Franticsmurf

For years I played in a band whose BL was excellent at reading the audience on the night. While we stuck largely to 'the set', the order often changed and there was a pool of additional songs we could launch into if necessary. He inevitably got it right. But then something changed and he became really bad at reading the audience. There would be noticeable gaps between songs and we'd either end up doing songs from his solo act or from the repertoire of songs he was teaching students at the time. For some reason he got obsessed with playing Sweet Caroline in every set. Nothing wrong with the song as such, but as a Blues Rock band it stood out badly. His justification - they all loved it and anyway someone asked for it. The former excuse was hard to argue against as, inevitably after the juice of the barley had flowed, people would sing along to it. But no one ever requested it within my earshot or eyesight.

I've seen a few of the YT videos of Jon and the Band Geeks, and enjoyed them. So I was interested when this new single and album were announced. Having listened to the single it takes me back to the Jon Anderson Yes days. Yes from 1967 to when Anderson finally left were my favourite band and it's great to hear something definitely new but with the elements that made Yes the band I was into. CD will be ordered.

Last full rehearsal with the Hulla band for next Saturday's Hullabaloo festival headline (well, we organise it so we get the best slot 😃). It went very well - tightest I've heard the band play. Add to that tea and biscuits during the first half and you have a very refined evening. Our BL is a massive Springsteen fan, so he bases the set duration on Bruce's marathons. We were just over three hours start to finish last night, with perhaps 10 minutes of break. In previous years, the crowd participation, extended intros and requests for encores has taken us to the 4 hour mark. I'm also playing with a scratch band made up of three Hulla bandmates in a support slot earlier in the afternoon. Our last rehearsal is Thursday. Friday is set up day - we have a large marquee to cover the stage which is set in the village green and most of the band help out with that in return for breakfast and fish and chips at the end of the day. Our sound guy does the event sound and I'll be helping with that too. A busy week ahead. 😃

Fair point - I didn't take into account the 'originals' part - and, according to their post they're looking for support slots. I still think it would have been better left out of the post - as you say they can cover their lack of PA with a hire job if necessary and no one would be the wiser.

I've just seen the Facebook post. It doesn't help that they don't have a drum kit or PA either. 😀

I don't know about fees as our was a long time ago but it was higher than the social club gigs we were doing at the time (iirc double) and if they were any distance away we would have accommodation included (usually the cheapest caravan). Mixed audience (one night we went on immediately after the kids entertainer and played to a bunch of screaming 5-8 year olds for about 20 minutes), usually drunk (the parents not the kids, although...). We were doing a few parks before the trend in stag/hen weekends so our audiences were generally better behaved than the pub/club circuit.

I did that last week - tuned down for 'I Fought the Law' and failed to go back to E for 'Town Like Malice'. What's worse, despite the solo bass intro I didn't notice until the last note of the song. 😃 It may be time for me to move to Ukelele.

Last night was the penultimate full band rehearsal before our mini-festival headliner on the 22nd. It was more of a request night as I had suggested everyone should nominate songs from the set that they wanted to go through to iron out the wrinkles. As usual, only a few actually did that, but we managed a couple of hours getting the first five or six songs from the set sorted, plus a couple we hadn't played for a while. Tonight we have a reduced band workout with a local charity choir with whom we'll be performing 5 songs at the festival. We've played with them before (and a percentage of the festival takings goes to support the homeless drop-in centre they run) and it's always good to have them on board. Last year they performed 'One Day Like This' on their own and it was amazing, so this year we're playing it with them. Replacing the strings intro is our sax player and until last night I was a little skeptical of how it would sound, but he nailed it with a breathy performance. Our regular sound man wasn't there and although he's got the whole mix set up properly, we couldn't get the monitors to work. There were many faces staring at the two monitor amps - I managed to eliminate the desk as the cause but amidst much muttering and in-taking of breaths we couldn't figure out why there was no signals from amps to speakers. We ended up using the main PA alone which, to be honest, was fine but the sound was a little 'unrefined'. I expect the solution is some switch that we all overlooked. We have one more full band rehearsal and a run through with the 4 piece mini band I've put together to play a support slot on the day. As there are two Dave's in the four piece, it has been christened '50% Dave'.

I would say that as the BC collective is generally a friendly bunch (yes you are), and this thread doesn't have any serious consequences (no prizes/awards at the end) then let @Geek99 stay. Absolutely the last thing I would want to do in any thread is to prevent a BCer from being able to drown out a geetard. 😃

When I started, we had no engineer and I was just taking a line from the headphone out on the mixer for vocals. At that point I was still using backline and it was mainly to give me clearer vocals (we rarely had any monitors, relying on the main PA spill). I agree that the IEM sound is only as good as your monitor mix, which relies on the competence of the person doing the sound. And if we accept that what we do is performance, then the look of the rig plays a part in that. 😃

Same as @uk_lefty above. I've been using earplugs to manage the onstage volume for years so to move to in ear monitoring wasn't as much of a change as it could have been. It does leave you feeling a bit isolated, but if your monitor mix is good (and it took me a while to get it right) then there's little problem. Some folk get around the isolation by having one or more ambience mics feeding into their mix - these pick up the audience and the general stage ambience which can help with the isolation thing. I started off just having the bass and vocals feeding in to a Behringer P1 and using earpieces that didn't completely isolate me from the rest of the band (who weren't using IEM). I found it was easier for me to hear my vocals, which was the main reason I started using earpieces. Now I'm playing in the Hulla band, there are 13 regularly on stage and being able to isolate from the brass is great. I've just started using a Behringer P16 which connects via Cat5 cable to the pre-fade of the FOH X32 so that I can control my own monitor mix in real time. I certainly wouldn't rule out playing with backline again - as I said I miss that sound behind me - but for what I'm doing at the moment, the IEM set up works well. And I can't advocate ditching the drummer as he gives me a lift to and from rehearsals! 😂

I've been ampless/IEM in the main band for 18 months now and I like the simplicity of carry-in/out (although I no longer have an excuse for not helping carry the PA gear now 😃) but I miss the sound of the bass behind me. The IEM set up gives me much better sound clarity, particularly with the backing vocals, and as we have a permanent sound man, I know I'm getting a good and consistent sound out front. I still have an amp and speakers for depping and any other band work I do.

In the early years of my career, while I hadn't been saved and was still a geetard, the bass player and keyboard player in the band were managing to wind each other up passively - each found things the other did annoying and/or frustrating but nothing was said out loud. We gigged and rehearsed and since they were on opposite sides of the stage the gigs were ok. But then we went into the studio to record a demo (in the days of cassette tape demos) and the keyboardist took charge, mainly because he was on a Music Tech course and he'd managed to blag studio time at the college he was attending. The bassist kept changing his arrangements (to me it seemed it was on a whim). The whole band was getting frustrated at what should have been a simple evening's recording of songs we'd been playing and rehearsing for a year as it turned into a two day event. There were mutterings but it was at the next rehearsal, in a cramped and sweaty basement studio, where the detonation occurred as the keyboardist, fed up with another 'if I play this line instead' moment from the bassist, hurled a large metal bar stool across the room at him. There was an impact, fortunately not full on and somehow it missed the kit lying around. There was a shocked silence from the rest of the band, some swear words that wouldn't be allowed on here and the bassist left. We got a dep in to fulfill the gigs that had been booked, spent some time looking for a permanent replacement and slowly the band faded away.

Off to see Nick Mason's Saucerful of Secrets in Cardiff on the 24th June.

Logic and common sense says one top end bass, partly because I would expect it to play and sound good and partly because I would get used to the nuances and so on of that bass. And for my one bass, it would be a Precision, because it works and is versatile enough for all the uses I would put it too. But I'm a bassist and logic and common sense are alien concepts more suited to the keyboard/computer programmers. And I love new things. So I think that the one-bass-to-rule-them-all would eventually be replaced by a Fellowship of HBs (I'm straining the LOTR analogies here). In my real world, I have a Precision and a Sterling - both of which I consider to be my 'top end' basses. Currently the Sterling is resting and the Precision is out for the gigs. I have several cheaper basses for use as back-up, including a HB Guitarbass and a HB fretless.

The Hulla band organises and plays a festival each year and since I joined them I've put together a band to play a support slot at each gig. This year, it's with three of the main Hulla band members (drums, the dep bassist and the guitarist). The drummer and I are the only 'experienced' musicians - that's not to say the others aren't good, but they only play at Hulla rehearsals and gigs, so they have less stage experience and confidence. We've had five practices at which we learnt 17 songs and now we've slimmed the setlist down to 12. Last night we had the first full run through with our Hulla sound man in the critical friend role and a GoPro in the 'camera never lies' role 😃. We managed to squeeze two complete run throughs in and the inexperience showed through with big, silent gaps between the songs and messy starts and finishes in the first version. I could feel the frustration as each little error contributed to the next and there was no enthusiasm in the playing. We finished and took a break to talk it through. Fortunately, everyone was aware of their own problems and it was a pretty open discussion. The sound man had some suggestions as well (I was singing in too high a register for one song, for example) so we played through the set again with these in mind. It was like a different band had taken the stage. It was tighter and after the first couple of songs, the mood was noticeably better and this translated into the playing. We ended on a high. There is still work to do - mainly starts and change overs (there's an instrument swap midway through the set) but it was a great way to end a rehearsal.

I've used my Warwick 1x10" for loud rehearsals (with a TCE BAM200) and as a partner to my Elf 1x10". The only downside is that you can't easily stack a second cab on top because of the socket arrangement.

Last night was a long rehearsal with the Hulla after a long day volunteering with a local wildlife charity. We're building up to a big gig in June so it's more about fine tuning the arrangements and set order rather than learning new stuff but the BL brought in a new song (One Day Like This) and so I had to sight read (I don't sight read his charts very well). It all seemed to be ok for a first run through. We'll be performing 4 songs, including that one, with a local choir and that rehearsal is in two weeks. We've worked with them before and it's always a great sound when they're on board. As I hadn't gone home between day and evening events, I had minimal kit. No pre-amp, just a DI into the desk and my Spirit headless. The bass had been in the car all day and I was expecting tuning issues throughout the evening, but it only needed minimal tuning at the start. I've always found this bass t be very stable - one of the reasons it's often my back up bass. The sound was ok for the rehearsal although as I didn't have my IEM setup I couldn't hear my vocals properly (and that's the excuse I'll be sticking to if they were out of tune).

I'm using IEM from a P16M (see @Boodang above) fed from the Ultranet out of an X32. The feed is set to pre-fade so that I can create my own monitor mix independent of the main or monitor mixes from the desk. I assume the XR18 has the same ability to feed pre-fade signals into Ultranet. The P16M has connections to allow you to daisy-chain several of them from the one Ultranet feed, each unit retaining its ability to make a personal mix for monitoring.

As above, always unplug. And keep a spare battery handy, just in case. I've found that rechargeable ones don't tend to last as long but are handy as a spare.

Ohh, I like that. I'll have to try fixing my GoPro to the headstock next time I play. Nice playing, by the way.

Sometime you can over think things - I am guilty of that and have been the pain-in-the-bottom 'that didn't work and this was too fast and that could be tighter' voice in the van on the way home 😂. Bottom line is they enjoyed, you got paid and the things that didn't work as well are things that can be polished and fixed.

All the other comments above (mine included) not withstanding, whatever the act the audience has to enjoy it otherwise what is the point? So I get what you're saying. A tribute act at whatever level has to be careful that it doesn't take itself too seriously (however good they are, they are not the original band) but at the same time it has to be good enough to justify the 'tribute' tag. A fine line which will vary depending on the act being tributed as well as the level of venue (e.g. pub or theatre) and the expectations of the audience.

I was in a 'Plays the Music of...' Eagles band for a few years. When we put it together was talked about making it a tribute act but none of us looked remotely like the Eagles so we made a conscious decision not to try. As has been said above, a half-hearted attempt would be worse than none. That said, we made some effort with clothing and instruments to fit in with the look and feel of the Eagles. I didn't play my headless bass in those gigs (nor was it there as a back up - I used my P Bass with the Jazz as a backup)), one of the guitarists used a twin neck for Hotel California and we opened with the close harmonies of 'Seven Bridges Road'. At many of the gigs we played, while the gig was advertised as an evening of Eagles music by the agent and tickets sold as such more often than not we were asked by the venue owners if we could do a second half of more general rock which always went down well. In my opinion, to be a tribute act you should look and sound like the original act. Agents and venues will charge a premium for tributes so for that money I expect some effort to have been made and to see a show.

I believe they call it 'character'. 😃