u/Key-Patience-3966

I play regularly with three bands and sub for others. I have 50+ gigs on my calendar annually, and I have a full time job. When called for a last minute sub, I can pull off four sets of classic rock with one day's notice and no rehearsal.

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I think I've gotten to the point where I'm questioning $100-$150 and free food for bar gigs.

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I feel like I'm a better player than that and maybe I should take a stand and just say I'm not going to play for less than $200 a night anymore, which puts me more into festivals, larger gigs, corporate and private events.

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Anyone been at these crossroads and made the leap to bigger, better bands and gigs?

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Or will I narrow my options too much and wind up not playing often?

A couple weeks ago, I was playing a slim ekit, with a midi controller pad that had multiple instruments mapped on midi channel 1, and then I used an edrumin interface for the hi hat controller and kick pedals, but the midi channel was omni.

Everything worked fine the entire gig until the last 15 minutes, when the midi controller went silent -- no midi was triggering any VST instrument in Ableton anymore. The pedals kept working though.

I restarted the laptop and Ableton. I restarted the midi controller. The only thing that would fix it was unplugging and reconnecting the midi cable from the controller. Then the midi signals would work again for a while, then it would disconnect again.

I tried reproducing this at home and couldn't with just the midi controller, so the only conclusion I can reach is that there was some channel confusion because I had the edrumin set to any instead of a different channel than 1.

Any other ideas?

https://reddit.com/link/1sqppgc/video/hnztshismcwg1/player

Used these layouts:

1. My full SD3 ekit (kick, snare, three toms, closed HH, open HH, ride, crash, China, cowbell and tambourine)
2. SD3 Octobans, rototoms, bongos and a kick with metal rattlers
3. A C Major keygrid connected to a Chromaphone3 synth keys
4. A single Chromaphone3 Future Tam pad
5. A single Chromaphone3 Drum from a Lost Tribe pad
6. SD3 percussion: bongos, shaker, key rattle, tambourine and some clanky thing
7. A single Chromaphone3 East Asian Low Drum pad
8. SD3 toms: high, mid, low racks and two floor toms

Lessons learned:

• Adjust the buffer size so you don't have 17ms latency. Lol! Set 2 went much better for some layouts
• Normalize the mix volumes across channels (duh)
• Know that using a stick is quite different than finger and hand drumming. You may need larger targets and fewer.
• Look at your set list so that you have the right instruments together, not in different layouts so that you don't have to change layouts in the middle of the song to get the cowbell.