bonzodog

Check out the Yamaha stagepas range. They do a range of output levels and are a nice compact system with built in effects. You should get their small new one in your price range or maybe the louder version second hand. Don't forget you will need speaker stands, leads and mics too which will eat into your budget

[quote name='Jazzneck' timestamp='1439559123' post='2843914'] Do I Love You (Indeed I Do) - Frank Wilson, Cmaj. [/quote] love this song but never been able to find the bass tabs anywhere

Your very own 'The biggest news story of them all'

Little green bag. And not just the famous riff at the start. The bass line to the whole song is great

Oops we've always played it lower starting in C

Thanks everyone. Just been into PMT Bham on my lunch break and bought a Zoom B1on

Don't really use effects but planning on getting something to have a noodle with at home through earphones and then may use live. The zoom B3 gets great reviews but are the effects and drum patterns the same ones that are used on the B10N? I dont need the DI on the B3 and not too fussed about the plastic casing of the B10N so if I only need the effects, looper and tuner would I be better saving half the cash and getting the B1on or are the effects better quality on the B3. Thanks

[quote name='TransistorBassMan' timestamp='1439382409' post='2842311'] Mike Peters isn't singing with Big Country these days. Simon Hough is on vocals now. And Derek Forbes is playing bass for them. [/quote] That is correct. Always thought Mike Peters was going to be a long standing member of Big Country. The Alarm were another classic band though and had some great songs well into the 90s. 68 Guns is still one of my favourite all time songs

Did she have a music stand?

My three piece band only put vox through PA. We use a small Ymamaha MG10Xu mixer with built in effects into a pair of powered EV ZLX12p 12" speakers and we are very happy with sound. Mixer was £120 anD speakers were £300 each. Perfect for small to mid size gigs

Years ago I went on a lads holiday to Ibiza and although not into dance music went to the legendary Manumission. It was an amazing night and the way the DJs got the crowd going was amazing. The mixing of the tracks was certainly an art form. I thing the only thing is, like with keyboard playing is how do you know the mixing is live and the not prerecorded? That's the problem I have. I remember a comedian saying why would you go to a club just to see a specific DJ. It's not like you go to the movies and ask which projectionist is on tonight!

[quote name='bluesparky' timestamp='1439063279' post='2839770'] OOh! finally, something I know a lot about! Most of the smoke machines out on the market are DMX controllable, and the rest of them are usually analogue controlled either by their own custom controller or via some kind of 0 - 10V DC analogue controller. It may involve a steady hand and a soldering iron but it'd be worth it in the long run. These can also be controlled via DMX via a little box of tricks called a DEMUX which converts the 5v DMX digital signal into old fashioned 10v (or 12V or what you need, depending on the demux's output / spec) which can control older / cheaper smoke machines, strobes etc. Using relay units can also help you out if you want to control non-dmx items. They'll use a DMX signal to trigger a 230V output which can power anything, i.e. fans (for keeping cool or the foot-on-monitor-hair-being-blown-guitar-solo), strobes, haze machines (NOT your usual smoke machines, as they'll need 10 or so minutes to warm up first), fuzz lights (i.e. rotating beacons) etc.. Control wise, A DMX controller can start from a £10 USB dongle, which can control 1 universe up to £40,000 desks which can do hundreds and hundreds of universes. 1 universe sends 512 x 8bit DMX "channels" at once. Older style tungsten lights (par cans etc) use 1 channel, they only do one thing - ON! (they have to go via a dimmer, which receives the DMX signal, decodes it, and tells the tungsten lights attached to it to turn on / off / how bright they should be depending on what the controller is telling them to do) LED based par cans start at around 3 channels (Red, Greed, Blue groups of LEDs) and can go up to a ridiculous amount depening on what they're capable of, but usually simple ones are around 5 channels (Red, Green, Blue, Intensity, Strobe effects). Moving lights have more functions ("attributes") in them, so therefore will need more channels to control them E.g. Intensity, Pan & tilt (movement, often these have two channels each to enable 16 Bit smoother control of them), colours, gobos (these are cut outs that are placed in the path of the light to create shapes in the beam), strobe, CMY control (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow colour mixing to enable [i]almost[/i] infinite colour control), focus ("edge"), zoom etc. This can easily chew up dozens of channels in one moving light, so therefore the amount of moving lights you can have on one universe is greatly reduced. e.g on one universe you can have 512 tungsten par cans, 75 or so simple LED par cans, 20 reasonable moving lights. You can have as many combinations of lights on one universe, it doesn't matter, you use the console to patch the universe, i.e. telling the controller what is on the universe so it can send the right information to the lights. i.e. if you have 10 led par cans, which use e.g. 5 channels each, you need to address / number the par cans with unique numbers for inependant control of them. For ease, address them as 1, 6, 11, 16, 21, 26 etc..... The lights will have to daisy chained together to get the signal from the desk / controller to each light. Therefore, if you have 10 x 5 channel lights on one universe the next "free" address is 56 (unless my mental maths is wrong), so you'd e.g. address a smoke machine at 56, or the first moving light at 56. You can of course address two lights the same, but they would do EXACTLY the same as each other, which is fine. It can be used to save DMX channels if you've only got one universe of control or it can be used to minimise programming. The way DMX works is that it simply broadcasts its signal down each universe and each light listens for the information which is relevant to it's address range (i.e. 1 - 5) and then its functions respond appropriatly. If a light isn't addressed the same as the console / controller thinks the light is patched at the light won't behave in the way you'd want it to. You'll also get unexpected results if the console / controller thinks the light is a different type of light. There is no standard amongst manufacurers, or even between lights from the same manufacturer, which dictates what each channel does in each light. This is usually because the lights don't do the same things, or because manufacturer's don't need to comply with others. These days lights can have hundreds of channels (usually larger moving LED fixtures which let you control every LED individually) and larger shows can easily run into hundreds of universes of control too - the tour I was on for pretty much all of last year had a wall of LED fixtures of 179 channels each, which limited us to 3 lights per universe resulting almost 13,000 channels just for [i]some[/i] of the [i]backlight[/i]. (I have many more boring facts like that, but I appreciate no-one really cares!). DO NO split the signal like the audio boys do, i.e. with a physical y-cord, it may work at first, but it's more often than not bad news, it won't break anything but it'll cause signal degredation and DMX reflections which will produce unwanted and unexpected flickers, flashes and blips randomly throughout the lights. The way to get more physical lines of DMX from an original single physical output of a desk is to use a buffer (splitter), which is e.g. 1 input and 4 identical outputs. The official standard connector for DMX is 5 pin XLR but as 3 pin XLR connectors are cheaper a lot of fixtures run on 3 pin cable. DMX only uses 3 of the 5 pins in an XLR 5 pin cable. The two spare pins in the XLR 5 cable aren't used. They were originally going to be used for two-way communication between lights and consoles / controllers so the lights could feedback to the console and update it with any errors, problems or similar. There are 3 - 5 and 5 - 3 pin adaptors on the market which mean you can daisy chain from 3 pin fixtures to 5 pin fixtures quite happily. As stated previously, you shouldn't really use mic or audio cable, but it can work. Personally I wouldn't advise it at all, but if it works for you and temporarily gets you out of a sticky situation then OK. The two spare pins There are adviseable limits on how many fixtures you should daisy chain together, thanks to signal degredation and purists will state you should terminate each "stream" of DMX. This means putting a special XLR plug called a "terminator" into the output of the fixture at end of the DMX daisy chain. The terminator has a 120 Ohm resistor inside it which helps stop the signal bouncing back down the cable and causing reflections further back up the stream of the daisy chain of lights. The reflections are usually movement twitches or colours flicking etc. Most modern lights these days won't need terminators, but poor cable, VERY long lengths of cable, cheap lights and even having certain different manufacturers of lights having their DMX signal daisy chained in and out of each other can cause serious issues without a terminator. There is a lot of free DMX control software out there, it's usually the hardware that costs the money but there are some bargins to be had. Sadly, I don't know too much about foot controllers or the fixtures on the market which are suitable for pubs, clubs & smaller venues etc. but if you need any tips, advice or info about the DMX protocol, lighting in general or you're doing a gig in bigger venue / enormodrome then feel free to drop me a line! A very quick internet search has uncovered a couple of nice little summaries of what I've said. http://www.elationlighting.com/pdffiles/dmx-101-handbook.pdf http://www.lutron.com/en-US/Education-Training/Documents/DMX%20webinar_7-29-2010.pdf http://www.pangolin.com/LD2000/dmx-about.htm http://www.marketbaba.com/svembedded/pdf/DMX-512%20Connection%20Details.pdf I've not re-read this post back, so if there are any glaring errors, either grammatical or related to the subject of the post then it's simply due to laziness on my part! [/quote] I was just about to say that

There are also some good drum loop apps you can download on your phone too that you can play along to

For dmx mode you would also need a controller which allows you to program lights like have them all on a certain colour. Do the lights not have an auto run function ? Most LEDS including ours have 3 options. Sound to light DMX and auto run. In auto run mode you can slow the lights down to change at a slower pace. This is what we do so our lights change approx every 10 seconds

Thanks for the replies so far everyone. Some great tips. I already have the smart black or white clothing as thats what we wear in our Mod band, and back line wise I use a LH500 and 2 x TC BC212 and also have a spare amp as cover. Think I will spend this weekend writing out all of the 'standard' covers you hear most bands playing and get learning. I think the wedding/function band depping is the way to go.

Sorry if this has been covered before but looking for some fresh advice. My 3 piece is going well but guitarist has announced our 2 gigs a month quota is too much and only wants one gig a month. It's understandable as he has a stressful job and works a lot of shifts. I on the other hand would rather do more gigs but don't want to leave this band as we are good and its great fun. Therefore I am thinking about offering myself out as dep bass player and backing vox for other rock covers bands but never depped before so looking for advice and what I need as a minimum ability wise. I can't read music (yet) but am a fairly competent player. Our band play all the jam and most who songs and I picked all those up easily enough. Is it just a case of learning as many popular songs as possible? I assume in an ideal world you are given notice of what songs to play. Is there enough work out there for a dep playing in pubs and clubs? Any tips would be great Thanks

[quote name='Hobbayne' timestamp='1438535854' post='2835263'] i quite enjoyed the Sheridan Smith Cilla TV show last year. [/quote] Yes that was a great show and would like to think Cilla herself thought she was portrayed very well

Down in the tube station at midnight

I think 'Another New York question ' is a great name for a band

[quote name='Meddle' timestamp='1437855496' post='2829592'] It seems a recurring theme in a lot of truely gifted artists, be they painters, poets, musicians, directors, comedians... their private lives are horrid! [/quote] When I used to work the social club scene as a singer I worked with dozens of comedians. Pretty much all of them were the most miserable and boring people I have ever come across off stage

My listening to and even playing music drives my wife up the wall. Then again, I think me even breathing drives her up the wall too

Always love playing iron man by black sabbath. Very simple but quite a few parts to it. In my top 10 fav songs

Should still be on Netflix

Logos are a great idea. If you are ever on a multi band gig the posters will need a logo as the space you will get on a poster will be too small for a photo. Look at any festival posters. They all use the bands logos

We are a mod revival band. We wear black ties and white shirts and decorate stage in union jacks and insist we are advertised as such but we still get no end of punters asking for sex on fire dakota and mustang sally