borntohang

Ambi-sinister. Poor lefties do get a bad rap in Latin...

The VT needs a little more tweaking for guitar sounds than the Tech 21 preamps designed for it, but yes you should be able to get something usable. Luckily you can save the presets too so won't need to change them between instruments. I'd recommend some kind of ambience or reverb in the loop as it might be quite dry-sounding out front.

I find the key is you can't usually afford to be fussy, or only take gigs you feel are artistically rewarding, at least until you've earned a rep. Once I got over that mental hurdle things improved! Luckily I do enjoy nearly everything I play these days and there have been some very rewarding times, but ultimately if the Wiggles called up tomorrow and I didn't have anything booked in then I'd be learning 'Fruit Salad' with all the actions before the call ended.

I got an MIJ Squier 32" after years of playing Mustang shorties to try out something different. It's great - so good in fact that I ended up buying a long scale P and now it sits in the case. The folly of man!

There aren't many musicians on the scene without a side job right now - for some the side job might be teaching students and for some it's YouTube channels, or publishing music to spec (I know a few who make a decent wedge from getting incidental music onto Love Island and such). You really can't turn down a gig either - I played with a small orchestra last Saturday and all 22 of us either already had another gig next day or picked one up over the course of the evening. My foray into full-time lasted about a year, but was derailed hard by 2020. I'm lucky enough to have a side gig that's involved in the industry and the rest of my 'work' is gigs and crewing. We have a mortgage but no kids and my partner also effectively works self employed so we get to pick our time off. Touring was rough on our time together for a while, but I have settled into one or two small tours per year which don't stretch over a week or two. Have to do lots of three day runs though.

I work at Hiwatt, not for Los Bitchos! The amps they're loaning came from our workshop though, which is always nice to see on TV.

They do, yeah. Not much of our stuff onstage in geenral this year but we had LB playing in the warehouse this morning. Some nice lingering shots of the backline too, thank you very much Mr Beeb Cam Op.

Great aren't they? The genre is a variation on Cumbia.

The festival themselves are great about the clear up - the fields are pasture for the rest of the year so there is an entire economy of workers and volunteers there for days afterward to make it liveable for cows again. Unfortunately some of the punters seem to have the idea hedonism also means conspicuous consumption. Last time I worked there was a chap at my gate who had bought a banger car for a couple of hundred and stuffed it with five-man worth of camping gear; the other four in his group came up in a separate vehicle and they were planning to abandon the whole lot, including the beater car, and travel back in one vehicle so they didn't have to pack anything up . He claimed it was cheaper than petrol for two cars, but considering the price of the festival plus all the gear I could only conclude that some people have too much money and very little sense. I kept seeing that photo of the guy who had built an IKEA double bed in his tent in the news and wondering if he was going to bother taking it away again today. The general culture of the festival is really against that sort of behaviour, but apart from weighing people in and out to try and track/ban offenders I'm not sure what else could be done about it.

Fred Again's stagemate was briefly my tour manager. Good to see him back on the artist side and doing well; he was far too cool (and occasionally too much of an instigator of chaos) to be a TM forever. My old man is at his tenth Glastonbury this year at 71. Still enjoying himself but takes a camper instead of a tent these days. Not spotted him on the footage yet but I keep an eye out.

I caught some footage of Sledgehammer a couple of days back and they sound great. Gabriel actually looks like he's having fun! And yes that vegetarianism seems to be working for Levin. I'd be happy looking like that now, never mind at 77...

I think there's bands that could have maybe got away with a couple of cheeky cracks about being a rock band billed on a pop festival, but RB aren't them.

Basically except the exposure is heavy Radio One playlisting either side of the show plus your set on iPlayer, which is an actual reliable way to make a bit of cash! Same setup as Glastonbury really - labels pay for their big artists to do it at a loss because they know the benefits are ultimately worth it.

Big Weekend doesn't pay fees. The Radio One play that comes with it is the prize, and really he should have known that they were going to be playing to a bigger stream audience than any they'd get in person. In mitigation, RB are about to start a headline arena tour this week. Having been in the same position where you're about to do your biggest ever shows and then bomb in front of somebody else's midday festival crowd I can at least sympathise with them being tempted to throw a small paddy. I got on with it though because I'm a professional (and also was getting paid my session fee either way). 😜 That said, I also know a stage manager who has never said a single negative thing about any band ever, no matter how guff they were, and after one show with RB he claims they're both derrières, so perhaps there's something more going off there...

Honestly if I was running tech for a circus of likely half-deaf dudes playing a song or two each while trying to maintain some kind of flow to the schedule then I'd probably just chuck a couple of wedges down too. I wouldn't take my IEMs to open mics for the same reason... RAH is definitely about the biggest size I'd be comfortable with stage monitoring and no isolation at though - I bet the acoustics are good in there but you'd still be fighting the back splash.

Effectively what we're doing, yeah. We take our own DIs for the same reason we take our own mics - not reliant on whatever the venue happens to have. Plus a bunch of those are stereo or particular set units for things like the acoustic.

We tour with a pre-rigged stage box, full mic setup, and a desk so all the house gets is our CAT5 cable and it's ready to go. Levels are set in pre-production and stay the same for the whole tour so mixes should be stable apart from accounting for mic position on drums. Monitors are on wireless feeds coming from stage box and FOH can control them for tweaks as needed - our backup is a couple of wired belt packs and long XLRs that I can hot swap out to replace any of the four main feeds in a disaster. I run from the fifth 'tech' mix which goes to FOH, Lights, and Backline (me) and just has the basics of guitar, click/cues, vocals, and talkback so I can listen for any issues; the other two are obviously in front of the PA so apart from click this is mostly for my benefit. If the house engineer really doesn't want to use our desk for some reason (only been an issue once) then our FOH guy will run sound for the support that evening and they can sit out. We're lucky to have a good team and headliner leverage, but we've done plenty of festivals the same way and it seems increasingly common for them to leave desk space on the tower to run your own setup.

My main ampless gigs have been on the tech side so this is one I can actually field. Short answer is it barely takes up any time - I just go around and replace the mics with a DI using the same XLR to stage-box and then FOH recall the appropriate scene for levels. You can even leave the amps in place if you're using the amps later and don't want to mess around with mic positions. Ideally given a headline scenario (which it usually is) and freedom to make the other bands work to OUR spec then our DIs have their own stereo XLRs at the front of the stage so I only have to run the minimum of cabling, but we can work with either.

I've been on IEMs since 2019 through necessity, but never with a totally silent stage. My favourite compromise has been live drums and a small backline just in case, mostly kept extremely low for tactile feedback (and real feedback). My least favourite was electronic drums and the rest of the band on full volume backline and wedge; absolutely horrid and only got through the show in one piece because my isolated IEMs meant I could mostly ignore the ghastly stage sound. I have a show with a 30 piece orchestra next month which will be IEM only so that will be an experience - possible I will take a small tube head and a Captor setup for that one. I've started playing with an instrumental trio recently and we use 50 watt valve half-stacks simply because we can, it's fun, and there are no vocal mics to trouble the FOH. It's doable because we're not playing the Dog and Duck and the psych/doom scene we play in is very accepting of loud amps anyway as that's still the standard - we've actually found that our 50 watters are severely under-gunned on most line-ups. We know the amps well and use the extra headroom for big dynamic changes instead of just cranking them which helps us stand out from the drop-tuned masses a tiny bit.

Having known crew and promoters who have worked with The View I remain unconvinced they'd ever be together enough to be able to pull off staged promo... They did well back in the 2000s but unfortunately have form for last minute and mid-show cancellations. A number one record only gets you so much latitude before even the label are sick of you. On a side note I'd be terrified of scrapping on the stage at Deafies. Feels about ten foot up in the air with no handrail when you're up there at best of times.

Young 'uns don't use forums is the long and short of it. There's a shift in how they perform music too - being in a band unfortunately means having time, space, and resources (plus generous parents if you're too young to drive) whereas putting your recordings up online is basically free once you've got a guitar and an interface. Playing for thirty people down the Dog and Duck jam session might not seem quite as appealing in comparison to putting up a video and potentially getting thousands of hits. I can confirm that once they're out of the teens then being in a rubbish student-indie band is just as popular as it ever was though. You might put that down as either a pro or a con depending on how you feel. 🙂

No, but Chinese made models will start with C and Indonesian with I. The letters following usually indicate factory - my VM strat is ICS for Indonesia/Cor-Tek for example. My Chinese CVs are Cxx but the newer ones have Ixx serials. I should really stop buying so many Squiers. 🤦‍♂️

Not explicitly labelled on the guitars, no. Classic Vibe was basically a marketing term for slightly more accurate Squier reissues, or at least visually accurate. 'High end' manufacturing (for the price point), tinted necks, classic hardware and alnico pickups. Worth having a browse through the wiki: https://www.squierwiki.com/Classic-Vibe-Series https://www.squierwiki.com/Vintage-Modified-Series

The Squiers were good quality too - made in Indonesia before production shifted to China for the early CV models. These days they're a bit of a bargain as they're next to nothing and have SD Design pickups, real rosewood boards etc. I'm still on the lookout for one of the PJ models coming up locally to me. My VM70s strat is the best £140 I've spent on a guitar in years. Probably not the most authentic reissue (although the poly finish gives that authentically seventies plastic-dipped feel...) but the neck is brilliant, nice and light, and the pickups are hot with a mid push that sounds almost Telecaster-ish. Plus at that price when I accidentally picked the gig-bag up unzipped and it took a header into the warehouse floor I only cried a little bit!