bassbiscuits

I’ve had a couple of those double straps and never really got on with them. Instead they just seemed to pull my head forward, which wasn’t ideal.

Haven’t Franz Ferdinand just released a new album too? I think they’re still pretty active rather than being a nostalgia act.

The princely sum of £30 all in.

Courtesy of FB marketplace this weekend I picked up a Yamaha FG Junior JR2 3/4 size acoustic guitar, with its fairly decent padded gigbag and a fender wall hanger thrown in. It’s in pretty much unused condition - I lemon oiled the fretboard, gave it all a good wipe down and restrung it. The action could go down a little and the frets feel like they need a polish but with a good set up I’ll have a very decent little guitar for not much money. Also fits in the car boot nicely which means I won’t have to choose between taking my kids or my guitar whenever I go camping. Happy days.

Aha. The manual points out that: “Guitarists will be pleased to know that two of ZEDi-10FX's mono channels feature Guitar DI high impedance inputs, allowing guitars to be plugged straight into the mixer without the hassle and expense of carrying separate DI boxes.” Theres a push button with a pic of a guitar on it on the channels Im using. If I don’t press it you cant hear enough signal to use. If I do press it you get this massive hum. I’ll try using my DI pedal in the chain and not using the “guitar button.” Also wondered if 3/4 from tuner into XLR of mixer channel would get around it. hmm.

Not as far as I know. I’ve not got the mixer to hand at the moment but it’s always just worked with normal guitar leads. It’s only when effects which are connected to power supplies are involved that the noise starts.

Just guitar lead from acoustic to tuner and then tuner to 3/4 inch jack channel input on mixer.

One of them has a plastic earth pin (a One Spot) the other doesn’t (a Mooer). I tried both and gave up. I ended up using just a tuner running off battery and the hum disappeared.

So I play acoustic guitar, which usually goes straight into my little PA (a little Allen and Heath desk and two Mackie SRM350 powered speakers). The only pedals I use are a Korg Pitchblack tuner, and occasionally a Boss GE7 Eq pedal and a EBS compressor. However I’ve noticed at a couple of gigs (mainly the ones where you’re running a lot off one socket/extension) that whenever I add my pedals into the chain there’s a massive buzz thru the PA. I’ve swapped out each pedal, each guitar, two different power supplies and plugged them into to different extensions etc but still it happens. Even one single pedal and one single adaptor is enough to do it, so it’s not any individual pedal or the adaptor trying to draw too much power. The only way around it has been to stick with just a tuner running off batteries, which is perfectly silent. What am I missing here? Is this problem with venue wiring, nearby lighting, my leads (swapped them out too), my PA, or something else? It’s doing my head in.

Yup - the pub gigs I do are with my blues trio (all three of us sing and play) or as a solo performer (guitar, vocals, harmonica) for the even smaller places which don’t have the space or the budget for bands. I love playing in a trio. Plenty of room musically and onstage, we can travel light, plus fewer people to organise dates around too.

I’ve had a couple of sub-£300 basses I’ve bought blindly, with mixed results - one fine, the rest wrong for various reasons. But a punt I was willing to take. Wouldn’t do it for anything more expensive though.

Just back from doing a rare solo acoustic guitar/vocals gig. It turned into a brilliant evening. Was beset by technical gremlins at the start (buzzing power supplies, dodgy wiring and breaking a string on my main guitar in the first intro to the first song…). But just used my backup £40 Yamaha FG512SJ with a Seymour Duncan woody in the sound hole all gig and it sounded great. The venue usually has music on Saturdays, so Sunday afternoons currently seem quiet for passing trade (though a load of my friends and their mates came along and made a racket). Maybe Saturday nights would suit my rowdy loud playing more anyway. I needed a decent gig after a rubbish few weeks in several aspects of life so this one did the job perfectly. Very happy indeed. Edit - added the only photo I can find from the gig

Back around 1999 a sort of Brit pop / indie band I was in (weren’t we all?) did a gig in London at a place in Soho. We arrived to find we were billed as a jazz band, and our set was in between two drag act singers, so we didn’t exactly fit in musically or sartorially. When it came to be paid, the “promoter” told us there’d been a mistake and the fee was only half what we’d agreed (not even enough to cover the petrol money). To add insult, the van we’d hired had got a parking ticket while we are at the gig. On the plus side, no hang on. There wasn’t one.

There’s a hotel just off the M1/A50 roundabout which I was gigging at a couple of years ago. In the dark and the rain I missed the lane to access the hotel and then had to drive most of the way to Derby before I could turn around. Cursing, I eventually got back to the roundabout - and did exactly the same mistake of missing my turning again! By the time I got to the gig I was well cheesed off, late, properly stressed out and having pointlessly driven to Derby and back twice.

To be fair my sense of direction is awful so I can’t say too much. I was driving home from Wales last month when I noticed the surroundings were no longer familiar and realised I’d missed the entire M42 and driven through Birmingham.

An original glam metal band I was in played a gig up near Stoke in about 1992. It involved us a driving up in our various cars from Swansea - quite an outing. My dad drove me and my girlfriend, while the singer drove the guitarist and their girlfriends in another car. We got home about 3am. The singer’s car didn’t get home till 7am having somehow taken a wrong turn; alarm bells began ringing when they reached the outskirts of London, a mere 190 miles east of their destination. Looking at the map now I still can’t figure that one out.

No guilt about it - as a lifelong metal and rock fan, I still adore the Communards “Don’t Leave Me This Way,” oodles of 90s house music, and Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for Walking.”

Went onstage straight after a male stripper once at a social club gig. The stage was covered in slippery baby oil and an abandoned chair, and it’s fair to say many of the women in the audience would have preferred to see more of the stripper (though they had already seen all of him..) rather than a band of 40-something lads launching into Mustang Sally. Probably more Phoenix Nights than Spinal Tap tho.

Also a gig I did at the Tamworth Assembly Rooms back in 2021. First gig with that band. Went for a wee a couple of minutes before due onstage and there was some really good music playing in the toilet. Turned out to be our intro tape. Panicked and rushed back to the wings ready to go onstage and then played whole first half with my fly open. Nice.

The festival we did some years ago where it was the soundman was just a mate of the organisers who had a PA but didn’t have a clue what he was doing. The band before us sounded dreadful - it was just the monitor mix coming thru front of house. Our onstage sound was awful, everyone had the wrong mix anyway or none at all. Once it was obvious it was gonna be a mess we just spent the rest of the set laughing. We wondered how much worse it could get (a question which was answered when the next band started up and all the audience could hear was their click track coming out thru the front of house). Absolute shambles.

I’ve had a few Hiscox cases for acoustic guitars and basses. They end up spending most of their lives in my garage, unused. I’ve ended up with Protection Racket cases instead - not as rigid, and still bulky, but light and with shoulder straps and big pockets.

Iron Maiden “Running Free” in early 1986. I played violin in school (quite badly) before I started learning bass and worked out the main riff of the song on the fiddle first, holding it like a guitar.

I remember after lockdown taking a good while to get back to match fitness when gigging restarted. Same with singing. If I don’t sing regularly I lose some of whatever internal muscle tone / breathing etc is involved. Though back in 2002-2005 I stopped playing bass completely after a bad split with my band at the time. I concentrated on acoustic guitar instead, which in hindsight benefited my bass playing when I did eventually restart, by giving me another viewpoint and different understanding. Swings and roundabouts innit.