Gig cock-ups

[Guest Craig C]

Oocha!!!

[Guest MDP]

that was teh only edgar prais aberdeen gig i've ever missed. shhame really i htink it wooda been quite funny

[Chris]

Ow, that's pretty similar to what Denis Lyxen did onstage with Refused:

YouTube - Dennis Lyxzen Busts his head open refused

[Teabags]

Both those are extremely similar to Fighting Shit at Drakes. They stopped when ti happened, Jim fixe dhim up, Filthpact played, then Fighting SHit went back on and played a proper fucking blinder!

[HairyScaryMark]

Ow, that's pretty similar to what Denis Lyxen did onstage with Refused:

YouTube - Dennis Lyxzen Busts his head open refused

That band, particualrly the singer was obviously an accident waiting to happen with his overly energetic and sometimes agressive stage presence. Poor guy though. Put a lot of effort into a gig and that's how it pays off.

Status Quo moves have no room to be done on tiny stages with singers who run all over the place.

[Old Gold]

That band, particualrly the singer was obviously an accident waiting to happen with his overly energetic and sometimes agressive stage presence. Poor guy though. Put a lot of effort into a gig and that's how it pays off.

Status Quo moves have no room to be done on tiny stages with singers who run all over the place.

No, the correct terminology when it comes to Refused is YAS MIN! Overly energetic my arse.

"He's going for a wank!"

[Flash@TMB]

Can just imagine this...... Forget to plug it into mains, battery runs out in the middle of a song. Norton Anti virus opens and scans the computer for viruses in the middle of another song. Then an alert appears warning about something wrong with windows making a large pining type sound which is projected through the PA system. Then, the blue screen of death.

Trust me... get and Intel based Mac with OS X. Then - provided you remember to plug it into the mains - nothing will go wrong.

[HairyScaryMark]

No, the correct terminology when it comes to Refused is YAS MIN! Overly energetic my arse.

"He's going for a wank!"

Sorry. I was referring only to their movements around the stage. Not their music, which I quite enjoyed in that clip. I am otherwise unfamilular with the band.

Trust me... get and Intel based Mac with OS X. Then - provided you remember to plug it into the mains - nothing will go wrong.

That's actually worth me concidering. All the software I use (apart from cakewalk sonar) runs on Macs. I woudln't use sonar, in a live situation anyway.

I think I ideally could do with, AT LEAST 2GB of RAM. The set of samples for one of my pianos is 1/2 GB on it's own. And that's the lite version. Haven't got the full version working yet.

Do you run a Mac at The Moorings Bar?

[IamScrooge]

Really dreading using a laptop in a live situation.

Can just imagine this...... Forget to plug it into mains, battery runs out in the middle of a song. Norton Anti virus opens and scans the computer for viruses in the middle of another song. Then an alert appears warning about something wrong with windows making a large pining type sound which is projected through the PA system. Then, the blue screen of death.

You forget the part where you accidentally click on your gay midget porn movies and they start playing all over the fucking PA.

But never mind, if it happens in the moorings it'll be the best sounding midget porn ever!

[soundian]

Trust me... get and Intel based Mac with OS X. Then - provided you remember to plug it into the mains - nothing will go wrong.

Except possibly the hard drive being susceptible to vibration, which I've seen with practically every laptop set-up live.

I'd recommend something with a big enough buffer to handle skips, like a portable/DJ CD player, for live work if you only need it for playback. If you edit in real time I suppose you have to take your chances.

[Flash@TMB]

Do you run a Mac at The Moorings Bar?

The tills are PCs. The jukebox front end is essentially a PC. But none of those ever get a sniff of the Internet, and they are dedicated to running a single application, so essentially an appliance OS.

My own personal machine is a Mac - I switched from a PC because it was costing me 30 minutes a day (and often more) with crashes, viruses, and failing to connect to our network for one reason or another. Laura uses a Mac also. The accounting software is Sage which is PC only, but we found it more stable to run it on a PC emulator through the Mac. This has the added advantage of being easier to recover when the Windows config goes tits up.

My Mac can run PC stuff native on Parallels which is a PC abstractor rather than emulator.

But I would NEVER go back to a PC.

[AndyB]

I tried to post my gig on this website.

It did'nt happen.

[GraemeC]

I still don't think anyone will beat this:

Same man at Kef doing a un-intentional dive head first off the stage and breaking his neck.....

Of the Les Paul

[HairyScaryMark]

Except possibly the hard drive being susceptible to vibration, which I've seen with practically every laptop set-up live.

I'd recommend something with a big enough buffer to handle skips, like a portable/DJ CD player, for live work if you only need it for playback. If you edit in real time I suppose you have to take your chances.

I think that advice was aimed at me but I am not 100% sure.

I would use the laptop for running VST plugins under Native Instrument's Kore in a live situations. This currently accounts for around 2/3's of my keyboard sounds. With 2GB+ of a RAM, I don't know for sure but I think I should have most samples and keyboard sounds loaded into my RAM when I load my 'performance' at soundcheck.

I don't think I have anything that I would want to use live which doesn't run under macs. A rackmount PC is maybe worth concidering. Could install install RAID with 3 hard drives (the method which causes increased perforamnce and security). It is possible that the large amount of fans required in a rackmount PC could be an issue for 'noise' and such.

Muse Research do these units running a customised version of linux. A number of my plugins (4, i think) are not currently supported on it though. Also more expensive than I would like for the specs of the machine. Also would rather not pay for the supposedly 'free' plugins when I currnetly already have a collection.

--Mark--

[soundian]

I think that advice was aimed at me but I am not 100% sure.

I would use the laptop for running VST plugins under Native Instrument's Kore in a live situations. This currently accounts for around 2/3's of my keyboard sounds. With 2GB+ of a RAM, I don't know for sure but I think I should have most samples and keyboard sounds loaded into my RAM when I load my 'performance' at soundcheck.

It was aimed at Flash's claim that NOTHING could go wrong, and just as general info for people. Note I did say if you were using it for playback, as in playing back pre-recorded/sequenced stuff, which can go horribly wrong if the hard drive decides to skip.

[IamScrooge]

It was aimed at Flash's claim that NOTHING could go wrong, and just as general info for people.

Oh SOMETHING can always go wrong

I'm pretty sure that everyone knows the personal computer is one of the least reliable machines man has ever made, yet we all still get frustrated and even surprised when they crash

[bobbassguy]

I think the biggest gig cock-up I've been involved in was when my band was playing this 'venue' in Elgin, which thankfully isn't there any more. We didn't have proper monitors at the gig, and the 'venue' (I refer to it as 'venue' because it was a pseudo-rock bar that was about as rock as a papercut to the eyelids) didn't have any, so we were forced to improvise - we hauled along two extra PA speakers and just sat them on the ground, facing us. However, we found that all the sound coming from it was going more to our feet than our ears.

Our solution?

Angle them upwards by balancing them on some bricks, or boxes, or something. It seemed to work nicely, until our set had gotten the rock/metal-starved teenagers of Elgin going a little more chaotic than we'd anticipated. Inevitably, the leaning objects got dislodged by the pit, and the speakers fell back on themselves, and the leads protruding from the back of the speakers were crushed by the weight of the cabs, cutting out all of our PA sound somehow (probably some intricate speaker setup).

It held us up by about 12 minutes while the sound guy rectified the problem, so were forced into much impromptu jamming using only the power of our power amps, inevitably resulting in something not too dissimilar to Spinal Tap's "Jazz Exploration" (remember, at the Sea World place, when they're second on the bill to a puppet show?).

Needless to say we didn't angle our 'monitors' with easily dislodged objects again after that.

[Guest MDP]

aye, i've seen MANY laptops fail in a live situation, apple's are much better. I'm going to buy a mac-mini very soon (not for live use) because i'm so fucking fed up of windows, my friend bought one (with 1TB of external hard drives) and has never yet had any problems.

[Ross]

fun.

i have a lead breaking/volume control/lead pulling out/accidentally standing on footswitch type incident at every gig i think. but that's because i'm a cock.

off the top of my head, some other vaguely amusing incidents related to me being a cock:

• falling through a hole in the middle of the stage, up to my chest, mid-choon. i did not look cool.
  
• dropping a mic, prompting the sound engineer to charge onstage and lamp me several times about the chops, before being rescued by our drummer leaping over the kit and laying into the engineer, all while i stood, stunned, doing nothing.
  
• stumbling into my amp and knocking the head backwards off the cab, damaging it somewhat. only it wasn't my amp, it belonged to the headliners. i later sent them a cheque.
  
• falling off the front of the stage at kef/lava/glow/whatever, with my foot tangled in monitor leads, dragging the monitor off the stage with me. i sensed the bouncer wasn't amused by the way in which he manoeuvred me over the barrier onto the dancefloor.
  
• throwing myself offstage at the end of the set, landing on some kid's leg, and then the rest of the audience jumped on top of me. he screamed in considerable pain, and we very nearly broke his leg.
  
• droppping my guitar to the stage (from waist height) in a slightly tame display of rock and roll abandon. only i missed the edge of the stage and it dropped a further 5 feet to the floor. i thought it was ok until i picked it up by the body, and the neck remained where it was.
  
• smashing up two perfectly good guitars in a genuine fury, because i thought they were fucked. turned out the amp i was using was overheating and cutting out. duh.
  
• buying a new (but cheap) guitar the day of a gig. 3 songs in to the set, one of the strap buttons falls out, and the guitar tumbles to the floor, fucking the neck. the bastard.
  

i'm pretty sure i was sober when most of this nonsense took place.

xxx

i think i witnessed almost all of those