mike257

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.

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!

Bandcamp, or see if the artists have their own store on their website.

Top work! Looks and sounds great.

Yeah, if it's just for one specific band and it ticks your boxes, then it's all good. In a more traditional band setup or with a bigger group, it'd get restrictive pretty quickly. I run a small production company so mine has to be flexible - goes out (or did do!) on all sorts of small gigs, function bands, corporate events, and I've even been able to squeeze a 10 piece soul band through it without too much fuss.

I think it says more about the dreadful standards of quickfire internet journalism these days, that someone writing an article about a famous bloke fails to make sure they're using a picture of the right person! I absolutely agree that IP rights are immutable and that the control of their use sits with the owner, and I agree that the owner of said IP has every right to act to protect it. I'm also aware that it's an important part of trademark law that you have to demonstrably act against infringement or risk having your failure to act used against you in a future trademark case. I do think, for a group of artists that have made it their business to stand up against corporate interests that they disagree with, it doesn't sit very well as a way to treat people and could have been handled in a more sensitive and constructive manner.

Thanks for the post. I'll have a proper watch through that when I've got time. James Eade is very highly respected in the live production industry and runs a lot of training courses on temporary electrical installation for events, amongst other things. Anything coming from him will be spot on.