I am totally GAS’ing for one of those Kala solid-body basses. Maybe one of the fretless ones, I don’t know why. Summat like this:
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Oh, yesssss. Did you see the blemished options on the Kala site? They go fast because they are around $100 off. Oh, the temptation!
(And y’know who plays the demos of these babies for Kala, right? Hi, Gio!)
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They’re OK if you like that sort of thing.
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So question for the G&L aficionados: L2000 Tribute from the 2003-2006 Korean era or newer Indonesian version?
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More new gear!
I am totally fed up with not being able to properly hear myself in a band environment, unless I crank the amp up. But all that leads to is the guitars getting cranked up too… We played a gig a couple of weeks ago that left me feeling rather down - my playing wasn’t where I wanted it to be and I put much of that down to struggling to hear the bass.
We’re running the guitars into the desk, along with the vocals, but as we don’t have a subwoofer, I’m using my amp and a cab. These are plenty loud enough and sound good, in and of themselves, but if I push the volume up, it can (and does) overpower things.
The vocalist is on in-ears, but the two guitars steadfastly refuse to entertain the idea, “The Beatles didn’t use in ears in the 60s…”. The four “musicians” are reliant on stage amps and the stage monitors. Certainly one of the guitarists and myself are also wearing hearing protection.
But I need a solution … I need to be able to hear myself! Hence the wireless IEM transmitter/receiver. I now need to work out how I get a mix of the rest of the band and my bass. Sounds easy, but our desk only has one aux out, which the vocalist is using, with her vocals dominant in that mix. My plan is to take a feed off the monitors and bring that into a small auxiliary mixer. I’ll then take a feed from either my ME-90B or the amp head, push that into the mini-mixer and then take my IEM feed from that.
Of course, we could just go and buy a bigger desk, but I don’t think the others would agree to that as we have only had the one we’ve got for 6 months!
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“Yes, well, then again, you guys aren’t exactly John or George now are you?”
Seriously those kind of comments always make me giggle. Look, that may have been great for them and all their innate talent, but trust me bros, we need all the help good tools can give us.
“Eddie didn’t know music theory!” is another great one. Yes, well, he was a kid with talent that then went so deep in to doing nothing but playing guitar from an early age with a monomaniacal zeal that by the time he was an adult he was an unparalleled musician by feel and sound alone. Anyone over 25 that isn’t already an accomplished musician who doesn’t think they need all the help they can get to reach even 10% of that talent (if you’re exceedingly lucky) is deluding themselves.
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Ain’t that the truth, although we do manage to deliver a couple of Beatles songs reasonably well 
I’m a 100% with you, @howard, on needing all the help we can get. I don’t know if it is a mindset thing, or a recency thing, but given that I only started playing bass three years ago, I’m very open to all this tech - kid in a candy store, 'n all that. Both our guitarists have been playing for years, so I guess they are used to playing through amps and stage monitors. I don’t have that history…
Another interesting topic is the use of a click. If we were all on IEMs, then a) we could use a click to tighten up on timing, but b) it would also open up backing tracks for synth etc. We don’t have a keyboard player, and don’t really want to expand to a 6-piece band, but accessing some keys via a backing track would be cool. The response to the click thing is that it won’t feel ‘organic’. My view is that any and every band that you now see will likely be playing to a click in the studio, and also on stage.
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There’s a lot of stuff the Beatles didn’t use in the 60s that I bet your guitar players use. It’s not like the lack of IEMs (did they even have those in the 60s) is what made them Fab.
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I’ve heard of bands where just one person (generally the drummer) plays to a click and the rest of the band plays to the drummer.
I’ve also heard variations on that where the drummer’s click is only for the first XX amount of song, just to give them a chance to lock into a tempo.
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I do feel the need to post this … this was from a couple of weeks ago 
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Eddie wasn’t formally trained in music theory, but he knew it and learned it without all the jibber jabber of teachers and texts, it was internalized, as with all the others who are in the same boat, which makes these statements even dumberer.
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I feel your pain Duncan. I had such a bad gig not being able to hear the vocals that I went home that night and started researching IEMs.
I had resistance as well but got round it by buying everything myself (mixer / xlr splits etc) and saying let’s give it a go.
Fast forward nearly a year and multiple gigs and we’d never go back to stage monitors plus we sacked the guy who refused to use IEMs 
If you ever have any IEM / Mixer questions happy to try and help.
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That’s some serious kit, @Barney!
I’d love it if we could move the full band to this kind of set up…
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Where are you doing the mixing, @Barney? Is that on a laptop, or a physical board?
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Looks like the Behringer XR18 or Midas is the middle piece of gear. That’s a digital mixer that you can control with phone / ipad.
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Correct Behringer XR18. No actual physical mixer, everything is digital. We use the mixing station app.
An old Ipad is used for the main FOH mix. We can give this to who ever is running sound for us up front and they slide virtual faders on the Ipad to change the mix. We set all the gain structure on the Ipad at sound check then only use the faders for the live mix.
We all have the app on our phones and then can create individual mixes for our IEMs. In my mix I have no drums (because I’m standing next to him) and then vocals higher than guitar in my mix.
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I’ve been digital mixer shopping the last few months, I’ve learned what they all look like. I’m waffling between the Behringer / Midas, Allen and Heath, and the Mackie (leaning towards the Mackie). @sunDOG The XR18 is probably lb for lb the best digital mixer you can get for the money. I don’t know the GBP, but they gor for $500 new here in the US. If the goal is to it on the cheap, with the mixer all you’d need is more Xvive’s. It’s got the 6 xlr outs on the bottom row, with 2 main outs that you can send to FOH.
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That’s really cool. We’re on a physical mixer…
Perhaps as we gain more experience, we’ll end up with better kit!
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I think it’s more about can we slowly move the whole band in this direction. As I mentioned above, there is a degree of resistance. I’m thinking that if it now both the vocalist and me on IEMs, we then slowly chip away at the reasons to say ‘no’.
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Those same aux outs can go to FRFRs for the holdouts…
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