Jack

After a whole year with no gigs and auditioning for nine bands, joining six, only to quit four of them, I started 2026 with a gig! New years day at Tynemouth squash club. My new brit pop project Rewind played our first gig to sadly mixed reviews, we knew we weren't at gigging level but the club had been let down by another band and 3/4 of the band (not me, I'm fat) are members so we were drafted. Some major blunders (me shouting chords at the guitarist during a disastrous 'I predict a riot' was a highlight) but overall I'm not too beaten up about it. We knew we weren't really ready and there were more good moments than bad, there's definitely the bones of a good band there. Rig: G&L tribute sb2, shure wireless, quad cortex, pair of qsc k12.2. Hpf: 130hz Shoes: hiking boots Rating: 4/10.

Oh that's a given but ideally for snagging rather than expecting to have problems. It would be nice to have a plan going into that.

Yeah I will once again be taking on the role of soundman in this group and when we do it will be with my nice digital mixer that has a lot of control, through nice speakers, in nice rooms. Unfortunately the rehearsal rooms we use tend to have crummy analogue mixers with '3 band at best' eq per channel and nothing else. It's not that I don't know how to use a DI, it's that I don't know if the lackluster sound we've had over the past few weeks has been because the DI solution inherently isn't working for us, or if it's actually a perfectly fine solution being hampered by the crummy pa in a crummy room.

Oh no I've done a few photo shoots.

Certainly not... 😁

Thanks all. We've had a few runs through now with a very basic DI box into the desk (I've been loaning a Thomann one) and we all agree that it's a little lacking, but for the moment we don't know if that's because the guitar/di combo needs some extra tone sweetening or if it actually sounds fine and is being held back by crappy rehearsal room PA systems. We have plenty of options and ideas thanks to you guys though.

I built my home practice Valeton into a board. Most of the time I use the Valeton but it needs a wall wart and uses jacks, whereas the quad cortex gig rig that I sometimes use at home for setting patches etc needs a power cable and xlrs. I hate getting on my hands and knees behind the chair to mess with the cables! Korg pitchblack custom, Valeton gp100, Thomann DI. Pedaltrain nano, Cooks Adam. Occasional wireless bugs.

I'm not familiar with that specific A&H but, aside from the compressor that you say it doesn't have, is there anything else in that post that's out of the question? Personally I am not a fan of using, or even starting with, in built presets on digital mixers. I find that they really tend to over egg the pudding and I spend the first bit of any soundcheck just undoing what they all did. I just find myself wondering how awful the source has to be to need that much doing to it? In fairness the only mixers I really have experience of are my Behringer XR18 and several local venues that use the A&H Qu/SQ stuff so I am not an expert on multiple desks and perhaps other presets are better.

Don't worry about the mixing app, it's essentially agnostic about how it connects over the network. Connect the tablet using the inbuilt settings app. Mixing station should still be set on wireless. Not that this matters if you can't connect to your home router and browse the web though, it seems as though the adapter itself either doesn't work or isn't configured properly.

For what it's worth it is technically possible. I have a usb c dock that I normally carry in my laptop bag that works with my tablet. Tablet is a Samsung something or other, router is a mikrotik and the dock is a little ugreen one from Amazon. Oh well, hope you get it sorted!

When you tried at home did you turn the wifi on your phone off? Exactly the kind of thing that I would do would be to plug in a (useless and non working) cable, connect to the internet over wifi and tell myself that the cable works.

Hi all, I'm buying my old Junior Jet back after a 6-year loan to a fellow local bass player. What strings are you all using on yours? As I recall they are difficult to find and you often end up with a mix of actual string and silk around the tuning pegs which isn't ideal. I understand that short scales Chromes (ECB81S) fit really well, but I can't stand Chromes! I would probably prefer flats over rounds but I will gladly put well-fitting rounds on over badly-fitting flats. Average tension preferred, leaning towards higher if I have to pick a side. Thanks in advance.

It bothers me that some of the cables don't go all the way to the edge of the frame!

So you want to use them in the place of centre fills but not necessarily as centre fills? Not ideal but then we've all worked with less than ideal setups before, just a part of gigging in the real world. Normally when one puts speakers there they are used to make sure that people in the very front of the audience can hear the things on stage that don't produce much volume on their own. The thinking being that if you're right at the front then the main pa is shooting over and past your ears. So it's often vocals, vocals and more vocals in centre fills as things like drums and guitars are probably making enough stage volume on their own for the first few rows. If possible I'd put the extra speakers on an aux send, that way you can do their own mix and eq. Even if they are just duplicating the main mix and being used as extra volume rather than extra coverage they're still going to sound different and the added control of being on an aux send will likely help.

Sorry for all the quotes, just getting caught up on one of my favorite threads. Downsizing from multiple pedals to a multi is definitely a 'thing'. Much easier now as well as they are all fantastic, you could honestly gig with nearly all of them. Although I'm sure in 10 years time they will all sound terrible again! I still have a little analogue board with 3 pedals on a nano, but my QC (and before that my HX stomp) is just my rig now. What else could you need? He says, looking at the limited edition Sansamp paradriver... Pleased to see I'm not the only one, although it still feels like cheating. Just for three songs in our set, what about you? That is slick. Have you seen the little cable ones? They put a bit less strain on the jack socket IMO.