Now on tour with The Kills. A small romp around the US with a show in Vancouver too eh?
Libertines Tour Finished – all a good tour it was, a great bunch to work with and short of a blackout while we were in NY it was fairly hassle free.
The tour started at the El Ray Theatre in Los Angeles, CA. For this US tour Pete was not with us, with american Anthony filling in on guitar.
Back in my “home town” (one of two really), as we play a show at the Bluebird Theatre in Denver.
The Opera House in Toronto, ON, Canada.
Cafe Campus – Montreal, Canada.
Our bus – The Molly Ringwald. Note to self, you might not want to take the tour when they give you a weeks notice that they want a bus….
After our show in Montreal we head to NYC, and about an hour after we get checked into our hotel for a night off, and right before I send Nick the Hat off to the airport to fly home, the electricity decides to stop working.
Everyone trying to get home.
The show in NY ends up being cancelled, and we head for Washigton D.C. to get back into the land of electricity. One show there, then Atlanta, and then all the way back to NY to make up for the cancelled show. At the bands request, here we see our roadie Lonnie preparing for the NY show.
Irving Plaza, NY
The Guilty Parties…
Tour with The Cramps finished. And what a crazy little tour it was. Mostly good venues, a couple of stinkers here and there. We were lucky to have a good bus driver, though it was his rookie tour, he was a smooth safe driver, which always makes things less stressful.
Numbers, Houston, TX – Aztec Sound bring in one of the better rigs on the tour, a XL-200 and and an EV-X rig.
The Roxy, Boston, MA – great working with Brian of Showmix again and his Ameks.
you guess where, Orlando, Fl Ahhh the Crust, eh hem, I mean Crest.
On the tour we stopped in Washington D.C. to play the most excellent 9:30 Club. Was great to see that they replaced their Crust, ah hem!, Crest with a new desk. Something I hadn’t seen before, the Audient Aztec. With the exception of the color choices of orange and light blue for many of the knobs, I liked it quite a bit. 12 VCA’s (what is one to do with 12 VCA’s?) Good sounding desk, nice eq’s and mic pre’s. Definitely a big improvement over what was in there. Some other cool features – the ability to assign aux sends to the matrix, and a “ambience” section in the middle consisting of a stereo mic pre, bass and treble eq, and assignment to aux sends (cool for bored tapes or in ear monitors audience mics).
During the tour my Tour Manager Itinerary File Maker Pro Solutions got tweaked a bit. I’ll have an updated version out soon. But before I put it up I want to make some other changes. There are allot of venues that only take a percentage of your T-shirt sales (or anything that isn’t a CD or record), so now my next puzzle is to get my merch files to be able to handle this. I also want to get it to work well in a GST or VAT situation. Other modifications include a label layout for printing the guest list (so you can put labels on envelopes), more ticket price spaces on the deal sheet (along with some other small layout changes). And I ponder weather or not I should make it able to do two different hotels, which it used to do long ago, but I took it out, as it was extremely rare that I was getting two different hotels (band, crew). But on the Cramps tour when we were in NYC there was the need for two (one for band in NY and one for bus and crew in NJ). So I contemplate adding it in again, the main hassle being able to fit two hotels in the itinerary book pages (as I try to make it so the small itinerary books can be printed up 1/4 page). Any suggestions?
I said goodbye to the Cramps after the show at Irving Plaza (sold out, went great, hate mixing from the balcony there) and then spent some time in Queens visiting Josh before heading upstate to see how Mercury Rev were doing, and doing well they were, busy on all sorts of projects besides working on their next album.
Then a long drive to Slippery Rock, PA to visit my friend Jennifer, then up to western NY to visit friends and family, back across NY state to Queens again, and then back up to Albany to Fly back down to Newark and finally back to San Francisco.
Current Projects? – Cleaning the kitchen, and the living room, and my room, and the bathroom, and the hallway, and the back room, and the little closet off of the kitchen, and the…..
Busy Busy Busy with another tour with The Cramps! See the tour page for the current schedule of shows. I got involved a tiny bit late in the game, so it’s been allot of work of catch up advancing the shows and getting things together, but all should go well. As I’m so busy this is just a quick update, hopefully I’ll have time to write more soon, and to finish posting some pictures from the eX-Girl tour. In the meantime, Stay Sick!
eX-Girl Tour Concludes. I had an excellent time working with the three women that make up eX-Girl. They have gone back to Planet Kero now, but will soon return to Planet Earth for a tour of Europe. They told me “sugoi” as they left, which I think means they thought I did an excellent job. Or at least I hope so 😉
The SxSW festival in Austin went well. At our show at Elysium, we were blessed with a good (volunteer) stage manager, and other volunteers who helped get band gear on and off in record time in cramped spaces. I caught a look at the production info the local crew got at the venues, it took awhile to figure out the input list, but once you think of it digitally it begins to make sense. I was even more amused when I saw that all the venues got the same thing whether they had 40 channels or 12.
Our first night there, eX-Girl played outside of Emo’s. Seems Dave Rat got rid of his classic Yamaha PM-2000. The thing is definitely in need of some love. Quiet PA, threat of rain, and cranky Yamaha aside, the show goes well and the local crew saves the day by doing a great job.
Live Sound Wisdom – 
eX-Girl Tour. On the road again… It’s so great to be on the road again. Crammed in a van with a band from Japan! Go to the tour pages to see the schedule, and catch the show in a town near you!
Tour Manager Files Updated. Minor update really. More venues and hotels in the databases, and small, mostly cosmetic changes in the files themselves. The biggest difference being that they will only work with Filemaker Pro 5 or higher (OS-9, X or Windows). The databases for Filemaker Pro 4 will still be available (via email) but no longer updated. Another update will probably appear after the eX-Girl tour, seems some things might work a bit better in OS-X than 9, mostly with printing. I’m hoping it makes printing itinerary books a bit easier. Stay tuned.
Welcome to 2003. Happy new year one and all! Hopefully this year brings good new exciting things and events to us all. Yes, I am a bit late with these greetings… so now a long over due update to the site…..
Resume Updated – The resume and tour pages have been updated, rearranged and such including the addition of show listings for all the shows I’ve worked at various venues and such. Go to Tour or Resume to see the trivial details.
Now running on OS X, and the Pizmo doesn’t complain too much. Was pretty easy updating to ten. I was going to say it hasn’t crashed yet, but I have the magic touch and have managed to lock it up now and again, but no where near as much as 9. A bit taxing on my processor with all the new transparencies and whatnot but I’m a happy camper overall. though putting the new OS in has put me in a bit of a larval stage checking out it’s inner workings and tweaking this and that.
Tour Manager Filemaker Pro Database – Oh yea, I did say I was going to put up a new version for FMP 5.5 and higher. Well…. I will, I swear. Updated Venue, Hotel, and Promoter databases along with the first release of the inventory database should be coming along too.
Mercury Rev completes touring “All is Dream” with shows in Australia. Always a pleasure to visit Australia with the exception of the long flight there and back, though the flight wasn’t too bad as I slept most of the way. Three festival shows for the Livid festival and four club shows to end the tour. The club shows were a mix of stuff, though mostly old desks in need of some loving care, that or the trash! 😉
The Livid festivals present a mix of line arrays. We played on the main stage before Oasis, well, that is the second main stage, as they had two “dome” stages right next to each other. This made for a very easy changeover, and more prep time for me at FOH and Oliver at MON to get our desks set up. From the audience point of view its also a nice set up as there is nothing blocking the view of the stage, as the mix position was set up in between the two stages. Though while good for the audience it wasn’t the best for me, as I basically listened to the center line array, mixing in mono per se. And with Powderfingers desk in front of mine I was a bit secluded in the FOH tent, I couldn’t even see any PA at the show in Brisbane. So I spent a lot of time on headphones and hoped the local crew would tell me if anything was out of whack.
The first show in Brisbane was with the EAW line array, and I can’t say I was too impressed. Didn’t seem to have the dispersion and sound quality of many of the other line arrays. Though the dome stages were working against us. The roof came out a to about the barricade, so if you were in the first 20 rows or so you couldn’t even see PA. The Brisbane rig didn’t have any front fill, but the Sydney and Melbourne sights did. The ceiling at the mix position was too low, and a basically couldn’t hear any of the PA directly. Oh well…
In Melbourne it was the Vertec rig, which is pretty good, still sound a bit like JBL but carries for days, and If your going for a rock NS-10 sort of sounding mix, they will do the trick. In Sydney it was the V-dosc, and here I was happiest. While the Vertec was good, a go for a bit of a high-fi mix with Mercury Rev and the V-dosc gave me what I asked for. So our tour ended on a good note for me. Now the boys head into the studio to work on their next masterpiece, and hopefully I will be around for the next go round.
Big thanks to all the Australian crews, and especially to Al our local Tour Manager who did a great job. Will be a pleasure to experience Australian hospitality in the future.
Mason Jennings tour completed. Was a good change of pace from the Mercury Rev tour. With only a three piece band, van with no trailer, and 16 channels tops, things were a bit simpler. Time to actually tweak and fine tune a mix. Hopefully I’ll get to work with Mason again…
A set of really good shows in Denmark and the Reading/Leeds Festivals. Back again from a European trip with Mercury Rev and some really good shows in Aarhüs and Copenhagen. Some of the best crowds all tour long. Reading and Leeds went well. Things are much easier at festivals when there are two desks. The first day at leads was a bit rough, PA sounded a bit like, well, ass, well, maybe not that bad, but not like nexo. Not sure they tuned the thing any, though it got better as the day went on. The boys at Leads the next day had there shit together and the rig sounded like a nexo should. The funny thing was the Strokes brought there own XL-4 in, for 14 channels or so from stage. They did sound good though. But even better, and the band that I think should have headlined – Jane’s Addiction. Nuff said. Thanks to all at SSE.
Mason Jennings Tour – I’m set to go on a tour of the eastern us with Mason Jennings and his band, which will be keeping me busy mid September and than again in late October. Quite a change from the 6 piece of Mercury Rev to the 3 piece of Mason’s band. Thanks to my roommate Mike for hooking me up, I’m looking forward to the tour.
Mercury Rev Australia Tour – And to top it all off, the Rev have been called back to Australia for the Livid Festival, expanded beyond Brisbane, the festival will be at Sydney and Melbourne in addition. Main stage right before Oasis is our slot and we ain’t complaining. We shall sneak a couple of club shows in to keep things interesting.
Audiosquid 