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we're not headlining this one though, Steve Hackett is
which makes sense cos he's got actual fans and stuff..
it was soooooo much fun...
met Steve Hackett and some of the band at breakfast
what really nice, chatty and approachable bunch of guys...
Perm wigs and flares are strictly not allowed on stage! I've decided.
My first gig with a band I joined about 4 weeks ago, since moving to Exmouth.
Indigo Hammer rocking the Pickerel Inn in Stowmarket tomorrow night
A great live music pub that always gets a bit wild later in the evening.
I, of course, wont be paying any attention to the shenanigans as it's the first gig I'll be playing using the AX8 going through the PA and not using guitar cabs so I'll be constantly fretting about the sound out front. Lucky poos needed!!
Never mind, we got free beer all night and got paid too.
Also chips are "Plant-based" no matter how you cook them.
Went bloody brilliantly. Acoustics in the pub were horrible - low ceiling and solid stone walls so a lot of time was spent getting vocals sounding OK and trying to persuade bass player to turn his rig down and maybe even read the eq and compressor setting page of the fookin manual)
But onto the AX8 and its performance. A caveat is I used to use it with a cab and power amp so am fairly familiar with the unit. But for this gig I wanted to just use the PA and carry less heavy stuff.
Had a chance to set it up in the studio through our new Alto TS115 cabs (ICBM will be spitting feathers at my choice of 15inch speakers for mains but we’re a loud band and need a bit of oomph out front. And we’re skint so couldn’t afford anything else!) I used 6 main presets –Hiwatt for clean , Plexi for Crunch, JCM800 for grind, JVM for sizzle Cameron Atomica for high gain and a bassman for fuzz. Plus an AC30 with loads of delay for some U2 songs we cover. All presets had tubescreamer, delay, phaser ready to deploy when needed.
Interestingly I ended up deleting the pre-sets I thought were awesome with the power amp and cab and just started with the stock Fractal sounds. They sound good. The only adjustment I made was on the high and low cut filters – taking out anything below 120hz and above 6000kHz – just to smooth things out a bit.
Every post you see on the Fractal forum says people ‘came up and complimented me on my tone’ I never get this – just drunk people shouting random stuff when I’m trying to play. But the unit sounded great. Blends brilliantly with the bass and vocals. Not a ‘hi-fi’ sound by any stretch, still has enough rawk to sound rock and roll and everything is tweakable on the fly on the AX8. Those times I wandered out front the sound made me smile - and inspired me to play; which is my ultimate measure of if I keep a bit of kit.
The PA throws the sound out in a pleasant spread. Not a huge amount of volume is needed to cut through which makes balancing better.Bit weird not having a cabinet behind me but quite pleasant not to have to worry about it.
Monitors were a bugger to set up – had them far too loud at first and needs some proper EQ-ing but will figure that out with practice.
Overall opinion – a great start with a brilliant bit of kit. I’ve got the AX2 / MFC101 waiting in the corner of the garage awaiting setup so will report on that at some point.