Greg Edwards69

I was there too with my wife. We were rear standing. Got as far forward as we could for the first part, not far from the mosh pit behind the mixing tent. Sound was so-so there, but could see bugger all of the stage. My wife started to feel a little claustrophobic towards the end of their main set, so we made our way to the back to get an overpriced drink from the bar. The sound at the back was a blurry mess, reverberating throughout the whole stadium. If we do a big arena or stadium gig again, I'll pay the premium for front standing or seating close to the stage like we did for Queen and Def Leppard several years ago - much better sound. Otherwise, the show looked great... what we saw of it on the big screens. We left just as the encores started to beat the rush to the train station - hundreds of others were doing the same thing - a bit of a shame, but we heard the ones we wanted to hear (although I would've liked to have heard the crowd joining in with 'Fear of the Dark'). We really enjoyed Halestorm's set too. I've never really listened to them before - the wife said she sounded like a heavier Lady GaGa... she's not wrong!

We've used bandhelper and a shared google account for ages. I upgraded our bandhelper account to a higher tier a while ago that includes a scheduler. It does things that google calendar can't do such as availability checking, which is easier than messaging people on a group chat to check availability, but so far it's been met with resistance. If you can get everyone on board, it's well worth the investment. Even only the lower tier without scheduling it's very useful for repertoire, set list and lyric management, along with midi features and attaching mp3s of songs for people to learn.

School Prom gig last night. Mid week ones are always a bit of a challenge, what with having to leave work early etc, but at least I got home at a decent time! Second time we've played this one (our drummer works at the school and his wife is headmistress) and second time we've done it without any of our usual singers. Keen readers may recall that one of our singers dropped out of last week's gig because of his ME. He was supposed to be doing this one with a dep female singer, but he still wasn't feeling fit, so she ended up doing the whole 2 hours pretty much on her own. We had a rehearsal on Tuesday, when we found out he was still unwell, so we hastily put together a new setlist to get through the gig. I ended up singing 4 or 5 songs as well to give her a rest. Under the circumstances, it went much better than I expected it too. Typical "gymnasium sound", but it sounded decent out front. In-ears were another matter. I don't get how the in-ear mix keeps changing from gig to gig, but I was getting pummeled by bass and kick drum and hardly any guitars. We definitely need to do some work with that. Teresa, the dep singer did a fantastic job. She was in a previous band over 20 years ago with the two guitarists, and I depped with them on their last ever gig before forming this band. I quite forgot how good she is with a crowd. It helped for this one that she's also a school teacher herself. You could tell how comfortable she was interacting with the kids. The school itself is a special needs school. It was fantastic to see these children enjoying themselves in a safe, nurturing environment. I feel they wouldn't have had the same opportunity to express themselves the way they did last night in a regular school. It's humbling to see them being encouraged by the staff to be themselves without judgment. So, yes. A good night in the end. Any anxiety I had about not having our usual singers quickly disappeared once we got going. The evening finished at 9.30 and I was home a little after 10.30. More of those, please! Although I was still aching when I got up for work this morning. Next stop, The Cricketers and a wedding both in July, with yet another dep singer that we've yet to rehearse with! It seems like the years of deps!

Saturday was a surprise 50th birthday party, in the upstairs function room at Starr Sports, Canvey Island. The birthday boy’s wife booked us months ago after seeing us severaral times, including another party in the same venue. Apparently he is a huge back to the future fan, so they had an “enchantment under the sea” theme, including decorations, and we offered to include a couple of songs from the film in out set, as well as a couple more when Liam, one of our co-lead singers was also going to man the DJ booth. I say ‘was’, because we got a message Saturday morning on our band group chat to say that his ME was playing up quite badly which took him out of action. This meant revising the set list for Jenny, the other lead singer to do the gig on her own - something she hasn’t done for a some time, particularly this sort of gig - as there are a few songs she simply can’t pull off. There was also a few in the set that she doesn’t usually sing or hasn’t sung lead on them before, but was confident she could. I realised this also meant I was going to need to up my backing vocals game, and sing some parts I don’t usually sing… which is fun! This also meant the DJ service was said we would provide before, between and after sets wasn’t going to happen either. Luckily, I have some party playlists already set up in the Music app on my iPad (aka iTunes) that would get us out of trouble. I just had to find a couple of extra songs from the BTTF soundtrack to play at certain predefined points during the evening. I needn’t have worried though. The evening went without a hitch. Jenny did an amazing job on her own. I feel she sometimes relies on Liam’s confidence to interacti with the audience, but it seems to have rubbed off on her. This venue also has a lovely big stage area and she made the most of it (as did I), confidently moving around and interacting with everyone. My curated playlists worked fine (thank goodness for Bluetooth on our mixer), although I realised that I can't switch to BandHelper whilst playing music. That's a mistake I won't make again! I also realised during our first set that I hadhn't synced BandHelper before I left home. So I connected it to my iPhone whilst it was playing music towards the end our break so that it would sync when I switched back to BandHelper, not realising that a FB messenger notification would pop up... loudly, through the PA system. Another mistake I won't make again! Ooh, one last thing, as this stage is so wide, last time we played there I noticed the speakers being so far apart, meant the drums didn't quite gel. So I asked one of the guitarists to being their DXR10 speaker to use as a centre fill. Sat it on top of the sub, plugged it into an aux out of the mixer, with the same mix as the main, and set to post fader. Dead easy, and sounded great. Definitely made a positive difference. So all in all, a good night after, despite the anxiety of being a man down.

I seem to recall reading that basslines were played in a higher register decades ago due to the limitations of vinyl at the time, as well as playback equipment. Not to mention the limitations of early bass guitar amplifiers. I wonder if this led to more melodic bassline creation?

I popped into Bristol branch last year whilst on a short trip. I left the shop with the same feeling. Nothing for me there.

Even if the strings are new, a poor break angle / witness point could potentially cause this issue.

It's sad, but it's been on the card since the original owners sold up and cashed in. My local was the OG Pmt in Southend. I went there a bit, but I was never a fan and felt dirty doing do. Something bout the way they ran the business felt off, and their face-to-face customer service left something to be desired. Not to mention some of the horror stories I'd heard about their guitar setups. I used to quite like their original tiny shop, but they got too big too quickly IMHO as the "professional" bit in their moniker went out the window and successfully put their local rivals out of business by targeting the budget end of the market. Eventually, they simply didn't stock the things I was interested in and wanted to try. When they sold the business, the original owners retained the Southend building itself and charged the new owners an extortionate amount for rent. So the new management simply closed the store. It surprised me, but to be honest I don't miss it. There's other local shops I miss more - such as Honky Tonk - who PMT effectively put out of business.

I sold my G10s wireless and replaced it with a far cheaper Lekato unit for this reason. I don't need anything more advanced for the gigs I do.

From what I saw in the presentation, there's a DAW-like view for song stems that you can freely mix as you see fit. I think I saw a separate mixer feature as well for all the ins and outs. I assume you would be able to assign stem tracks to different outputs to make this feature truly useful.

But now you don't need the computer. It can all be done from within the HX Stadium, backing tracks, automation, even DMX lighting. Heck, you could probably run the whole band through one device.

Line 6 stated in the live stream that the price of the Helix Floor, Rack and LT are going to be heavily reduced by a couple of hundred dollars. I would assume this will affect the used market price.

The reason I'm excited by the Anagram is that it does pretty much everything I do in my Helix LT in a Stomp sized package - saturation or not (although I'm sure it will come). The Stadium's are built upon a very mature platform, and are more powerful than I need (not to mention bigger). The Anagram is astonishing for a v1 product, and I'm sure it will only improve over time if Darkglass stick to their promises. If anything, it shows Line 6 what people expect from a refreshed Stomp, if they make one.

I watch a bit of the live stream, and it seems to me that Line 6 have done something unexpected and are launching a premium, higher tier product rather than direct replacements for the current generation of hardware. It also sounds like the current hardware will continue to receive support and development, although how much and for how long, who knows! For me, I am looking to repair and/or replace my ageing LT at some point. I bought it over 6 years ago and it's showing signs of age that need addressing, such as burnt out expression pedal sensors, one of the encoder switches is tempremental and the screen has started to develop a blue line. I will likely get it fixed in time, but I am getting tired of lugging it around. The Darkglass Anagram seems on paper to be the perfect solution of me, at least it will when promised features are enabled. I'm hoping with the newly revised pricing on current HX hardware, the replacement parts might get cheaper, although I doubt it. It's a great time to be a guitarist and bassist, that's for sure.

IIRC, from what I know about wifi routers, 2.4 GHz has a longer range than 5.8 GHz but is more prone to interference from channel overlap. 5.8 GHz is cleaner in this respect. It's also worth bearing in mind that both frequencies are used by wifi and Bluetooth (in the case of the former), so subject to environmental influences. I always try and remember to put devices such as phones and tablets into airplane mode if there are problems. I remember playing at one venue that had a wifi extender plugged in next to me on the stage that was interfering with my 2.4 Ghz wireless. I turned that thing off and cured the problem instantly.