lozkerr

Thank you for your input. If I'd turned down, I'd have lost everything else - bass, my mic, guitars, main vox and keys. Using this rig gives me control over what I need to hear, and if I get blasted with noise from the desk, I can kill just that feed and still carry on OK. If bleed-through is causing issues, that needs to be fixed at soundcheck, not half-way through the second set, which is when all this started. I don't know what happened out front and TBF I don't really care. What I do care about is my hearing, and after getting bombarded with noise three times on the trot, I'm not prepared to risk it again.

I've described it in detail in this thread:

I thought of that. Repatching would only take a few seconds - join the mic input and output cables and plug the bass DI into the pre-amp on my pedalboard. Just need to make sure there's enough slack in the cable when setting up. Then loosen the IEMs slightly to hear more ambient sound and the job's a good 'un.

I've found them pretty reliable so far. The curved sleeving at the earphone end fits nicely round my ears, making it easy to tuck the wires out of the way. They've only been used in anger a few times, so they might not last as long as pricier sets, but I can't fault the design or sound quality. They come with a few different tips, and the second set I tried seemed to fit the bill - they cut out all the ambient sound and stayed put even when I snagged the cable. Aye, it's easy to take the Old Town for granted and get irritated with the tourists gawping round in open-mouthed wonder. I think the sense of history hit me properly during lockdown - when I had to go to the supermarket, I found myself walking more slowly and noticing more things because of not having to dodge groups of tourists. Old ghost signs, tenement bell-pulls still bearing the names of long-departed residents, carvings on buildings, roads that once went somewhere and now didn't - all the things I'd hurried past hundreds of times and never noticed. It was creepy at the same time, though - seeing places like Princes Street and the Grassmarket completely deserted brought on a feeling of being a post-apocalyptic disaster movie. Though I was born here, I'd spent the majority of my life in England - Somerset, Bournemouth, Hertfordshire, London and Leeds. But I'd aye had a hankering to come back to Edinburgh. The flat I'm now in was a holiday let, which I rented for a couple of weeks, and during a chat with the owner, she mentioned they were selling up. My divorce settlement was just sitting in a bank account and I'd been wondering where to buy a place, so it was a no-brainer. The B-word result was another factor. Yes, I liked it so much I bought the property 😊

OK, as promised, here are some pics and details of what goes where. I was hoping to have picked up all the cables by now, but while staring blankly at the cables in Guitar Guitar it sank in that no high street shop is going to stock a lot of twelve-inch XLR cables, so I guess I'll have to get them online. No matter, it won't be used in anger for a couple of weeks yet. Are we sitting comfortably? Then let us begin. Here is the front. Top to bottom - Behringer MX882 splitter mixer, Furman power conditioner, Eden WTP600 amp in a Gator case. And yes, from a locking point of view, the case is upside down, but I had to assemble it on my dining table and didn't want to scratch the glass. And here is the rear. Correct - the back of the mixer is almost inaccessible, so I think a patch panel will be needed. This is a better picture of the back of the mixer, nicked from G4M's website. And here are the all-important connection details. All the sockets are labelled, so reading from right to left: Main input L: no connection. Main input R: no connection. Main output L: out to IEM belt pack or transmitter. Main output R: no connection. Channel 1 input: IEM feed from main desk. Channel 1 output: no connection. Channel 2 input: DI output from amp. Or pedalboard pre-amp. There's no EQ on this mixer. Channel 2 output: DI to bass on main desk. Channel 3 input: vocal mic. Channel 3 output: mic feed to main desk. Channel 4 input: condenser mic pointed at singers. Channel 5 input (jack socket): unpowered ambient mic or powered mic via its own PSU. Channel 5 output (jack socket): no connection. Channel 6 input (jack socket): unpowered ambient mic or powered mic via its own PSU. Channel 6 output (jack socket): no connection. Mains kettle lead from power conditioner. Each input channel has one of two modes - SPLITTER or MIXER. Set them all to MIXER, set the balance controls fully left and dial in the mix you want. The signals going to the main desk from bass and vocal mic aren't affected by your mix. And that's it!

First person to see will buy. Or else.

They seem to have recovered OK, thankfully. I used my IEMs during rehearsal last night too, commandeering the PA monitor feed, and it really cut down the studio noise. I think they'll be a permanent fixture from now on.

Quick update. I've put the gear together - tonight was the first chance I've had to spend any time on it - and guess what? It works! IT BLOODY WORKS! Granted, I had to pull my practice rig apart to get the right cables and drape the living room in a spider's web of electric string to test everything, so it looked a bit messy, but I can mix the levels in my IEMs independently of whatever's going to the main desk. I still have to test a few more things, and do the rounds of the local music shops to get some cables of the right length but I'll post some pics and a diagram of the signal path tomorrow, as @MacDaddyrequested. Whoop whoop!

I've bought some bits and bobs to make a personal IEM mixer after being blasted with noise at our last gig. It took ten days for the ringing to subside. No changes to the signal path though, so I'm technically still in, I think.

I initially thought one mic would do, but this 'ere Gear4Music geezer grabbed me and said, 'wanna buy a mic, eh? Eh? 'Ere's one for twenty notes my darling, but just for you, I'll do yer two for 34 quid, 'cos I like the cut of yer jib, whadda yer say? Gowarn, yer know yer want to.' They're cheap wee Sub Zero mics and I doubt they're particularly good quality, but if I can hear the wedges and singers, all's good in the hood. Having two will give some added flexibility - I was thinking of pointing one at the singers and the other at the nearest wedge monitor. The ZS10 IEMs came with a few different tips and after trying them all in turn I think I've found a pair that work well. I'll try a few different ones if I still think I'm not getting a decent seal. I've been bombarded with noise three times on the trot now and I'd like to hear nothing other than what's coming through my IEMs. Aye, Auld Reekie gets its claws into you. I'm in the middle of tourist central, at the top of the Royal Mile. I bought this place six years ago, after being exiled south of the Rio Tweed for most of my life, and I can still recall how I felt when I'd stop at the top of The Mound and just look across the city in awed wonder. There's plenty to b|tch about, no doubt about that - the Airbnb blight, overtourism, the never-ending car wars, the state of the roads, yada yada - but this is a fantastic city. I do feel very privileged to live here and have been born here[1]. [1] In Leith. Please don't tell the Old Town locals. They'd hang me in the Grassmarket if they knew]

Aaarrgh! The gear I ordered arrived this afternoon, too. The Zoom R8 looks the biz all right, provided I could instantly kill the feed from the main desk and have enough inputs left over to hear what's going on on stage. Not a huge bit of gear, either. <thinks, thinks, thinks> Now that I've got the gear, I'll see how well it works in practice as a first step. I bought a 4U Gator rack case as well, so that my Eden WTP600 can fit in alongside the splitter mixer. That's a good incentive for my wee brain - I'll have to bring a spare amp by default if I want any monitoring! I'll try it out at rehearsal on Thursday and report back. We're getting too loud in the rehearsal studio as well - in our run-through before our last gig, one of our guitarists used a phone app to measure noise levels and we apparently hit 125 dB at one point 😱 If we can't dial it back, I think I might suggest that everyone stands on the opposite side of the room to their amps so they can clearly hear the racket they're making - and I'm as guilty as anyone in that respect.

Damn, I should have thought of that. I have a Zoom H2 that I use for recording our rehearsals and the sound quality's really good. I've ordered a pair of el-cheapo condenser microphones to give me the option of pointing one at the singists and the other at a wedge monitor. I'll have to do some experimenting to see what works best. At least I don't have to worry about hearing our boilermaker drummer! He can wake the dead when he gets carried away. I have a Behringer P2 belt pack that doesn't look to have as many features as your P1 and I did think of turning the whole thing down when the volume got unbearable but I'd have had to stop playing to do a reach-around under my jacket (stop sniggering in the cheap seats) to get to the volume control. Worse, I'd have lost everything else, so I soldiered on, but I'm paying the price for that now. The solution I'm planning sounds very similar to yours - personal mixer taking inputs from bass, vocal mic, an on-stage sound source or two plus a feed from the main desk. Bass and vocal mic up on the splitter mixer so I can hear myself properly, sound stage down a tad and the ability to instantly kill the feed from the main desk without losing anything else if things go tits-up. With the splitter mixer on top of my amp, I can hit the mute button in an instant. Hopefully the gear will arrive on Monday. I'll report back on how well it works. On a different note, your location says you're now in Edinburgh. Is this a permanent thing?

Yes, of course. If Gear4Music are to be believed, the gear should be here on Monday. Stay tuned 😊

Thanks, folks. My ears are still ringing from a week ago, so I've decided to give the personal system a try. The IEM feed from the main desk can go into the splitter mixer so I can turn it down / off if need be. Hopefully the gear will be here before next Thursday's rehearsal, so I can try it out then.

...tha does it thissen, as they say in Yorkshire. My ears are still ringing from our last gig six days ago. The gig was on a college campus and we had a keen student stage crew, who were happy to provide me with an IEM feed. All seemed well at soundcheck, but as the gig progressed the monitor mix got increasingly louder and it sounded like my mic was being turned up and down, possibly due to bleed-through from my backline. On top of that, our drummer, who is a human metronome - no, he really is good - started hammering away at his kit like a boilermaker on piece work. On a fully mic'd up drumkit, which I was standing right beside. I could hardly hear my bass and ended up digging in hard, which inevitably resulted in a lot of string clatter, and also found myself singing BVs far too loud and I've strained my voice as a result. I am not happy about this - in fact I'm severely p'd off. I've been wondering what to do about it, as I'm feeling apprehensive about putting my hearing in the hands of sound engineers whose experience might not be that extensive. Something similar happened on our previous two gigs and I'm concerned that tinnitus might be just around the corner if I carry on like this. Custom moulded IEM earplugs will deffo be an improvement, but I'm wondering whether it would be safer to set up my own monitoring system that won't put me at risk of being deafened. I was thinking of something like a Behringer MX882 splitter mixer, with bass and vocal mic outputs going through that and out to the main desk, and a couple of ambient mics to pick up the stage sound. Mix those to taste with the bass and vocal mic and put the combined output through my IEMs. What are people's thoughts? Am I overthinking this? Many thanks, Laura

Mine is a Martindale HPAT400 - a simple pass/fail tester. I did think about getting a more expensive model, but given that it would only be used for our single-phase band gear, a simple yes/no seemed sufficient.

I can't remember what came from who now and I don't want to libel anyone, sorry - I bought the gear a while ago from several different people and all the electric string that came with it was put into the same box to await test and inspection. Plus, even if I did know who they were, it might be unfair to blame the seller as a lot of the cables accompanied double-insulated lights, where switching line and neutral wouldn't even be noticed unless a PAT test was done. I guess the lesson is that the copper's ABC mantra should always apply to used electrical gear bought off tinterwebz - Accept nothing, Believe nobody and Check everything.

I've spent the afternoon PAT testing a load of secondhand gear bought off fleabay that's having its first outing next week. Three kettle leads had line and neutral reversed inside moulded-on plugs. Needless to say, they're now in the bin with the offending plugs cut off.

One of our staples. I play it fingerstyle too.

That sounds like a decent price. I'm wondering if classic bike prices have fallen back from a peak? They went utterly stupid for a while - two-stroke Villiers-engined crap like the James Captain (top speed 45mph ahead of a cloud of petroil vapour) were going for more than that a few years ago. Even Velocette LEs were fetching silly money for a while. Having said that - I've just had a wee Google and it does look like that's the case. Goldies, Venoms, Super Rockets and Dominators seem to have dropped back a bit from where they were about ten years ago. So do Black Shadows, albeit not quite as much.

In my painfully-acquired experience, playing a five-string bass (and I'm guessing a six-string, too) is a lot easier if you can read notation. Not sight-reading - I'm certainly not one of those nauseatingly talented people who can look at a piece of sheet music covered in something that looks like a spilled ants nest and nail it on the first play-through - but seeing how the bassline progresses, noting where the big shifts occur and being able to decide whether to start on fret 10 of the B string, fret 5 of the E string or the open A based on where you have to go from there makes learning a song a lot easier. Sometimes it's easiest to ignore the B string completely - Echo Beach, Back On The Chain Gang, Suedehead, Slippery People and China Girl from our current repertoire spring to mind right away - but some songs are much easier to play by anchoring in one spot on the B string and playing across the neck, especially if you're singing at the same time. Roxanne, Heaven, Pretty In Pink, Rip It Up and The Best spring to mind in that regard. Five-string tabs seem to be very rare beasts indeed. When low Eb or below is needed, even the books I have tell you to de-tune. Online tabs almost always have the open notes detuned. The only person I've ever come across who writes five-string tab is Becky Baldwin, but I daresay there are a few others. And, of course, if you can read notation, you can play anything written for the double-bass if you ignore the bowing instructions.

Props. That can't have been a cheap purchase! I had two BSAs back in the day. One was a crappy old Bantam, about which the less said the better and the other was an A65 650 twin. Lovely machine - it's one of the few bikes I really regret selling.

I did that a few years ago after a couple of ales. Bid on an old XS750 and was outbid by £50 at the last minute. Would have been awkward, especially as I'd nowhere to keep the thing!

Likewise. It seems to be a nice sturdy bit of kit - certainly better-made than the wee Machine Mart trolley I've been using up to now. If it takes all my gear in one go, I'll be a very happy lass indeed!