comment: a much more useful / straightforward suggestion by @gazhowe below 😊]

Brilliant! Clearly could do with a bit of make-up gain applied to one of them though? And the saturation looks way too clean! 😅

Let us know if it's living up to (our) hype!

Nice! What does it sound like? 😀

Wingman – Ninjafox Engineering Maybe worth checking this contraption out which was recommended by @jaythemusicguy and looks useful as an alternative to midi?

Fyi I much prefer the Tonelib software, which is also free, to Zoom's own patch editing software. They've done a great job! It's something I'm going to greatly miss when I get the MS-60B+

Obviously too cheap - just had my order cancelled and a full refund paid! Ah well...

...in fact, because of your post @dave_bass5, I've just seen a mint used G2-4 on Reverb at a "let's pay you to it try out" price (just £55 inc. P&P.) and couldn't resist it!

I'd had the exact same thought!

Good shout...you know that the MS-60B+ is coming out in a couple of months as the replacement for the 60B which was originally released back in 2013? Might be a nice one to upgrade to down the line - will also have the same dinky footprint but the upgraded chipset found in the B2-4. I'm looking forward to getting mine 😊

That's fair Russ, but I think the counter is that sound to light can give a band some additional visual energy for the audience? No? Having said that: - lighting is a missed trick for many bands and certainly not an area of great expertise for most; - our lighting rigs tend to be fairly basic (and yet another thing for the put upon bassplayer to have to sort!).

I totally get you not wanting to be too reliant on an audience member - we just stand mount our camera and try to remember to stop it going into standby mode every 30 mins!

That all makes sense. So we are not hearing the audio from the DJI itself, just the video?

Agreed - that's very decent image and sound quality! A 1" chip does seem to be the magic number for indoor low light gigs. Given the cost did you consider getting something like one of the Sony a6000 series with its APS-C chip + a Rode stereo mic, which combined will be in a similar price bracket? Here's some low light footage from our gig on Fri night for you and Russ to give some comparison of that set up - Al Krow (@al_krow) • Instagram photos and videos

Makes a lot of sense. Human hearing doesn't typically go below 20Hz so anything below that is just subsonic high-energy crud! High passing / low cutting those sub sonic frequencies will leave the subs free to focus on the 30Hz+ range which is as low as a 5 string bass goes anyway. It seems to me that would always make sense in a pub venue which is what this thread is about. Just wondering whether it would also hold true in a larger dance club situation where the punters are enjoying "feeling" the bass?

Nice board Lee! Know what you mean about the EBS filter. I've recently got one and I can't recall another filter pedal that's done such a good job for the money for me. I like it as much as my previous 3Leaf Proton Mk4 and it's a fraction of the price. The Q dial adds a really nice touch.

While you're at it maybe give the Q-Tron filter a try out on it. Ok so it doesn't match my new all time favourite (EBS IQ) dedicated filter pedal, but it's not bad!

@Woodinblack - just pulling you onto this thread, as your point maybe of wider interest. If you still have a B1-4 then worth adding the ZNR sim to your patches - it's definitely part of the signal chain within your created patches. I've got it on a pretty heavy duty ZNR setting and it does make a really positive difference.