Two great shows with Meshell Ndegeocello

Posted by audiosquid on June 25, 2001
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Two great shows with Meshell Ndegeocello. Fantastic band, a bit tricky doing monitors. The band was easy enough to work with, but the house gear isn’t the greatest, and the short depth of the stage puts the drums close to the front. Her sound engineer brought in a great collection of Nuemann and Sennheiser microphones, KM-105’s on all the lead vocals. A very good sounding mic, very open, a bit of high end spike. Made for a tough time getting quiet vocals loud with so much bleed. But the darn nicest bleed into a microphone you ever did hear.

Fellow tour manager Matt says my Tour Manager Database’s rock! And he is using the old old old version! Get your own free copy to use, manipulate, mangle, and otherwise write 0’s and 1’s to your hard drive as you try to keep track of a tour. And I swear there will be a manual one of these days (not that you really need one.)

Tour Manager Files Up for a bit…

Posted by audiosquid on June 22, 2001
Posted in: compy, family, life. Leave a comment

My Filemaker Pro – Tour Manager database files are up are ready for free download! The manual isn’t ready yet, but if your familiar with File Maker Pro you won’t really need one. Go to the files section to get the goods, and don’t forget to drop me a line to tell me what you think, suggest improvements, or send updates to the Tour Databases – Venues, Hotels, and Promoters.

In other news my sister is harping on me for living with two other guys, with no girlfriend at the age of 30! And she is only in the 7th grade. Youch! Well as any other touring individuals know it’s hard to start or maintain a relationship when on the road for months on end. As soon as I find my dream girl I hope my sister approves!

On the touring front, Mercury Rev has set some dates for festival shows in Europe and Japan.

Another tour with the Push Stars finished

Posted by audiosquid on May 22, 2001
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Another tour with the Push Stars finished. The last couple of shows went well, even had the pleasure of mixing on a Heritage 3000 for the last gig at Northeastern college. (Why is everybody at Scorpio so grumpy all the time?) I wont be working with the band on their upcoming west coast tour, but I wish them the best of luck.

It’s good to be home again, especially good to be hooked back up to the DSL line. Average connection speed on the road with Earthlink was 28K, with a couple of connections at 46k or higher, but that was rare.

My Filemaker Pro “Tour Itinerary” database is almost ready for posting. I’m not sure I’ve got the space on this web site to post it for download, but it looks like I will have it available for free download from Fact42. I’ll post in the news here when it’s available.

Not sure what is going on in the month of June here, got the dingy clubs in San Francisco calling me for work again, but after touring through the dirty clubs of the US I am not really into working as a house engineer at one. But ya do what ya have to.

Almost done with the Push Stars tour

Posted by audiosquid on May 9, 2001
Posted in: life, tour. Leave a comment

Almost done with the Push Stars tour. Things have been going well. We are traveling back up north now after shows down south. Weather has been perfect everywhere, I think we skipped spring and went right to summer. I’m sure it will be back to cold and windy when I return to San Francisco.

It’s been one of those tours where you wonder why nobody takes care of the sound equipment in the club. Gear is dirty and uncared for. Does anyone care about quality anymore? Not that everyone can afford the best gear, but what ever you can afford, you’d think you would make sure it was kept in as good a condition as it could. That, and do any gas stations out there still put soap in the squeegee holder?

Almost ready to hit the road with the Push Stars

Posted by audiosquid on April 12, 2001
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Almost ready to hit the road with the Push Stars. About 60% of the shows advanced, and I’m just waiting for someone to return my multitude of messages to finish the rest. Found some more web sites for the venues and the itinerary has been updated. Now there is talk of a possible west coast tour in June. X-Girl also asks if I am available to mix their record release show in Tokyo. Crazy. But the show is June 4th, and the first Push Stars show is the 5th. So it looks like I’ll be cruising the west in a van in June.

In fact maybe Mercury Rev will return. I see Jeff is still hard at work on the web site…

Got a USB audio dongle from Griffin in Nashville. Only $35, and pretty cool. The jacks on my Powerbook where becoming intermittent (shoddy construction really) so I had to get something else, and their iMic works well. Works with Coaster and Digital Performer 2.7. I imagine it will work with Cubase, but alas, Pro Tools does not support USB audio, so SOL.

And finally made the Powerbook happy with a new 256MB DIMM, so I’m rocking at 384. Anyone want a 64MB DIMM for a Powerbook G3 Firewire? Yours free if you can find a use for it!

Starting to advance the Push Stars date

Posted by audiosquid on April 9, 2001
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Starting to advance the Push Stars dates. Lots o phone calls. The Olu Dara show at the Justice League went well, sold out. The club got some new monitors that are definitely an improvement to the small wedges that were there, and the monitor desk has been fixed and seems to be fully functioning (though it’s still possible to run monitors from FOH if needed)

Apple did nothing to help me with my disappearing RAM, but a guy named Glenn in New Zealand did, sent me an app that reprogrammed my RAM to work again. There is still a question of weather or not the RAM is working at it’s best, but I am looking at a 2ns difference. That’s pretty damn small, so I think I’ll just keep it as is, though PowerMax in Oregon (who I got the computer from) offered to replace my RAM if needed, but I think I’ll be keeping it as is, it seems to work fine.

Some good shows this weekend

Posted by audiosquid on March 26, 2001
Posted in: live sound. Leave a comment

Some good shows this weekend. The Michael Hampton show at the Justice League went well, was good to see a friend and fellow sound engineer I hadn’t seen in awhile. Only problem is the Justice League sound system is plagued by buzzes, most likely due to no ground, but they are working on it. Third Ear out of Richmond, CA supplies us with a good monitor rig with a Mackie SR-40 and a slew of PAS wedges and KT EQ’s.
Sunday at the Bottom of the Hill was even better, for $7 you got all you can eat BBQ, potato salad, pasta salad, hot dogs, veggie burgers, and three bands. A great show by all, and was cool to see Chip playing with the Mother Truckers. It has been awhile seen I have seen him after mixing monitors numerous times for Zero at the Maritime Hall.