Stormcellar Band Home Page

Howdy Folks. I have been a little preoccupied of late organising our tour, and we haven't spoken much about it.

Here are my current thoughts on the matter, expressed in part, pictorially.

1. organising a tour is like:

mixed with 

leading to potential

or

but principally

that is all.

For no apparent reason today I recalculated our gig roster since back in the day (yikes), and, subject to some minor statistical fluctuation (miscounting), I came up with the figure of 328 shows since 2008.

Even allowing for the odd rescheduled show, that puts us well over the 300 show mark and that's a milestone worth noting :-)

Off to the country this weekend, Dubbo RSL on Saturday night from 8:30 and a Sunday afternoon gig in Gulgong at the Gulgong RSL from 2pm, and we're looking forward to being joined by the lovely Ms Jo Fitzgerald for these shows!

Both shows are free entry!

Howdy Folkses. Did I mention our name was up in lights?

Yep. Pretty impressive huh?

Err..Big thanks to Dr Tom for setting us straight on production voodoo, but more of that in a moment.

Welcome to the Sporties. It's big.

They have Beer.

They have many, many, many video screens. It looked like a Samsung shop had been on Sale, they had monitors above the monitors.

Every football code imaginable was on screen, and we were informed by some local punters that our set up for the band could wait until after the footy. 

Given the fact that the same match was displayed on (literally) 30 screens in their vicinity, that remark occasioned a very Groucho Marx raise of the eyebrows :-) Ironic, ne ces pas?

Whilst we waited for the Footy to come to its conclusion...oh..there's another game on. (sigh)

Rosie and I opted to try the brasserie and found another blogworthy object of culinary fascination.

Mesdames et Monsieurs, we present the Helmet Pie.

Meanwhile, with sufficient codes of football completed to enable setup, Dr Tom got on with his nifty little new equipment thingy.

What's wrong with this picture?

Where's all that bulky sound gear gone?

Uh-oh, I feel a rant coming on.

Ah, soapbox, where's my soapbox.

Apols for any techo terms used, I'll explain where possible.

Generational Shift - Sound Production Changes, Disruptive Technology and some Geeky Stuff.

Right.

Every now and again you observe a change taking place right before your eyes.

Regular readers will know that we embarked on an 'improve our production' project about a year or so ago, following on from some assessment and recommendation from Pete D.

We started to use a Bass bin to enrich the lower register sounds of the male vocalist (that'd be me), we changed to powered front of house speakers (they're  the ones that point at the audient) , introduced some lights (with varying results, still an area of contention) and have gradually moved from a Set and Forget mix style to getting some help with an actual human person to help mix.

During this process, we've whittled the system down to what I thought was a terrific little mixing desk (Allen & Heath mixwizard, which i still maintain is a no-bull@&#* mixing desk with everything you need and nothing you don't), some powered FOH, bass bin, compressor, foldback, multicore etc etc ye gods.

So, we thought we pretty much had the formula down, but over the last few gigs I have started to see more and more iPad linked sound devices.

yes the smarts are moving into the production chain.

Dr Toms setup on Saturday & Sunday was a great example of the pros and cons of this disruptive technology.

I use the term 'disruptive' in the tech sense, the change has come upon us and the next generation of gear effectively makes buggy whips of the previous stuff. Expect pre-2012 mixing desks to take a beating on the 2nd hand market. 

Ok, so what's the big deal?

Everyone's got a computer with them

It used to be that devices with smarts in them cost $$$. I guess I am thinking of the generations of sound gear 1960-2010. As electronic prices went down, more bits of semi smart gear were introduced.

Recently it seems that the manufacturers have thought 'hey, everyone's got a smart device iphone/ipad/ equivalent with them, so why build the smarts into the device - lets built the inputs and controller and then run software to control it from the users personal computing'.

Personal Computing is now truly Personal.

I have always fought against what I perceived as the overpriced cult of Mac, as an avowed Frankensteinian-hack-it-together PC guy, but I gotta say, the iPad etc are just such generational leaps - people are only starting to realise that the device they're carrying around now has almost the same grunt as a processor from a significant desktop from 5 years ago..

I've been looking at lighting control systems controlled from the iPad via wireless and I've seen the iPad used as a mixing tool so that the sound engineer can wander to the front of the stage and mix from the middle of the room without without wires or disrupting the audience.

That's great but what really blew my mind was when I compared the footprint of the new way versus the stuff we've been using and I suddenly realised that this approach was rendering everything else obsolete.

I present this image again, check out the area Tom is using for a full production system.

With the iPad operating all the standard mixing functions as software based operations, the amount of physical hardware drops dramatically.

This is a 16 channel desk?? Yep, that little box above the iPad.

This means more grunt, many many more functions and features (such as equalisation of auxiliary mix channels) and other soundo nerdisms, and that's great, but people have been showing me that for a while and i was 'meh' about it.

But when you start to think of the ripple effect - smaller gear, less space, faster setup, lower transport cost all with a better sound production outcome, you start to see the generational shift.

This is the threshold at which point your gear is either old school (manual, limited smarts,bulky ) or part of this current change; external hardware and then a link to a personal computing device with software with a billion little additional features, previously only known to the people that make Britney sound good.

Rant over.

Oh - except for the thing about the directional speaker. Sporties uses them to reduce noise spill, so the speakers are set into the ceiling and fire their sound straight down - the upside is that a metre away from the speaker, you can't hear it.

The downside is that 1 metre away from the speakers, you can't hear the sound.

We had a number of people from the audience tell us it would be nice to hear the vocals occasionally during the song. ...Yep, technology, gotta love it.

Right, back to the gig report. Cheers to all the folks who stuck around at the sporties and Happy Birthday to Gina!

Sunday at the Royal

Sunday night followed another stunning cloudless blue skied end of winter day.There were some very Miami Vice pastel evening colours on the way to Bondi.

And a moon (we like the moon, but not as much as cheese, shout out to X)

As we were loading in, I struck up a conversation with a chap who had lost his cat. Sad.

 If you're a Bondi local who lives near the Royal hotel, be on the lookout.

We had a particularly good evening, shout outs to Debra, Heather and all the folks who got up to dance last night and a very big shout out to Frank Bennetts alter ego who dropped by, stuck around and said such nice things :-) 

We're back at the Royal at the end of August, looking forward to another good night there.

A run to the country this weekend and Ms Jo will be with us! YAY!

I'm ranted out. Off to do some more stuff :-)

MJEB.

Hired Guns is back on the Australian Blues Roots Chart again for this month, like some Zombie thing.

To recap, it spent 8 weeks at #1, 20 weeks or so on the chart and finally left the chart 2 months ago...but now...it's Back.

Once again, in some dang fine company

This Month /Place Last Month/Artist/Album/Label

1/1/BLUE EYES CRY/Sleeping alone/Black Market Music

2/2/MR BLACK and BLUES & CHRIS WILSON/Blow These Tracks: Live on the Blues Train/Independent

3/3/DAVE BREWER/Night Walkin'/Independent

4/4/DAN GRANERO/Time To Wake Up/Independent

5/5/JACK DERWIN/Covered All In Blue/Independent

6/7/RUSSELL MORRIS/Sharkmouth/Fan Fare records

7/-/ALI PENNEY & THE MONEY MAKERS/And On It Goes/Independent

8/19/VARIOUS ARTISTS/Tony Cini's Blues Explosion Volume 4/Bad Penny Records

9/17/LIZA OHLBACK/Trouble Goin’ Down/Independent

10/8/CROSS EYED CATS/Just messin'/Independent

11/-/LAZY EYE/Move Me/Independent

12/10/SUGARCANE COLLINS/Downunder The Blues/Independent / Across The Rhythm Records

13/-/STORMCELLAR/Hired Guns & Borrowed Glory/Independent

14/23/CHRIS WILSON & GEOFF ACHISON/Box Of Blues/Jupiter 2 Record