Welcome to Episode 73 of the Bandhive Podcast.

It is time for another episode of the Bandhive podcast. My name is James Cross and I'm here with Matt Hoos of Alive in Barcelona. How are you doing today, Matt, I'm doing pretty awesome.

James has everything over there on the east side. Glad to hear that I am doing well as well. That is not supposed to be a tongue twister, but I guess to drop a band pun in, you could say I'm doing alive and well, shout out to those guys from, I want to say san Diego. No. Why are you shaking your head too bad of a pun? Oh, I'm just starting it off early, you know? Well, you know me and we're starting this episode early so might as well start off the puns early.

Anyway, we're gonna get right into it with a little bit of a story about, I want to say eight years ago. I was taking for an artist at a local music festival and it wasn't like all local bands. There were some bigger bands there, Pennywise, the offspring, some really great bands were playing and now this artist probably knows who they are if they're listening, I gave it away, but I was taking and all of a sudden no guitar and the guitarist kind of looked at me like, I don't know what's happening and I did everything I thought of.

I checked all the pedals were plugged in properly. I checked that the amp was running properly. I checked that the cables were plugged into the amp. I checked everything. Eventually we just gave the guitarist a different guitar and that worked. And at that moment I looked at the guitarist and said, did you shut off your pickups? And that's what it was. The guitarist had shut off their pickups because they weren't toggle switches like on a modern guitar. They were those old slider switches where it's just like each pickup has an individual on off switch rather than like a neck mid or bridge.

That looked bad. This was a big show with lots of great bands and the guitars go out because the guitarist shut off the pickups And then we spent 30 seconds trying to figure everything out when it was just turn your pickups back on embarrassing, not only for the guitarist but for the whole band. And for me too, because like I was standing there trying to figure it out and I couldn't figure it out. So I don't blame the guitarist for this. My first thought should have been, hey, this is a funky guitar.

Like is it the guitar? That's my fault. I was the tech. I was responsible for that. I didn't think of that because I was used to a guitar with a toggle switch. Anyway, that all aside, that whole situation could have been easily avoided if the guitarist knew their gear well. And if I knew the guitarist's guitar well, had I had a better understanding of that, all could have been avoided. There are so many things that could go wrong when you're playing live, you need to have backups for your backups.

So the whole point of the story here is we're doing an episode about knowing your gear. It's really, really important. And if you don't know your gear, you will, at some point be embarrassed on stage in a high stress environment and it's probably going to happen at the biggest show you're playing all year because that's when you're the most stressed out. So that's when things will go wrong. Of course, Murphy's Law, that's just how it goes. So matt, if you want to jump us into this episode, please take it away. Absolutely.

Gear is awesome. It's a tool that really, you know, that allows individuals to take their game to the next step. But I'm also a firm believer that gear should only be used when you need it. And the more variables you throw into an equation, the more confusing it's going to get. And with technology that's like amplified even more so pedals pedals are like one of these things that if you implement a pedal into your setup, it can make a world of difference pedals are also one of those things that if you have it set incorrectly, then it can ruin your performance.

And the only way for you to be able to actually make sure that you know, things are going the way that they're supposed to be going or that they're going to go the way they're supposed to be going. If you've actually taken time to learn how your pedal works or whatever piece of gear, there's a lot of things that you don't need to know. You don't need to understand how circuit boards work. You don't need to know that gold is the best conductor. You don't need to know little technical things.

You don't know, you know how many hurts or whatever. What you need to know is how to set it up. I couldn't tell you how many times I've played with artists who are like, why isn't my pedal working well? Because you have this going into the output, not the input or vice versa, You should know how your cables are supposed to run so that You get sound 100 of the time. And this is not like a rare thing. It's like, I couldn't tell you how many times I've seen people big old fancy pedal board bunch of pedals and they're sitting there pulling with their little three inches trying to figure out how to actually set it up so they get the noise that they want or you know, three of their pedals are working, but one of them is not.

And sometimes it's something as simple as like changing a battery, you know, like having nine volts on hand. Like if you want to be a professional musician, like you should always have an abundance of strings and you should always have an abundance of nine volt batteries. It probably guitar picks too. But that one can go either way depending on if you use them or not, but specifically nine volt batteries. And also like you should know if you have everything set up correctly, this helps you multiple reasons.

One the more that your head is in your gear, the more you know how it's gonna sound, you know how it's gonna play too. If something is not right, then you know that you set it up correctly. So instead of spending two hours trying to, you know, problem solve and figure out what's wrong, you can sit there and go, oh it's this cable, you know, I know that this cables done because everything is set up correctly and I can unplug this and plug my guitar into the other end and oh look, I have sound, I can move on to the next one.

Oh look, I don't have sound. Okay, so something's wrong with this connection. Something might be wrong with this power cord. I know that we've talked a lot about gear maintenance in the past. These two things walk hand in hand. You need to know how to maintain your gear. You need to know that you need batteries in strings and power chords and you need to know that you need to take care of these items. If you store your guitar in nothing but cold weather for a long period of time and then you pull it out and play it.

It's going to sound different. It's warped. You know, you've been storing your instrument somewhere that you shouldn't be maintenance and knowing your gear, there are two peas in a pod, so it doesn't mean that you have to know each and every individual facet. You don't need to know my rate of delay when I have it set on seven is perfect for this tempo. You don't need to get that intense with it, but you should understand the functionality and you should understand that a one knob is gonna to do volume.

One knob is gonna do rate, you know, oh, and if I go all the way to the right over here, that's going to do a reverse swell. You should have a basic knowledge. I mean if you're going out spending between $50 and $200 on a pedal, why would you not sit there and that first day, do everything that you can with it James. Didn't you just very recently have a new purchase where you had to learn a little bit more about your instrument? Yes, yes, I did. This is the third episode in a row that I'm mentioning it.

It's A G N. L. A. Set which of course G N. L. Is the company that leo fender started after fender and the a sat is his rebirth of the telecaster and so it came in and I love the guitar. You can perhaps see it over here on the left. I think it's a little dark and of course if you're listening in a podcast app, you can't see it, but matt you can see it anyway. Love the guitar, love how it plays. But the E string was a little close, the high E. To the edge of the fretboard.

And what's more is it wasn't even over the pickup pole on the bridge pickup at all. It was way out of line. And the Lowy was also shifted towards the high end of the threat board and the high end of the pickup pull that it was supposed to be over. So I thought, oh, this is no good. This is like this is going to be expensive, turns out that because it's a bolt on neck, which the guitar I've been playing for a decade is an epiphany Les paul with a set neck so you can adjust the neck.

The asset has a bolt on neck. So all you have to do is loosen the four screws on the back of the neck about one turn each and pull on the neck and then re tighten it because it shifts during shipping. And this is just because I googled it. I thought I was going to have to go to a luthier and get it checked out and do this. And then no, I literally just googled it and that solved the problem to an extent. So I thought, okay, that's not quite where I want it to be.

Well, let me take the tension off the strings because you have to keep the tension on while you're adjusting the neck, they said. So I took the tension off and I just unscrewed the bridge, partially nudged it over a little bit and screwed it back in. Boom, perfect strings are right over the pickup polls. It's not too close to the edge of the fretboard, It works. Now we have this beautiful thing called google and if your first step in figuring out a problem isn't checking google, then it needs to be.

Now obviously there's caveats to that. If you're live on stage, you're not going to pull out your phone and check google, you should know your gear by then. But if you are at home and you just got a piece of gear and you can't figure it out, that's when you google it because probably other people are having the same problem as you. Like. This is just on a forum that I was on and it was like the official G NL forum and that's how I figured out this is what the problem is, because it was such a common issue that the admin said to another person who got the guitar at the same time, I got it.

Check out this thread. There's a common issue. That's how common it was. They were proactively saying this problem happens, go fix it. So all that to say, just figure out what you are doing with your instruments. Because if you don't, then how are you going to troubleshoot it when you're on stage? How are you going to, if you drop your guitar in the middle of a tour and thankfully it's fine, but it needs a little bit of a setup. How are you going to do a basic intonation on it?

If you don't know how it works? I know tons of people who pay for setups and intonations and that's fine. But if you're on the road, you need to understand the basics of being a tech and go out there and say, this is what I'm gonna learn today. Get a cheap guitar to practice. That's what I did. I got a $20 guitar so I could figure out how to do setups and now I know how to do setups and for those of you who don't know what intonation is.

It's when you play, you're open E string and then you play your 12th fret. He those two notes should be the same one octave apart. And so that's making sure that your guitar is in tune or whatever instrument is in tune all the way through the neck. The reason they use the 12th fret is just because generally you don't end up playing in a register higher than that. So it's a good, nice low tone and a good nice high tone on each string. And that gives you cohesive thought.

And actually, like you were saying, artists who tour but don't have the ability to do these things themselves and they kind of shoot themselves in the foot. You used to be able to get away with this. If you were really, really good, you could get away with it. Buddy Rich is probably, I mean, he's arguably the greatest drummer in history at six months old, He could keep tempo and his parents realized that that he could keep tempo as a six month baby. So they started him on drums and this guy had such an understanding of tempo and rhythm and beat that it was uncanny.

I mean he had rivalries with frank Sinatra, you know, he is, he is the father of big band music and so he was a drummer and his band was called the Buddy Rich Band. So just to put into perspective how good of a musician this was, you know, what kind of caliber of a musician he was and the dude couldn't change his own drum heads. He didn't know how he could sit there and play and he would know that something was wrong about his kit and he'd be looking at his tech, like something's wrong, but he couldn't even tell his tech what was wrong.

He didn't even know why it was playing differently, why, you know, if it was tension that was wrong. If it was loose, you know, cams, if it was like, like whatever the issue was that he was experiencing, he didn't have a thorough knowledge of his gear and more importantly a thorough knowledge of how to fix his gear. And that resulted. I mean, Buddy Rich was pretty well known as somebody who was very short tempered and this played into his short tempered nous a lot. I mean he, their stories about the guy firing his entire band because one person wore the wrong socks.

So just to put into perspective, why would you ever want to be the person that continuously invites that stress into your life if you run into a problem while you're touring and you don't know how to fix it. It's just embarrassing. We once played with King 8 10 at a music festival in their hometown and one of their buddies ran sound and he ran the guitar D. I. And that was literally the worst possible thing that could have happened because at the same time as his wonderful beautiful, incredible multi $1,000 tone was coming through his amp on stage.

That's super disgusting raw audio file. Just the raw guitar input was coming through too. So it's like on stage you have this crunchy guitar and then coming through the P. A. You literally had like trying to tank tank, tank, tank tank and it was just embarrassing and the dude couldn't figure it out. I've never and I mean they were playing in their hometown on like main stage at a music festival and like how embarrassing for those guys and we all felt terrible for him because it was like dude what's this guy doing?

And afterwards there singer straight up told us he's like, yeah, that's the last time we'll ever let one of our friends do sound for us. And it was like, it's a combination of things, you know, like when you're competing at a certain level, there's risks that you shouldn't take and not knowing your gear is at the top of that list, definitely. And you know, matt, I have to ask you about this next one because you're a singer, do you cut the mic? Never, unless I'm not paying attention, you know, are occasionally my hand gets a little bit too tight.

A lot of mix, especially high end mix, actually have a line on the microphone and that's where you should hold your hand below. If you find yourself holding it too tight, too high, the higher you get, the more micro phonic feedback you get, cupping causes all this reverberation inside. And so what do you think happens when sound is bouncing around micro phonic feedback? That's where that comes from. So, if you're a vocalist, you should be doing everything in your power to hold out microphone as close to the bottom as possible.

You should also not be shouting directly into it, it should be a little bit below your mouth and depending on the type of microphone, because there's multiple different types of microphones, but most microphones that you will be using in a live setting, you're sure Sm 50 eight's or your Beta 58 SAR, those are probably your two most common, that you'll see it a venue, but those, the sound passes over them and falls into the microphone and that's where you're going to get a much more clear audio than if you're cupping the microphone, shoving it in your face.

I mean, if you're a pig, squeal band and your that's what you gotta do, That's cool. No, no judgment, but you're going to have feedback. And so, like, all vocalists should know that you want to capture the sound, not make it sound horrible, you know, it's just you're shooting yourself in the foot, you should know how your microphone works, you should have tested this 10 different times, and if you would plug a microphone in by yourself at your house and cup it in about eight seconds afterwards, you're going to hear it's gonna get really loud and maybe blow your P A speakers or whatever you're singing through, so, you know, stay away from that, learn how to use your gear, learn how to hold your mike.

Yeah, absolutely, and for those who don't know what Cupping the mic is, what matt and I are talking about, it's when you put your hand over the windscreen and everything starts to sound kind of like this, you don't want to do that because it sounds terrible and like matt said, it will bring in feedback and it's such a big issue with vocalists that optics released a mic that's culpable, it's called the Om seven. And they literally released a mic for that because vocalists very frequently cannot learn proper mic technique.

I'm looking at you a F I I'm looking at you, they use the Om seven because Davey cannot stop cutting the mic, but at least he knows it and admits it. So anyway, vocalists learn not to cut the mic guitar and bass players understand how to do a basic set up an intonation. Like what if your string gauge changes? That's another example where you might need to change the intonation of the instrument because the string gauge changes your Internation. All of these are just some examples on what artists can mess up in a live setting without a basic understanding of their gear.

Same thing if you're in the studio, you don't want to go into the studio and have the engineers say, hey, you know, we're on an hourly rate, but your instruments aren't set up, so I have to do the setups for you now and that's going to take me about an hour and a half because you have four different guitars. Guess what? You just paid an hour and a half for studio time where if you had been prepared and done it before you went in or even had, you know, a luthier guitar shop do it before you go in.

That would have been cheaper than the studio time. I can almost guarantee it Because for a setup you're looking at like $50 with a luthier. Whereas studio time, 50 bucks is cheap. Don't make the mistake. Be prepared for your live shows, be prepared for the studio, understand how your gear works, you know, matt, like you mentioned earlier, you don't have to understand the circuitry inside. We're not saying that you don't have to be a massive gear nerd to know every single speck airline pilots, for example, they don't know how every single piece of equipment works in their plane, but they know exactly what every single piece of equipment does.

If it's vital to the flight, how it affects their flight and the safety of their flight and how to troubleshoot it if there are any issues. So the point is, you need to know your system and know it well, you mentioned the studio and I think that it's really important to hit this home because with studio time you're either paying by the hour or if you're going to record a full length album, then you're going to be spending days in the studio and like, you know, ourselves included, there's times when it's like, members will be sitting around for days waiting to record their parts and then it gets to the time where we have to go record.

You know, somebody who goes to record apart and then then they need to change their strings or then they need to intimate the guitar. And it's like, well, you know, this is optimizing your time, especially when it comes to recording. You know, we've talked about making sure that you are up to par, making sure that you're well practiced. You practice at home, you rehearse when you're together, the same goes for the studio. You know, you need to practice changing your guitar strings at home, you need to practice playing your guitar and every different setting.

You need to know if you're nine volt batteries are dead going into the studio. If you know that you're about to track, be proactive about it, you don't need to to wait around and right now, if you're sitting and wondering what the next step in your music career is, and you're not abundantly sure, learn how to intimate an instrument, learn proper vocal form, you know, learn the difference between um, origami cable and the next best thing, you know, and and why mo ga mies offer you a lifetime warranty.

Things like that. When you when you have more overall knowledge of the industry as a whole, and of products as a whole, then you can actually come out and use better tools like me. I'm not going to try and put my music out on Myspace. Why? Because there's better tools? What happens if I've never used anything other than my space? Do am I just going to put it out on my space and it'll be okay? No, I'm going to learn how to use Youtube. I'm going to learn how to use Spotify.

I'm gonna learn how to use the tools that are industry standards that are readily at my disposal. And the internet is a fantastic tool. There's probably 100 videos online that to teach anybody proper vocal form. Probably 100 videos online to showcase the different frequencies the different microphones will use. Maybe you're using a microphone that's just not the best for you. Maybe you are really violent and you have like this heil pr 35 it's like the super rich, super like active. I mean, like, you could that thing will pick up anything and you have like a raspy voice and maybe maybe you need to be using a Sennheiser.

Actually taking the time watching some videos. Educating yourself in all these different areas. It's going to bring out a world of change on top of that. You might also realize different things about your gear that you never would have even thought of. Whereas like you might say, oh, this high LPR 35 this has absolutely incredible fidelity, The sound is beautiful. But if I like flick this thing in the wrong way, the internals are going to break and that's not going to be very good for touring musicians. So maybe you want a Sennheiser or sure, that's a little bit more Beat up a ball.

You know, just something that you can literally toss around because while the fidelity might be better on this pr 35, the resilience, maybe you guys are the chariot and your whole thing is literally destroying your kids and your gear every night. It's the same concept as knowing your audience. You need to know your what you're playing. If you're a folk artist and you just want to play some singer songwriter stuff, then yeah, you can use these awesome, super high quality high fidelity mix. But if you're like a touring rock band and your whole schtick is getting drunk every night and partying and destroying stuff, well then maybe you want to rethink that work from the outside in.

No, exactly. Like if you never play with delay in your music, then you don't really need to worry about what the delay pedal is going to sound like on all these different settings, if it's something that you're never going to use, so make sure you isolate what you have and why you're using it. And then from there, you can actually go forward a bit and plan accordingly. Absolutely. And to give a few more examples, if you're a guitarist, you should know and understand your signal flow and how it's processed all the way from your guitar, through to the amp.

So every pedal in your chain know how it's routed. So if a pedal goes bad, you can say, oh, well, let me take this pedal out and I'll put the routing from here to here. You might not necessarily have the pedals on your pedal board in the same order that they are in the chain because they might not fit right on the pedal board. You know, you might have to put one sideways if it's a larger than normal pedal and all kinds of things, you kind of have to do like a little Tetris there so you just got to figure out what you're gonna do otherwise it's not gonna work when something goes wrong.

The next thing is how many things can go wrong with your setup. Do you know what the most likely issues are and how you can solve them if they go wrong because without that then just gonna be standing there and not understand what's going on each time you need to fix something in your chain or your set up or whatever it is. Make a mental note that way, when something goes wrong in the future then you will know already, hey, this is what happened in the past.

Let me check this thing first. Other times there's just a ghost in the system and you can't figure it out. That's when you might need an outside opinion. I want to say one small anecdote and this is it's right in line with everything we're talking about. But it's also just a side note that's kind of important. It's that you should have a second guitar, you should have a second guitar ready to go tuned with six strings on it before you start your set. So that way, if your guitar string breaks, then you can unplug the guitar, you're in, run over and grab your new one and play that.

It shouldn't be anything complex. It shouldn't be anything ridiculous. It doesn't even have to be the same guitar or the world's nicest anything. It has to be something that allows you to finish your song and or finish your set. The last thing you want to be is that band that's up on stage going, oh, I broke a string. Does anybody have a guitar that I can use? Does anybody have a guitar? No, the answer is no, nobody has a guitar that you can use. You just destroyed your own guitar.

What makes you think that anybody else is going to blend you? There's they're not so don't be dumb. Then the second thing is, if you have this guitar, you should also have a quick means to plug it in. You either need to have two wireless systems or you need to have that one already hardwired into a different input so that you can walk over, swap your inputs or plug in a different cable and then you play the rest of that particular song without your wireless. But the point is you need to plan accordingly for things to happen because guess what things happen at every level of the game.

Things happen at every level of the game. You have to be ready for these things like when you're talking about top tier musicians, they have different guitars for every song and backups for those songs. And then on top of that they have texts that are, you know, if something goes wrong, they have a tech that brings out a new guitar. We always talk about emulating professionalism, emulating what the big Dogs are doing. Well the big Dogs are prepared for every single thing that could go wrong. Absolutely.

And to add to your note, they're the easiest way I found to have two guitars patched in is you can get a simple A. B switch, maybe why? For a quarter inch inputs for like 30 to $40. And the cool thing is you can actually use them both ways or at least the one I have, you can either have inputs A and B. Going out to the output or have input going to outputs A and B. So you can use them either way. That way, you know, if you want to have a backup amp, you can have one of these at both ends of your signal chain.

We used to use one of those live, we had one song where my guitarist couldn't both play the riff and scream all the words and it was really, really hard to entertain them. So my guitarist would use his A B y pedal to play through both stage right and stage left amps. So that way everything came through on the house speaker's wonderfully and nothing ever skipped a beat. A B y pedals are an incredibly incredibly valuable tool. Yeah, they are truly one of the most overlooked pedals because it doesn't do anything exciting.

It doesn't do anything fun. It doesn't make you go all that sound, you know, like it doesn't do anything like that. It just lets you set up different ways to do your routing and sometimes you need that, you know, have two guitars go into one chain rather than unplugging them and switching the plugs, You just stomp on it and boom, you're on the other guitar at the end of it. There you go. Have a second amplifier, the one chain splits to two amplifiers, and you can use that for sound changes to it doesn't even necessarily have to be for a backup.

It could just be like, you know, if you want like an A. C 30 sound on one and a marshall, J C M on the other. There you go. You know, you can switch between them. You could even have a pedal that will let you do either or both. That would work. You can do pretty much anything. It all comes down to understanding the basics of every single piece of gear you use in a live setting. So, your shows aren't rudely interrupted by a technical error, because that kills the vibe every single time. Mhm. Mhm. Mhm.

Yeah, that does it for this episode of the Bandhive podcast. Thanks so much for tuning in and listening. I hope that you learned something about your gear and how you need to understand it and why you need to understand it, because it really is vital to being a professional musician. You need to understand your gear. We've been having weekly clubhouse chats every Wednesday in the Bandhive Club. Following the episode, topics that we discuss, and we would love for you to join those as well. So, please head on over to the show notes at band I've got Rocks slash 73.

and you will find a link to our clubhouse club as well as a link to get on clubhouse. If you aren't already just be advised for now. The app is IOS only, sorry, android users, but it should be coming to android in a few months according to the clubhouse team, so please feel free to check that out. Bandhive dot rocks slash 73 is our show notes link where you can find our club link as well. Those chats on Wednesdays, typically three p.m. eastern, but sometimes it changes depending on if we have guests and their availability and that kind of stuff.

But we look forward to seeing you there. We'll be back with another new episode, next Tuesday at six a.m. Eastern. Until then have a great week. Stay safe. And of course, as always, keep rockin.