mike257

Lots of heated opinions here! I started out using Cakewalk in the late 90s, before moving to Cubase, which I happily used in studios and at home for a long time. I'm now a Reaper user. I do more live engineering than studio these days, and my initial use case for Reaper was as a very stable, resource efficient and lightweight platform for capturing live multitracks at shows. It's a lot less bloated and hungry than other DAWs I've used, and proved to be a solid choice for the job. I've since moved over to use it for all my mixing and editing. The included plugin set (it's an optional tick box in the installer) is all useable - there's no fancy graphics on the front ends, it's all just sliders and parameter value displays, but they all sound fine and do the job they're meant to do, and there's a pretty broad selection of them. The audio editing and MIDI functionality all works fine for me. There's a little learning curve in adjusting if you're used to another DAW, but that's to be expected. You can load custom keyboard shortcut maps and I'm pretty sure there's one available that mirrors common Pro Tools shortcuts to help if you're moving across. It's not going to be for everyone, these things are always about what works for you personally, but it does the job fine for me and I've used it professionally for mixing and mastering of material that's gone out for releases and broadcasts. No desire to change, as it's doing everything I need it to and not causing me any issues.

Is that guy with the gun and the villainous 'tache Big Beef Chief? 🤣

Cool - if the desk is up there with you, you don't need anything heavy duty for musicians to do monitor mixes, as you're never going to be more than a few metres from it on stages that size. Best practice is to run on 5ghz rather than 2.4, hide your SSID, get the antenna where there's no line of sight obstructions. If you're particularly worried about congestion you can use a free WiFi analyser app to see which channels are in use at the venue and change the wireless channel you're operating in to a clear one but at that kind of distance with those stage sizes you should have no bother. If you want to go pro for peace of mind, Ubiquiti make some great enterprise grade access points, but most domestic access points and routers will do the job in your case.

What size of venues are you playing? Is the desk at FOH or on stage with you?

The drummer is making a solid effort to inject a bit of energy in to proceedings, but he's definitely up against it there!

I think this is far more common that people would imagine. I worked with a pretty big name American artist a couple of years ago, band are all ridiculous top class players, some with a list absolutely huge names on their CVs. They're doing weddings/functions and regular church gigs when they're not on the road. An ex-manager of another band I work with runs a very high end function band agency in London and same story, loads of top class session players with huge pop credits. It's definitely eye opening when you get on the inside of it. I do a lot of tour management so I juggle the budgets for the shows. I think back to the bands I idolised as a teenager, the ones I thought "that's where I'd love to be in a few years", and I now know they will all have been slogging their guts out in knackered vans, sleeping in stinky poo hotels and barely making any money at all. As a kid, if their album was on the shelves in HMV and they were selling out 300 cap clubs, I thought they were living the dream!

Too many function gigs in the year or two after it came out completely killed any hope of me ever enjoying Get Lucky 🤣

The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion

It's a while since I've dabbled but I don't think Schism is too tricky, from what I remember.

I'd also go listen to some isolated bass tracks from famous recordings - there's stuff on YouTube from James Jamerson, McCartney and many more. When you hear all the buzz, finger noise and string clanks on iconic bass performances that you can barely perceive once they're sat in a mix, you'll feel better about your own! Analysing your own playing on an isolated recording is a great way to improve but without context you can also go right down a rabbit hole and best yourself up far too much!

His bit in his first stand-up DVD, Cosmic Jam, on how cockney music influenced the great classical composers, is absolute brilliance. Love his musical bits.

I know Jon from Conan, lovely dude. We both do splitter van hire in the same area so have passed gigs back and forth over the years. The man certainly has good taste in giant fuzzy amps!

I've heard this from a fair few people. Seems common that folk are tracking and editing elsewhere then throwing the audio across to Mixbus for mixing. Sceptical as to whether it'll give me anything I'm not getting from sticking Waves SSL channels everywhere in Reaper but might give it a go!

You must have picked up some freebies along the line - looks like the Classic Equaliser is the only one that comes free when you download the CS pack. I got the 76 in the free offer, and had a code for the EQual from Bedroom Producers Blog that I'd not got round to activating - everything else is inviting me to give them some cash!

Hadn't realised there was other free ones in the T Racks bundle. I'll have a dog through that. The 76 is great!