mike257

The RCF mixers in this range are really short on mic inputs and that just makes them a non starter for me. I honestly don't think you can best the XR18 for the price. I have an Allen & Heath SQ5 in my own stock, and regularly tour with Digico and Midas consoles, but for little "chuck it in the back of the car" gigs the XR is a great solution. I've got mine in a shallow rack case, and I've drilled out the rack ears and fitted a Powercon input and link out to chain to other kit, and a 13a socket to charge a tablet that I leave a USB plug in. I've got a little TPlink mini router velcroed in the back, and the rack lid has a zip compartment where the tablet and cables live. Everything in one small light box and a great portable solution for recording too.

It's not just one band they've gone after - I've got a few mates who are in "Pearl Jam UK", previously called Pearl Jammer. They've been a (very very good) working PJ tribute for over ten years, are genuine massive fans of the band, and everything they do is very very clearly marketed as a tribute show. They've had exactly the same legal smackdown sent their way as the other tribute that seem to have had all the press over it. Someone in Pearl Jam HQ has obviously decided to turn the lawyers loose and just go hunting for tribute bands. I don't think anybody sees anything put out by a tribute act and confuses it for the original (although a news article about PJ did once run a photo of my mate Kev "being" Eddie Vedder on stage instead of the real Eddie by mistake 🤣). More often than not, tribs are superfans of the original artist so it's even more of a kick in the teeth. I'd find it hard to argue that they're harming the brand of the real deal.

Used to run a soul/Motown function band that used a lot of does and the regular frontman and I had a pretty well worked out set of hand signals that we both used to lead the rest of the band - ones to indicate the chorus (a C shape), repeats of the current section (wave your finger in a circle), that the end was nigh (a clenched fist held up meant we're all ending after this bit), or to drop the dynamics down for a section (frantically gesturing downwards 🤣). Very handy, could be quickly explained and saved a lot of fuss when short notice deps were involved. To take it to extremes, I mixed monitors in 2019 for an artist with very exacting requirements and we had a complex language of hand signals for everything from turning up and down individual band members to increasing/decreasing reverb times in her IEM to adjusting the tonal balance of her vocal sound (with signs for bass, mid and high end). Took some remembering but was very effective for quick communication!

That's a very bass player friendly set of dimensions!

I'm running a Surface Pro 4 from 2015 (the tiny screen in the pics) with a dock that has two MiniDisplayPort outputs. Runs the extra screens without any fuss at all. There's the occasional bit of scaling confusion when you drag something from one screen to another but for the most part it's worked effortlessly with no noticeable impact on performance so far.

I've just built myself a studio desk at home as I'm doing more post production mixing now we're not allowed to gig. I was given the bay window space, with the strict directive that it wasn't to protrude in to the room. Think I've squeezed as much out of it as I can here! The two end bays under the monitor shelf are sized so that I can add rack strip if I want to fit kit in there in future. Going to build a small guitar rack to hold two or three off to one side too.

I was looking at this, chucked in the extra tenner to get the full Lindell channel strip, seemed like a good deal! Haven't tried it yet but it might break my habit of using Waves SSL E Channel on absolutely every track 🤣

I've got about 8 AKG D5 in my mic stock, they're belters for the price. However, regarding this whole phantom power issue - I can categorically tell you that no matter what someone at Roland may have told you, an SM58, or any other dynamic mic, does not require phantom power and engaging it will make literally zero difference to the sound your mic makes. Phantom power is for dynamic mics and active DI boxes that actually require that DC voltage to function. Applying it to mics that don't need it shouldn't damage them, but also shouldn't alter their performance in any way, with the exception of some old school ribbon mics, which will be toasted by it.

I got the red one from Kenny's Music for a tenner. There was a thread in here at the time and half the forum seemed to buy one. Was a few months back, don't know if they're still stocking them at that price now!

Good to see your collection still being put to good use, glad the DM has proved a worthwhile investment! I'd highly recommend the SQ. I'm a big dLive fan, and you can see the lineage in it. Sounds wonderful and is incredibly powerful for the price and size. Was a bit of a punt getting a new console given the state of the industry this year but already had a few jobs in that I couldn't have done without it (without paying to hire in) so I'm feeling slightly less regret as each week passes! How's this year been for you?

I got one of those little Yamaha things with the daft name (Sessioncake?) that everyone here was jumping on a while ago. Handy little box for practicing, although I've not used it as much as I thought I would.

I thought this thread was going to be about spotting notable bassists on public transport!

Sad times this month, finally parted with one of my 01v, and the second is up for sale! I have got this little beauty in now though - picking up a bit of streaming and recording work in the absence of any gigs so it made sense to stop hiring in and get something more capable!

Might be late to the party, but if you want to do it with off the shelf parts yourself and spare the expense of custom, you could use Neutrik Powercon rather than C13, then you can get everything in standard D-type panel mounts, with the added bonus of a power connector that can't be accidentally whipped out of your rack.

I used to have a 6u with an SVT3, rack tuner, wireless, and a 1u power distributer/rack light, only had to plug in power and the speaker cable and I was good to go. Then I got a Genz Benz Shuttle that could fit in a gig bag pocket and sacked it all off 🤣

The kick pedal is usually centre of the rack on the electronic kits, so the snare is usually sitting roughly equidistant between the kick pedal and the hi hat pedal, which is about right. Putting the snare centre would be like sitting it on top of your kick drum!

This won't work!! So, MIDI connections don't actually carry any sound. They just send instructions between devices. For example - if I connect a keyboard to a sound module using MIDI, when I play middle C on the keyboard, it sends a message to the sound module telling it to play a middle C. No sound goes down the cable, just instructions. It can be used to allow one piece of equipment to play sounds on another, or to control settings/functions, change patches etc. You can get MIDI fader controllers that can control the faders in you recording software, or MIDI pads that can play the drum sounds in your sampler. It's a language to allow your pieces of equipment to talk to each other. Your USB keyboard is talking MIDI to your computer, but over a USB connection. You can't connect MIDI to a mic input, or to anywhere else that sound comes in and out. You can only connect a MIDI port to another MIDI port.

If he's a beginner drummer, I'd get his tutor (or of he doesn't have one, a sensible drummer) to come round and help with the layout of the kit. Electronic kits allow for things to be positioned much closer together and in different spots than you can manage on a real kit, and I've seen plenty with pedals, pads and cymbals in positions that bear no relation to a real kit. If you can get the kit set up in a way that's reflective of a "real" one, it'll make the eventual transition to acoustic drums much easier and stop him picking up bad habits/bad posture by playing in the "wrong" place.

Another Reaper user here. Main attraction for me is that it's very resource-light (will happy chug away on a fairly basic spec computer) and very stable. My main use for it is capturing live recordings, where it needs to just work, and that's exactly what it does. As far as editing video - you won't find much in the way of software that does both well, because they're different tasks with different demands and workflow. Video editing is much more demanding of your computer than most audio tasks. If you're trying to do both at once, especially if you're doing a lot of processing/plugin useage on your audio, you'll be taxing your system. I'd be inclined to use the right tool for the job - finish your audio and do a final mix in a DAW, and throw that mix in to a video editor where you aren't asking the system to do anything extra other than playing a single file with no live processing.

Noooooooooooo! Mellon Collie & The Infinite Sadness is one of the few double albums that make me want to turn down the lights, clamp a pair of decent headphones round my ears and just disappear in to it. How an album with X.Y.U., Thru The Eyes Of Ruby and Stumbeleine on it (back to back!) can be samey is beyond me. Yes, the singles on their own would have been a great record, but it would have been the worse for what it would have lost.

It's definitely a weird phenomenon with rock music fans that they're surprised to find top flight musicians from "less worthy" genres are actually extremely talented.

Nobody musical in my family and my parents thought pursuing music was a terrible idea. I started playing guitar at 13, and after a few months on a borrowed acoustic, asked for an Epi Les Paul Special II for Christmas, on offer from Soho Soundhouse for £99. "Can't you find a cheaper one. It's not like you can really play it anyway" was my Dad's response. When I wanted to take music for my GCSE options at 14, the blocks were put on by my parents in collusion with the head of year "You can't read music now, there's no point carrying on studying it". Didn't stop me playing, and a few years later my shitty unsigned band ended up being one of the first shitty unsigned bands to be offered a headline tour of O2 (or Carling as they were back then) Academy venues. With my parents still nonplussed, I was pressed to stop chasing my dreams and ended up at 21 working with my dad at the same company he'd worked for since he was 15 years old, and the band folded shortly afterwards. Seven years of increasingly dull corporate misery later, engaged, with an infant son and a second one on the way, I took a chance, to my parent's sheer horror, and left the sensible job to make a living from music. Until COVID struck, I'd managed to sustain a career for eight years, although I do very little bass playing now and primarily work as a sound engineer and tour manager. I don't see my parents any more, but when I landed the biggest gig of my career last summer, touring as a monitor engineer for an artist who's music was always played in our house growing up, I finally got some acknowledgement, with a one word comment from my dad on a post on my company's Facebook page after mixing the main stage headline slot at Boomtown Festival - "Congratulations". That was it. I didn't feel compelled to reply!

Had a set for years that's migrated across various basses and always sounded great

If you enjoyed learning Sir Duke, you could stay with Stevie and add I Wish and Master Blaster to the list. Both fun lines to play. There was an isolated bass part of the original Sir Duke line posted on here a little while ago, worth looking that up for a little listen!

Yep. The reality for small to medium sized venues is that you need a pretty well packed house to break even. When you slash capacity to 20% but you also need more staff in to enforce distancing measures, you don't have to be a genius to realise the numbers won't work.