TrevorR

I love the idea of having a YOB bass for no reason other than “just because”. However, my personal vintage is Pre-CBS so that means the chance of having a bass to match is slim to none!!! Maybe a nice Hofner Club, though. That would be nice!

Off to see a performance of Adrian Snell’s rock opera, The Passion, performed with a choir and full orchestra at All Souls Langham Place tomorrow night. One of my fave musos - Dave Bainbridge (Iona, Lifesigns, Strawbs etc) is in the band. Should be good. And just bought tickets for Trevor Horn’s band at Hampton Pool this summer. Can’t wait!!!

He’s such a fantastic musician- still miss Iona. Will be seeing him playing up in London on Saturday evening, playing in Adrian Snell’s band for a live performance of The Passion, with full orchestra and choir! Can’t wait!!!

You should check out Bela Fleck’s new album… several versions of Gershwin’s Rhapsody In Blue arranged with banjo taking the piano parts… an orchestral version, a bluegrass version etc… Here’s the bluegrass version.

Not played MRL in years. Was always a blast to play. So long as you’ve got a keys player who’s not afraid to bash out a rhythm-heavy piano part enthusiastically (as opposed to a polite, Richard Clayderman playing style) you’ll be golden.

Agreed, no problems propagating and bass sound with that rig!!!

But hopefully NOT plastered!

Must have been a bit before my time. Can’t ever recall a music shop in Staines itself…

But all too typical with volunteer teams. Our team would occasionally ask me while setting FoH “Do you want it a bit louder or quieter?” I’d say to them, “Nothing to do with me. Front of house is entirely between you, the pastor and the worship leader.” We had one of those set ups where we could each set out monitor mix from our iPad.

Alan Spenner tearing up a groove with Andy Newmark and Neil Hubbard before launching into a speedy Love is the Drug…

Bass by the fabulous John (“Johnny Gus”) Gustafson on Love Is The Drug using a P-Bass that Ian Waller (later founder of Wal basses) rebuilt, modified and rewound the pickups for. Roxy had some stunningly good bassists, especially Johnny Gus, Gary Tibbs and Alan Spenner.

Andy, Pro bass pots are weird… never seen the like on any other bass. Rather being an integrated part of the same unit like most pots, the pot and the shaft for Pro basses are separate items. The body of the pot has two locating holes at the centre of the hub and a separate plastic spindle with two locating prongs fit into those holes. Yes, bonkers! After many years the plastic locating prongs get brittle and can snap off - which is what has happened to yours. Give them a gentle tug and you’ll find they come right out and you’ll be able to see where the prongs have snapped off. Same thing happened to my Pro2E about 15 years ago. I took it to Paul for him to fix and he did is bang up job. The pots locate directly onto the circuit boards so I wouldn’t have trusted many people to have replaced them. When he fitted the new “normal” pots it really brought the bass back to life! So my advice would be to take it down to Fetcham and get Paul to swap them.

For me it’s Tiran Porter’s exquisite tone on Takin’ It To The Streets.

The three that spring to mind are the Fender Geddy Lee Jazz, the Fender Marcus Miller Jazz and the Epiphone Jack Cassidy Semi-acoustic. All very well known bassists but with basses that you would be happy playing in all sort of contexts. The fact that two are flavours of Jazz bass probably helps their transferability. The bass I’d feel pigeonholed by would be any pointy metal type bass. They look silly enough in their coven genre but utterly ridiculous anywhere else. I saw Chuck Berry at a festival in 1983 and he was clearly using a pick up band. The bass player had an Explorer shaped bass - an Aria ZZB IIRC. Playing Maybelline and No Particular Place To Go it just didn’t look right!

So, at last night's Woking Weekly Monday Night Jam night Beth (one of the regular singers) sidles up to me and says "Trevor, you could play Hocus Pocus by Focus, couldn't you?" "Erm... give me 10 minutes to work out the riff and I could try..." And so this happens... bonkers but such great fun! A bit random but, what a blast!!