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bluesparky

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Everything posted by bluesparky

  1. [quote name='Dad3353' timestamp='1448661171' post='2917326'] 'FACE' is for that other lot... [/quote] Ha ha!
  2. This t shirt caught my eye earlier and it's going on the list. Not too in your face but obvious to us. http://www.zazzle.co.uk/eadg_bass_guitar_tuning_t_shirt-235305239544153062
  3. Pantera!!!! Jaco (in any line-up) Vai (the "band") - just to hear the Sex & Religion album played live, with TM Stevens & Devin Townsend etc Hendrix Queen with Freddie. (I did do the 2008 cosmos rocks tour, but it was with a.n.other singing, not the same in my book!). Led Zep (before my time though - however I was annoyingly in the building on the day of the O2 Ahmet show as I had just loaded out the Take That tour that was in the previous night / week. I knew most of the crew on the Led Zep gig and could've easily stayed in the O2 and seen the gig, but I'd have to have been in Manchester early in the morning after the Led Zep gig to load into the MEN and there wasn't a practical way of getting there. Looking back I should've just taken a cab to Manchester or hired a car - it'd have been worth it in the long run).
  4. [quote name='Nicko' timestamp='1446726574' post='2901762'] I really like the Stereophonics music, but Kelly Jones is an absolute 1st class a**hole IMHO. Slash. Need I say more? On the subject of U2, The Edge is almost as bad. [/quote] Slash? I'm not sure of his past, but now he's one of the nicest people in the industry. A few colleagues of mine have toured with him multiple times and have said he makes a good effort to go out of his way to be approachable to fans & his crew etc when he certainly doesn't need to. A quote from his LD was "if it wasn't for Dave Grohl he'd be the nicest person in rock 'n roll", which was nice for me to hear - on that note I asked what his & Slash's opinion of Axl was, the answer definitely wasn't quite so positive.
  5. Madonna, on average 4 times a week since July and will do so until Christmas... I can't wait to go and see another band which plays more of my type of music - it all pays the bills though so I can't complain.
  6. Forget Back To The Future day, this song was release 19 years ago today. Where has the time gone?
  7. Brilliant! love it! (the 1 & 3 clapping is a personal annoyance of mine).
  8. [quote name='4-string-thing' timestamp='1439121369' post='2840135'] Wow, thanks for that bluesparky I'm not sure how much of it I actually understood, but I'll have a good re-read of it when I have more time and try to absorb it properly.... I've seen simple DMX controllers on ebay at very good prices, so I'm hoping something like that would do what we want.... [/quote] No worries, if you need any more general DMX / lighting thoughts, information or anything put in a simpler fashion then feel free to drop me a line.
  9. Great idea, Love it! [quote name='Bassman Sam' timestamp='1438034657' post='2831151'] Dick Waving and the Fast Cars. [/quote] Can I have some kitchen roll for the coffe on my compter screen please?
  10. My suggestion would be, as mentioned to have pre-programmed scenes and chases in banks with switches for up/down bank. Each bank having 2, or 3 different looks or chases on their own button - a 7 segment display would be handy for this. It depends on how big you want / need to go. A tap-tempo could be handy for chases used during interesting songs and also a flashing LED letting you know what the tempo is would be good. Smoke on off could be handy. A couple of things that could be nice to have could be a default "between-song" look, so you can hit it's dedicated button at the end of the song, which overrides everything and a pre-stored or default look comes up and stays there until you press it again so it'll revert to whatever you've setup to be ready for the next song. This would avoid the ghastly look of the lights still chasing wildly whilst the vocalist is introducing the ballad you're about to play. Also the option to have one of the scene / chase buttons which doesnt toggle / latch on, it'll only be active when it's pressed. It can either override whatever is being currenlty outputted, e.g. for a quick black out, or snap to dark blue during a quick rest / 4 beat pause in the song etc. or it can ADD to whatever is being outputted/ e.g. it could be a cue where all lights go to white, this could be on a big hit, or when you go into a chorus, big intro chord etc, if it's only on when you're pressing the footswitch it'll be natural to do as it'll often be on the first beat of a bar etc and natural to do whilst playing (the same as engaging an effects pedal on your rig) or have a scene stored which can make all / some of the rig strobe (overridden in white, or not) controlled by a latched or momentary footswitch. A master intensity push button control might be handy. I don't know how bright the lights are that are commonly used, but they may be overpowering for some of the more cosy venues, but could be perfect for the larger venues. Then you could have the chases and scenes programmed at full intensity and you'd have the ability to dial them down a bit if you're just a duet in the dog and duck on night, and then have it all at full intensity when you're at the enormodome the next night. If you're lucky enough to have moving lights, then the ability to maybe store a chase on one of the button which does a position move, over 2 seconds. Store 3 or 4 position only scenes for all moving lights in a chase, which is advanced by a push of a foot button. In my opinion the worst thing people can do with moving lights is having them move and flash all the time, non-stop. Less is definitely more when it comes to moving - unless it's a wild solo or a nice gentle waft during a ballad.
  11. This one: Dave Brubeck, Blue Rondo a la turk https://youtu.be/vKNZqM0d-xo I first heard it on Ken Burns' documentary when it was first aired, I went out and found it as soon as I could. I only just remembered it when I was thinking about which tracks I could suggest for this topic so now I've bought the piano music and I'm slaving away at it. The main riff is far from difficult and a pleasure to play.
  12. I'm back in the country (briefly) this week, so here's a good old fashioned bump in case someone is interested.
  13. OOh! finally, something I know a lot about! [quote name='Damonjames' timestamp='1438958091' post='2838986'] The cool thing with DMX is you can control things other than lights, like a smoke machine for example of the console (provided it is a DMX enabled unit) and you just daisy chain the lights up [/quote] 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!
  14. Great, thanks for the heads up, I've been a fan of theirs for a while now (clearly not big enough seeing as I didn't know there was a new album out!). I've lit them at a few festivals too, they're always spot on live and create a great first impression to those who don't know who they are.
  15. Good news! I was in a similar position and listed after a stringray for years! I only had to wait 6 years before I could afford to get my hands on a new one. I got my five string in 2001 and it's been my main go-to bass ever since. Love it.
  16. The solution for the time being is that they're going into my son's wardrobe (it's pretty big). He's only 2 so he doesn't need all that space!
  17. [quote name='bartelby' timestamp='1432237292' post='2779650'] Bought a book from Mark. It was in perfect condition, nice quick and secure (what kind of tape was that??) delivery. Fantastic communication. Mark's a pleasure to deal with. [/quote] I can't remember what I used on your package, but I usually use simple matt gaffa tape (which seems to get frequently & [i]accidently[/i] overordered on the gigs I work on and then they seem to fall into my toolbox), or if you were lucky it could've been the luminous yellow matt gaffa, but I usually leave that for special occasions.
  18. Pre-going-away-on-tour-for-a-very-long-time-would-like-to-shift-them-before-I-go-type BUMP!
  19. [quote name='Big_Stu' timestamp='1433093229' post='2787769'] Put them in the back of your largest cupboard, put a white sheet over them and then pile any shoes or handbags that you can find on top of it. Worked for me. [/quote] Ha ha! Worth a go!
  20. [quote name='chris_b' timestamp='1432981178' post='2786717'] Check it out. If the Ashdown is OK then temporary storage gives you plan B up until about the end of October. My other suggestion is to get rid of all your cabs and fund a couple of BF Super Compacts, for a much smaller foot print which you can leave in your daughters bedroom. She won't mind and won't even notice for a good few years. [/quote] Great idea, but i've agreed that there'll be no more equipment coming in for a VERY long time!!
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