mike257

The click track will be usually either fed to the mixing desk and returned to the drummer in their in ear monitor mix, along with the rest of the band as needed, or the drummer may have a small mixer as part of their monitoring setup which receives the click directly from the playback system along with their mix from the monitor engineer, allowing them to directly control how much click they want to blast their ears with!

I've used them in large scale touring productions right down to little club shows. It's a massively useful tool. One high end function/corporate showband I've mixed a few times had two different clicks outputting from the playback rig, each with different verbal cues built in - one for the band and one for the vocalists - so even a last minute dep jumping in on a show had cues in their ears for every section change, breakdown, ending etc - great when the band had loads of mashups and unique arrangements. I've seen some very sophisticated setups where a playback rig is sending clicks, automating patch changes on keys and guitar rigs, and feeding timecode to lighting/video to sync the whole show up. There's huge creative and practical potential in these tools that goes far beyond just keeping unruly tempo wandering in check!

Soooooooo good. Remember seeing the Used For Glue video on MTV2 back in the day and being instantly hooked. Such a great record. I met Walter when I was about 17 (20 years ago 😳) and he was an absolute gent too, spent about 45 minutes just hanging out and chatting.

The bigger the venue, the less you need a substantial backline. I'm usually pushing faders these days, but when playing I've tried to go direct and IEM as often as possible for a long time now.

You should! Loads to see. Lots of heritage sites, all the main museums are free to visit, tons of good food places, lovely architecture. Obviously there's all the Beatles stuff if you're that way inclined, but plenty to enjoy even if you're not.

Glad to see the old girl still getting some use! My Yamaha's are long gone, but my SQ5 is doing solid work. Currently piloting an SD12 around the UK and Europe mixing monitors, lots of fun....

The bleed is often down to poor quality sound cards within the laptop, and/or cheap cables. A half decent external interface should sort you out.

My experience of this over the years (having done the original band DIY touring thing in my youth, to occasional covers gigs around a day job, to full time muso/techy work) is that, broadly speaking, the more professional the act, the more accustomed they are to you having multiple projects on the go and to have to use deps from time to time. When I was depping around all over the place, I'd frequently drop in to reasonably high end function gigs with nothing more than the setlist and a handful of notes on the arrangements, and a Motown band I was involved with would sometimes end up doing a gig as a ten piece with seven players who'd never even met before turning up at the gig. Conversely, it was the part time pub bands looking for a dep who'd ask you to come in for rehearsals before playing for £70 at a local boozer. I remember one in particular asking me to come to a rehearsal to "try out" to dep a handful of pub shows for them, and to make sure I could play Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick, because they liked to "test out bass players with it". I think whatever the situation, whether it's a pro working band, a part time pocket money thing, or a fun rehearsal room project that might play the odd show, the important thing is that everyone knows what the expectation is going in to it and is on the same page. If you just want to jam and play the odd gig, and dip in and out of other projects, but the rest of the band want to be playing shows every week (or vice versa) it's doomed. If everyone knows the score, and is comfortable with seeing the occasional dep drop in, then it's definitely workable to be involved with multiple projects.

I've been trying not to do NYE gigs for the last few years, but after the work diary being ravaged by 'rona I'm currently saying yes to everything that comes in! Sadly no four string action - I'll be hauling a load of PA in to a fancy hotel and mixing a band.

Put two products in my basket (Polytune clone and the cheapo 3" monitor speakers), came to £56. Put the 30% discount code in and it knocked it down to £48. I'm no Carol Vorderman, but that's definitely not 30% off! EDIT: On further investigation - anything already showing as having a discounted price isn't affected by the codes. Ah, well!

Ben is great, I was production manager on a tour with him and two American Elvis chaps a few years ago. He's a cracking performer and a properly lovely guy, will be a fun show!

Absolutely bloody love Fighting With Wire. Two great albums. Such a shame what happened with the release of the second one. Have you checked out Jetplane Landing? Cahir from FWW played guitar for them from their second album onwards, and Craig from FWW is on drums for the final album. All recently disappeared from Spotify when their record label shut up shop, but well worth tracking down. Been on heavy rotation for me all week. Absolutely brilliant.

Seems like an odd mix of songs, looks to me like a band that doesn't know what it wants to be and who it's audience are. I can't quite see the crossover between people who'd watch a covers band playing Rise Against tunes and people who'd watch a covers band playing Chris Isaak! You may have been presumptuous in assuming you were "in" but you may have also dodged what seems like a practice room project that may not have had legs anyway. From the tone of the thread, seems like it's been a learning experience that's given you some insight in to next steps and how to approach things in future, so it's by no means been wasted effort, just another step in the never ending journey of learning that we're all on with this stuff!

Two issues - one already covered above that the headphone socket generally bypasses the speaker, the other being that it's all well and good to hear your bass, but I'm assuming you'd like to hear everyone else too! You ideally need a feed from whatever mixer your band is running, to a headphone amp, to your ears. This allows for a mix of all the instruments to come your way.

Flightcase Warehouse and Swan Flight as mentioned above. Castle Cases and Five Star Cases are also very good.

They all need a device of some description to run the POS software that drives them. If your venues have WiFi, even a cheap Android tablet will do you if having to use your phone is a big issue. If not, you could always get a cheap old phone and a GiffGaff SIM that just lives in your merch kit. I use Zettle for touring merch sales with a few artists I work with. The app is easy to use, quick to get a new merch person up to speed on (we often get a local vendor organised by the promoter so I'll have to give them a crash course quickly before doors open and it's never an issue) and the reporting features are pretty in-depth. You can log cash sales on the app too, so it leaves me with complete visibility of every item sold at every show whether it's card or cash, which is really helpful for accounting and for estimating sales based on historic data when I'm doing tour budgets. The only limitation is using it abroad, I don't know if it's changed but last time I looked in to it it didn't support multiple currencies.

Slightly biased as I'm currently on tour mixing them, but absolutely loving this album by my good friends in Clean Cut Kid. Proper songwriting and great playing, brilliantly recorded. https://open.spotify.com/album/6WB2kQKKY1mq9zRrsKU46b?si=HY7DHzXsRmW6znAv9-7C9Q Bass work all done on a very, very nice 60s Hofner Violin too. Lots of nice prominent bass parts in there.

I mean, a DI or something is the "right" way to do it, but I've done countless small gigs in bars over the years where I plugged a jack straight in to the desk and got on just fine. Would I do it on a proper gig? No. Will it do the job in a pinch? Absolutely.

Welcome back, nice to see a familiar name from the old days around here!

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.