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Warning To Bands...


bradm

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its a two way street. there are PLENTY of people out there doing sound that just shouldn't be. Most often its these prick shows that are the most arrogant and also possess the least amount of know-how. Usually they're easy to spot, but sometimes you get fooled and end up doing something stupid like say...using that house Marshall 412 instead of your rig.. and then you realize that the dude probably couldn't mix a bowl of Kraft dinner let alone mix a band....something like that anyway. I guess the important thing is for everyone to act proffessional and handle the fragile egos with velvet gloves.

"you know I've never seen anyone use that radio shack mic on a kick drum.... oh its your favourite....ok..."

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i guess this is going back alot of years... but at the time... it was a very versatile multi-effects unit with very respectable delay and a nice reverb. very simple to use (you'd be changing patches on the fly)... nice LCD.. loads of parameters to fiddle with... and you could find one in EVERYONE's rack at the time...

the soundcraft i used back then only had 3 aux sends, so i found i could get some quality dly/rvb mixes outta one send leaving me with one send for mons (imagine a time when two monitor mixes was being spoiled!) and another free one for something else. i used it for vocals exclusively... think there was even a nice rvb/dly/chorus patch that did some wild 'thickening'.

they also came out with a GPX50.. which was a guitar rack unit. had one of those too... but no matter what i did i lost the 'tube warmth' of the marshall as soon as i added any rack unit, so i dumped it. guitar wise i've been a purist since 19. a wah is ok.. because its an expression pedal... and a chorus i guess if you are in a small band and want to fill the sound out... but i firmly believe the sound equation should be guitar+amp=sound. thats a personal preference though.

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That's halarious!!

I knew a guy who use to work in a recording studio. He said the rock bands were the worst to record, they were all premadona's or whatever and always wanted to change specific levels when they were already perfect. My buddy had a whole section of knobs on his board that did nothing, that's what he'd let the rock stars play with. After the fiddled with a few knobs (that did nothing) they were convinced that the sound was now finally half decent... hehe jokers...

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spx90's/900's are still a mainstay in many FOH racks-very popular item for over a decade. These days any multieffects processor would do really and the convertors and reverbs would probably be better too. But the 90 had an easy menu system and quick adjustments so it was easier to tweak than alot of the new shit. And it had a backlit display-essential for dark clubs. I've got an Ensoniq dp2 that's very similar, but these days even Lexicon and TC Electronic have far superior stuff for a few hundred bucks and up. I'd say the Lexicon MPX1 is todays top of the heap for multifx, and it's under $1000....Mad.Large.Crazy.

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>> purist since 19. a wah is ok.. because its

>> an expression pedal... and a chorus i guess

>> if you are in a small band and want to fill

>> the sound out... but i firmly believe the

>> sound equation should be guitar+amp=sound.

>> thats a personal preference though.

Yes, that is one sound. There are many more sounds out there. Open your mind.

Steve

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man.

i've been pretty busy the last month and barely get ot post, let alone read anything on jambands as of late... but i have to say something about this post you linked to , Brad.. as it holds the fundamental truths of live music within its verbage.

it is so dead nuts on that i don't even know what to say. (not really...)

too too often bands have some sort of superiority complex wrt the sound/lighting technicians they work with... like they weren't good enuff somewhere along the line to become 'musicians' and had to settle for being a tech.

so wrong. so fundamentally wrong.

to be a good tech you need to know ALOT about music and sound... almost always 1000 times more than what some sloppy guitar twanger knows about the same topics.

not that i'm tech of the year, but i did my time as a house tech (about a year) in a 200+ capacity room back in the day. i've met the worst! i even had a vocalist insist on using his broken wireless mic over a 58 because the wireless was cooler. COOLER!!!! OMFG!! I asked another band once to sidewash their full marshall stacks because they quite literally were louder than the PA, but they refused saying that no one would see the amp stacks then, and that was a major part of thier show. morons.

in SFG we've always tried to do the sound guy right, when and where we can... from a few props while on stage to a drink or two at the END of the night. whatever. a little apreciation goes a long way. a good tech can make a shitty band sound good.. a good band sound great.. and a great band sound like the gods fucking eachother or something!

so.. all that said, as a sloppy guitar twanger as well.. every now and a gain, i have come across some dude who has a house tech gig, but doesn't have a fucking clue what he is doing. so what are ya gonna do?

well. you respect him, and politely request any changes you may want. he may just be getting started and will probably be better next time you come to that venue. bottom line... like said above.. obey your soundguy. if not for fear of the suck botton*, do it because its the right thing to do to a fellow brother in the same biz.

to draw a Suess parallel.... the band is like the Whos living on a spec of dust, and the soundguy is thier Horton... the world cannot hear them without him! (was that too far out?)

oh yeah... as an audience member, no matter what you think you might know... never ever fuck with another guys board or mix. you may not like it, but don't 'tweak' anything while he is out walking the room. that's just plain rude.

in closing i'd like to add that i wish yamaha never stopped producing the SPX90. i'd have 4 in my rack ... if i still had a rack. anyone got one?

*(the pitch shift trick has been around for a long time.. even nastier if the shift oscillates.. but not as stealthy as the trick the guy in the story used! what a pleasant read. and even more pleasant to see everyone understood the point. thank you for linking to that.)

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yeah. i'm pretty closed-minded. that's why i said 'personal preference'. i listen to lots of delay/phase/flange/chorus i asure you. i just don't play with it.

did you take that personally somehow? my appologies if you did. it wasn't meant that way at all. my comments about the soundguy were just my personal observations too... same with the SPX90. if someone likes a different multi-effects unit better, i sure don't have a beef with them. same goes for soundmen and guitar rigs. to each there own....

forgive my poor msg board etiquette.

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