Buzzy

I can sympathise with your ex bass player. I'm near Dartford and played with an Essex based band for a year. It was the QE2 crossing that caused me to quit. Sometimes it would take 90 mins to get to a gig that was only 10 miles from home.

When I first heard Club Tropicana I thought he sang "Ohh they're pissing in the sea." Took me ages to realise that its "All thats missing is the sea."

Amazed this hasn't appeared in this post, Bob Babbitt at his greatest

We use Teamup which works well for us. Its set up to be colour coded for gigs, rehearsals and not available. Only one band member relies on others to update things for him. He's never uses facebook and keeps making the same excuses about his phone being locked up etc etc to avoid whatsapp and never seeing any emails.

Jah Wobble in January, looking forward to some of this

Amazed to see One The Juggler on here. Waddo, I would love to know what amused you about it. Had a bit of finger trouble when I was replying.

The SKAstards https://youtube.com/channel/UCH-H19WfU-axS5gn98gFPEw

Sorry for the slow response, we've found a bass player. Now the guitarist has left and we still haven't found a replacement keys player. Could be game over, already had to cancel six gigs for July. Bloody bands....

Busy Kent based Ska/Reggae band looking for bass player. We play a mix of Two Tone and old school Trojan classics. We want a player who is willing to put in the work to learn the parts. We're a friendly bunch and have loads of gigs booked for this year.

We had our first rehearsal since August and first one since the keys player quit the band. Not as rusty as I thought we would be but still some work to do. After quite a heated discussion about using backings the majority decision was not to use them and keep searching for a keys person or maybe add another guitarist to fill out the sound. Thanks for the input everyone.

Thanks for the opinions. First rehearsal tonight since August, first thing is to get past how rusty we'll be then have a run through with the backings.

Just wanted to get some opinions on using backing tracks. The keyboard player has left my band and we are due to start gigging again in June. We've placed plenty of ads for keys players and thought we had it sorted but the potential keys player has dropped out before the first rehearsal. Our singer does solo gigs using backing tracks and has suggested we use prerecorded keyboard parts if we can't find a new band member. I have mixed feeling about doing this, the quality of the tracks is superb, they are true to the proper recorded versions (we only play covers) and were played by real musicians on real instruments but it feels like a bit of a cheat to use backing tracks. Anyone had experience of using backing to cover a specific instrument ? Am I being too precious about feeling its a bit of a cheat? One of the guys in the band said that we shouldn't worry about using backings as every band uses sample, auto tune etc.