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At this point people usually suggest sitting down with the drummer and talking things through or having a 'band discussion' or helpfully reconfiguring your FOH so that the drummer gets 'his sound' and everyone's happy. Well, that never works, so wait until the next time you see him and then punch him in the nuts as hard as you can. No preamble, no 'Can we talk about your bass drum amp, Tarquin?' Just an overwhelming pre-emptive strike on his testicles. He'll probably leave the band on the spot, which is fine. If he doesn't leave, keep pulverising his gonads until he does then find another drummer and carry on.

He kept them on in bed?

To be fare wetherspoons are only chav central of an evening , in the daytime its racist pensioners and blokes with no teeth bad tats and a habit having a row with themselves at the bar...

I'd be tempted to put the drummer through the PA. I don't mean miking his kit up, I mean repeatedly pushing him head first into the speakers until he gets the message. Having his own combo for the bass drum has to be one of the daftest ideas I've ever heard.

Thought I'd show off the basses I use when playing with THAT 80s ROCK SHOW as my character 'Jeff Leopard' Check out www.that80srockshow.co.uk / www.facebook.com/that80srockshow Charvel 575 Deluxe / Washburn B80 Chicago Series / Kramer D-1 Bass

A few of you who are friends of mine on Facebook, will have seen a post I made earlier on that site earlier. David Essex. I'll profess having the tracks Rock On, Hold Me Close, Stardust and Gonna Make You A Star on a Spotify playlist feels somewhat of a guilty pleasure (much like a couple of Girls Aloud tracks, cough); I had some decorating to do earlier so just decided to dial up his first few albums to accommodate me while I was working. They're spectacular albums really and have aged very well, in that they don't sound that old. If you're familiar with the tracks I've listed above, then you're honestly in for a treat. They're dubby, clever, smart even. I've listened to them three times today. Go on, have a go. Brilliant stuff.

No. I want a newspaper to report the news. I dont need something to reinforce my own personal prejudice. I can make my own mind up about issues, I don't need a rag to tell me how to think. Give me the news, the bald facts and figures, not a heavily biased far left or far right view of an issue. Read the facts and make your own mind up, or, read a red top and simply hear what you want to hear. As for JD. Top bloke, good bassist and good musician/songwriter. His band of choice ended, for him, with the death of Freddie. Job done. His time in the spotlight also ended and he is happy with that situation. Why cant the press understand that some people are not fixated on staying famous.

Back on topic.... What a weirdo JD is. What kind of idiot would want to bang out a terrific body of work, make a few bob out of it, and then choose living comfortably and quietly with his loved ones over hanging out with industry types, hobnobbing with the terminally shallow and sucking up to the press.

I believe the correct protocol when buying the Mail is to simultaneously purchase a copy of Razzle magazine. That way, you'll have something to hide it inside and thus avoid shame and potential humiliation when leaving the newsagents.

Subs are not necessary for micing a drum kit, especially for smaller venues such as typical pubs and the like. One mic in the bass drum, another perched for overhead, and that's all. Have them go to FOH, turned up just enough to hear them, and no more. The idea is not to create festival chest-heaving lows, but simply integration of the whole kit (not simply the bass drum...) into the overall band sound. The principal role of the PA is still to carry the vocals, and a smidgen of drums in the tops shouldn't be so loud as to hinder this. Unless your repertoire is very unconventional, there's absolutely no need to have an overpowering bass drum in there at all, and any decent drummer would recognise this and play accordingly.

What was the actual story? As far as I could work.out it was rich rockstar keeps himself to himself. Non-story. Poor journalism. He clearly doesn't want the attention and isn't doing anything to attract it. Why even print it!?

Fixed.

Some would say “Liar”, but I believe you. I think it was the time Mr Deacon was attempting to enjoy a quiet Sunday roast but was being continually heckled by a member of The Goodies, sat nearby at another table. As luck would have it Giant Haystacks (who had just been working out and not had chance to shower and freshen up, so slightly stinky) popped in for a Spritzer and stepped in on Mr Deacon’s behalf, telling the Goodie, in no uncertain terms, to leave the reclusive bassman alone. ’B.O. he-man raps Oddie’, as the tabloid headline said...

Look at it this way Rich, at least you know where all the nob-heads are, and can plan a night out knowing you can successfully avoid them. If it weren`t for Wetherspoons you may well end up in their midst.........

I got one from China about 10 years ago when I was doing a lot of selling & buying, cost about £3. Quite a cheerful little thing it is, too.

Of course, regardless of what anyone else says or thinks, he is by right afforded legendary status simply because of his excellent contribution to Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds.. (IMHO of course)

I’ve played with a drummer who did this, it’s basically a really stupid idea that only works if you don’t want any kind of bass other than the kick in your overall sound. There’s no good reason for a kick to be put through a bass amp in a live band. Dance music maybe - but even with dance music one of the first things you do to control a mix is cut the lows on the kick to make space for the bass. Same thing as when a guitarist boosts his lows or the keyboard player decides to ‘double up’ on bass. Recipe for disaster.

I can't see what all the fuss is about! I read the article about John Deacon in The Mail as I get it every day and it was fair piece of journalism.

Now I have to visit the Daily Moron website to view the article. Must remember to clear my browser history afterwards. If anyone looks I don't want them seeing that there amongst my other perfectly acceptable foot fetish and midget porn websites. Could you imagine the embarrassment?

Absolutely. As for the DM just don’t buy it, truly dreadful newspaper.

Took delivery of the PF-50T and connected it to my Super Twin, then plugged in my '73 P and played along with a classic soul compilation. Oh. My. God. Punchy, fat, touch-responsive sound. Smooth and effective tone controls, including a Treble control that actually has a useful effect with flat-wound strings. The Gain knob should actually be labelled 'Fur', as that's what it seems to control (in the best possible way). This amp is all that I hoped it would be - and no hum, I'm pleased to say. Here's the rig, and the settings I ended up with:

After Mr George Orwell and his essay The Moon Under Water: My favourite public-house, the Frog and Fakkit is only two minutes from the central car park, but it is on a side-street, and polite little families and well-dressed couples never seem to find their way there, even on Saturday lunchtimes. Its clientele, though fairly large, consists mostly of ‘regulars’ who spend much of their day in a recumbent position in the nearby park and go to the Frog and Fakkit for the drugs available from a weasel-featured man named Danny as much as for the beer. If you are asked why you favour a particular public-house, it would seem natural to put the drugs first, but the thing that most appeals to me about the Frog and Fakkit is what people call its ‘ambience’. To begin with, its whole architecture and fittings are uncompromisingly 1970’s. It has a mixed bag of formica-topped tables and cast-iron tractor-seat chairs, plastic panels masquerading as oak and peeling, Paisley wallpaper. The sticky carpet, the gouged bar top, the fake horse brasses adorning the walls and the ceiling stained dark brown by tobacco-smoke, the nudie-picture calendar behind the bar — everything has the solid, comfortable ugliness of the mid-twentieth century. In winter there is generally a good fire burning in the skip outside the front door, and the ‘last century’ lay-out of the place encourages those fleeting collisions which lead so gratifyingly to flare-ups of savage violence. There are a public bar, a saloon bar, a dealers’ bar, an off-sales counter for underage drinkers and – upstairs – a large, empty room in which on Tuesdays Fridays and Saturdays live bands perform to the utter indifference of the patrons below. In the Frog and Fakkit it is never quiet enough to talk. There is a radio behind the bar tuned to Heart FM, a ‘digital’ juke box, two fruit machines, Sky Television and piped-in music. All are playing simultaneously and the only time they cannot be heard is when a band of hopelessly incompetent hobbyist ‘musicians’ is upstairs performing Sex On Fire. The barmaids know their customers by name, having at some time taken most of them upstairs there to conjoin on a soiled mattress under the ‘stage’ . They are all middle-aged women—two of them have no teeth—and they call everyone ‘yew fakkin kant’ irrespective of age or sex. You cannot get lunch at the Frog and Fakkit but there is - beside the plywood lavatory door - a snack counter where you can purchase expired pickled eggs or pork luncheon meat fried in batter (cold). They are particular about their drinking vessels at the Frog and Fakkit, and never, for example, make the mistake of serving a pint of beer in a glass. Apart a selection of ‘pewter’ mugs screwed to the canopy which overhangs the bar every receptacle is made of plastic, a wide and vivid scar on the landlord’s jaw perhaps testifying to the matter. The great surprise of the Frog and Fakkit is its lavatory. You go through a narrow passage leading out of the saloon, and find yourself in a fairly large garden with plane trees, under which there are old car tyres, broken bottles and the remains of a tramp who expired there a few years ago. Up at one end of the garden there is a roofless garden shed wherein the customer in search of relief will discover a spreading pool of urine, a stained plastic bucket containing a noisome admixture, and a pile of newspapers, mostly editions of the Daily Mail from the period when said organ was edited by Mr Paul Dacre. On summer evenings there are ritual human sacrifices, and you sit under the plane trees injecting skag to the tune of delighted squeals from feral children prodding the burnt offering with sticks. The Frog and Fakkit is my ideal of what a pub should be—at any rate, in a metropolitan area. (The qualities one expects of a country pub are slightly different.) But now is the time to reveal something which the discerning and disillusioned reader will probably have guessed already. There is no such place as the Frog and Fakkit. That is to say, there may well be a pub of that name, but I don’t know of it, nor do I know any pub with just that combination of qualities. So if anyone knows of a pub that has junkies of every persuasion, food poisoning, brutal violence, insanitary facilities, deafening noise, regular visits by Plod, a reeking midden in the garden and prostitute barmaids I should be glad to hear of it, even though its name were something as prosaic as the Red Lion or Wetherspoons.

I've worked on a number of basses and other instruments with the same or similar setup. And they can be a right pain to get even volume. If the above advice doesn't work about making sure the bridge piece bottom is flat and the piezo slot is clean and flat. Then cut the bridge in half carefully! I use a Stanley knife heated. And cut NOT where a string lays but inbetween a and d obviously. This spreads the tension more evenly. Has worked every time on a difficult bass.

Well that's one name for it.

It’s not the only fix, but it’s the easiest. Other fixes would be milling an angle in the pocket or neck heel, recessing the bridge. Or a different (lower) bridge/saddles. So a shim is probably your best bet. Veneer works well for this. Ideally the saddles shouldn’t bottom out until the string are resting on the fret tops (just so you know what to aim for)

Let's get back on topic... I don't like Wetherspoons because they don't let you sit at the bar. I like to entertain everyone by getting very drunk at the bar and making amusing, witty comments about the appearance of the other customers and staff. If they have a hilarious tic, rubbish hair or particularly bad dress-sense, so much the better. But oh no, you have to take your drink to a bloody table and sit there like some kind of sad, friendless loner. Also, the beer is shít.

Well I tried, one can only do ones best

You don't have to know what it means, so long as I know what it means. 😎 In layman's terms that speaker probably can't go either low or loud enough for gigging at more than what we refer to as coffee house levels on my side of the pond. I'd say it's much better suited to low level studio work than gigging.

The missus buys the Sunday version for the crosswords, as they have cash prizes. Honestly. I flicked through the pages a couple of times but felt ill. If you want a particular bias in your chosen paper, ie, pro Brexit and anti Corbyn/Labor Party, then this is the paper to buy. If they can slant a story to show bias they do, to a massive extent.

Perhaps I've been unlucky then, and have only been to the 3 or 4 out of 900 that seemed to be inhabited entirely by football-shirt-clad nerks who think that drinking Stella rather than Carling makes them sophisticated, habitually shout "Oi oi!" at people 6 feet away from them, and are seemingly engaged in a contest to see who can laugh the loudest at nothing and spill the most beer. Perhaps if I went to a 5th one, I would find the haven of peace and tranquility that many some seem to find them. I'm not going to find out.

He ashphalted my drive last week and did a wicked job!!

Well not really!........Queen are obviously in the headlines at the moment with their new film, and people in general would like to know about the forgotten man.You would be lieing if you said that you are not curious about certain musicians who you don't hear of anymore. There must be some musicians that you like but are no longer in the limelight,and you would like to know what they are currently doing.The Mail has penned a topical piece here, and they haven't slagged him off, they can probably leave that for May and Taylor to do.

Might I also suggest checking out his early 70's movies 'That'll be the day and Stardust'. An absolute who's who of stars in them.

I assume you mean the wenge? and yeah i think im going to have to, and take some off the edges, and drill out some weight elsewhere too... in case you can't read that... thats 4lbs 7oz just for the wenge. by my best guess, if this all got stuck together and the hardware added on as it is now, this thing would come in around 15lbs, and thats too heavy even for a beast of a man like me. im just realizing now that ive basically got a collection of the heaviest wood i can find and then built a huge body shape with it. worst comes to the worst i'll rout some of the thickness off the wenge, but if i can help it id rather not. in other news, the inlays are coming along well. i had a pretty successful weekend: getting the lightning and those tiny fiddle ends of the clouds in SUUUUUUUCKED. but im pleased with it so far. i like the way the ziricote looks in the background as well, i'd been tempted to just go with a flat black ebony to help the inlays stand out, but the ziricote gives it a bit of depth. what do you guys think? also ive now got a headstock design im pretty happy with: I had originally planned to go with a fairly classic symmetrical headstock... sort of alembic esque. but i always loved the look of le fay bass headstocks: its obviously very similar, although widened out a bit to accommodate a long truss rod cover and some big schaller tuners, and reversed. for some reason i always thought the le fay ones looked like they were the wrong way round.

So, to paraphrase Father Ted, put the louder one further away. 🙂

That's the Mail's top tier journalism in action. A none story which has no relation to all the sh#t that's going on in the world. Often quoting an unnamed source (i.e invented) then five paragraphs of Ethel from Tyneside said on Twitter, "I blame all the immigrants" Edit: Other news providers are available, but they're all pretty much as bad as each other. They just blame different parties or social groups.

Or, get him to sit down and pummel his man globes with his bass pedal...

If you have an estate of 900 pubs and growing and employ over 37,000 people, it places you in a very strong position to negotiate the leanest buying prices, it’s economies of scale, that’s why I can go into my local one (and it is a local, manager and same staff been there years) and buy a pint of cider for £1.99. The original premises, a hotel, stood empty for a few years, Wetherspoons revived it to a very high standard retaining many of the original features and it’s now a great focal/meeting point in the small market town where I live. Showing a video of a brawl in one Wetherspoons out of 900 does not depict the usual type of clientele that use there pubs.

..........just like yer average village local then................ 😎

I can beat that - a drummer who wanted to feed a bass drum mic into my bass amp. I politely explained to him that it was not an option.

All this is very much about John Deacon, NOT! To get back on track a bit, I`ve just re-read the article about him in this months Bass Guitar Mag - turns out that he refinished one of his Precisions as and when he felt like a change, rather than buy a new one. I think that`s quality, sure he probably had enough money to buy Fender, but keeping with the bass he liked to play/how it sounded, just with a fresh coat of paint, nice one.

I know there hasn't been much activity on this thread recently, although there have been a few references to it in other threads. As previously explained, the next stage here is a lightweight design using neo drivers. As an interim step, I've just revised Chienmort's Beyma system by swapping out his Celestion ceramic compression driver for a neo one. The sound hasn't really changed, but we've saved about 1.5kg thanks to the new compression driver and simplified crossover. Phil asked me how it measures, and the easiest way of showing him is to post the measurement here. So..... I've been able to compare this cab with my own version fitted with the Faital Pro 12PR320 (and the same compression driver) and the Faital Pro cab is noticeably better in a number of areas. I'm therefore not going to publish any details of this interim system, but will go straight to the Faital Pro system once I have revisited the crossover to see if I can't make it a bit simpler. As you can see from the frequency response curve, this design is as FRFR as you like.

Please accept my sincere apologies and hope this goes some way for my penance

Forgot to take pics ? If that doesn't require accidently falling down the stairs , yer honour, i don't know what does. Shape up Jim !

is there anything wrong with Wetherspoons supporting British Jobs?

Speakers don't deliver watts, and Hoffman's Iron Law is immutable. That doesn't necessarily mean it's not a decent enough piece of kit, but I'd have to see some real data before making any assumptions about how well it compares to the competition.

Fixed so as to correspond with your avatar.