TimR

I think you'll find that they need to do an awful lot more than just set up and run a worthwhile charity to be considered for a knighthood. His list of charity endeavours and support is very long. Ranging from Land mines to Animal Cruelty...

Another Tuba player here. If you're going to play a brass instrument you're pretty much going to have to learn how to read the dots. Although a lot of the dots I was given were treble clef so my bass clef is still a bit rusty. Mainly because the Tuba players had graduated from originally drinking shandy and playing trumpet.

You'll be lucky to narrow it down. I once depped for a band who I'd never met until the night. The only interaction I'd had was with the band leader by email when I asked for a setlist. He replied, it's all standards, you'll be fine. I spent the whole evening working very hard playing 3 hours of tunes I had never heard before in my life. "This one is in E. After 4..."

Quite. And in the UK Engineer isn't a protected profession. Anyone can be an engineer. However a professional engineer is something different to an 'engineer'. They will have a degree or a similar level experience based qualification. So let's not get bogged down in semantics based on proffessional snobbery. As I say, it's 'recording' engineers trying to make the band sound like they do on the 'CD' or maybe MP3 or Radio. Everything louder than everything else. Maybe it is the problem with the musicians not playing dynamics and making the music actually come alive. I rolled my eyes again last night as one of my band members said "We need to play it faster as it's lacking any energy." Maybe if they learned some internal dynamics and concentrated on phrasing instead of turning up to 11 it would have more life..

I'm pretty sure they're engineers. They use skills and equipment to solve problems. Pretty much what an engineer does.

Indeed. Where the objective is to reproduce the sound on stage as closely as possible and amplify it. I think the engineers bands bring with them are recording engineers who are trying to reproduce the CD sound.

We have a band get together with instruments tonight. Won't be a practice or rehearsal as we don't have a gig lined up. But will hopefully be allowed to show the guitarist how his PA works following our gig two weeks ago when I found out he just puts the main mix back through the monitors. Which is somewhat less than ideal for outdoor gigs.

Personally I think you should PM Rosie. I suspect she knows exactly how it works...

Yes. Sure. We played a fair last week. Cash. They're not organised businesses with £m turnovers, auditors and HMRC requiring returns.

Yes. Practice is what individuals do at home to get an idea how the song goes, chord progressions, bass lines, important riffs, basic structure. Then rehearsal is when you find out that none of it works and has to be rearranged to suit the band. Then you go away and practice the new parts to the new arrangement. What you don't do is use rehearsal time to complain to each other that you're not all playing what's on the record. 😁

Our singer has managed to get us on their system and it looks like we might actually get paid for the gig we did in August 2021. Although I suspect it'll be in the last financial year or something else will stall it now. 😁

It's the same the world over. Clients who are a nightmare get charged more for your services, and if they decide you're too expensive and go somewhere else it makes your life easier. Otherwise they can pay a premium for the luxury of being awkward.

Yes. Going through this at the moment. Fairly new female singer. Guitarist thought she be great as a rock front lady and tried to get her to sing songs from when he was a teenager, about 5 years before she was born. We've eventually steered him round to what she knows and likes. Sometimes for things to work, everyone has to change what they want to do. And I think the band is much better for it.

Practice is cheating.

One of each and an imperial one.

She needed a different app. Simpler the better. Plenty out there.

Something went terribly badly in that first song. May played some really duff notes and then started scowling around the stage. Again. Autoprompt hidden in the stage isn't visible to the audience.

There's a very long thread about this somewhere. Depends entirely on your show. If people have come to see a band, they don't want to be faced by a wall of music folders with musicians hiding behind them. If they've gone to listen to a band and/or watch the singer, it doesn't really matter what the musicians are doing. With the advent of small Ipads, that problem is mostly resolved now. The use of an ipad/tablet for reference is fine but if you're putting on a show you shouldn't be hiding behind it and anchored to the spot. You might as well be staring at your shoes or frets.

Doug Helvering. Worth a follow. A lot of 70s musicians would have grown up listening to Jazz. It would have been played everywhere.

That would make sense too. My first amp was 120W combo lent to me but regularly being used for a function band in the 70s. 300w+ amps didn't seem to be readily available. The SVT was 300w but an outlier and required an 8x10" cabinet. So I'm really thinking the bottom end wouldn't have been there in any strength for a rock band without really distorting.

Watching Queen: Live at the Rainbow on Sky Arts - it'll be repeated... John Deacon doesn't appear to drop below 7th fret very often. And he's a lunatic, all over the stage and his body is bopping to 8ths for the most of it. What a player. He's definitely one of my early influences. Now left wondering if 70s sound systems couldn't do the bottom end with any power, or whether something else is going on.

You have to entertain the audience. That's the primary purpose of playing music to an audience. Just have to make sure you have the right band for the right audience. If the audience want me to play Sweet Caroline, I don't have to like it, but if it's what they want, who am I to argue. I'm not going to be listening to it on my way home. I probably wouldn't even listen to it more than once to learn it. 😁 We have songs in our setlist we don't rehearse. If we haven't gigged for a while we run through the list and ask who needs to rehearse each tune. Mostly those tunes get a quick shake of the head and everyone looks at the floor. That speaks volumes to me. But come the gig, the place is jumping and we all have smiles on our faces. When that happens I'm not entirely sure the songs we play are what makes us happy.

It's all about phrasing. The only person not treating them as 4 bar phrases, is the only person getting lost.

That's not quite the same. It affects how you rehearse together. It's difficult to explain. In this example B^ are accented phrases of B. And you're trying to get the band to accent those phrases together. ||:A...|A...|A...|B... :|| |B^...|B...|B^...|B...| |B^...|B...|C...|C...| Is not |A...|A...|A...|B...| |A...|A...|A....| |B...|B^...|B...|B^...|B...|B^...|B...| |C...|C...| Especialy when the person counting in the second example is consistently getting it wrong.