Al Krow

£400 for a pub gig is excellent money for a solo singer, given that full bands will often go out for £250 to £450 a gig. Sounds like a win-win for both him and the venue? Love the fact that your ex drummer and mates bought the pub, that's very cool!

Maybe true for tied pubs, but they get charged less for the beer. I'm basing the margin from working in / with the industry for independent operators.

It's about £215 extra booze at typical 70% wet margins. Personally I'd go see a decent live band over a solo act + backing tracks, every time!

Nothing there I disagree with Woody! My key "counter" point was that playing weddings can be a lot of fun...the thrust of the earlier posts was that they are a chore and done mainly for money, which was putting the likes of Phil off. (And if you re-read my post I was saying our figures per head, like your band, are also below £400 each). We do plenty of pub gigs too!

Haha, allow me to put the counter! Being invited to play at someone's wedding is a real privilege and can be a huge amount of fun! The guests are there to have a great time, all you need to do is play your part and it can be an absolute blast! And, nope, I don't agree that a function band is just a pub band in a different better-paid setting, well not the better more successful function bands anyway. One of the things that disheartened me most initially was taking our material and approach that worked really well at pubs and finding that it fell flat at functions. Personally I think if you're looking to get into function work you need to step up from a hobby / "bit of fun" mindset, which you can get away with as a pub band, to looking to be a more professional / slick / tightly performing set up. Sure, it will usually mean arriving earlier than you would need to for a pub gig, and we're also prepared to travel quite a bit further for functions than for pub gigs as they will pay 2 to 3 times as much as a typical pub gig - the £400 each / function gig figure @mrtcat shared is very decent indeed, fwiw we're typically on less than that for most of our function gigs.

Great spot thanks. I'm not at all familiar with the slicer pedal, but it does sound pretty cool! In what ways does it differ from an arpeggiator pedal?

Speaking of massive pedal boards the Fratellis bassist clearly had one! What do folk reckon he's using to get the funky filter / delay sound at the start of the track and on the verses? He seems to kick just one pedal on to engage the effect.

Interesting. What were you finding the Octabvre was adding vs the OC5?

Nah, just very good practice! Bit like doing a sound check before a gig!

A couple of ideas from me (YMMV! etc) Suggest checking out the Boss OC5 for an excellent and great value octaver? I share your pain re. drives: I've got 7 of the things sitting on my shelf which I really need to get around to moving on, haha! I found that my most recent multi (GT1000 Core) managed to match / out do them all which my cheap-as-chips Zoom B1-4 hadn't really come close to doing. But the most important thing about the GT1000 Core is the always on preamp setting, as we're not using backline, and finally getting a tone that I really like and seems to be getting plaudits from fellow BC'ers.

Query sorted!

Thanks Phil. Lighting is often very much overlooked as being key to a live performance - certainly has been by me and my crew! On my agenda to upgrade our lighting set up over the next 12 months...

Also interesting, given the thousands of Spectors you've owned 😅

Interesting. I have a similar, but significantly lower intensity, high pitched whine on my Euro 5LX, which I assumed was a shielding issue and have been meaning to get looked at by a bass tech. Paging @cetera !

^^This 100% !

That sounds fab Pete! Not gonna deny that Led Zep are one of my all time fav bands and JPJ right up there with his bass lines. Am I right in thinking he only ever had one bass? If so, did anyone ever mention it's all in the fingers?! Any clips / promo material of you guys?

A little August bump to see if we can catch a few more BC bands 😊

Ah ok. In my experience it's been the guitarist who wants to stick with backline and "real amps" which, tbf, I can completely understand. Whereas singers, in my experience, generally jump at using IEMs as they can hear themselves really well and only have acoustic drums on stage blaring out. Particularly helped if the desk has really decent preamps which our CQ kit does (a noticeable step up from my previous Soundcraft MTK12). The combination of having a personalised mix at the volume we each want (potentially also giving much less damage to our hearing?), decent IEM earpieces, and quality desk preamps has made the gigging experience a much more enjoyable one for me, and I'm blessed that my current crew (7 of us, in total, on rotation) are all totally on board and very happy with IEMs. I guess I could probably say I'm a convert, haha, having switched to IEMs for the last couple of years whilst previously regularly gigging with amps and monitors for a much longer while before that.

I guess one huge advantage of IEMs is removing a major source of potential feedback from the stage sound?

Xvive A58 Guitar Wireless System review | Guitar World Nice little review on Guitar world - pretty positive

Hadn't come across the Xvive A58 - looks like new kit out this year with good reviews. I'm a fan of their U4 for IEM's. They do look quite bulky though! Btw - if you don't want to take the Nux case to gigs, there's nothing's stopping you leaving it at home - it's just there for convenience and doubles up as a back up battery pack. It's also available in 5.8 GHz.

Had to look up what that phrase meant! Apparently means: something that is self-referential, self-aware, or cleverly referencing itself or its own category. It often implies a level of self-awareness or commentary on the thing itself, rather than just the content. That phrase is so meta

Nope. I think the Boss SY synth sounds are much less "classic synth" in comparison to the MXR, C4 and FI. But there are enough decent options for me to use on a few tracks with my covers band which is all I am really needing. And the "faux-tracking" is super tight. This is a pretty cool demo, albeit on guitar

Admin costs of £14M on what??! It's not like they have a huge amount of staff...

So useful to know that the MXR struggles to track at pace, thank you! For bassists less competent at "synth bass technique" than you (like me for starters), that could be an issue. Together with the arpeggiator and a decent display, another reason to stick for a while with my Boss SY-200 which delivers idiot-friendly "tracking" at pretty rapid speeds.