Rants

  The downside of having a nice big truck to drive the PA around in was that bands always wanted you to go and pick up the lights from the lighting company for them, and take them to the gig in your nice big truck. And then, of course, take them back the following morning.…

What do you say to someone who values your work at zero? Do you laugh them off and tell a dismissive joke to avoid confrontation? Do you calmly explain that your work is as valuable as that of any other professional or do you chuck a wobbly? If you haven’t experienced this insult first-hand you’re…

LL, the drummer for the Harris Tweed band popped into the factory the other day, and over a coffee we started reminiscing over funny things that have happened in the course of earning a living. Mine have been well documented [some might say ad nauseam!]in this column but he has had no-one to write his down…

Well it wasn’t me alone. Grub had a lot to do with it. I collected him and the bass player from Littlewing at their place in Five Dock. We loaded their stage gear into my production truck, a Ford F350, and we drove the three hours out west over the mountains to Bathurst. It was…

By rights, no-one should even remember the MP3 format by now, any more than people can remember Betamax or Hi-8 tapes in the video industry. Somewhere along the line the audio industry was sold a miserable lie that has all but poisoned our capacity to advance the hi-res digital cause. It’s time we woke up from…

When it comes to audio production, one thing is certain; there are no rules. And for that we can thank people like Geoff Emerick of Beatles fame (amongst others). He used to break rules on a daily basis: put mics close to drum kits, feed line-level signals back into mic preamps, man-handle spools while the analogue…

The gig was called Metal for Melbourne – a celebration of Heavy Metal music from eight bands who would have won prizes as Spinal Tap clones, but in this case they weren’t intending to be funny! I made sure I packed my ear plugs for this one! What is it with metal bands? A bigger…

Where have all the big, glossy, chrome filled metal monsters of the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies gone? You know, the ones that immediately spring to mind when someone says “American Cars”. Southern California – to many people it means Disneyland and Universal Studios; to others it means freeways and traffic jams. Twenty seven million people…

No, let’s not. Please, just let it go I won’t be going to any of them, since I heard quite enough of old showtunes when growing up with my parents. Not only did they insist on dragging me along to things like High Society, Carmen Jones, South Pacific, Porgy and Bess etc. etc., and if that…

Forget the pound of flesh, how about an ounce of customer service? (attrib. William Shakespeare)                 Some journeys start off badly but get better. Others start off OK but get worse. This one is the latter! Once again Colin, my partner-in-crime at ARX, and I were heading off…

When I used to mix bands full time, and lived the strangely nomadic, semi-nocturnal life of the working sound engineer, casual acquaintances would often ask me, “What do you do for a living?” If I replied that I worked in the Live Sound industry and did the sound for bands, their reaction was usually one…

“Sugar Cane ate my brain, when I drove on the Bamboo Train…” (Apologies to Robbie Robertson from The Band for the misheard lyrics from his song ‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down’) After a couple of weeks holiday in Vietnam, my gf and I organised to go to Phnom Penh, in neighboring Cambodia, since…