paulears

That's the problem. For some people, certain job roles that meet the above requirements are deemed to be employees? Stage Management are good examples - most are now treated as employees. In TV, unless you have a Lorrimer Letter, the BBC won't treat you as self-employed, even if you are bona fide genuine self-employed person. Daft!

I'm getting my lighting guy back - he left to go to a better job abroad, but is coming back because 17 hours a day seven days a week isn too much. I feel for him.

I got some of the MU sponsored moulded attenuators and if I stick them in, it goes quiet. After 3 mins or so, you acclimatise and can make the same quality and quantity judgments you did before. I can play my double bass with them in with not tuning issues. I've not yet found anything that doesn't work wearing them. My band IEMs keep the noise out too and I can't adjust to going back to the old levels. I would expect that a court would seriously reduce compensation for hearing issues when once aware, the subject chose to continue exposure. Like the asbestosis thing. Once you discover you have it, you always wear a mask. Not to do so is just plain stupid.

It was - my band supported Quo at a football stadium, and they were using their Garwood IEMs. We got monitors, but they were showing us the IEMs and saying how they were great, but every venue just sounded the same now. That said, we got wedges, and it was very, very big with speakers!

Sadly the marine market isn’t much use as their products are band limited with fast performance drop off by 163mhz. The commercial radio products have performance up to about 470mhz so the next user group with off the shelf products isn’t till you get into the 1ghz band and above. Channel 21 to 70 frequencies just don’t have allocations that make commercial products viable apart from tv antennas. The Sennheiser paddles are hugely expensive for what is inside!

Yes - I see your point, but if you are already dealing with the security involved with dealing with vulnerable young people and adults, then you already have secure storage for their licences, photographs and the other stuff, like which parent is Not allowed to collect them etc etc. For what it's worth, in my pro pantos, we do NOT keep any records of the people who come to collect the kids. It's never been a requirement, and as most belong to the local dance school who run this for them, they are the ones who oversee the kids exiting, not the venue stage door staff. However, their names are on the list, and get ticked off as 'left the building'. Who they went with, I have no idea, and can't see why I'd need to add this to my list of responsibilities. I'd have thought this is a chaperone responsibility? I usually scan the sign in sheet and if the quantity is right, I couldn't worry about which child is in and which one is actually in the show - if there should be 12, and there are 12, smile and move on. If there are 11, I find the chaperone in charge and ask if I should worry, and if they say no - again, move on. I've been dealing with pro shows with kids in for 15 years now and nobody has ever asked me for a list of who was in, and frankly, I would have no clue, even at curtain down. Clearly GDPR is something people fret about, for fear of getting it wrong, but stage door signing in, for me, is a working document for the day, to be destroyed. I can see how people would want to check the kids go to the right people, but that is surely NOT part of the signing in sheet practically every theatre sticks to the counter? That idea that you write in black on a black background, in Hotblack Desiato style for me is totally ruining the purpose of the sheet - for everyone to see who is in the building quickly and simply.

surely this is taking GDPR too far. if you have kids licences, you already have all their details that need safekeeping under the GDPR regs. The signing in sheet is added security for them, and with only a name and no photo, or visible address is NOT by my reading of the rules, anything to concern me. this seems like somebody getting GDPR paranoia. It is meant to be protection, and if you can be secure enough with your duties under child protection and licensing, then stage door keepers are not an issue. Surely the actual Act section is this bit/ My highlighting. A signing in sheet is not something that needs to be stored for future use and filed away. If they are simply shredded once people have gone, then no personal data has been filed or stored. The purpose of signing in sheets is to see who is currently in the building, not who was in the building last Wednesday! Based on this, those expensive blacked out sheets are praying on the gullible. Don't file them or store them and just shred them when the people have gone. I am of course not a lawyer, but I'm very dubious of people attempting to use a positive law to make life harder or worse, make money.

Passive splitters like the ones linked to are fine - I've got a rack with the usual branded splitters and the other with two 4 way passive splits - wide band types with similar loss specs, and they're just as solid. I've always said that radio mic issues are caused by those RF black holes, where the path vanishes totally, rather than a few dB of loss - which we get in remote antennas anyway. SMA connectors really mean sourcing ready made ones, as they are a bugger to solder reliably without a tiny iron and a magnifying glass, and I still mess them up.

It does strike me that you could simply cover the entire antenna in plasticoat or similar once the cable has been sealed properly. Alternately, as we're now using old TV bands for radio mics, if you want a designed in waterproofing, find a TV antenna, and reduce the length to around a couple of directors and one reflector, which won't upset the tuning that much, and install those at suitable locations. As an alternative to this kind of approach, you can source from aliexpress ground planes - there's a socket for a ¼ whip on the top, and a socket for the out on the bottom. As an alternative to the alternative, you can make things like sleeve dipoles that sit inside white plumbing pipe, and it's easy to knock up perfectly efficient antennas. Waterproofing isn't too much of an issue really - but steel rusts, aluminium goes powdery with it's version of corrosion, and plastics degrade in UV - Maybe the secret is for simple and cheap and replace as and when.

I guess it's just like asbestosis - was it caused by something you did in your past, on the balance of probability? I was a witness once, and the judge was very balanced in his viewpoint, explaining in detail that both parties felt passionately their version of events was the right one, and then he said he was very sorry that he had to rule on who's story was the most probable one. When it's a physical injury - deciding blame must be an awful procedure to go through for everyone.

Your job has really morphed over a quite short time really? What concerns me is the actual data. The employer is keeping this Leo of detail and basing so much on it, yet the subject of the data may decide, or forget to wear the protection. They may also be moonlighting on other gigs where their exposure is not recorded, and then your operation get the blame, possibly lowering exposure levels even more. So many musicians also practice out of the venue. How many might spend an hour at home practicing that one little section they personally, despite their ability level, find tricky. Revealing your weak areas at work is not good, so once out of your control, they may add to their exposure, and you get the blame. It's really good to see the employers taking this level of care and building stats designed to genuinely help, but the fact that you don't have access to their out of work data surely warps the very stats you depend on. Many folks leisure activities involve loud sound. You can't make them wear exposure meters out of work, but until somebody now has hearing issues and takes an employer to court, we won't know if all your hard work will still be enough.

Before I lost the will to live I found just one that had good sound, and to be honest on that one the vocals were quite clear and clean. What I find strange is that the area nearest the stage appeared to not have any sound at all, bat in quite a few OTT sub bass the phones clearly couldn't handle. itbwill be interesting following this one, non-disclosure agreements probably mean we won't find the cause.

Some gigs seem to be so much like being in the Eurovision Song Contest. One of the names apologises for the bad sound meaning somebody is tarred for the rest of their career. If you sign up for a job, and do it, rather than walking before (which is also a bad thing for the CV) the result stays with you. Anything you say to deflect the blame will reflect right back. If the person in charge resigns or get sacked and the next gig is solid, then they were crap. If they stay with total support, and the next gig is a good one, the first bad one was still their fault. They cannot win and they cannot shake of the fact they were involved. Funny world we live in. A bit like being a football manager. You carry the can for the team playing badly, and once they start, you can't do a thing!

I just cannot get my head around eating two people to do followspots that produce such pointless, in many cases, lighting when those two people could do something far more interesting useful and career enhancing work elsewhere? You end up using follow spots for things they do badly just to give a few people the chance to do something? Like the school show that gave somebody the job of “tabs operator” and then the damn things come in and out at the end of each scene! Often, sadly, we still get those who cannot sing, dance or act given lighting as a role to try to gain a bit of credit. Followspots are just a poor tool nowadays and far too dim to be useful once a stage is blasted with LED washes. My 1200w discharges are now glow worms! We now hire in followspots when the occasional rider needs them.

How on earth can you supervise them, unless up the tower with them? Impractical. I just don't see the point of the exercise. You can provide infinitely better lighting without followspots. There is little point training people to use them when practically, it's impossible without show conditions and this means you're giving one to one tuition which is over and above anything the current specs ask for. If you are running a BTEC spec, or one of the extra snippets of a GCSE, there are no real criteria for getting grades for accurate follow spot practices. The rules get twisted to let this happen, but follow spots are just rubbish lighting tools compared to a clutch of elderly Fresnels, profiles or nowadays, movers! Why mess around with H&S people and the hire costs of external people putting up towers? It's daft use of resources.

Personally, from bitter experience, even if you can get the follows spots onto a suitable platform, the performance of 13yr olds with follow spots is enough to make me never waste money on them ever again. On the list of useful equipment followspots are often pointless. When they're used accurately on a wide stage to highlight certain performers in a tight hard or soft beam, they do their job - but with a novice spot op, with no experience, or real time to practice they either bob up and down missing the targets, or get used iris open to make it easier, and look simply awful. I'd have a long hard look at what they are actually for, and if the aim is to pick out people from others, maybe a big X marks the spot and half a dozen fixed focus profile on faders that can cover the acting area. I really can't say I have seen a single school production anywhere that had what we'd term competent operators by normal standards. In virtually all cases, people stood in the dark, or kept going bright/dim, or everyone got covered and looked light rabbits in headlights. In the pro-show touring world, one nighters now rarely have any use of followspots any longer for cost and varying skill level reasons. I've seen hundreds of school shows and cannot remember one where followspots added anything to what I saw. Far too often, they were used to avoid somebody climbing up and using the provided real stage lighting that often was abandoned because the safety elves determined it was too dangerous to let humans up ladders.

Playing Devil's advocate here, but doesn't this compromise at least the authenticity of the music, and therefore it's historic impact. Isn't some of the really loud stuff only really good because it's really powerful? Clearly musicians of calibre are capable of playing however directed within reason, but the protections now coming in force in more and more places as a result are lopsided. Protect the musicians, but ignore their audiences. We do have events where they extend over longer periods with some people attending every performance. Nobody is looking at their exposure (yet). We're also leaving some musicians totally behind. The bigger production get protection, but we pay no attention to the smaller pubs and clubs where sound levels can be really high. I saw one of the best holiday resort shows I've ever seen this week - huge drops of line arrays and a cast and band of around 30 - ALL on in ears, and the sound level in the auditorium really nice and untiring. Quite nice to be able to hear a quality PA for once not much above tickover. The local pub last week was by contrast unpleasant to be in. The band that were playing do 4 nights a week based on the dates on their web site. Who looks after them?

What I would try before you spend any money is to run the cable to where it has to go, and connect pin 2 of the XLR balanced cable to the jack tip and pin 3 to the sleeve. Ignore the shield, and keep it floating and unconnected. I've been running an amp like that for years down a multicore.

What would the protection device actually do? Open trapdoors and drop the offending players into the basement, or turn off the orchestra stand lights? If it's simply noticing a flashing danger light, I doubt it would be very effective. Maybe electric shock to the conductors baton?

I like bangs, but a maroon doesn't sound like a bomb going off/explosion, it sounds like a maroon.

I tend to agree that forcing people to change habits should be a positive experience. I can only speak from myself, but my switch to playing with IEMs meant for me a big drop in stage volume, and it's totally beneficial. On those occasions I have to play with wedges, I now wear the ear protection I got through the MU and it's just an adjustment. No different to getting your first glasses, or being made to stop eating rubbish food and going on a diet! You can do it, with a bit of initial effort. Musicians are going to be far less resistant than we imagine.

Pretty well all the celebrities do this - present a 'brand', so in a way it legitimises what most of them already do - run their business through a Ltd company. These cases always seem to set precedents of one status or another - the camera folk who work for the BBC exist on having a Lorimer letter - issued by HMRC that legitimises their self-employed status, and you cannot work for the BBC's camera department without one. I tried to get one, but the criteria are so tight that in effect, you need to have worked for the BBC in that role a number of times. If you have not, you cannot meet the criteria and cannot work as a self-employed person for the BBC, You will be taxed and NI'd like it or not. The Lorrimer in the name is another of the test cases where it was decided. This was the easy bit of the process This was fine - but there is a spreadsheet for detailing your work. This wants a years work listing with specific run times - the text of the letter explaining the requirements is below - and as I had only 4 single days worth of TV work, I didn't;t follow through - although it does say the actual work doesn't have to be in that area, so maybe for the future?.

In that example - you use their software, which allows you to submit the .csv file to HMRC. This is the trouble. The software assumes a level of user spreadsheet competence. It does seem that the simplest version is just to have a small series of boxes, as the old online system had, and you type into a spreadsheet the figures, upload the file to the online submission app you have sourced, and if the spreadsheet format is correct it goes across seamlessly. The kind of people who are worried by MTD are, in the main from what I read, people to whom computers are an issue - so bridging software will be tricky too. Personally I was very sceptical and somewhat cross, but I now really like the new system I'm using and do not want to go back - I like it. However - HMRC are having a few issues. I volunteered for starting early but it has messed up the collection system. HMRC told me they had collected the Sept-December VAT as usual on a date in early Feb. I knew they hadn't;t having checked my account a few minutes previously. They were very confused as online, and on their system, I owed nothing at all. I held on while they got in touch with the MTD department who confirmed that they hadn't actually got the payment at all, and would I mind transferring it to their account manually. I wonder how many other firms have noticed? Big ones probably missed it, while small ones like me got to notice because my new software kept prompting me to approve a transaction against the bank account. I'd entered the VAT payment in the 'VAT payment' section of the new software but it noticed no corresponding sum going out of the bank. Going to be interesting in April.

I've been doing things as a result of this, but HMRC have softened their language in the past few days. I get their media posts due to a ######-up their end, and get embargoed stuff they send to the broadcasters. Looking back to about October last year, they have changed critical works. "should" is now "could", "will" is "might" and other similar changes. The other thing was that the exceptions from the system were tiny - yet now in the blurb below it's clear they appreciate that some people cannot comply - often for internet reasons. A friend on a farm in the Yorkshire Dales - their internet is non-existent so on-line anything rarely works before you get the connection dropped. Now, there's a bit more leeway. Don't forget the rules on the VAT registration are based on rolling periods, so you may well have managed to keep below the 85K turnover based on April to April - but exceeded it in a different period. Those with voluntary VAT registration were being told that once in, you're in - so de-registration the only solution. However - there is some scope for the spreadsheet translation software, but early reports indicate that it needs people to really understand spreadsheet formulas and you have to point the software to the right fields for reporting and this is your call - if you make a small slip in the spreadsheet, the reporting will be wrong, so it needs more care. I went for the Freeagent solution withe the receipt scanning. It costs per month but my accountancy bill will reduce by roughly the same amount so status quo there. However, so far I am very impressed and sold on the system as it's uncovered payments going out unknown to me. It analyses the ins and outs from the bank and compares these to receipts and invoices and matches them up - which you review and agree. It found a direct debit with no matching receipts/invoices and BT were taking £100+ each month from my account on top of the correct payments, and I'd not noticed - Freeagent did! Sorted with BT, but how long would it have gone on? Some other MTD oddities are that plenty of people do not know about it, not having had any post from HMRC about it. For those over the threshold, they cite April, but this appears to be the first quarter where a digital reporting is needed at the end. Those who didn't know won't know till July that they should have been using a new system since April, so even if they invest in a new software solution, backdating it won't be simple. Here's the HMRC latest release - it's very long winded, so stop reading here if you don't wish to fall asleep. The important sentence is at the end - who doesn't need to do it.

I managed to NOT make it work on a 2m cable, pack to pack - and the cable tested fine - the fault was rust! the screen and both cores had been exposed on a sharp edge drilled between two racks, and the copper was green, and presumably hi res or possibly a partial short between the pair.