Sunday Weave_WTF is Club Gear Anyway?
Welcome to another Sunday weave.
When I was a kid, I rode my bike up to RadioShack, bought some little mixer, then would get a cassette deck and a record and mix those together.
And I'll be damned if what I'm doing now doesn't feel like that again: sending a bunch of suspicious sources through a mixer that's super cheap, but works really great. And honestly has way more function than some of the expensive stuff, because it has to.
Friday was a really great show. It was called The Dumbest Show on Earth.
A longtime friend came up with a variety show idea. People come up and sing, there's a puppet, there's bits, there's a theme. This one was 1977, so we picked a bunch of songs, and I was the utility guy.
I was cutting in DJ stuff, sound effects, quotes from movies and TV shows, and kind of prepared myself the best I could. I used a sampler and DJ software from the iPad.
A couple things stood out.
The rap was great. I ended up doing a lot more backup singing and singing than I thought I would, which was great. So basically, I was the hype man for the group, sitting in the corner making snide comments. The singer and I griping at each other, which was the bit.
And it really came off.
The puppeteer? Smashed it. There was a drum battle. There was a dance-off. It was really fun.
So the form and format worked.
The crowd was really good, and the band sounded great.
It helps when you start out with an AC/DC song.
I thought I was under-geared.
Sitting around thinking about it this morning, I was probably over-geared.
I can pare down my little rig even more, which the sound person kept referring to as a "contraption." LOLS. I'd worked with this sound engineer before at a different club, and she is hilarious. She gets the vibe of the band, and she was just really funny and kind of delightful to work with.
But the star of my show, gear-wise, was—and this is relevant for a few different reasons—but I'll say, this not being a gear blog, I do have to highlight it: The Teenage Engineering Sidekick mixer.
Now, know that I'm looking at a mixer from Pioneer, say, and it's about $2,000. And that's their small one. However, this little guy is $179.
Like any of these Teenage Engineering things, you kind of—or at least I do—earmark the great ones and buy them the day they're out if it looks good (They always deliver.). Otherwise you're on a wait list for a few months.
It's really kind of a turn-your-world-upside-down mixer.
There's only two physical up-channel faders. There's no crossfader. But there are tons of different ways to get audio into it and audio out of it. And you can link them together, actually, and have as many of these as you want.
It operates on two AAA batteries and has about an eight-hour life.
So definitely a gig.
It makes my MixTour Pro, which runs djay Pro, a bit redundant.
And it's hard to imagine as "pro gear" due to a of kind of experience bias.
I ran this thing out of an eighth-inch, basically aux cable, into a stage box that I have.
And honestly, I hid that fact from the sound engineer.
Because it looks so horrifically inadequate. This tiny, tiny little cable going into a very butch stage box that I use for a stereo out.
And when I say it worked, I mean it absolutely worked.
I didn't even know until this morning, looking through it, that I had tons and tons of gain that I wasn't even using via a different setting.
A little company just turning audio stuff upside down.
And if we're going into some kind of era where most musicians I know are practicing, or maybe being forced into practicing, a bit of austerity, cheap and small and useful is the way.
When you're young, you operate this way--and have WAY more fun.
And now, when I'm old: cheap and useful.nReturned to it.
There's a known thing in the DJ world that when you go fully "Pro," you go to Pioneer CDJs—or now AlphaTheta CDJs—and a mixer, you lose a ton of functionality. They basically work like shit compared to some sub-$200 controller that you plug into your computer via USB-C.
It's all this weird illusion.
And even I'm going down the track of, okay, if I put together $3,400 worth of CDJs, and then a $2,000 mixer, at least I'm under $6,000. It'll look cool and I'll feel like a DJ.
Total bullshit.
The software running on your phone or your iPad is $6 a month, or thirty-some-odd dollars year. I don't know. It's super cheap. It runs better than all that Pioneer stuff. Their software is horrible.
I have one midi platter where I can switch decks, so I get the feel and the look of a modern DJ, but for $350 off eBay I've got the same thing.
So now my rig, because I already have an iPad, is under $500. It runs on batteries. It'll do an entire show, no problem.
And guess what?
Nobody cares.
It's a crazy world we live in, and all the noise on the internet is that if you use Teenage Engineering gear, it's either way too expensive or it's way too cheap and like a toy.
They can get very expensive. They can get too cheap.
Make up your mind, internet!
What I've found through my professional gigging: this cheap stuff works.
It works in a club. And it sounds great in a club. And it's totally appropriate in a club.
So, onto the next gig.
The day you're reading this, Sunday, I've got an outdoor gig in the middle of the day in the Texas Hill Country. It's gonna be hot as a mother.
I'm going to bring this setup to really test it out. No crossfader.
Who knows? Cross your fingers for me!