Some people have to learn this the hard way. I suspect that there aren't many IT specialists on the payroll for Falling in Reverse. I also suspect that may change in the future.
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Poor babies…
- Thread starter Michedelic
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Some people have to learn this the hard way. I suspect that there aren't many IT specialists on the payroll for Falling in Reverse. I also suspect that may change in the future.
Why do we assume it's for lip syncing when it could just be MIDI commands to change patches, etc?
"Blame it on the crew" he says. Nothing like being thrown under the tour bus...probably should have kept that to himself and delt with it privately.
Sorry about cutting so much out, your post is actually great, long posts by people who give a damn what they're saying are the most interesting ones.
What struck me was that between those two core truths, strange paths can be traced.
Earlier I posted about a Stranglers bassline in front of a not-very-discerning audience. (I'm not a master of hyphens but I do try.
On one hand, the audience may not care, and judging by the poor sound they WERE very easily pleased. What was most interesting was that I'd told the guys running the pub and the live sound that I was intending to play folk tunes, maybe some Stranglers if if they thought it might work in that pub (seemed unlikely to me but I wanted to try it).They said yes, they were up for that, so I did it. Now, these guys are the ones most likely to have their expectations thwarted if I actually sucked, but they were the ones who liked it most.
Different context, it may well have fallen like a lead balloon, but in this case the failure of a sound device lead to the same tough conditions that Burnel had to cope with early in his time with the Stranglers, so maybe that's partly why it worked.
It could be said I should have had a backup device, or at least a power switch or soldering iron, but there's a limit to what I can carry alone, a limit to time available, and no matter what the context, or its scale, we can only use what we have. The way I see it, the show must go on, and it may need some change to fit circumstances. This is why I don't prepare a set list, instead I'll prepare stuff I can do in case the other stuff isn't going to work. It's not a plan B, it's actually the revocation of the notion of planning, it's tactics, not strategy, and it can save a show.
I knew if my gear failed I could rely on my playing. Without that it WOULD have failed.
I'm pretty much a prepper in life. I bring all kinds of "plan B" (C, D, E, F, etc.) options with me. I repair medical equipment for a living. Even I don't bring a solder iron to the gig.
Passinwind
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- Dec 3, 2003
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I'm pretty much a prepper in life. I bring all kinds of "plan B" (C, D, E, F, etc.) options with me. I repair medical equipment for a living. Even I don't bring a solder iron to the gig.
I often did, it came in very handy quite a few times.
It's likely more than just backing tracks. It could be lighting or other display programs, video if there are projections on screen, click tracks for the drummer. They might have their monitor mixes all preset. Maybe they run amp modelling software. Their FOH guy is probably running software for the live mix.
I would hazard a guess that not only the laptop's but also their external backups were misplaced, otherwise that's when it doesn't make sense to cancel the show. If you back everything up to an external drive, you should be able to work from any machine.
It could be for almost anything, such is the capability of the software these days. And those folks who think it's always a "crutch" and they "should do it all live", well, not everything people do musically with software is an approximation of something played w a traditional instrument. Someone joked about a musician saying they "play" a laptop, as if it's always just a DJ pressing play. Go to an Autechre show and listen to those guys improvise on systems they built themselves, making music that sounds nothing like anything made by "real" instruments. Not saying the band in the OP is at that level, but there's tons of very cutting-edge stuff out there, where the computer is the instrument.
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I’m not a fan of their music, but it’s super produced. I’d be willing to bet each song has 20 (or more) tracks going on. Makes sense that they cancel since they wouldn’t be able to give a performance that the fans would expect. Unfortunate that there wasn’t back up computers to control everything, but still… I’d be pissed I’d I expected the full presentation and received, “less than” what’s on the record.
Oh I'm gonna get my popcorn out for this one and the responses to come... lol.
Autechre - probably my favorite band in the late 90s and early 00s, Incunabula was a revelation for me - only play with electronic gear, so if it goes dead then there's no show. But a more traditional - in terms of the instrumentation - band should be able to perform some acceptable version of their own stuff with minimal means, namely bass, guitar, drums and vocals. Or with even less than that, and then it's magic. Even superstars can do it.
But YouTube compresses the sound tracks like crazy, so quality will be less than mediocre. That's why I cover Misfits. Their studio quality is so low that even YouTube can't waste it.
If the band can't play the show without the laptop and the laptop *can* play back the show without the band, that makes the laptop the only 'crucial member' of the band - so it should get top billing and the star's pay, right?
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Falling in Reverse is getting good gigs so they must be doing something right.
+1 on this ^^
Seems to me that the lesson here is "be prepared."
If getting paid depends on certain tech working, it's up to you to make sure that tech is covered in redundancy.
putting a choir together, who wants to sing lead.
putting a choir together, who wants to sing lead.
Not sure how many actual choirs you have worked with, but they ALL wanna sing lead.
How about that laptop 4th from the right, 3rd row left.... the one with the green tint. It looks like it could stay in tune.
Yep.
I have no idea why they needed the laptops. Tracks, lights, sound, effects, other production issues? No idea and the article never said.
A radical thought I have is that some music probably lends itself pretty well to being pared down to crucial parts, and some probably doesn't. I don't perform any of the music I write live and I won't bring it into the bands I'm in, because it's not guitar-based and finding people around here with the skill to finesse all the pieces into place for a performance would be difficult. If I'm presenting for the first time to an audience that isn't familiar with it, I don't want it reinterpreted for other instrumentation. There's a reason I produced it the way I did- that's how I like it.
And I don't want to sing/play alone on a stage with tracks. However that's probably the way it would best be done - maybe a keys player, a drummer, me and tracks, if I could get lucky enough to find the right people. The stuff on tracks at that point would be pretty minimal, but to me it's still important to the production.
So I see both sides.
The lame part of this is that they were unable to replace what they had from a backup of some sort, but even with files in the cloud you're still going to need a new laptop, software installed, setups to sync things together - might be a lot to put together with a few hours notice. And if you're traveling it's possibly unreasonable to think that there's more than one place to store duplicates of things - a tour bus doesn't have a duplicate space though something like a spare laptop could theoretically be put in a lock box in there.
But I don't know the full situation so I'm not going to be judgmental about it.
They did what they felt like they needed to do. To me it's sad that their gear was stolen.
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Yup. And many do it to great success, without selling out, staying humble, keep on creating...
Just like some of the jazz cats out there who think your electric bass playing in your rock band is not musicianship. Just like some of the classical cats out there who think jazz is a bunch of nonsense.
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