Modern Roadie

We tried the 9 – 5 schedule at The Ritz with a breakfast line check!
Doves took to the stage at 1.30pm in front of a packed Manchester audience. This was a 24 hour sponsored music event, but it still attracted the hard-core Doves fans. A few technical difficulties with the hired backline but the crowd seemed determined to enjoy the show.

Met a few friends in town before heading up to the Apollo to catch the Chemical Brothers. These boys really know how to put on a cool show, although I wish I’d remembered my earplugs! You rarely see video and lights complement each other so well, and those old school green lasers even get the 30 something ravers jumping around!

Had another early call for our flight down to London.

We've a 7.30am lobby call for today's matinee performance.

Apparently this is where The Smiths performed their first show.

Loads of bands playing today. The Chemical Brothers are at the Apollo this evening, hoping to catch up with a friend who looks after their Midi setup.

Early start with a BA flight up to Manchester.

We've a production day in the venue the band are playing at 11.30am the following morning! It's part of a series of shows entitled '24-hours of Music'. Unfortunately there's a club night after our production day, so some of the backline and most of FOH has to be struck.

The jetlag really kicked in today!

With so much flying around the world when working for a touring band, it's nice to see such a great rapport between the pilots and their ground maintenance crew!

Actual Entries from Qantas Maintenance Logs

Well, with a few days at home, I thought it time to spruce up the old blog space.

Blogger give you the option of moving to your own server space via FTP, so this blog is now hosted by my DSL provider. This enables me to forward traffic from the new URL:

http://www.modernroadie.com

If you visit my blog site, please switch to this URL as new posts will not appear on the blogspot.com page.

For you news heads out there, the feedburner feed remains the same:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/ModernRoadie

Check out the new Roadie links!

Last US show before we head back to Europe. Another airing of SpaceFace last night for the energetic Philly crowd.

Been fratically installing Widgets?! Keep track of what's going on with this Widget Manager

Fun show in Boston opposite the Red Sox stadium. It was a game night so we had to keep drunk supporters out of the truck! Think a few got packed between cases.

Just loaded into the Theatre of the Arts in Downtown Philadelphia. It is Sunday morning, so the only people in the street are cleaning up from the parties last night.

Found a great utility that enables you to boot from your ipod. Its not recommended too often as the ipod drive is not as sturdy as the internal. If you are in a pickle, the mass of utilities that accompany the MRD3.9 rescue drive should be able to deal with most problems.

Here is a great link to a Flikr site featuring a mini image history of Apples homepage.

Been experimenting with a different CSS style sheets. Any comments folks?

The band were performing on Conan O Brien today, so the hired backline loaded into NBC TV studios at 10am. We then had an hour to setup and do a quick line check.

The hire company couldnt provide most of my setup, so I used one of the PowerBooks with an 828 interface for the sequencer playback and an M-Audio USB controller directly into the other G4. I zoomed the Logic transport for Andy to start the sequence.

The show is recorded at 5.30 with bands closing around 6.15, so we had a quick dash over to Webster Hall for the evening show.

Had trouble with one of the play back Fostex machines again! This time the main machine lost its display, so I had the hired 828 poised ready for the backup G4 to run the playback backup files I made in Manchester. Exchanged a few emails with a guy at Fostex so hopefully we will be able to replace to offending PCB board.

There was a great vibe at these NY shows, met a couple of cool Doves fanatics.

Those stairs at Webster Hall are a killer!

Just fired up MacStumbler and had a quick wander around Webster Hall, our venue for the next two nights. Eventually found an open network after being bombarded by frequencies from over 20 routers!

Had a great day off in NY yesterday. Went with Martin down to the Mac Store in SOHO to pick up his new purring powerbook before heading over to the Lower East Side to meet a few of the crew boys.

SIR will be delivering the TV backline for us to check over - don't think they were able to find an upright midi piano :(

The band seemed to have a great show in Toronto. Just one semi-tone made all the difference for Jimi when they got to Cedar Room. Just meant pitch shifting the samples.

Sunny Toronto today and the truck has just backed up to the stage - gotta love that!

It's been a busy few weeks for this venue with Coldplay and NIN through their doors.

We had problems with the playback for Here It Comes in Detroit causing the band to exit the stage. Jimi couldn't hear the click so the playback percussion would run out of sync. We switched to the backup Fostex, but the problem persisted. To me, this implies the problem is between the headphone amp and the send to Jimi's ears. We also tried bypassing the stage box by taking a line directly from the Headphone amp to the monitor desk, but this still didn't solve it.
Of course it always works ok in sound-check!! We'll be testing every stage of the click lines today.

Jimi's voice is much better than the end of the European tour. He's obviously nervous about straining too much while he's still recovering. I suggested they take Cedar down a few semi-tones as it seems to be right at the top of his range.

Great audience reaction last night, despite the band believing they made a few 'first night' mistakes.
Mercury Rev played a top set, and were almost a daunting act to follow.

A few keys on the controller keyboard seemed a little odd last night, so Martin and I decided to take it apart after line check today. The Fatar has a strange design involving felt, springs and metal rods in all the wrong places! Just managed to get it all back together before sound check - and with no screws left over!

Been specing the keyboard rig for the TV show on second showday in New York - thought it might be cool to use an upright Midi piano instead of the Fatar controller.

Here we go again folks!

Band and crew all flew in from their respective home towns yesterday. We jumped on the bus early this morning as the band want an early soundcheck. I really enjoy the buses in the US - the AC works and we've TVs in the bunks!
Just unloaded the trucks and the lampies are rummaging through their boxes! Had a quick scan over the backline as we've not seen it for a couple of weeks. Always takes a bit of time for everyone to get back into gear!!

First show with Mercury Rev today - really lookin forward to meeting those guys.

Spent a while cloning the partitions from my powerbook to an external firewire drive using Carbon Copy Cloner. Also burnt my User home folder, which was a whisker under 4.6 Gig, to DVD as a backup. Then booted my machine from a rescue boot CD to launch Disk Utility and reformatted the internal drive. I was then ready for a completely new Tiger install.
Decided to partition the drive in half using Volumeworks, so i've also a volume dedicated to data.

Tiger installed perfectly, and after a few setup forms, I was launching widgets like they were going out of fashion! The Automator also looks very interesting, and the new Xcode2 has some cool new features.

People have been complaining about system performance when they first launch Tiger, but this is due to the spotlight facility indexing all drives for quicker searches.
There seems to be a load of small touches that make this OS easier to use. For example, Safari takes you to a network diagnostic if it's unable to connect. Very cool.
The new Safari also supports RSS news feeds:

feed://feeds.feedburner.com/ModernRoadie

Please bookmark my feed :)

I'll be leaving the show computers at 10.3.7 until I know Logic runs perfectly on Tiger.