mike257

Is that guy with the gun and the villainous 'tache Big Beef Chief? 🤣

Cool - if the desk is up there with you, you don't need anything heavy duty for musicians to do monitor mixes, as you're never going to be more than a few metres from it on stages that size. Best practice is to run on 5ghz rather than 2.4, hide your SSID, get the antenna where there's no line of sight obstructions. If you're particularly worried about congestion you can use a free WiFi analyser app to see which channels are in use at the venue and change the wireless channel you're operating in to a clear one but at that kind of distance with those stage sizes you should have no bother. If you want to go pro for peace of mind, Ubiquiti make some great enterprise grade access points, but most domestic access points and routers will do the job in your case.

What size of venues are you playing? Is the desk at FOH or on stage with you?

The drummer is making a solid effort to inject a bit of energy in to proceedings, but he's definitely up against it there!

I think this is far more common that people would imagine. I worked with a pretty big name American artist a couple of years ago, band are all ridiculous top class players, some with a list absolutely huge names on their CVs. They're doing weddings/functions and regular church gigs when they're not on the road. An ex-manager of another band I work with runs a very high end function band agency in London and same story, loads of top class session players with huge pop credits. It's definitely eye opening when you get on the inside of it. I do a lot of tour management so I juggle the budgets for the shows. I think back to the bands I idolised as a teenager, the ones I thought "that's where I'd love to be in a few years", and I now know they will all have been slogging their guts out in knackered vans, sleeping in stinky poo hotels and barely making any money at all. As a kid, if their album was on the shelves in HMV and they were selling out 300 cap clubs, I thought they were living the dream!

Too many function gigs in the year or two after it came out completely killed any hope of me ever enjoying Get Lucky 🤣

The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion

It's a while since I've dabbled but I don't think Schism is too tricky, from what I remember.

I'd also go listen to some isolated bass tracks from famous recordings - there's stuff on YouTube from James Jamerson, McCartney and many more. When you hear all the buzz, finger noise and string clanks on iconic bass performances that you can barely perceive once they're sat in a mix, you'll feel better about your own! Analysing your own playing on an isolated recording is a great way to improve but without context you can also go right down a rabbit hole and best yourself up far too much!

His bit in his first stand-up DVD, Cosmic Jam, on how cockney music influenced the great classical composers, is absolute brilliance. Love his musical bits.

I know Jon from Conan, lovely dude. We both do splitter van hire in the same area so have passed gigs back and forth over the years. The man certainly has good taste in giant fuzzy amps!

I've heard this from a fair few people. Seems common that folk are tracking and editing elsewhere then throwing the audio across to Mixbus for mixing. Sceptical as to whether it'll give me anything I'm not getting from sticking Waves SSL channels everywhere in Reaper but might give it a go!

You must have picked up some freebies along the line - looks like the Classic Equaliser is the only one that comes free when you download the CS pack. I got the 76 in the free offer, and had a code for the EQual from Bedroom Producers Blog that I'd not got round to activating - everything else is inviting me to give them some cash!

Hadn't realised there was other free ones in the T Racks bundle. I'll have a dog through that. The 76 is great!

Bandcamp, or see if the artists have their own store on their website.

Top work! Looks and sounds great.

Yeah, if it's just for one specific band and it ticks your boxes, then it's all good. In a more traditional band setup or with a bigger group, it'd get restrictive pretty quickly. I run a small production company so mine has to be flexible - goes out (or did do!) on all sorts of small gigs, function bands, corporate events, and I've even been able to squeeze a 10 piece soul band through it without too much fuss.

I think it says more about the dreadful standards of quickfire internet journalism these days, that someone writing an article about a famous bloke fails to make sure they're using a picture of the right person! I absolutely agree that IP rights are immutable and that the control of their use sits with the owner, and I agree that the owner of said IP has every right to act to protect it. I'm also aware that it's an important part of trademark law that you have to demonstrably act against infringement or risk having your failure to act used against you in a future trademark case. I do think, for a group of artists that have made it their business to stand up against corporate interests that they disagree with, it doesn't sit very well as a way to treat people and could have been handled in a more sensitive and constructive manner.

Thanks for the post. I'll have a proper watch through that when I've got time. James Eade is very highly respected in the live production industry and runs a lot of training courses on temporary electrical installation for events, amongst other things. Anything coming from him will be spot on.

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.