mike257

They do (I'm one of the people that does the stuff) and there's only one right way of doing it, and if you're doing it wrong, you're almost certainly doing that knowingly. However, doing "that stuff" requires participation from all the people you're getting a visa for - the artists and crew have to personally fill out paperwork, visit the US Embassy in London for a visa interview and submit their passports for the visa to be added. A band that started touring the US in the late 70s/early 80s will know this and will absolutely know if they haven't done it. The visa is physically stuck inside your passport, and has a clear expiry date. If they've travelled without the correct visa, they've done it knowingly and it's on them and their team, really. All of this is moot if the visas were wrong 🤷

All the chatter I'm seeing on socials and forums seems to be focusing on the very speculative idea that they were rejected for their political views, and conveniently ignoring this point here. Going to the US to work, in any context, requires the correct visas, and a band that have been around as long as them will be well aware of it. They're expensive and time consuming to obtain, but they're a reality of touring out there. I hold an O2 visa linked to the O1 visa held by an artist I work for - even with that I can only enter to work for that specific artist and nobody else. If you visit the US and work (and playing a show counts as work) without the correct visas you are working illegally and if caught you're liable to be deported, banned from the country for 5-10 years, and ineligible for the ESTA programme (tourist visa waiver) permanently. If they've rocked up to the border without the correct visas to work, that will absolutely be the primary reason they've been denied entry, and it's on the band and their team for not having their paperwork lined up. US immigration don't muck about, even more so under the current administration, and I'd not be taking any chances going over without watertight paperwork.

I know A&H have a Custom Control app for some of their consoles but don't know if it's available for QU. With the Mixing Station custom layouts, you get a grid and can draw on/reposition/resize any controls you want, wherever you want, and you have options to limit how they operate too. Definitely worth having a little play with it.

Glad to hear you've got a solution you're happy with. I did an install some years ago for a local community centre with similar use cases. Majority of events involved one or two hand-held radio mics, a playback source on a 3.5mm jack, or a laptop hooked up to a projector. I put a Behringer XR18 in, but the big winner was building them a custom layout on Mixing Station. I made a fairly idiot-proof basic scene with some generic "safe" EQ settings, then set the app up to automatically boot in to a customs layout that only gave access to a fader and a mute button for each of the main input sources (Mic 1, Mic 2, HDMI, 3.5mm, and a stereo XLR hookup at the back of the room for visiting mixers on larger events), a fader that brought up reverb on the mics, a master fader, and a big red "reset to defaults" button that reloaded my scene in case something had gone awry. This meant the least skilled volunteer could operate the system for 95% of their requirements. The full interface was a couple of button presses away for an experienced op to use if required. You could do a similar thing tailored to your use case for any desk supported by Mixing Station (Behringer XR, X32; Allen & Heath CQ, QU, SQ; various others) and just give volunteers the tablet to use.

Suspected he might not be keen! He stays busy enough doing the bits he prefers doing. He's a wizard, that lad. I'll have to pop in and see him for a brew, it's been a while. Tom Benson is another Liverpool based tech who might be more inclined to look at that sort of thing. I'll DM you his number. Andy Free is another one - used to be the engineer in the Zanzibar and now looks after all the Jacaranda venues, very handy with repairs.

The absolute best I know is Dan Whitelock-Jones of DWJ Amps in Liverpool. He pretty exclusively works on valve stuff these days (and on his own amp builds, which are great) but it's always worth an ask. https://www.instagram.com/danwhitelockjones

https://toursupport.be https://www.backline-rental.be/ https://www.kick.be/ https://highwayholidays.eu/Backline-1 These are all in the area and have been recommended to me in the past, although I've not used them personally.

Pretty sure Snow Patrol are still selling out arenas in the UK and large theatres in the US, and Franz still comfortably do a few thousand tickets a night. I'm often surprised by how "big" bands are/carry on being when they're off my personal radar. I mixed monitors for them on a large festival in Belfast two summers ago and it was absolutely wild. They headlined the Friday night, with 10,000 kids absolutely going for it. I don't think they'll have any difficulties winning over a festival crowd here.

Drummer is an old friend of mine, hope you had a great night!

I've used bank transfer in both directions pretty extensively. I work for myself and I'm used to invoicing clients for my work and being paid by BACS, so that probably has some impact on how I feel about it, as I basically get my entire income via bank transfer, and regularly pay suppliers/freelancers that way too, but there's also no easy comeback to reverse the transaction if a deal goes wrong. On BC, as others are saying, there's usually a trail of feedback and/or community participation that can give you a clue. There's a fair few members (myself included) who were here when it was BassTalk and Bass world, so have probably been knocking around for a good 20 years at this point!

Loads of touring bands out and about with systems like this, many based around the X32 rack, although the M32C, Wing Rack, Yamaha TF Rack are also options, as is the new Allen & Heath SQ Rack, which is (IMO) the far superior piece of kit, but also a chunk more expensive. The big thing to think about is making it as quick, simple and easy to implement as possible. You're asking house engineers to tie in to their system, and to patch stage inputs via your rack, so everything should be clearly and accurately labelled, and you should absolutely provide tails from your splitter outputs to tie in to their system. You can get cheap 8 way splitters, but then you're running a bunch of additional XLR cables out of them within your rack. Most pro-built systems have a rack panel for all of your inputs with a set of internal tails within the rack for patching to your monitor kit, and a multipin output connector for attaching external tails to patch to FOH, like in the below pic (made by the brilliant Jake at SA Touring) This is more costly than the off-the-shelf 8 way units, but takes up less space, needs less external cable and connectors, and will be built to a much more robust standard. Of the rack mixers mentioned, the only ones to give you enough outputs for everyone to run stereo IEMs are the SQ Rack (12 XLR outputs) or a Midas M32C (1u rack mount mixer brain) with a Behringer S32/Midas DL32 stagerack (16 XLR outputs). You could also add additional stageboxes to an X32 rack but it'd take up more space and be more costly than the M32C and stagebox option. Whatever you go with, get the internal wiring nice and tidy and secure, and clearly label all of the inputs and outputs (on the rack panels and on your tails) with the channel number and name so it's easy for any engineer to patch through. Also, if you're getting multiple wireless IEM systems, absolutely budget for an antenna combiner (or two - each combiner can usually link four transmitters so won't run all six off one of them) and a decent paddle or helical antenna so that you're not running an antenna farm out the back of your rack. It's best practice for working with multiple sources of radio transmission and avoids issues with multiple adjacent antennas. You ideally want a single power connection to run the whole rack from too - it's easy to get hold of Neutrik D type connectors and pre-punched rack panels to take them, so you could bring out your power (Powercon), antenna (BNC), network and USB connections neatly on to a 1U panel for quick access instead of reaching around inside the rack in a dark corner of a stage. I would absolutely suggest giving your tails as a loom rather than individual cables. It's much neater and more manageable, and looms are available off the shelf in 8 way and 16 way from from various suppliers (if you didn't go down the multipin route mentioned above). If you're sharing bills with other bands, doing festival spots etc, the whole thing needs to be able to go in fast and come out even faster so everything should be approached with that in mind. The other critical thing here is to include clear information in your tech spec and make sure it's communicated when you're advancing your shows with a promoter. Most reputable venues should be able to easily accommodate what you're asking for (including sending a return/submix of drums if needed) but will be much better equipped to help you if they know in advance what you're expecting from them. Be clear about what you're providing and what you need from them, and everyone will have a smoother day with less surprises.

I use them on touring shows all the time, almost always a pair of small diaphragm condensers, but you can use LDCs, shotgun mics, or even dynamics if that's what you've got to hand (is there ANYTHING you can't point an SM57 at? There is not!) On an elevated stage I'll pop them on short stands at the left and right corners at the downstage edge, panned respectively in the artists' mix, but on a lower stage I'll often use tall stands and get them higher up to fire above the punters. I often see others positioning them to point directly at the crowd but I much prefer to angle them upwards so they're aimed at the roof to around the centre point of the room. This gets you more room vibes and less of the front row's conversations, which can be very distracting popping up in your ear mid-show. Depending on the acoustics of the room, I'll turn them down or mute them completely during soundchecks, as an empty room will have a lot more reflections bouncing back and you don't want to compensate for that the wrong way in a mix and then find yourself backpedalling once the crowd are in and the acoustics of the space change. When I'm mixing monitors, for some artists they prefer the ambients pushed up in the breaks between songs so they can feel the energy of the audience, then pulled back during songs for a more direct sounding mix. Others prefer to set a level for them and leave them, just to give a sense of space to take the edge off the directness you can feel in a clean ears mix. Everyone's got slightly different preferences here. Definitely worth experimenting with and a great way to overcome a clinical/sterile IEM sound - a little dash of room ambience can go a long way.

Balanced XLR outputs from amps should be fine. One thing to avoid is using a minijack to XLR to connect a phone/laptop to the mixer as phantom power will fry the output stage, but running from (for example) an XLR output on your bassd amp should be all good.

Absolutely, yes. It's in heavy use on pro stages everywhere. As @PinkMohawk said, a huge amount of infrastructure in touring shows is running on tactical/flexible network cable and Ethercon connectors - digital multicores, lighting control, MIDI, and sometimes analogue audio too. I used it for analogue lines on a tour with a rap artist to pick up the main and booth feeds (four channels of audio) from a DJ mixer at centre stage as it was lighter than running a 12 way stagebox out like we'd normally use for stage drops. Used it across two month-long tours, in and out every day being coiled by heavy-handed stage crew, didn't skip a beat. Had a rack panel in monitor world, and a breakout to XLR tails for the stage end. The Tourcat cable (and similar stuff available from other pro brands) is made to be flexible, lie flat on stage, and be coiled easily. You'll be absolutely fine with it. Wasn't on a drum, it coils fine just like any other other stage cable would and didn't need any special treatment. Was just tossed in a cable trunk with all the XLR and other audio bits.

What I'd say is approach it with patience and allow yourself time to adjust. The benefits are massive - for your hearing health, the clarity of the mix, and how your band sounds out front without having stage absolutely blasting with noise - but it will almost certainly be "weird" at first and take some trial and error to get right, and then more time to get used to it, moreso if you don't have a dedicated sound engineer working with you who knows their way around it. Don't be immediately put off if it's not great straight away, as it's a big change and there's a lot of variables and practice to getting it right for you.