mike257

[quote name='LiamPodmore' timestamp='1340801971' post='1709767'] [b]JAR Music [/b]- The Cavern (Liverpool) / O2 Academy Liverpool, along with the Birmingham and Islington O2 Academy Venues. [/quote] I'd personally avoid this crowd - they're from the "Buy overpriced tickets from us, sell them yourself, play for 15 minutes and make us loads of cash" school of promotion.

[quote name='D-L-B' timestamp='1340221458' post='1701419'] So, my band, alpha male tea party, finally completed and released our debut album back in April after spending about a year recording and mixing the damn thing. The entire album was recorded in our small rehearsal room by ourselves and mixed and mastered by our guitarist, Tom Peters. Since this is the finished article constructive criticism pertaining to the recordings themselves isn't really invited. I'm more putting this up for fellow BCers to hear (and possibly buy ). For those of you that choose to buy I promise to donate £1 from every sale generatred through Basschat towards the upkeep of the site. [url="http://www.alphamaleteaparty.bandcamp.com/"]http://www.alphamale...y.bandcamp.com/[/url] Thanks. Dan. [/quote] Hey fella, didn't know you were on here - I spend all of last year playing with Greg, sure he's regaled you with tales of our disastrous attempts to find band members that weren't useless. Glad you're putting him to good use! Going to catch a gig soon, new baby has been keeping me busy.

Ah, of course - I was looking on my mobile, tiny pics! The t-shirt design will easily go in one colour so shouldn't be an issue - the hoodie design could be tweaked though, although hoodies are pretty expensive to buy/print compared to t-shirts. Are any touring bands coming through your local area? Have a chat to them about venues/promoters and get it straight from somebody with experience, also means you can tap up some potential bands to share a gig with.

Is that front and rear print on the tees? The two print locations mean an extra set of screens, so double the setup costs. It's still screen-printable, just a little more expensive so will cut into your profit. Maybe one of our resident experts (Paul h is a t-shirt wizard!) can give you some advice on the best way to lower the colour count for printing. Taking this way off topic from actually booking yourself a tour here, and the great advice flying in from everywhere else - happy to help with anything tour related if I can though, feel free to PM me.

No worries, happy to help! You can usually get pretty good prices for shirts from small local places, try and stick to a single colour design if you can, every extra colour adds to the setup and print price for screen printing. If you can rope in somebody who is a canny designer you can do a lot with one colour. There's a few BC members who do it for a living if you want tips from the experts. I've usually bought about 100 at a time in a mix of sizes, you can get them pretty cheaply if you buy decent quantities, I think ours came in about £3.50 -£4 each and sold at £7 - a much better return than you'll get from those online "print on demand" places. Badges are a good cheep and cheerful one and there's a few websites that do them for a pretty low prices, as opposed to stickers which seem to be pricey for ones that look good unless you're buying enough to cover the Empire State Building from top to bottom. The other important thing I forgot to say about merch is making it visible. Too many bands say "you can buy .... from us, come and find us afterwards" and then depend on your crowd remembering what the drummer looked like and grabbing him at the bar, while the rest of you sit in the dressing room. Make it visible, have a merch table, and have somebody glued to it at all times. Being available and approachable will win you fans and friends. A good idea is a ready made display - I got two of the biggest cork noticeboards I could find, plastered them with the band's logo and then pinned/taped on all of our merch and prices. Stuck a couple of hinges on them so they would fold shut for transport (and keep the display from getting knocked about) and you've got an instant shop front that you can throw up on a table and be ready in seconds.

[quote name='charic' timestamp='1340623601' post='1707063'] I was thinking of a hotel every other night maybe... if we decide not to stay in the big city's then maybe we could get it cheaper I suppose. To be honest, it IS an advertising thing but it's more a baptism by fire for gigging [/quote] Yeah, the city centre ones aren't usually cheap, but we did a week long Academy tour and stayed either on the outskirts of the cities or in the first motorway services with a Travelodge along the route to our next show. Don't think we ever drove more than 40 mins after a gig, and there was only one night where we had to go slightly in the 'wrong' direction to bag a 9 quid room. Routing the tour as sensibly as you can (not crisscrossing back and forth across the country!) is really important in terms of keeping your budget in check. Fuel will likely be your single biggest expense on the road. Make sure all of your communication to venues and all of your promo material marks this out as being a tour to promote the album - one thing I've been advised many times is that if you're touring, it should be [i]for a purpose. [/i]What are you selling/promoting? Just gigging for the sake of it is a missed opportunity. As soon as you have your schedule in place, start looking at doing some localised promotion in each area. Are there local websites/magazines/Facebook groups covering your genre or the local scene in general? In Liverpool we have a couple of free mags that are distributed to bars, venues etc around the city that cover the local scene, and general and genre-specific Facebook pages, some of which are pretty active and full of useful contacts. Anything you can do to engage with people through these channels, make some friends and even get some help with local feet-on-the-ground promotion is a good thing. The localised promotion backs up the next big one. Merch. Get it, make it look good but don't overspend on it - you need to price it affordably enough to have people take it home, and enough of a profit margin that it is worth your while. Reasons why this is important are two-fold. People have short memories, so you ideally want everyone who walks through the door of the show to go home with [i]something[/i] that has your name on. Make this as easy as possible for them - it's good to have t-shirts and CD's (price them cheaper in a bundle eg. £7 shirts, £4 CD, tenner for both) for the spenders, badges for those with pocket change to spend, and flyers liberally scattered around the venue (with agreement from venue staff, don't tick anyone off with your mess!) for the tightarses in the crowd. The other reason merch is so important is cash flow. Every t-shirt you sell is a meal for a band member or two, or a chunk of the petrol to your next stop. A few last minute t-shirt sales have bailed me out on the road more times than I care to remember. Put someone sensible in charge of the money, have an ongoing float and write down everything you sell. Only spend what you need to get by - if you're going to take food/beer spends out of the tour kitty agree a daily limit and stick to it. Breaking even on a tour is hard work but can be done. Basically, think hard about what you want to get out of it. At the very least, it'll be a week long crash course in gigging, and a great time with your mates, but a bit of planning and extra work can hopefully make it more than that and bring some new fans, contacts and positive attention to your band. Exciting stuff!

If you don't want to rough it in the van and can all save a few quid to chip in, look for a Travelodge within a sensible (say 30 min?) drive of your venue, pref on the route to your next one. If you book early enough they do them stupid cheap, sometimes as little as 9 quid for a room that comfortably sleeps three. We occasionally squeezed six of us into one room with some stealthy sneaking in, but we did a week long tour where we had two hotel rooms every night, was luxury to get a post-gig shower and a decent kip. As for your set length, you'll probably find that as an unsigned band without an established national fanbase, you'll be booked on nights with a bunch of local unsigned bands of (hopefully) similar genre, and won't be treated any differently to them, so probably 4 bands doing 30 mins each or something similar - I'd be surprised to see anyone on a bill like that given an hour set. It'll be the best week of your life though!

Nice one! Yeah, think the 3/4 inch are the original size, found some ebay ones. Did get an email back from Loud but they weren't much help!

[quote name='0175westwood29' timestamp='1340211099' post='1701180'] no presets so there out even if the are nice! andy [/quote] If you could live with two presets - a subtle reverb for general use and a great big huge long one (for example) - you could pick up a used 'big box' Holy Grail and mod it. Came across a pretty cool and simple mod, just need to add a second pot, LED and footswitch and you can set two different reverb times and stomp between them. Probably less than a tenners worth of parts and I just missed a big box Grail on eBay for about 55 quid so a good low budget option.

[quote name='EskimoBassist' timestamp='1340219915' post='1701374'] Used M9s are around £200, I got mine in mint condition for 220 posted. [/quote] Really? Christ - maybe it's time for me to sell some pedals! I could probably offload all the stuff it would replace and have nearly enough to grab one at that price. Food for thought!

Or something like this if you want to stick with stomps: [url="http://www.moenfx.com/gec9.html"]http://www.moenfx.com/gec9.html[/url] Has 9 switchable loops, the last three of which can be used for A/B switching, as amp channel switches or as ordinary loops. There's more expensive solutions that do a similar thing (Ground Control unit with a couple of racked-up GCX switchers) but this is only about £230 and would definitely make switching your crazy setup more manageable!

[quote name='dood' timestamp='1340287832' post='1702334'] I'd suggest, if you want simplicity yet the ability to program sounds, grab a couple of really nice drive pedals then buy yourself TC Nova System to take care of EQ, pitch and time based effects. I use an additional baby size MIDI controller to call up ten different patches instantly. If you need more routing options for pedals, i'd encourage you to grab a second hand TC G-System. [/quote] Indeed, consolidating things seems like a good way to go. Guitarist buddy of mine has just gone from a giant board full of stomp boxes to a Mesa Triple Rec (which is giving him all the drive sounds he needs) and a TC G Major 2 for all of his mod/reverb/delays. All controlled from a MIDI box that switches his amp channels and effects patches, and lets him tap tempo too. I'm off to his practice room some time soon to tweak it into tone heaven with him!

I wasn't a massive fan of my Ampeg 115 - I used to have the 410/115 stack and found the 115 pretty weak in comparison to the 4x10. No direct experience of the Orange bass cabs but I've played with a few guitarists using the Orange stuff and they're probably my favourite guitar cabs, sound huge and very well built. If I had the dollar I'd have one sitting under my guitar head.

Hola folks, My SVT610HLF had its front feet bumped off it in transit (not by me) quite some time ago and I've been meaning to replace them for ages - finally getting round to it! Can any Ampeg cab owners do me a solid and measure the height of the feet so I make sure I order the nearest match for the originals. Can't find direct replacements online and having a wonky cab sucks! Cheers all, Mike

I'm undecided between insanity and stupidity! Do all these options serve a purpose in your band? Will you really want to [i]mix[/i] all of those channels together? Four full range signals with a different stack of effects on each is likely to be a sonic mess once you blend it, not to mention a snakes nest of phase issues. I'd be inclined to think about what you're most likely to want active simultaneously and come up with a set of switch-in-and-out-able loops that tick your boxes. It's easy enough to knock up a Loop A/Loop B/Bypass footswitch, you could have one covering the drive options at the beginning of your chain, one covering off some of the modulation. It'd surely save you cash and complexity to try something like that rather than buying 27 compressors and 13 EQ pedals to have parallel channels that you may never blend. If you're going to spend that kind of dollar you could just buy one of each pedal, rack 'em and get a Ground Control system on the go, that could handle your stomp boxes, and also MIDI switching on something like a G-Major for all your mod/reverb/delay. At least it'd be a bit easier to use that way, although you'll have to sell a kidney!

Can your budget stretch to a used Line6 M9? Tons of reverb sounds, and definitely has the wacky, ambient out-there bases covered. Guitarist I know uses one for all of his 'verb effects and gets some amazing results. Obviously, it does tons of other stuff too, so will find multiple uses if you're an effects-heavy player. If they're too far out of your budget, the M5 has (as far as I know) all of the same effects on board, just in a much smaller footprint and is less easy to hop through presets on the fly.

I wouldn't totally write off the Joyo - I have the Ultimate Drive (Fulltone OCD clone) and the delay and they're both very good for the price. The Ultimate Drive is doing pretty much all of the dirty work on my guitar board at the moment.

I was just coming along to suggest that! Patchmix doesn't always make it obvious where the right button is!

I've just had Owen Electronics recommended to me by a mate who had his Stereo Memory Man fixed recently - also make their own pedals which I've heard good things about. EDIT: And my faulty Deluxe Memory Boy is in the post to him as we speak. Had a good chat to him about my pedal, his pedals, possible mods and things, seems a knowledgeable bloke. Will report back when I've got a working pedal in front of me!

This is one for all you pedal experts - the only expensive pedal I own in amongst my cheap and cheerful board has packed in! When the pedal is active I still get my clean guitar tone but nothing is coming back through the delay signal - if I turn my blend to 100% wet I get either a load of noise and crackle, or nothing at all. Had a quick Google and haven't found answers elsewhere as yet, so any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Can't afford to replace this one!

Is it improper to chime in at this point and say that I've got an ME-50B for sale? Link is in my signature below

[quote name='JakeBrownBass' timestamp='1339497260' post='1689204'] I'm on tour with a Michael Jackson tribute at the moment and getting great results with a Moog Little Phatty. [/quote] Wow, awesome gig to get, I tip my hat sir. So many classic songs and excellent baselines!

The Ampeg SVT610HLF is a great cab, but quite different from the 810 - it doesn't share the 'infinite baffle' construction, and has a port designed to kick out some big bottom end. Will have more prominent lows than the 810 but lacks the mid hump that defines that tone. It is a great cab in its own right though, and is a nice compromise on size/portability, so certainly worth trying out.