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Where as Def Leppard broke records in October 1995 for playing in three continents in one day (thank you Wikipedia), we achieved the more environmentally friendly three shows in 24hrs in our local village! Thankfully as I was on mandolin, all the shows were walking distance so I just carried my small pedal board and mandolin around the village. First up was "The Crown" which was amazing for music a few years ago. Whilst stopping short at needing chicken wire, it wasn't a great start. Line checking, the sound guy asked one local who kept saying "turn down" (it's an experienced acoustic duo so nobody was troubling the neighbours). The second we had lost any edge or bite to the sound he proudly announced "Well, I wasn't going to stay anyway!" Needless to say, I just pushed that slider right up! We seemed to play to nobody, only to find out a fair few were sat outside listening. The bar staff charged me £4 for 2 lime and sodas just prior to going on too. They knew we were playing a free charity show for disadvantaged kids so I thought they could have waivered that but I just politely paid it. Such a shame overall though, as a few years back it was an amazing venue for live music. We then went on to "The Club". This is not normally open in the afternoon and was the one I knew would be a disaster. However, against all odds, there was a small but very enthusiast crowd. We both agreed that it was really enjoyable. We had some downtime between sets so stayed and watched the next two acts. As we left the barmaid made a point of coming over and saying how much she enjoyed the show. The final show was at our regular haunt "The Blue Boar" so I knew it would be well attended and fun. It was. Much like the Club, we were offered a free drink for providing our services for the charity. We had a family down the front who seemed to love our set. The Dad was straight up afterwards asking about our instruments and we chatted about growing up in the 80s. They were one step further, finding us on social media and writing some really nice comments. It was worth adding, the show was our first since launching our zombie inspired third single. So, although we did the show for charity, it was a good opportunity to plug our new video. And talking of which...

Been meaning to add this here for a while, in its Root Beer Sparkle glory. Powerful pickups, versatile, fat, woody tone from the set neck korina body/neck, rosewood fretboard. Lightweight too. I love the neck which is based on Watt's "Dan Bass" ('65 Gibson EB-0)

On Saturday I had my annual blacksmithing gig in a replica logging camp blacksmith shop at Marten River Provincial Park. They have a lovely forge and decent anvil and I had hundreds of visitors to the shop as I made smoke and flames from the forge and sparks fly from various things I made during a hot but fun 5 hour non stop session. The only music was the steady rhythm of hammer on hot steel but I think I can still count it as a gig. I've been doing this for over 25 years now and it is always a good day and they want me back next year. I volunteer for this so there's no pay but this year they gave me a swag bag with some nice goodies from the park store. Forge on! Next band gigs will be early September at a bluegrass festival and a jazz gig a week later.😊

We played the reopening night of a newly refurbished and under new management pub the other night. Safe to say they've got 6 weeks at most. Oh well As I've been told off for this before, the band is The White Line, although don't bother following us as we're winding down and not taking any more bookings. The rig was MIA P > Shure GLX > HX Stomp.

Sat night at a small pub just behind the High Street in Tring, Not much space and there was a 60th Birthday party going on too, luckily we got em all dancing quite early and the evening ended very sweaty. Great fun all round.

The Pit in Newstead on Thursday. This was a practise run for our "almost acoustic" set at Rebellion Festival on Thursday. It's a long story but I have to use this "tupperware bass drum" contraption I made a few years ago. Unfortunately the PA at The Pit wasn't really up to the job, so although it apparently sounded fine out front, we were really struggling on stage. Anyway, usual positive reaction from a crowd that seemed impervious to our decidedly average performance. Star and Garter in Manchester on Sunday. There were two great bands on before us - Iconoclasts and Instant Agony. Classic punk stuff really, loud, noisy, and a lot of fun. We were headlining but I don't really have a drum kit I can share with support bands at the moment (another long story), so opted for the house kit which is always great here. Unfortunately, although everything was expertly tuned as usual, I could not get my kick pedal to clamp to the bass drum properly. That combined with agony in my wrist lead to a few errors on my part. Nothing disastrous though, and again, the audience had no idea. I had 2 different people tell me that's the best they'd seen me play! 🤣

Version 1. I far prefer string slots rather than holes.

Mine was just insane. I took the covers band I play for to my local, where I’ve played literally hundreds of times with other acts and all my mates go etc etc. It’s much smaller than our usual venues, so I knew it would be a squeeze, but I was totally unprepared for the sight that greeted me when I arrived! Cases and cables were just everywhere, it was utter carnage. We started playing and a few songs in, the power to our area died. It took ten minutes to get it back on and the router connected to the iPad for the Xair mixer again. Next song - the mic stand on the guitar amp just randomly collapsed…and the guitarist’s board locked up and had to be restarted. Then the power went off again. Another ten minutes later we were back in business (again) - when the singer’s acoustic battery ran out. Engineer ran up and switched it while he switched out to electric for a song. Back to acoustic again for the next song and his transmitter failed…so the engineer switched it for a cable mid song… …which failed in the next song. Then the drummer threw up all over his kit…. A lot. I mean a LOT. Then he did it again….and again…so much it splattered my bass as it bounced back off the snare head. The entire kit and drum mat was just coated in the stuff. And the walls. And the drummer. And basically everything else. We stopped. Singer did an acoustic song to finish the show whilst the drummer went white and scraped chunks off his kit…Gig was over. … Until the drummer decided to keep going, and so we pressed on and did three more songs with the poor lad looking very peaky and a tremendous smell hanging over us... Show must go an’ all! Crowd loved it, we had a great time and are being rebooked for a higher fee. We’ve not had a single issue at a gig in three years. I think all three years’ worth of minor niggles caught up with us in one night! Sorry, no pics, the pub was too full of people dancing for the engineer to even see the band and we were all busy dodging chunks!

As simple as it gets ( for me )

Rather simple. 9 Precisions. To be fair, one of them has rounds on it!

Well I got the gig (had to learn 11 original songs) and the guitarist told me that the effect in the OP was some sort of Big Muff

'78/'79 like this one, probably around £2500. This might be coming up for sale soon.... Rob

A sunday evening wedding for us last night (so glad I booked the morning off work today!). A beautiful converted farm venue called Apton Hall in Rochford, so, nice and local for most of us. The drummer was a guest at the wedding, and one of the guitarists lives about a 3min drive away so they could get in there early in the morning to do the main setup of drums and PA. Since we added an EV sub and upgraded our IEM system, we've been relying on our backline a lot less lately. So we decided this would be a good opportunity to eschew the backline and rely only on the PA and IEM. I'm pleased to report it worked well and was incredibly liberating to walk into the venue with a bass on my back, Helix in one hand and a guitar stand in the other. No need to fight over plug sockets at the back of the stage, just one power lead, a guitar lead, XLR to stage box, quick line check and I was set up. Great crowd who were up for a boogie from the start. Unusual set list for a wedding, however. The bride and groom and their friends are into more alternative music, so they asked us to play our party stuff in the first set and rockier stuff in the second, which is contrary to what we'd usually do, not to mention some of the requests we'd never normally play at a wedding (such as By The Way and Oughta Know) but I was happily surprised how well they went down with their guests. Rolled into bed around 1am, still glad I booked the morning off today! The next one is in a couple of weeks for a biker club in Dagenham - for a complete change of pace!

I've been playing around 45 yrs now but unless i'm playing songs regularly i just don't retain them. I'll get away with not playing them for a few months and a quick run thru brings it back. I tend to run thru both bands set lists at least once a week to make sure i'm on top of them at a gig and i've been in these bands for 5 yrs and 2 yrs. 😂 Dave

Giving it laldy with the punk band last Saturday.

I only play fretless so this is my simple little board. I've only just got the Zoom so haven't worked out any patches yet but it does have some nice effects that I'm liking.

Here's my trio of Teles. Admittedly, the reason I went for the Squire in particular was because the affordable Fender version is no longer readily available, but they are superb basses in their own right. Certainly a lot comfier to play than my old slab bodied Fender. I recently had a chance to play one of the new US reissues and, apart from the Fender being far more period accurate, there wasn't much difference in feel at all - apart from the Fender neck being fatter. My latest one, the blonde on the left, has a replacement pickup which is a lot hotter - it's got a more solid low end but loses some of that trebly clank that the stock pickup has. I'll know if the pickup's a keeper once I get some new DRs on it.

Been having a tidy and sort out of my gear but that means I can also have a play with a new setup on the board. Came up with this that I think will work with some extra pedal and switching options. Basics are tuner Big muff in a loop (send/return) so you can blend clean in (makes it useful for bass and cheaper than the ones everyone says work better for low end etc) Chorus and reverb in another loop Octave Looper pedal to try out. Hopefully will get chance to plug it in and give it a good try this week.

What a Waste - Ian Dury and The Blockheads

I’ve been thinking about this recently - I’ve never counted, but there must be a couple of hundred tracks I would be able to jam my way through. Partly I think it’s just experience - I’ve been playing more than 30 years - but partly I think it’s because I play them fairly regularly. last couple of years I’ve been called on to play a couple of Elton John numbers more regularly, and these have now “stuck”: they were new tracks to me, not heard before. I took the time to sit down with the tracks and wrote out some charts, which are hybrids of chords and the occasional reminder of an interesting little bass part which makes a verse or chorus recognisable. First two or three times I plays it live, I’ll use the chart and refer to it: I play through the track maybe 4-5 times in the week before the first gig. This seems to be enough to get it to stick - but I think a big part of it is enjoying the song, at least for me. It never feels like a chore - learning new music and finding interesting stuff in it. That seems to be what works for me, and the bonus is it really helps enjoy the gig an enjoying the music, with musicians who are enjoying it too. That infectious, smiley energy you get. Working with a drummer on the cool bits.

My upgraded Metro Express was a nice enough bass (VTC preamp, Hipshots, Di Marzio pickups etc) but I was really missing that B string... so off it went to a new owner and I have an MTD Kingston Z-5 incoming. Lightweight, 35" scale, asymmetrical neck, 3 band eq ticks all my boxes. Maple burl top, rosewood board, looking forward to it.

Pickguards-Pah !

Will has got a nice 73 jazz in at the moment, I’m holding out for a maple and black block one but it’s quite tempting , few dings in the neck though https://bassbros.co.uk/product/1973-fender-jazz-bass-4/

Alex is correct insofar as what he talks about, which is frequency response. As to whether by looking at charts you can tell what a speaker sounds like, you can. But that's 'charts' in the plural. A waterfall chart will tell you most of what a frequency response plot doesn't. Then there's THD, polar response, power compression and a half dozen more. Speaker emulation devices adjust frequency response, some high end studio plug-ins can adjust some other parameters, but none can do it all. The main thing they can't do is to vary all of the various parameters as a function of the volume that the speaker is being played at. If your charts are going to be truly accurate they have to be measured at various power levels, because they will change at various power levels. Even if you had software sophisticated enough to duplicate all of the charted results at one given power level it wouldn't be able to do so at any power level without an unaffordable level of processing, along with the necessary interface to tell the software at what power level it's operating at any given moment. That would require something with capabilities similar to Klippel analysis. It would be less expensive to run six different speakers.

I've had a UI24R since 2019 and I found it to be a really good mixer. On those rare occasion that 16 inputs aren't enough the UI has 20, that's so useful. I'ts not strictly an app that you use to control it, you connect via IP address, so any device can control it with any browser. I have two old iPad 3 that I hand out to musicians which still work just fine. It has 8 mono (or up to 4 stereo) auxes, but I have assigned 1 of the 2 headphone outputs to be a stereo aux (hardwired for drums or keys) too. (The other headphone out might be able to send another aux out, but I'd have to check if that's correct) There is a learning curve but I like the control layout and options. There's a really good FB user group, go there to read & learn all about it. It can be occasionally quirky but its awesome IMHO. If mine died I'd buy another in a heartbeat. My main mixer now for functions and PA jobs is an Allen & Heath SQ5 but the Ui24R is a very capable back up for me. I use the UI for my originals band as it's so portable. We run 4 stereo mixes and I'm about to build a splitter rack for our gigs so we can control our on stage monitoring and the house engineer can do his/her thing out front. I also have my trusty DL1608 which I rate highly too, great for smaller gigs. Mackie put together a lovely app to learn quickly & navigate.

I do have a small collection of basses but the main ones that I use are these: Spector NS-5XL My main recording bass, apart from fretless I haven't used anything else for the last 5 years of recordings (couple of LP's, EP's etc.) Spector Euro 5 Classic This is now my main gigging bass for one of the few bands I do live gigs with. This gets most of the action though as this band gigs the most. I'm subbing for an Iron Maiden cover band a couple of times a year and this is what I use for that gig Spector Euro LE1977 (the one on the right, left is it's sister, the LE1979) I don't use fretless that often and certainly not live but when I do use it for recordings and practice this is the one Warwick Thumb NT6

I have an explorer bass, no idea what brand it is, bought it off ebay years ago, but it doesn't play badly at all and has a single P bass pickup so sounds pretty P bassy. Needs all the paint stripping as whoever had it before me tried to paint on a wood effect... it looks awful! I'd love to have the time to do the work on it and then use it at the most inappropriate moments. Jazz gig... crack out the explorer!

I was at (and played) at Belladrum. Surprisingly, one of the best sounding basses I heard was a Westone Thunder 1A, by a band in the Seedlings tent (Nani maybe?). And worst were the 2 basses, especially the semi acoustic, played by KT Tunstall’s bass player (the bloke from Gorillaz apparently). All thump and no note….

Warwick mug & two Thumbs ;]

I'm glad you made that simple. 🤔

Lugging a double bass is rarely fun, and I can't change my car without taking it along to check the size. But I love the "theatre" an upright adds to a performance, and I love the 'thump' that they have. I just have a cheap unbranded one, but it sounds pretty good.

A Bitsa that plays well and sounds great with La Bella flats. 1971 neck - the tuners have been replaced, but have been on there for a long time! Resprayed body, and there's a big hole under the scratchplate where someone had added a second pickup

It’s a weird market. Some of the private sale prices on BC are higher than dealer prices with none of the benefits (new strings, ability to pay with a credit card, etc). As a reference, Bass Bros had a lovely 1976 Precision, all original with the case for £2500. Given their mark up must be 20%, I’d wait it out and see what you can find for around £2k.

Version 3? 😃 Mark

I've recently learned a couple of Blur basslines (Girls & Boys and Country House) and they're quite fun to play. The man makes some damned nice cheese as well.

Hah hah knowing how you feel about Coldplay that is some condemnation! But I agree. I've seen some vids of Scott's fave players and to a man they're pretty much all jazz fusion types who spend most of their time widdling above the 12th fret. The only thing worse (by a head) are 80s 'neo-classical' guitar shredders

I've converted my Spector basses to run at 18v rather than the stock 9v. Any excuse to switch on the soldering iron

By low cost I mean not the real budget ones, the ones in the £100 range. Certainly the nux, smoothhound and a few others list that as a feature.

Fiery Gun Hand - Cardiacs

No gigs this weekend. We had the Thursday night show at the Washington County Fair. If I had a choice I'd pick our 1.5 hour special event shows. It's less work and more money. Theater gigs are hard to come by. Most of these historical theaters are from the 1920s and there's not many around. Just so happens we have The Bend Theatre right in my home town, West Bend. We probably play there twice a year. Daryl

I kind of thought it'd be Dad's choices only, otherwise it'd be just another thread of people's tracks they like? Better let the man himself decide? .. 😁