[Note: As I mentioned in this post I’m taking a free online Berklee course in Music Production. It includes weekly assignments that must be posted so that they may be peer reviewed by another class member. Since they require teaching one of the topics covered in the week’s lessons I will be posting them here so you may see as well – hence the slightly odd format required by the course.]
Tag Archives: gear
Make Your Own Reflective Tags
I recently purchased a nice leather messenger/briefcase bag from Rustic Leather. I like everything about it, except for one element: the Timbuk2 messenger bags I previously used had dangling reflective tags which made me more visible when walking at night.
I looked for something similar to attach to my new bag’s copious amount of D rings, but did not find anything like those tags – so I decided to make my own.
Minimize Options For Misconnecting Stage Gear
Unless your band is performing at a very high-level venue, you are usually lucky to get a brief line check – you jump on stage, plug into the sound system for the first time at the start of your set, and the sound person give you a thumbs-up that he has a signal from you – before you start to play, let alone a full sound check.
So if you don’t get that thumbs-up, your band starts losing time from your set while you and the engineer try to figure out the problem in your signal chain! While you can’t always prevent an issue caused by sudden gear failure, you can avoid issues caused by misconnections…
How To Fly With Your Musical Instrument
Musicians travelling by air have long struggled with figuring out how/if/when they will be allowed to bring their instrument in the cabin, rather than expose it to the not-so-tender mercies of baggage compartments and handlers. The US government recently passed this law creating uniform rules for allowing instruments into the passenger cabin:
Musical-Instruments-on-Aircraft-US-Law-2012
BUT… as of this date it is not actually in effect, because it set a deadline
Not later than 2 years after the date of enactment of this section, the Secretary shall issue final regulations to carry out subsection (a).
In the meantime, here are some ideas to help make your instrument-toting travel smoother: