Hello from European airspace. On the way to Japan, and only 10 more hours to go!

And hello from Osaka Japan. Got in a bit late today, so luckily we get to skip the production meeting that they always like to have right when you get to the hotel. Not too worried about the top notch crews that are here in Japan. The electrical bills must be insane here with all the neon, though Osaka isn’t quite as crazy as Tokyo. Will be good to get some rest tonight after the days sleep deprivation project as we hop from plane to bus to plane to bus……… Riding to the hotel, I can see where some of the cool road plans for Gran Tourismo come from.

Sound check tomorrow, another Yamaha desk, but this time the old school analog version of a PM4K. The lucky ones are on stage with a Heritage 3000. Oh well….

Some time off in London – Chillin in London with a couple of days off before we head off to Japan. What to do, what to do…..

Spain report – The show at Benicassim went well, considering it was the first show of the new touring party. The Meyer line array rig was on hand and I must say that it can be a very loud rig. Sounded very good, as many line arrays (especially outdoors) sound. The Yamaha PM-1D was a cool desk in many respects. Complete recall, eq on every input/output (nice to have eq on the aux send to reverbs), a delay on the headphone out to sync up local monitors with the PA. The compressors sound all right, but I wasn’t impressed with the FX section, basically 8 SPX-990’s built in. A very “touchy” desk too, when you tell it to do something, it does it. It didn’t crash on me, and with more time to set it up properly I could see using it more often. If they would only come out with a MAC version of the PC software you can use to set up the desk offline. Well, that, and I’d rather have a Midas 😉

London Show – In house Martin W-8 rig, not too bad of a room but the low end will mess with you from sound check to show. Gets better in the audience, but gets worse on stage. But no worries, they are tearing down the place for a tube extension