Category: Gigs

“Your bass player is too hard to watch”

Post author By admin
Post date January 14, 2005
3 Comments on “Your bass player is too hard to watch”

Years ago a rock & roll band I was in took a little trek to Kemmerer Wyoming to do a gig. Playing a gig in the Twilight Zone would be normal compared to this gig.

Our bass player liked to jump around on stage while playing. He would even do the headbanger move and flip his very long hair all around. It was quite entertaining. He also wore his pajamas for the gig. Gee I can’t imagine why these hicks from Kemmerer thought this was out of the ordinary.

The people in the audience just kind of stood against the back wall of the venue and just watched in disbelief. They looked like deer in your headlights. When we went on break they literally came up and asked: “Can you tell your bass player to stop jumping around? He’s too hard to watch.”

Stolen SUB

Post author By admin
Post date January 4, 2005

Here’s a little salute to the asshole who broke into my bass player’s suv:

After a gig we hauled our gear into our respective vehicles and the bass player had the PA system in his suv. He had a bunch of stuff in his garage so he had to park outside overnight. When he went out to his truck in the morning he found a broken rear window and one of our JBL 18″ subs was missing. That part sucks.

Now for the “justice” part of the story:

At this particular gig we had some kind of problem with the PA. There was a bad cable or something which caused us to blow one of our 18″ JBL subs.

So the asshole crook has a 50/50 chance of getting a good 18″ sub for the pawn shop so he can go buy some crack. Well buddy, no crack for you. You stole the blown one you loser…

Boneheads Gigs Musicians Recording

Board mix breaks up band

Post author By admin
Post date January 3, 2005

I do live sound gigs sometimes when someone wants to pony up a few bucks to pay me. When I do run sound it usually kicks ass.

There’s a heavy metal band I did some albums for and they hire me to do many live sound gigs as well. They have a big PA and it sounds killer.

The last gig I did for them was at a scary biker bar. The day after I did this gig a guy staggered into the bar with more than a dozen knife wounds…

This is a pretty easy gig. They set up the PA and I show up and twiddle some knobs. So for the hell of it I decided to bring my laptop, and an I/O (that’s soundman geek talk for input/output device) to capture some audio. I just ran a “board mix” straight into my laptop. If you know what a board mix is then you know they don’t necessarily sound very good. The issue is that POST mixer a ton of processing can take place in the PA. For these guys it’s namely thousands of watts of power with some EQ’s and compression blasting out of dozens of big speakers. So the sound coming out of the console may sound quite weak and out of balance if you don’t listen to it out of the PA.

Board mixes are almost always out of balance due to the stage volume of the players. The guitar player in this band for instance has quite a few Marshall amps which are loud as hell. So since his stage volume is very loud it’s not necessary to pump him out of the PA very much. The resulting recording of would then be lacking guitar because of this.

So what we ended up with was a mix that you would simply critique the band’s playing and tightness. I burned the band a CD of the gig (not from awedeals.com).

A couple of weeks later I get this crazy email from the drummer listing his $30,000 (supposedly) drum kit for sale. I later find out that after the drummer heard the board mix he got into a big fight with his bandmates. He thought the sound sucked and said that the singer sounded stupid when he talked to the audience inbetween songs. This singer has talked like this from day one. The only thing I can figure is that the drummer didn’t have as good of time since he was SOBER for the first time at a gig! Whatever the real reason is the band broke up. I felt a little guilty even though I clearly explained that the board mix wouldn’t sound all that great.

So in trying to do a favor for some guys, I produced the straw that broke the camel’s back. I’ll think again before I do any more clients any “favors.”

Gigs

New Year’s Eve Gig Summary

It was a fun new year’s eve show at that same new club I played at last week. There was a good sized crowd but surprisingly not as big as I thought it would be. Tonight’s band configuration was basically two different bands with 3 guys in one band and the same 3+1 (accordian) in the other.