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A bit late to the party so rather than post individual gigs I thought I'd just post a block session from the year to catch up. I play in a 50s and 60s Rock n' Roll band and we do either electric or acoustic gigs. We mostly play clubs, pubs, weddings, parties and festival. This is our first year together and out of the 74 gigs we've done so far this year, I would say we have only had 2 naff gigs, the rest have been brilliant and so much fun. We've played anywhere from huge festivals playing to a few thousands, to a train station, to a roof of a pub, bandstands in parks, a biker festival in the middle of a field, school and village fete's, a record shop for international record day, a jive club, restaurants, a hairdressers, a fire station, beer festivals, classic car shows, a beach, carnivals, a donkey derby, a bowls club, a kids Back to the Future party as well as many pubs and clubs. We are just in ths middle of a 4 week summer break and then we have 40 more gigs to take us up to Christmas. Rock n' Roll 😁

Managed to get time to finish this tonight! Stuck a Dimarzio P in I had in the spares drawer, along with a bunch of spare electronics - fitted, soldered up and so on. Assembled and strung with some TI Flats - it’s now sounding like a proper chunky thumpy P bass. Very nice. I added the costs up. Given I had a lot of bits lying around this actually only cost about £120 - but I reckon even if you had to buy all the bits it would be around £300 all up, which is really rather splendid!

Just responded to an ad looking for a low end pluckerer ... ten minutes into phone call... oh we’d rather you not be in any other bands 1 advertise the fact in the first instance 2 stop being so fkn precious 3 who tf do you think you are dictating terms and conditions of what i can and cant do in my own fkn time ..... and breeeeeathe......

Please forgive the ostentatious title, some of you will remember a discussion a while ago regarding tool sharpening and my insistence that sharpening jigs are not needed; well I was asked to write this about how edge tools are sharpened in a professional cabinet making shop. Now please don't try and compare how a jobbing chippy sharpens his or her tools on site that is a different story but cabinetry and Luthiery have a similar need for tools that are precisely sharp as opposed to being sharp enough. I will honestly say the one machine/power tool I would not do without is a wet grinder, I would rather rip boards up with a ripsaw and plane them flat and to size by hand than do without that and have done in the past. Why you may ask? Well when you are trying to do fine work in wood the single most important thing you need is control and with cutting tools the only way you can get that control is with very sharp tools, not almost sharp or even sharp enough, to get precise cuts first time and every time they need to be sharper than that razor you shave with each morning and kept that way. It is a job that can be tedious if you let it be, the trick is to let it not be and to do that it needs to be quick and easy then it can be seen as a way of releiving your mind from the concentration levels of doing careful work for long periods. Lets have a look at my sharpening area What you see is a wetstone grinder, a tub of water and two Japanese water stones which a are wedged into wooden blocks to keep them from sliding in use; they are then kept in the tub of water when not being used. Above these I have a variety of gadgets that are associated with sharpening various tools but there is only one of note, the grinding angle gauge The wetstone grinder is used to give a hollow grind to the edge on a the cutting tool at a set angle which is determined by a little gauge. Mine is a 25 degree gauge which is a good all round angle for many tools giving a nice balance between durability and sharpness. The blade is clamped into a sliding carriage at the correct angle like this Then it is simply a matter of switching on and moving the blade from side to side until you have a fully ground hollow edge that is square. I've tried to illustrate that with these photos as best I can You can just make it out but notice that ragged burr on the edge. All we have done is to prepare our blade for the real sharpening: In days gone by various types of oilstones were the way to go, when I was an apprentice I had a prized set of Arkansas stones but things thankfully have moved on some since then, we have the waterstones, diamond impregnated tiles, ceramic stones.... My own favourites are the waterstones and I'll explain why. Waterstones are a man made brick for want of a better term, made of precisely graded grits, they are bound together quite loosely so they actually wear quite quickly in comparison to other types but that to me is an advantage. When you sharpen a tool you abbraide it's surface so tiny particles are removed, these can become embedded quite firmly in the stone and cause something called glazing which reduces it's efficiency. Waterstones on the other hand break up very slowly so the particles are freed stopping that glazing. The downside of that of course is that the stone can quickly wear out of true, thankfully it is so easy to flatten unlike the old Arkansas stones that needed taking to a stone mason. To flatten a waterstone just get a strip of 80 grit sandpaper taped to a flat surface and give the stone half a dozen rubs on that and the job is done, easy. Another great advantage is that water is used a s a lubricant so rather than having oily hands after sharpening they are merely wet and the stones can just be put back in the tub with not further cleaning or drying needed. I have two stones, the large red one which is a 1000 grit stone and the yellow one which is a 6000 grit, I use one at a time, they are both out above just for illustration. I don't have photos of the actual procedure but it is easy to understand. To start sharpening you stand in front of the stone (1000 grit), one foot in front of the other (important). You take the blade in both hands with some fingers from each hand on top of the blade to give it full support. Place the blade on the stone and feel for that hollow grind, there is a point where it sits flat and stable. Now you can either sharpen at that or as I do lift the blade a tiny amount so I only grind the front edge. Lock your elbows tight into your rib cage to lock your arms rigid, then rock backwards using your legs, so weight shifting from the front foot to the back foot, that stops the blade rocking. Do that four times and you should be left with a tiny shiny flat across the whole front edge of your blade. If you look closely mine isn't even, my stone needs flattening (OOPS!) but looking closely notice the burr Change the stone to the 6000 grit and do the same again, remember this must only be done backwards never forwards, the stones are too soft. So four times then flip the blade over and place it flat on the stone, slide the blade over the stone backwards four times. Repeat that two or three more times until when you examine the edge there is absolutely no sign of any burr and the back face should be almost a mirror finish. That should give you a wholly flat edge, for a bench plane you may want to give that edge a slight curve, to do this I use an extra pass over the 6000 stone with pressure on one outside edge then the other and that will be enough to give you a nice edge for a plane And that is it, just give the blade a quick dry on a towel along with your hands and back to work but be careful, that blade will be sharp and i mean sharp. The grinding procedure isn't done every time, just when the sharpening procedure starts taking longer as the flats get bigger; typically I sharpen four times then regrind. Even with regrinding a single blade can be processed within a couple of minutes. I keep four to six plane blades above my bench and sharpen all of them at once, that way I am less likely to be tempted to use a dulling iron when it is so easy to quickly change and it is quicker to sharpen six once then one six times. I hope you can see the logic in that method, every cabinet shop I have been into uses that exact method so I assume that it is probably the best and easiest way of doing it, being quick and easy you are more likely to want to do it and the more likely your work will improve. One last thing and this is actually the very first thing with any flat blade. The back face of a cutting tool needs to be flat, when you buy it it won't be, not even close. The first job with any new chisel or plane blade is to flatten it; how depends on how bad it is. Sometimes 10 minutes on a 1000 grit stone will do it flattening the stone a couple of times, if it is really bad then some 80 grit carborundum powder and a piece of glass it the way to go. Once it's flat then it will stay flat as long as you keep your stones flat but that back face MUST be flat to get the best out of your tools. Very briefly the reason why: A chisel is used mostly but supporting the back edge on work that has previously been cut, either to the side or behind the cutting edge. The back of the chisel is used as a rest and as a guide for progression, if your blade isn't flat then it will either dig in (blade concave) or ride up (blade convex) and that will never ever let you produce good work. Plane blades Other than you wont be able to sharpen properly a bade that is hollow along it's length one of the most important pasts of a bench plane is the cap iron, unless that is in intimate contact with the blade face it will clog up and even with the sharpest blade in the world that plane will not work or certainly won't be capable of quality work but more on that again.

Heh... 1. Yes, girls can play instruments too. That guy who said to you that girls should either sing onstage or do b**w j*bs off stage will remain a nobody forever, deservedly. 2. Don't allow yourself to be intimidated by the sheer size of that acoustic guitar your friends play. There *are* other instruments. 3. Don't allow yourself to be intimidated by right-handed instruments. Don't turn them upside down. Lefties do exist - look for them. 4. You will fall in love and live with a guitarist for the best part of 20 years. He will be grateful to you for knowing how to listen to him playing, being by his side, and waiting for him offstage. You will be grateful to him for getting you into music big time. You will even end up being grateful to him for eventually dumping you - that will be the trigger for you to start playing bass. 5. Regardless of point 4 above, don't wait until you're 41 before taking up bass! 😮

It's not plywood - it's a carefully built alternating-grain laminate of painstakingly chosen tone woods.

If you can find a used Skyline Lakland Precision (Bob Glaub, Duck Dunn, 44-64), that’s about as good as you’ll find for that £750 IMO. Si

I picked up the original Subdecay Quasar DLX. It’s great. Don’t get to use much Phaser, but it’s so versatile I decided to keep it around. Tap Tempo, (or expression control of sweep/rate) plus all the different waveforms, and a clean blend make for a really cool pedal 👍

The best thing is to transcribe lines yourself, use them along with the chords in the lead sheets. That’s how I learned anyway. It is an art form, one of my tutors at uni showed us a formula for creating walking lines, it sounded like a formula too, there was very little beauty in it. A good album to transcribe from is Bill Evans live at the village vanguard. The way it’s mixed puts the bass on it’s own in one channel. Scot LaFaro is the bassist, wonderful lines.

I put fresh rounds on my old Yamaha RBX774 when I first acquired the bass. Those strings stayed on for the next 8 years and boy did they sound good!

That’s all given me an idea - I will design & 3D print one for my Warwick Streamer Jazzman - the angled J pickup doesn’t lend itself to a normal ramp shape.

I have two of the Alto TX10s, I use one of them for home practice sometimes and I have very occasionally used one on a gig but that's purely to point right at my face for personal monitoring only. You'd have to have a really nice 8" or 10" frfr cab to hang with a band, the cheaper ones won't do it IME.

How lucky am I to be doing this again after a 25 year break?! Enjoy it while it lasts!

Last night I was thinking that the 60yr old drunk woman dancing right in front of my mic was really drunk. And I kept repeating the phrase "avoid eye contact, avoid eye contact!"

But ultimately had it not been for the whole mid-70s punk thing, they would have just faded into obscurity. Incidentally, on the subject of The Stranglers, a few years back I was at the wedding of one of my mates daughters. At the reception, I was sat next to Paul Roberts, the guy who took over vocal duties from Hugh Cornwell. Never having been a fan, I didn't have a clue who he was. It was a surreal experience. He kept on saying, 'Don't know whether I'm going to eat, I have a gig in Birmingham tonight.' Then the food came out. He nibbled and just said, 'Right, here we go,' then procured a radio microphone from his jacket, got up, walked over to a corner of the room, turned on some big band music and then crooned his way through about a dozen Frank and Dean songs, whilst walking around the reception and inviting people to do the odd line of Fly Me To The Moon. He was fantastic. In the evening, he did a medley of Stranglers tunes to about 30 people and a load of kids, then left and drove up north. I actually joined in on No More Heroes. Like I said, surreal.

Very uncomfortable when one sits down, however.

It is pretty much te same pre as the DoubleFour, with a 100w instead of a 70w D class power amp. It will be clean, not brittle and build quality like all PJB stuff will be good. For the right price a good amp. The DoubleFour already was quite loud and this amp has bigger speakers (the 30w more will have minimal impact on extra volume, the bigger speaker surface area will).

Dead Roundwounds is a good band name.

Well with ply sometimes it goes one way, and of course some times it goes another ...

If it sounds ok it is ok. If it looks ok that's even better.

I'd be tempted to change your playing style, if you keep hitting the jack. I can't imagine in my wildest playing how on earth that happens.

I hope I didn't follow through when I slipped that one out

Voted! Extra credit to Douglas for this:

When you're last minute depping with a band and at the gig have a complete mental blank about the next song that you apparently ran through with them at an impromptu rehearsal that afternoon. Singer, to me : "we're going to do ' Be My Bad Move Dreamer' next" Me: Blank look.................. Singer: " It starts with the bass - remember??? Me: Errr............File not found Singer: "do-do-dar- dum-dum" (Pulls a bass face and plays imaginary bass) ..........."Remember ?" Me: 😥 Guitarist: "No, actually we never did go through that one" Me: ............🙂.....................☺️😊☺️

The worst for me is when I think ‘wow, really nailing this tonight’ 99% guarantees the next minute will be crap.

Hi folks just thought I would let you all know I've got the Nux Loop core running on my pedal board. Its got 99 memory slots for saving loops so for my use I downloaded some moog drone in E and some birdsong and then loaded it onto slot 1 and hey presto opening of Rush's Xanadu (for our medley)! Also have an air raid siren going in slot 2 for opening of War Pigs. I think for £65 (BAX) its not too bad a way of triggering effects or even backing tracks, but I'll let you know how it pans out in a gig (Sat), anyone else use something similar for this little money (im a terrible tightwad)??

...and give yourself some good advice As I trudged back and forth in the rain humping gear from last night's gig I thought of that scene in Red Dwarf where Rimmer's head from the future pops up from the middle of the table and he attempts to warn his previous self of events yet to come. So I'm me and just starting out on this musical adventure and this gnarly, bald, lived in version of my once beautiful face appears and says "Whatever you do, no matter how tired you are, unload the gear and put it away before you go to bed." What nuggets of wisdom have you gleaned from this curious calling of ours?

Seymour Duncan classic stack... I have these, nice vintage tones - no noise.

Yeah.... but the old one had jacks in the top. These are in the side. im guessing once the patch cables are in there will be zero difference.

Keep as many projects going as you can manage time-wise - let natural selection determine which ones survive and which ones die off. As long as you're open about it I don't see any issue.

I wish! touch sstuff I am often all over the place. I far prefer nice real keys, buttons and knobs. I am also mindful of how easily I have accidentally liked pictures on facebook etc 🙂

I do like a bit of Polly Jean Also liking this atm

I have always tended to change my strings pretty frequently as I love the sound of fresh round wounds, however, in my new band I needed a couple of basses tuned to D, one to gig with, one for rehearsals so I ended up using a battered parts bin Precision which had a really old set of round wounds on it, part way through the rehearsal I realised that this parts bin bass sat in the mix much better than my other Precision with far newer strings on it.....I shall not be changing the strings on a couple of Precision's for a while

Sorry to hear this, chap. Hope you're OK now

I knowwwww...I just reread that sentence and couldn't quite believe I'd written it. It's a slow Bank Holiday, after all... 😑

TBH most published figures for bass cabs are at best economical with the truth and at worst simply fantasies. And unless your bass guitar or synth is pumping out pure sine waves, the fundamental is the least important (and many would say the least desirable when it comes to low frequencies) harmonic to reproduce. Stop reading the fiction in the spec sheets and start using your ears. My Helix + FRFR (RCF745) sounds far better than any of my previous bass rigs including the very expensive high-end ones.

Same as everyone else is saying if it sounds ok and isn't de-laminating why worry. After all don't many cab manufacturers go to great lengths to highlight the quality of the plywood/laminated wood they use, always stressing how void free/dense/better than everyone else's their laminate is? If it's not broke...

You da man (on this particular topic)

If I could go back in time, I'd go back to visit my 15 year old self and tell him 3 things. 1. Knuckle down at school, do some actual work instead of arsing about, perhaps you might actually get some decent 'O' levels. 2. When you hit 23, your drummer mate Keith will call you from London, begging you to head up to the Smoke and enrol at the same music college as him. Do it. Then maybe you will get a session career like he did. 3. Most importantly: stop being such a disrespectful little bastid to your parents. They are the best people in the world, and you will miss them dreadfully when they are gone.

Do it for the enjoyment of doing it, remember that first and foremost it’s your hobby so treat it as such, hobbies are what you do for fun and to chill.

Given that it was a record label, I'd be willing to put money on saying it was/still is a record label.

Once the back is glued on is no time to remember that you've forgotten something so this is a time for a pause, note the remaining jobs, do them, pause again. Hopefully, I've paused enough times! First there's the cross-grain maple strip across the join line. Because the back has a double curvature as it slims from the main chamber to the neck, I let the glue for the strip set while bending in this direction by using a fillet underneath at the bend axis of the panel: Then the all important label In the past, I've marked the top at this stage or similar and - because it's pretty much final thickness, those can be difficult to get out. So for the clamping, I cut out a comprehensive set of clamp cauls, chamfered so that the edges don't dig in (fingers crossed!): And then - after one more fit check - the 'well, it's too late now' step :

Just silly talk on here Anita is half decent for a pop soul singer but Aretha wears the crown .

You mean it's one careless cough away from a cataclysmic shart event? 😃