mike257

I was production manager on this streaming festival last summer. Main stage at M&S Bank Arena (in this YouTube playlist here), and we had three other venues running across the city, all for three days across the August bank holiday weekend. First thing I'd do is forget about WiFi. If you want to do it to any reasonable standard and with any sort of reliability, a wired connection is essential. Find out where the router is in the venue, get a drum of Cat5/Cat6 and get yourself connected! OBS will feed any of the big name streaming platforms with relatively little fuss, and there's sites like Restream that can push it multiple platforms if you need it. Also need to think about audio - at a small gig, you don't always mic everything, and the mix in the PA is just filling the gaps around whatever racket is coming from stage, so you can't just take the house mix as your audio feed. You need to either take a split in to a separate mixer for broadcast, or do a broadcast mix of a spare aux on your desk. If you want to make sure the video and audio stay in sync, sending the broadcast audio mix in to the line inputs on your main camera and using that as the audio source in OBS will mean it'll be locked in with that video signal. vMix is the pro alternative to OBS and is available on a free trial (I think it's 30 days) so if you're doing anything critical it might be worth looking at that, it's a bit more stable.

I think there's definitely some sort of scale here, and "gifted musician who picks up the key by ear and knows what to play" is possibly not at the same end of said scale as "stoner who freestyles something different every time you play, that may or may not actually sound like he's playing the same song as the rest of you" 🤣

As much as I've got issues with the way the test program is being handled, the point of it is finding ways to deliver large scale events, because that's where the biggest issues are, and thats what the industry needs to get moving again. Phase one included a concert for 5000 in a festival tent, two large scale indoor club events and a business conference in Liverpool, snooker at the Crucible, and a lower-than-normal capacity football match. Phase two included a downsized Download Festival, Royal Ascot, Wimbledon. Phase Four is slated to include Latitude Festival and Tramlines Festival, so a big festival on a single site, and a multi-venue inner city festival, as well as the sporting events already mentioned.

They've released a summary of the findings this week, but nothing that constitutes actual advice on how to implement any of it as measures going forward. What little that has been released only came after various industry bodies mounted a legal challenge to force the release of the findings. Whole thing is a shambles.

Both of those events are part of the government backed Events Research Program, which is overseen by researchers and scientists and is supposed to be providing the data that allows us to plan how we move forward with safe delivery of events. Frustratingly, they've not provided any useful guidance from the results of the Phase 1 test events yet, so it's been no help so far. Not prohibitively expensive, it just doesn't exist. No insurer will underwrite the massive losses a large scale music festival would incur if it was cancelled due to COVID once the operational spend to deliver it had been committed.

What's going on is that despite the numerous test events that have taken place, the government have given no guidelines or insight as to what will or won't be allowed after July 19th. To put a festival on requires a huge investment and at least a few weeks lead time to build the site, the start of which involves the organisers committing large sums of money to various suppliers so they can crack on with the work. What's happening is that these festivals are reaching the "point of no return" dates where they have to start spending big money on site build, but not receiving clarity as to whether they'll actually be able to go ahead at full capacity, or at all, and what measures they'll be expected to have in place. If they can't go in to their build phase knowing they can honour all the tickets sold and run at full capacity, they're risking devastating financial losses - at which point it's a safer bet to postpone and ride it out until such a time as they can actually take place at full strength, rather than spend a million quid building a site and then only being allowed 50% of the customers needed to balance your budget, or not being able to run at all. That's why gigs in August onwards are pulling - it's still fairly likely that capacity limits will be imposed on large events even after July 19th, and unless they know for sure what that will look like, they can't be sure of the financial viability of the event. All the talk of insurance is because one of the headline points the live industry has campaigned for over the last year is for the government to back an insurance scheme to protect events from losses through Covid related cancellation. The insurance industry obviously won't underwrite it themselves as the risk is enormous. Other countries have put similar schemes in place but the government have refused to entertain it so far.

I ordered some the other day, very tasty. Still got leftovers in the fridge!

Yep. A lot of the specialist event trucking companies are having to set up sister operations on the mainland, employing European drivers, and doing a handover once a load gets across there. The whole thing is just a mess.

Live performance is the key income source now for almost all artists at any level. You're right that touring was a loss leader a few decades ago but that model has completely turned on its head now. "Fledgling" bands wouldn't be entertained for a stadium show because promoters will only book a show they're fairly confident they can recoup their outlay on. By the time you can fill a stadium though, the returns make the astronomical costs worthwhile. On a smaller scale, budgets are tight everywhere. You can be a well known name with successful records out playing pretty packed shows in large clubs, and your tour can still be completely dependent on merch sales to be profitable.

I think the means of consumption, measures of success, and routes to get there have shifted massively. In the 90s, you had BBC radio stations, and a limited number of commercial stations. You had the early days of satellite/cable with a handful of music channels. You had NME, the chart on a Sunday, Top Of The Pops. The majority of the public consumed music through a very small number of sources, and they tuned in to them regularly. When an artist broke big enough to hit these platforms, they were in front of everyone. Our eyes and ears are no longer pointed en masse at such a small number of sources. Everything is way more fragmented, the big music publications have nowhere near the power and influence they held, there are a million more distractions, and music audiences are fragmented. You can be huge within a niche genre, have a rabid fanbase, and fill large venues in a way that would have put you in all the big spots a few decades ago and pushed you to wider prominence, but doesn't register in the same way now - you can still do well, but it'll be in a bubble. There are still arena-filling, Radio 1 playlisted rock bands from the last couple of decades that have made a big impact through bold fashioned hard graft. A fair few have been mentioned already. Really though, there's not that many that have made it to that level and sustained it long term, even looking back to the days of RHCP.

If you weren't good enough to be in the room, you wouldn't be there. That said, surrounding yourself with people more experienced than you are is the absolute best thing to do if you want to keep learning and developing. I try and do it wherever I can, and the biggest leaps I've made have been from throwing myself in situations where I'm out of my depth and having to rise to meet them!

To understand the signal flow, it can help to imagine it like an old fashioned analogue desk where the reverb is another unit off in an outboard rack. You have a send knob on each channel that goes to the reverb unit You send vocals, maybe snare and toms, and the acoustic guitar. Those things are all mixed together and sent to the reverb as one chunk of sound. Reverb is applied to the whole thing, and comes back to your desk on a single channel as "reverb tails of everything". What might be happening here (hard to say for sure without being in front of your desk!) is that you're sending whatever comes out of your reverb unit to the IEM mixes, but you've sent vocals and various instruments in to that one reverb for your FOH mix, so you're getting the reverb tails of everything coming in to the IEM mix. The best way to deal with this would be to dedicate at least one effects unit to be a vocal reverb solely for the IEMs. Send nothing but vocals to this one, and send the FX return channel where it appears in to your IEM mix (but turn it off in FOH). This way, you can tailor that reverb to suit the in ear mixes, and it won't matter what you're doing with your main FOH verbs. The extra sophisticated way would be having one dedicated to each vocalist, but if you're new to operating a digital desk, I'd keep things as simple as you can! If you're struggling to put this together, drop me a line. You could drop your show file on to USB and then email it to me, and I could make the necessary change on the offline editor and send it back.

As a tour manager, who actually has to arrange these things for the artists and crew in the touring party, and has to manage the budget for making the whole thing happen, I'd be inclined to disagree. Whilst we don't need visas or permits for EVERY country within the EU, there's a fair few we do, and some come with stringent requirements, fees, and lengthy processing times, as well as interview visits to embassies, usually in London, for all applicants (which incurs travel costs and a day's pay for each person required to make the trip). Countries that don't require a visa still place a limit on the number of days you can work in said country per year. This might not affect you if you tour Europe once a year but if, like many crew or session players, you work with multiple artists and hop from one tour to another, you might find yourself in hot water when you realise you've used up all your days in one of the countries on the schedule. On top of visas and permits, there's now tax complications in each territory as we're no longer part of reciprocal schemes. There's carnets for your equipment which big tours crossing all of Europe would have had professionally arranged, but smaller DIY/low budget tours would do without and just not drive through the couple of territories which required them when we were members. They're now needed everywhere in Europe. I'll do my best not to delve in to the political aspects of a clusterfck that one third of the electorate voted for, as politics isn't my business. Touring, however, is my bread and butter, and it's been made more challenging, more expensive, more difficult to drop personnel in at short notice if needed, and generally more of a pain in the balls in many ways by our new status as a third country.

This: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/234013379072 Plus ~£20 for the jack to locking mini jack cable.

Certainly are!

Like a stuck record whenever wireless comes up, I'm going to say the best for sub £400 will be a used Sennheiser G3 system. Rock solid professional kit that's still used on massive stages all over the world. Far, far better than the consumer level stuff. You'll often see it sold with just the belt pack, or with the belt pack and a lavalier mic. This is still the right system, and the guitar cable for the beltpack can usually be had for about £20.

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.