mike257

That's awesome news! Made up to get that update.

That's my mate Dave in the background there 🤣 he's an excellent bassist when he's not busy being a top tier roadie!

He did about 5 years as Mark Ronson's musical director and bassist, mid 2000s to early 2010s, so he's on all the live stuff from when the Version album blew up.

He hasn't seen me yet, but I've just spotted @VTypeV4 in the wild, and doing a bloody marvellous job of making Spear Of Destiny sound great!

Just realised I've fully slacked off on our tour updates Matt! Managed to squeeze in a few bits this year. Spent a month in the US across January/February back in multitasking TM/tech/iPad monitors mode..... Squeezed in some TV action while we were out there..... And then since we got home, I've been doing various bits of dep cover for other bands, some TM, some FOH. Everything I've mixed this year has been some flavour of Allen & Heath, from SQ5 to the big S7000 (apart from a rogue M32 on Saturday) The best update to this thread though, is that @VTypeV4 and I might finally do a show together this week! I'm I'm Scarborough on Saturday mixing monitors for Hooky and Spear Of Destiny are on the bill, so I'm guessing that means you're there too Matt?

I wouldn't suggest anyone buy a loudness meter as some sort of gauge for your performance volume. It'll give you more bad info than good, and steer you in the wrong direction if you don't know how to interpret it. Cheap decibel meters aren't accurately calibrated, and they show a peak value. Proper loudness motoring takes in to account that music is a dynamic source and measures with averages over a particular timescale (often a 15 minute average, but usually no less than 5). If you stand at the back of a pub with a cheap meter you'll see all sorts of shocking big numbers pop up when the dynamics are up or the drummer throws a big hit in - if the untrained person holding it tells you "you got up to 112dB!" and then you're moderating what you do based on that, you're chasing your tail because that momentary peak means nothing in terms of genuine perceived loudness in the room.

I was coming here to suggest Dan too, this is right in his wheelhouse and I'd have the utmost confidence in his work, both in the design and the standard of construction. He's the real deal.

Air have just done a massive sellout tour last year celebrating the anniversary of the Moon Safari album - an awesome show by all accounts.

It's been typed in the "Condition Details" instead of the item description. Took me a minute to spot it too, not the usual place you'd look for this info.

I know, I was being facetious.

As far as I knew, they'd had him on an electric kit for some time now. Maybe he's just sick of that thumpy sound of sticks hitting rubber pads behind him 🤷

Been a while, but I was pretty confident you can route any output to them, and it looks like Mixing Station says yes.....

You can actually bodge this with the X32 Rack, now that I think about it. It has eight XLR outputs, but it also has six "Aux" outputs on jacks, and I'm pretty sure you can still route the mix bus outputs to them, giving you 14 outs total.

Very much talking about IEMs here. Stereo in FOH is something you have to be pretty careful with!

Yes, absolutely that. Even if every input to the desk is a mono source, having the ability to pan each source across the stereo field makes an enormous difference to the clarity of your mix - lots of it is down to psychoacoustics and how the brain perceives and prioritises sounds based on direction. Going from a mono mix to a stereo one can make an enormous difference in mix clarity. I'm a monitor engineer by trade, so plenty of first hand experience of the difference it makes - and don't even start me nerding out on 3D immersive processing for IEMs, that's a whole different level of game changing!

In that case, you'd fit in to the X32 Rack by itself. You'd also fit in to cheaper options like the XR18, with the caveat that they leave you no possibility for future expansion, whereas with the X32 Rack, you can at least add the stagebox in future should your needs change. I'd strongly suggest going stereo for your IEMs when you can, though. It really does make a significant difference.

Options are fairly limited for that amount of inputs/outputs on a low budget. The only thing I'd suggest in that price bracket would be the Behringer X32 Rack, with an additional Behringer S16 stagebox to give you 32 inputs, 16 outputs, which probably comes in at just under £1k. This gives you enough inputs for everything you need now, plus spare capacity for any changing requirements in future, and 16 XLR outputs. The mixer has a total of 16 buses to be used for monitor mixes, subgroups, effects sends, so you could use 12 buses for 6 stereo IEM mixes, and have four spare for effects sends. Not my first choice of system, but my recommended choice at sub £1k prices. It's a very common choice for touring bands who can't quite stretch to a monitor engineer yet and are carrying a self contained rig. I'm not sure there's anything else in that price bracket that you can get enough outputs from to run stereo IEMs - and you absolutely want to run them stereo wherever possible, it's a huge difference.

I'm 17 gigs deep in this year's schedule, and have about 80 in the diary between now and the end of November - which is a slow year compared to the last few! Unfortunately, none of them with a bass round my neck - all with my tour manager, sound engineer or guitar tech hats on - but some cracking stuff in the diary, a few bucket list things in there for me so very much looking forward to it all. Nice mix of touring and festivals, including lots of time in Europe and short stints in both the US and Aus/NZ. Bass playing in 2025 has so far been limited to annoying the dog playing along to Spotify in the living room!

Going from your current speakers to a pair of 8 inch Altos would be a significant downgrade that I wouldn't recommend.

They do (I'm one of the people that does the stuff) and there's only one right way of doing it, and if you're doing it wrong, you're almost certainly doing that knowingly. However, doing "that stuff" requires participation from all the people you're getting a visa for - the artists and crew have to personally fill out paperwork, visit the US Embassy in London for a visa interview and submit their passports for the visa to be added. A band that started touring the US in the late 70s/early 80s will know this and will absolutely know if they haven't done it. The visa is physically stuck inside your passport, and has a clear expiry date. If they've travelled without the correct visa, they've done it knowingly and it's on them and their team, really. All of this is moot if the visas were wrong 🤷

All the chatter I'm seeing on socials and forums seems to be focusing on the very speculative idea that they were rejected for their political views, and conveniently ignoring this point here. Going to the US to work, in any context, requires the correct visas, and a band that have been around as long as them will be well aware of it. They're expensive and time consuming to obtain, but they're a reality of touring out there. I hold an O2 visa linked to the O1 visa held by an artist I work for - even with that I can only enter to work for that specific artist and nobody else. If you visit the US and work (and playing a show counts as work) without the correct visas you are working illegally and if caught you're liable to be deported, banned from the country for 5-10 years, and ineligible for the ESTA programme (tourist visa waiver) permanently. If they've rocked up to the border without the correct visas to work, that will absolutely be the primary reason they've been denied entry, and it's on the band and their team for not having their paperwork lined up. US immigration don't muck about, even more so under the current administration, and I'd not be taking any chances going over without watertight paperwork.

I know A&H have a Custom Control app for some of their consoles but don't know if it's available for QU. With the Mixing Station custom layouts, you get a grid and can draw on/reposition/resize any controls you want, wherever you want, and you have options to limit how they operate too. Definitely worth having a little play with it.

Glad to hear you've got a solution you're happy with. I did an install some years ago for a local community centre with similar use cases. Majority of events involved one or two hand-held radio mics, a playback source on a 3.5mm jack, or a laptop hooked up to a projector. I put a Behringer XR18 in, but the big winner was building them a custom layout on Mixing Station. I made a fairly idiot-proof basic scene with some generic "safe" EQ settings, then set the app up to automatically boot in to a customs layout that only gave access to a fader and a mute button for each of the main input sources (Mic 1, Mic 2, HDMI, 3.5mm, and a stereo XLR hookup at the back of the room for visiting mixers on larger events), a fader that brought up reverb on the mics, a master fader, and a big red "reset to defaults" button that reloaded my scene in case something had gone awry. This meant the least skilled volunteer could operate the system for 95% of their requirements. The full interface was a couple of button presses away for an experienced op to use if required. You could do a similar thing tailored to your use case for any desk supported by Mixing Station (Behringer XR, X32; Allen & Heath CQ, QU, SQ; various others) and just give volunteers the tablet to use.

Suspected he might not be keen! He stays busy enough doing the bits he prefers doing. He's a wizard, that lad. I'll have to pop in and see him for a brew, it's been a while. Tom Benson is another Liverpool based tech who might be more inclined to look at that sort of thing. I'll DM you his number. Andy Free is another one - used to be the engineer in the Zanzibar and now looks after all the Jacaranda venues, very handy with repairs.

The absolute best I know is Dan Whitelock-Jones of DWJ Amps in Liverpool. He pretty exclusively works on valve stuff these days (and on his own amp builds, which are great) but it's always worth an ask. https://www.instagram.com/danwhitelockjones