BigRedX

You do need to watch what you are doing with stereo, phase differences and low frequencies if you are intending to release your recordings as a records, as these can render the track(s) uncuttable.

Having stereo placement in IEMs can help with clarity in the mix when you have lots of instruments and vocals. However if you can hear everything well enough with a mono mix then you probably don't need it.

Considering that as of the beginning of 2025 In Isolation in it's most recent state has come to an end with Singer Ryan's departure to work on other things, we've been very busy recently. There was a farewell gig at The Salutation Inn in Nottingham as part of the Spellbound Goth night and an EP plus two new videos. The EP has three new songs - Light In Darker Times, Middle Child Millicent and Phantoms as well as a Matt Pop remix of Middle Child Millicent. It's available from Bandcamp as a limited edition CD version and on all the usual streaming and download sites. We also made two videos, Light In Darker Times which features the band: And Middle Child Millicent which doesn't: I'll be concentrating on my other band Hurtsfall, we have a new single out next month and are currently finishing off our debut album for release later in the year. We also have a number of high-profile gigs coming up including WGW and Twisted Firestarter.

I think one of the problems that anyone coming as new into "home recording" has now is that in the form of their computer and DAW software they have something that would completely surpass the multi-track machine, mixing desk and outboard gear of any pre-digital studio, and getting to grips with all of that is a close to vertical learning curve.

My first memory upgrade for a Mac Quadra 650 cost £399.00 for 8MB which was the cheapest option that I could find. Unfortunately the vendor had to supply 3 different SIMMs before I got one that actually worked.

I must have been exceedingly lucky in that I never had any SCSI problems during the many years that I was using it. That includes a setup that will probably be anxiety-inducing in anyone else who ever dealt with SCSI of: Mac > Removable Optical Drive > Akai S2000 Sampler. Surprisingly it worked fine so long as I remembered that once I had inserted an optical disc that was formatted for either the Mac or the Akai I couldn't then use a disc that had been formatted for the other device without rebooting everything first.

I'm glad I ditched DOS and Windows back in 1990.

To the OP. I'm going to be brutally realistic here and it's probably not something you want to read but here goes anyway. There appears to be a mistaken notion particularly with software, but also with a lot of high-tech hardware, that simply the act of owning it somehow gives you the immediate ability to start producing professional standard results when, as others have already said, these things take time and patience before you even start producing something passable. I bet you weren't ready to join a band within 10 minutes of picking up a bass guitar for the first time, you probably weren't ready within 10 weeks even, so why should recording be any different? Add to this the fact that some people simply don't have the ability to ever do anything more than passable not matter how good their hardware and software is. I learnt the long, hard and expensive way, that my recording ability is pretty much limited to being able to get a decent level signal from my bass into my computer. Everything else on my band's recordings is done by people with the appropriate skills and far more talent when it comes to producing a finished and professional sounding product. There is also no shame in recognising your limitations and accepting them. It seems to me that from the original and subsequent posts that the OP mostly wants to vent rather than actually sort out any problems. That's not necessarily a band thing. Venting does have its uses. However if they want some useful help we'll require the following: 1. What OS are you running? 2. There are lots of different Focustite Scarlett interfaces. Which one do you have? I have a Scarlett interface and although it's been a number of years since I had to set it up, IIRC all the associated software including a cut-down version of a DAW, is available for download once you have created a user account with Focusrite and registered the interface. To the OP: have you done this yet?

Have you tried coiling 30+ metres of cable using the under/over method?

Last time I went to a gig there (about 10 years ago) the sound problems were definitely down to the engineers doing the mix. HIM were just a mess of low-end sludge to the point that it was only possible to tell what the song was from when Ville Valo when into the higher register vocal parts. By contrast Fields of the Nephilim sounded great. The kick drum was big and tight without being boomy and the bass guitar parts well defined, and even Carl McCoy's deep vocals were clear and audible. So a balanced mix is possible. I'm lucky in that most of the gigs I go to are smaller venues, and the bands I like have bass players whose parts are often doing much of the important melody of the songs, so I hardly ever encounter the excessive/undefined bass problem. IMO the only way to prevent it, is to name and shame the PA engineers responsible.

I think I'd want to buy an Ethercon cable on a drum because that will definitely help protect it when coiling and un-coiling over and over again. I'd probably also want an identical spare.

This depends on a couple of things: 1. How important is it that what you hear in your IEMs is exactly the tone that you would hear without them. 2. What does the audience hear? The sound produced by the speakers in your rig or is it from the PA in which case at what point does the PA take its feed from your signal chain?

I think a lot of musicians need to wake up to the the fact that it is no longer the second half of the 20th century, the music business has changed, and trying to make a living based on the old model is not longer a viable option. Not that it's ever been easy making a living solely as a musician, that's something else that appears to have been forgotten. There's a lucky (very) few at the top and everyone else has to be doing other things in order to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table. It's not just the music business, it's society that has changed too. Traditional touring doesn't work because it's difficult to get enough people out on a "School Night" to make playing gigs on anything other than Friday and Saturday an economical option. Working people are much more caught up the their jobs/careers and students are desperate to have something to show for their tuition fees, to be going out on a week night. Apart from well established bands (most of whom became established under the old model) "tours" these days are a succession of weekend gigs spread over a month with the occasional Thursday and Sunday thrown in for cities and venues that can support them. And let's not forget that "popular" music simply isn't as important to people as it used to be. If we really wanted to make a stand, we wouldn't have our music up on Spotify or even use it to check out new artists, and we wouldn't go to gigs where Ticketmaster or any of its associated companies were involved in the sale of tickets or the promotion of the event.

From me all streaming services are for having a listen to decide if I want to buy the physical product. However if you really want to support an artist financially you should go and see them play live and buy a T-shirt afterwards. Unless they are selling CDs and/or vinyl in thousands they are unlikely to be doing more than breaking even on sales.

If they were further north I'd have been interested too!

I don't know what sorts of bands he's going to see, but simply from a practical PoV getting rid of the drummer is far more useful than getting rid of the bass player, or any other musician come to that. If you use backing tracks with live drums you have to then consider click tracks for the drummer and how they are going to hear that as well as the rest of the band. IME it makes everything so much more complicated, most of the time it would be simpler to have a bass player. Also once you don't have a drummer it cuts the amount of gear that a band needs to take in half. Without a drummer my (3-piece) band plus all our gear and someone to roadie and work the merch table fits into a single estate car. I suppose it also depends on the genre. In post-punk/goth there are plenty of bands without drummers but very few without bass players and there are some where the only instrument being played on stage is the bass.

IME the larger toggle switches will be much stiffer to operate than the typical mini-toggle and you might be better off with the original foot switches. Also have you checked to see how the existing switches are wired inside the pedal? The amount of space available and whether they are soldered directly to a PCB may limit your choices for replacements.

And so do I, with the same leads for the last 30+ years and not one of them has failed yet.

Nothing. I did put 100 Herco Flex 75 picks on my Amazon wish list, but no-one bought them for me. Everything else musical that I want is far too expensive to expect anyone to buy for me.

As other have said, unless you are well rehearsed playing with recorded drums instead of a real drummer, you'll probably be better off hiring someone to fill in, as there are all sorts of issues that you'll encounter and you need to be prepared and have contingency plans for all of them. You'll need to add count-ins for all the tracks and guide clicks for the rest of the band on any tracks where the drums don't come in at the beginning. Likewise for any mid-song sections with no drums. You'll be surprised how badly you'll drift out of sync on anything more than a single bar without something to keep the beat. You'll need to be able to hear the drums loud enough to play too. Again you'll be surprised how loud this actually needs to be when you don't have a human drummer on stage with you, because you will be relying entirely on the sound, and there's no flexibility in recorded or programmed drum playback, it's completely up to the band to keep in time with the recording. Depending on the genre it might look rubbish without a human drummer. Any additional clicks you need for timing purposes will detract from the performance. And to be brutally honest, if you need to ask about how to do to it, you'll need to spend a lot longer sorting it out and practicing, and maybe even spend money sorting, then is worth the effort for a fe gigs.

As others have said, I suspect that all of us are replaceable but depending on the band, it will probably change the sound and the dynamic, especially for originals bands. But what if you're not even replaced? In my current band when the guitarist left before we looked for a replacement we tried rearranging the songs with me swapping from traditional bass parts to using a Bass VI and alternating between bass and melody parts with the synth player. It worked very well and defined the sound of the band. When our drummer left latter on, we decided that rather than look for a replacement we'd go with programmed drums instead.

I can only speak from my own personal experience, but I've not found it anywhere like a difficult as some people on here seem to say it is. I don't know if it's down to where I'm based? Despite having a decent number of venues available for originals bands to play, Nottingham doesn't really have much of a "scene", the musicians from here who have done really well for themselves, have done so after they left the city and don't make a big deal about coming from here. However, it is reasonably well placed to get to most other parts of the country and about two thirds of the gigs I've done in the last 12 months have involved 2-4 hours travelling each way. I've just done a VERY ROUGH calculation and from 15 gigs in the last 12 months one of my bands has made just under £150 a gig when the profit from merch sales and PRS performance royalties from gigs is also taken into account. I know that's not much compared with your typical pub covers band, but has paid for our transport to and from the gigs, the couple of occasions we have had to stay overnight and rehearsal room costs, and we already have a decent sum available to put towards to manufacturing costs of our album when it's finished next year. We have been able to do this because we are organised and have picked the gigs that we play carefully. We have traded upon the various members' past achievements (we'd be stupid not to), but that only gets your foot in the door a few times, before you have to consistently back it up with an entertaining performance and songs that your audience want to hear. There has been some luck involved - the current iteration of the band landed a really good spot on a goth festival as our first gig, based on our past bands' reputations, but we delivered a performance when it mattered and got an excellent review as a result, and have been able to build from that.

I know this thread is probably aimed at covers bands, but my originals band changes its set every time we have a new song ready to gig. We have a 45 minute set and a 30 minute one. Each has a different opening song, and both end with the same two which are our big crowd pleasers. What happens in between is fairly fluid. There are combinations that work better than others, but we will always try out a different order at rehearsal first to make sure that the set flows properly from start to finish.

It depends on what you mean by "heavy" when it comes to gigs. IME for most originals bands who aren't signed to a supportive record label, playing any night other than Friday or Saturday is a waste of time unless you are supporting someone popular enough to be able to sell at least 100 tickets at a 150 capacity venue on a week night. That of course will limit how many gigs your band can do in a year. I don't expect to be able to make a living out of playing songs that I have written, as I suspect it will entail too many artistic compromises, and I already have a creative day job where my client is the "king". However I do expect to make back any money I have invested in the band and after that initial investment for the band to be at worst completely self-financing. From what I have seen the reason most originals bands can't even manage that, which should be an easily attainable goal, is either because they aren't very entertaining or because they simply aren't organised enough.