Admin Lisa Wagner
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Haha that would be a very poor listening experience. Our stepmum Michaela plays sax (you can see her play on some of our earliest YouTube videos) so I have had a go at it before. But the few times I tried it, I could hardly get a tone out of that thing.
Of course, it’d be fun to try it a bit more, and I love the sound of it. But I can’t sing while playing it which is a bit of a bummer …
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Hi Paul,
I use 10s on most of my Electric guitars (Gretsch Duo Jet, Strat, Ephiphone). For me it’s the best compromise of tone and playability. If I’m feeling a little lazy I might put 9s on whatever guitar I use for mindless noodling that I don’t use for recording.
To be honest, I don’t mind if I use nickel or steel strings or any of the popular combinations. I never found one or the other to be necessarily better or worse, and I always tweak my amp and guitar tone to fit whatever I want to play or record at the time.
We love the Pyramid brand but they are sometimes hard to get a hold of and are a little pricey. I don’t think you can go wrong with a set of D’addario or Ernie Ball.
Mona likes to use flat wounds a lot (as opposed to round-wound strings). On both her Rickenbacker and even some acoustic guitars. I have to admit, they do sound great for certain things. Especially rhythmic playing. Very old school, round and smooth.
And we definitely ALWAYS use flatwounds on bass. By now we can’t even imagine using regular round-wounds. Especially on the Hofner they sound fantastic and give you even more of that smooth, almost double bass sounding “smack”. 🙂
Hope that helps! -
Hi Rick,
That’s some good questions …
1) The little blue squares on the Mona’s drums skins are called “Moon Gel” and are basically just little damper pads made out of some sort of squishy jelly gel. You put them on the drums to take away some of the overtones of when you hit a drum, making them sound less “boomy” and more dry. In most cases that’s a preferred sound for drums.
Most drummers use some sort of dampening. Ringo for example often put his wallet, John’s Harmonica case or a cigarette pack on his snare drum or tea towels over his toms. Some people tape down napkins on their drum skins to “flatten” out the sound.
2) The boxes facing the musicians on stage are called monitors or “floor wedges”. As you said, they are there to allow the musicians on stage to hear whatever they need to hear to perform. If you’re on a big stage and the PA (the big speakers) is facing the audience you actually hear very little nuance of everything that’s going on on stage. Especially if you are playing loud music, with a loud drummer and have all the amps on stage. You will hardly hear yourself sing for example which can cause you to be out of tune. That’s why good stage sound and a great sound tech can make or break a show.
Normally each musician has their own speaker facing themselves where the sound guy will “feed” them whatever they need to hear most in order to perform best. Normally that’s mainly your own instrument + voice and the right balance of the other instruments being played on stage.
3) That could be one of two things. Especially in loud, crammed venues some musicians simply put in protective earbuds to look after their ears on stage. If you are standing an inch from the drummer hitting his cymbals with full force every night, you’ll soon damage your hearing, so over time it’s important to protect your ears.
However, most of the time it’s an “in ear monitor” system which does more than simply filter the sound. It’s used instead (or sometimes on top) of monitor speakers. So instead of having a monitor speaker facing you, you get your stage sound through earbuds. So you can for example hear your own voice and guitar playing amplified in the ear phones while it simultaneously filters out the loud frequencies of the drums or bass you might be standing in front of.
It’s a great way to reduce the overall volume on stage and can give you a much more precise mix. Some people (me included) don’t like that this can sometimes take away from the atmosphere as it blocks out some of the crowd noise. So I generally prefer floor wedges over in-ear monitoring.
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Great question! It was definitely one of the songs where the melody came before anything else. It was super “hummable” and had this old fashioned, swingy flair about it. That in turn inspired the lyrics, which then inspired the minimalist, jazzy Club flair old-school arrangement.
I remember when Dad and I discussed how great a Jazz guitar would sound with it. My first reaction was “Well, I can’t play Jazz, so we got to find someone who can for the record.” I had no idea where to even start but Dad convinced me to give it a try myself and some hours and plenty of YouTube guitar tutorials later we recorded my guitar track. If you don’t push your own boundaries you don’t learn 🙂
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That is so sweet. Of course you can sing one of our songs, and it’s really kind that you ask. We’ve seen the little clip of your performance you sent us and are very happy for you that you found the courage to sing with your friend! We know how nerve wrecking your first open mics can be! Trust us, we’ve been there 😉
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Guten Tag from Liverpool, Ken!
Welcome in the Club and thank you so much for popping in and introducing yourself.
We love how music brings together people from different generations! That Falco comment made us laugh out loud 😉
The 80’s were never the time for guitars and harmonies, and we guess neither is today but thankfully there is the internet and YouTube, so we can all connect regardless!
We hope you’ll enjoy it here and send groovy greetings!
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Hi Kevin,
Yes, we’re planning to offer something like that in the near future, since producing many different designs in small numbers and all kinds of sizes makes them too expensive and a nightmare to stock.
So bear with us, and we’ll let you know once we’ve managed to implement an easy way to handle that in our shop. Does that sound like a plan? 🙂
Thanks for the interest,
Lisa -
No, we’ve never actively approached them about a possible collaboration or otherwise. We haven’t really found the perfect project or reason to do so yet … we are sure they are both plenty busy as is 😉
If the opportunity arises, we’d of course be over the moon to meet or possibly even work with them. We suspect they are both aware of our music, as quite a few mutual friends assured us they are, but we don’t know to what extent we have popped up on their “radar” in any significant way.
Glad you liked the collabs we have done so far and I’m sure we’ll work with more cool artists over the years to come, but for now are going to really focus on our own music again.
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Hi George,
Thank you so much for joining the Club and all the kind words 🙂 We’re glad you found us on YouTube and it’s a shame we weren’t playing when you visited Liverpool. We hope you had a great time here and got to enjoy everything this city has to offer.
Are we ever coming back to the US soon? Ever? YES! Soon? Probably not. We have a lot of things planned for 2020 that probably won’t leave much time for travelling or touring, but our plans constantly change and evolve. So we can’t say for sure yet. Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans, right? 😉
We will be back one day!
All the best and stay groovy,
Lisa -
Hi David,
We’ve seen Paul twice, once in Cologne in 2010 and later in Liverpool (2015). It was special seeing Paul in his hometown but nothing will come close to the experience we had in 2010 when Mona and I flew to Germany just to catch his show. There were a lot of happy and overwhelmed tears involved :’-)
He really knows how to structure a show and how to take you on a journey. Obviously he has the best songs in the world to choose from, but still, he keeps it interesting from beginning to the end, even when he throws in his non-Beatle material.
Personally, we’ve never been big fans of his band’s big stadium sound, so we prefer looking at Beatles recordings and earlier live shows for inspiration. But we’re glad we saw him live and would go again in a heartbeat if the opportunity arises 🙂
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We just compared dates and had to laugh out loud when we realised this question came in literally two days before we announced our upcoming Q&A video. Someone here is reading minds!
This one will only be available in the MLT Club but we might consider filming another one for YouTube down the line. Together with more music videos, more albums, more content for the club, more live shows, more duo sessions …
If only there were 8 days a week … 🙂
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Well, there would be “Waiting For The Waiter”. An idea first born by Papa Rudi while waiting for no-one else but a particularly slow waiter 😉 Now the lyrics obviously morphed into all sorts of meanings and got a life on their own but nevertheless it started with a rather unsatisfactory dining experience.
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Thanks Mike, we had a great weekend. We got the Christmas album ready for the pressing plant and felt relieved and excited 🙂 We hope you had a great one, too and will enjoy the one to come.
Glad you like our version of “Here, There and Everywhere”. You’re right, “For No One” is another one of those hauntingly beautiful Revolver tunes. Again, one of our favourites (do we sound like a broken record yet?). We never covered it “officially” before but we remember playing and singing it countless of times with our guitars in our bedrooms as teenagers. I even performed it as part of my music assessment in Australia during our student exchange. Wow, I haven’t thought of that in years!
Who knows, maybe we will revisit it at some point, we have definitely thought about it before.
Best,
Lisa -
Heyho Darryl, thanks for the question!
To be honest, we used to stand that way in pictures to make it easier for people to identify who’s who. Especially in the beginning we used to get this question a lot.
After all, it’s MonaLisa, not LisaMona. So for us, it’s Mona right, Lisa left … (though I have to say in a different sense it should actually be Lisa right … I’m always right).
On stage it’s also easy to stick to the same set up every time so you don’t have to rethink the positioning of mics, amps etc. each show.
Now that I think about it, even the way we sit in the car or at the dining table, we usually stick to that order. It’s has to be subconscious at this point! 😉
Peace & love to our favourite city in Australia!
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Hi Skippy,
Yep, that’s our beautiful stepmum + manager Michaela. Thanks for saying we look alike, I take that as a big compliment 😉 It’s funny, we get that from time to time, even though I don’t really see too many similarities myself, to be honest. I would have said we’re quite different types in terms of bone structure, hair and all that but I guess you can’t really tell that easily on a picture.