NYC tomorrow night
Anyone who's in New York area, my band is taking our first road trip and playing the UC Lounge in Manhattan tomorrow night. We'll be there starting 7:30, so if anyone is around it would be cool to meet in person. Band is called Make Love & War.
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Have fun!
The venue is kind of small - it's basically two hallways around a stairwell, in a U shape. One side is the bar, the other side is where the music is. The stage is tiny, and we couldn't all fit on it (comfortably) so for a lot of the show, those of us with wireless would go into the audience and much of the show looked like this:
The extent of their sound system was also greatly exaggerated. Their e-mail was talking about a Soundcraft board with super duper speakers, and all this other junk. We came there to see a 6-channel Behringer and no monitors. When I was on stage (for a grand total of maybe 1.5 songs) I could not hear myself at all.
All in all, the show went well. My girlfriend, who is from NYC and was in town that weekend, brought two of her friends and two cousins, who in turn invited a bunch of their friends. Our ex-bass player's ex-girlfriend (think about that one for a minute) came out and brought several co-workers. My brother and his girlfriend came out, and two other band members brought a friend or two - so we actually brought a good size crowd, considering how tiny the place was (150 capacity).
They cut us off a few songs early (\"last song guys!\") so we played our rocked-out version of Five To One. The crowd went nuts, singing along and dancing, so they said, \"ok... one more song\". That's always a good sign. So they said we're invited back any time, which is cool. CBS radio hooked us up with this date, so our goal was not to let them down.
One lesson we learned is scalability of equipment. Our bass player has a monstrous half-stack which he brought for this gig. It barely fit on stage. Me and the other guitarist don't use amps - we run pedals directly to the board (GNX3000 for me, POD X3 for him). So in a situation where there are no monitors at all, this becomes a bit of an issue.
The other bands playing that night obviously knew what they were dealing with, so they all brought really small amps (1x10, 1x12) just so they could have some stage sound. This is something we're now planning to invest in ourselves. A word to the wise.
I hear you about the advantages of small stage amps. We play alot of small venues. I have a small 1X18 bass amp (120 watts), our rhythm guitarist has a small Line 6 50 watt amp, and our lead guitarist just downsized his amp to a 15 watt Fender! But all we need is just a bit of stage sound for our personal monitor and our direct line outputs from our pedals go to the mixing board for our real sound out front.
I did buy the Behringer Ultrabass plus 4X10 cab this past summer. It sounds great. But it's too big for me to take at most of the places we play at. I might get a smaller cab for the bass amp head just to be more flexible, but my old 120 watt 1X18 Rogue amp is still good enough for my stage monitor. My main bass sound comes directly from my GNX4 line output to the mixer.
I suppose if we had in ear monitors and 4 or more monitor mixes, we would probably not need any stage amps at all. I ask guys that have the in ear monitors how well they like them, and they still want those old fashioned stage monitors on the floor as a backup.
If all you need is just a bit of stage amp monitoring, then you really don't need the big, heavy, amp stacks of yesteryear because your main sound is just going from your pedal output into the GNX4.
But, take into account $80 of gas from Baltimore to NY, and another $50 or so in tolls round-trip, that money went real quick. Throw in other expenses, and we're in well in the red.
We weren't expecting to get paid a whole lot, rather we wanted to take a road trip up north, and see what kind of a reaction we get in Manhattan. Since we're pretty much set on doing a north-east tour within a year, it was a good exploratory expedition.
I don't know whether we're ready shell out for an in-ear monitor system. Based on this experience, I'm looking at a $100 Fender Frontman 1x10, which has RCA ins that I can plug my GNX into. We haven't decided on the nature of the equipment that we're going to get, just planning to go in to a music store and try out things that are portable and FRFR. At least that's my plan.
Basically, what we need to do is consider the various possible PA configurations we'll encounter, and be ready to face any and all of them in the most portable, and most efficient manner. I'll post back with our progress once this actually happens.
But the L1 does sound like a good idea. I'll run it by the rest of the group... if we don't have to finance all of our upcoming EP ourselves, it might be doable in the near term.