Tech-talk 2 - Percussive Drummer Live Set Up

Since we were asked so many times, we are going to reveal the secret behind the live set-up ;)
To start of, I am going to explain, the machines Feliks uses on stage.
His main instrument is the Alesis PercPad. It is a drum-machine equipped with four pads, that can be hit either by hand or by stick.
There is a midi-out, but we are using the 25 on-board sounds.
There is a broad variety from shakers, kick- & snare-drums as well as highlight sounds like bell-tree or woodblock. Each sound can be pitched. Listen closely on “What’s the Time” next time you attend a concert by Emma Heartbeat and you will catch the pattern Feliks is playing with a regular and low pitched timbales.
Only pain in the ass is, that between the songs, you have to switch manually between the different sounds - it is plenty of buttons to push!
Next to the PercPad on the same stand, we attached a small 10” snare. Before we were using a 14” snare by the Sonor Artist series. But it was to heavy and vulnerable to carry on flights. For the live shows only, we bought the smaller and less heavy “Fame Black Birch Snare 10”x5,5” “. It is only 40 EUR - but got a pretty decent sound and a nice attack for that price. In smaller venues we use it without a mic, in bigger venues, we attach a snare mic. The main use is to support the electronic snare on the refrain and add that extra pressure and dynamic you can’t get out of electronics and to add some percussive rim-clicks.
Last but not least, the stand carries a 7” splash (sometimes we use overheads, again at smaller venues there is no need to).
Easy set-up, easy to mix and easy to carry - both very important to tour.

Essen, Offenbach & Karlsruhe with Yes S Club

It all started about four years ago, when Quentin from Paris, France sent a beat via email. We ended up producing two tracks together, that never were released, but would stay in contact over the internet. He started producing and playing out shows with his band Yes S Club.

Recently he had the idea to come to Germany to play a few shows. We set up a small tour and are sad it is over now and Yes S Club are on their way back to Paris.

On Thursday Quentin, Gautier, Theo, Marine & Perseval arrived in Essen and we played a show for free to our homecrowd, to start the tour. There is better places for a concert on a Thursady night than in Essen (in fact nearly everywhere would be better), but approx. 40 people showed up, and made it a really good start into our tour.

Yes S Club spent the night with Nils at the ITD office, playing Ping-Pong-Jack-Daniels and were introduced to Schnapps and Tip-Beer out of plastic bottles.

The next morning Yes S Club couldn’t wait to taste some real German “Curry-Wurscht” and beer before we headed to Offenbach for our second show.

The venue, Hafen 2, is an amazing complex with a cinema, several floors and a great outdoor area. Unfortunately, as always if something is really good, it is only a matter of  time till it has to close down and they build a new mall / hotel / whatsoever.

But before this happens we were happy to play a show there. That night we were playing along another band, My Tiger My Timing from London. They put on a great show and it was so much fun eating, dancing, drinking and chatting with them, that again the night for Yes S Club and us was rather short.

Unfortunately the next day they left for Hamburg while we had to drive to the opposite direction to go to Karlsruhe, but hopefully we will meet again! Yes S Club enjoyed the sun, taking a nap in the park, while we checked on our right front tire, that is loosing pressure. It is only a short trip from Offenbach to Karlsruhe, but stopping at every station filling in air can make it last long.

In Karlsruhe we were scheduled to play at Kohi. We’ve played there before, so we knew it was going to be a great vibe. The venue is small and fun.

It was a pleasure to see & hear Yes S Club play for three times. Their show is fantastic and you shouldn’t miss to see it, if you ever have the chance to go to a show.

We already miss all five of them, the three days were quite intense and turned strangers into friends. But we are already planning on the next tour together.

MERCI ET À BIENTÔT!

US Tour 2012 - Day 20 - Leaving the US

We enjoyed the last day-off in NY, running around trying to get an impression of that city, but it was way too much to capture, espescially at this time of the tour. We simply run out of energy.

But we will return for sure. While writing this, we are back home safe already. Though our plane didn’t leave in Germany, they got a replacement and got us here in time!

We want to say- THANK YOU: to all the people coming out to the shows and supporting us, to all the promoters & to all the bands we played with.

It was AWESOME!

US Tour 2012 - Day 19 - New York City, NY

Last show of this years US Tour.

After spending the day in Brooklyn we are already pretty done. The temperature in NY is much colder than during the rest of the trip, pretty chilly and windy. Also Brooklyn is much bigger than we expected; if it was a city, it would be the fifth biggest city in the US, so we walked a lot today, to see as much as possible.

In the hotel we met “Voltaire Twins”, they already giged with us at the SXSW. Small world.

The venue is an old bar in Manhattan, which is really nice from the outside as well as from the inside. It is called Pianos and we heard plenty of good things about it.

The stage downstairs is in a really nice room at the back of the bar and when “Hillary Caps” & “Meet me in Norway” went on stage, the worries that the people won’t move from the bar into the isolated place in the back prooved to be wrong.

Thanks to them, and maybe as well to the nice guys from Flavorpill, the New York Culture guide who voted us into there top 11 SXSW discoveries, we had a pretty good  crowd, that wanted to be entertained and dance.

After we were told, that in NYC people don’t dance, cheer or express positive feelings about bands they like in any kind of way, we were really happy, to have people come up and dance on stage with us at the final show of our trip.

One last time we took a “we all have emma heartbeat shirts” picture, this time with Eugen, Dodo and Tyler, shot by a very kind cab driver before we went back to Brooklyn with the F train.

US Tour 2012 - Day 18 - Brookyln, NY

No, sleep, till Brooklyn.

This kind of gets it very well. A lot of driving, sleeping in more or less clean hotel rooms, sharing bigger or smaller beds. 

But we arrived at our final destination on this tour, the “La Quinta” in Brooklyn, without any bigger problems, like flat tires, robbery or murder. 

We dropped off the car and bought a metro card (it took a while, but we got how it works in the end).

The venue for tonight was “The Way Station” in Brooklyn. Pretty close to Flatbush, we hoped to feel a bit of the magic in the air. Opening up was Nick Demeris, a Loopstation / Beatbox / Comedyrap artist. It was fun to watch him, but unfortunatley the audience was chattering all the time in the beginning. Luckily more and more people showed up and when we went on stage the room was filled with people and it was a really great atmosphere.

Bad luck, but after a few songs we had to face some problems with our laptop again. Feliks and Emma used the time to introduce an improvisation of the well known German song “Alle meine Entchen” to the American audience and we did good in fulfilling our cultural task  and were able to finish our regular set afterwards!

“Hadran the Collider” put on some good folk / punk afterwards and since the cab driver didn’t finish his mission to kill us in an car accident, we had a really great day! 

We slept well in our tiny small room, that is packed with plenty of stuff since we don’t have a car (and a trunk) no more.

Tech-Talk 1 - In-Ear Montioring

Our first rehearsal with the new in-ear-monitors was a big success!
Not only the feeling of protected ears (splash cymbals & snare are very loud normally), but also the fact that every member of the band- two drummers and one vocalist- could hear themselves far better than before, was great. The drumming seemed to be much tighter.

It was really short notice that we -EMMA HEARTBEAT- decided to use in-ear-monitoring. But as Nils had a sudden deaf and a tinitus just a few weeks ahead of our US-tour and Emma always had problems to hear her voice on stage, we started to search for a matching system.
Luckily Hearsafe, located in Cologne, quite near to our hometown (Essen), made it possible to fabricate Concha-Earmolds for EMMA HEARTBEAT really fast (-Thanks for your support!!!)

Many other musicians made the experience that in-ear-monitoring leads to the problem of not getting the vibes and atmosphere of the audience because of being too much isolated by the plugins. So we were really curious about how it would work out for us.

First stop in America was Houston/TX. When we arrived at the venue, nothing was setted up yet and it shortly became clear that there would be no monitor-boxes on stage. A good opportunity- not only to check out the in-ear-system itself but also to see how we would get along to set up everything without a sound-engineer.
Luckily Nils had some experience with technical stuff and it worked out, the only problem was that all three of us had to get along with the PA signal, cause we were forced to plug in at the headphones-out of the FOH-mixing-desk as it was the only available slot.
Finally the sound on stage was not too bad but definitely left a lot of space for improvement. But we can assume that the new system saved our gig :)!

Next day we went to Dallas and a far better organized venue with its own sound-engineer. He had not too many experience with in-ear-monitoring and we always had a loud humming noise on our plugins that we weren’t able to get rid off. So we had to play with the regular monitoring (which was quite good though).
The secret of the humming sound was unveiled by Springfield’s sound-engineer one day later, who deleted the same humming by changing the amplified signal he sent to an unamplified - good to know!!!

With every show we played we learned more and more about the in-ear-system:

1. If you get yourself a headphone-amp, make sure that it splits mono-signals on both ears. Cheap ones, as for example the Behringer HA 400-system, will only send a signal on your left ear. Most venues run the monitoring in mono only (at least in th USA)!

2. Make sure to check all levels for the PA first before setting up your in-ear-devices, otherwise it might be clipping afterwards if you have to turn the volume of the channels up.

Although we had some technical problems in the beginning, we are totally amazed by in-ear-monitoring.
EMMA now has a far better feeling on stage, as she can hear her voice clear and it leaves her much more freedom to work with the voice.
She’s the only one who has a wireless in-ear-system ( = always sound on both ears) and can freely perform on stage without being afraid of feedback from the monitor-boxes and without any change of quality of the stage-sound.

All members of EMMA HEARTBEAT had no problem to catch the vibes of the audience and get used to the plugins rather fast and if one of us ever feels too isolated from what surrounds him/her or happens infront of stage, we just take out one of the plugs and play on!

There are a few more US-shows left to play that we are looking forward to as much as we are looking forward to make our in-ear-monitoring-experiences in Germany. 

US Tour 2012 - Day 17 - Atlantic City, NJ

9 hours of driving…

… and some jumping around in a big hotel-room afterwards

The show was cancelled (postponed to a day earlier), but we wouldn’t have been able to play it anyway.

US Tour 2012 - Day 16 - Asheville, NC

It started with a nice drive through the Appalachian Mountains. Not as high as the Rockys last year and luckily this time no snow, but beautifuls rivers & woods.

Asheville is very alternative - we walked around this lovely city and enjoyed the setting sun.

The show was scheduled at “The One Stop” and three bands from this years SXSW line-up  shared the stage. We nearly missed stagetime of our set today. When the first band, Quilt, went on stage, we realised that somewhere in the mountains we lost an hour. Damn, one hour sleep less. 

The venue was not filled-up to the fullest, but the crowd was very giving and enjoying the set a lot so we had lot of fun playing and watching ANR (Awesome New Repuplic) play a really cool set afterwards. 

After we sold plenty of merch …

and had great talks, we drove two more hours in the night sky to arrive at our hotel in a place called Bristol.

US Tour 2012 - Day 15 - Nashville, TN

We could have had the bad luck to destroy a Johnny Cash picture on stage this time, as it was hung-up close behind our drummers, luckily we didn’t.

It was the quietest show we ever played as the pa was set up for singer songwriters rather than for electronic music, but it was fun to play such a pa and the people still enjoyed. 

US Tour 2012 - Day 14 - Memphis, TN

Well, we are always one step ahead of the bad weather. That is good for us, but bad for Texas & Arkansas!

Although it was “only” a four hour drive today, it seemed to take longer, than the other before. The P&H Cafe, looked like a venue you would expect in Tennessee. An old dusty piano, lots of art and a picture of Elvis on stage (that got destroyed by Nils drumsticks, sorry for that!)

They had their regular trivia night on Tuesday and we were glad we didn’t join after we heard the first questions, it was a tough one.

After trivia it was time for us to set up and go on stage. By this time we were the proud keepers of a couple of Corona’s and two PBR pitchers in our bodies. 

Unfortunately some people left after the trivia, so the venue was not as filled as we got used to over the past shows.

But we met a couple of nice people that made up for the ones leaving, buying shirts cd’s and teaching us about the “tin / ten merge” and why we don’t understand the people from Memphis.