> I have a question:
>
> When all of you say "live", what do you mean? That you play the
> lead live from some keyboard, or do you mean that you mix the
> channels in on your way, as in not song-mode, or what the phuck?
When I've done live stuff in the past, I've generally played live
(keyboards, bass or stick) over some kind of sequenced backing if I was
solo. I've been in a few bands too where everyone played everything live (no
sequencing at all). Either of these descriptions does fine for me. I don't
have a particular downer on using tape/DAT/CD/whatever backing so long as
you're still giving the crowd their money's worth! I once triggered samples
on stage alongside CJ Mackintosh at the time that his band M/A/R/R/S had
Pump up the Volume in the charts, which was cool, but not really what I'd
properly call a gig - I was doing the live engineering and just did it as a
favour.
I used to engineer live a lot, and I loved bands that did it for real on
stage. People miming to tape was horribly boring for we road crew types.
Back in the late 80s I did a lot of 'has-been' bands, you know, people like
Mud, Marmalade, Dollar, Rose Royce, the Dreamers, the Nolan Sisters (!), the
glitter band, etc. Most of them played for real, and they were generally
great to work with, barring the odd asshole 'superstar' type. There were
some real hidden gems too - one day, a band called 'Rupert' turned up.
Rupert (a terrifically nice bloke, I should add) was an Elvis impersonator,
and quite a hoot. His band were a little over the top - the guitarist was
the fat guy with the goatee out of Los Lobos (remember them?) and the
drummer used to play with Gerry and the Pacemakers. I remember him looking
at me weirdly as I was miking up his kit - I always did it the 'studio' way
because that was what I was used to, so he was astonished at having about a
dozen microphones pointed at him! He hadn't ever had overheads used on his
kit before.
Then there was the day that Dollar did a gig, singing to tape backing. I got
the short straw and ended up doing monitors. The FOH guy and me got bored
with so little to do at the soundcheck, so we got *all* of the wedges out
(about 15 of them in total) and set them up in big rings around the
microphones. We must have had about 10 kilowatts feeding those things - the
sound level on stage was totally stupid. Despite the fact that,
realistically, we just did it to annoy them, one of the Dollar peeps came up
to the FOH guy after the gig and congratulated him on the best on stage
sound they had ever had. Sometimes you just can't win!
Sarah
