cheddatom

Yeh, amazing gig, although I thought it could have been louder, which is a first for me! Sam Wilkes is amazing but the keys player really stood out to me. Incredible solos

I've seen Louis Cole in various guises a few times. I am very into drums and drummers. He has the machine-like chops of JoJo Mayer but with the groove and feel of Benny Greb. It seems to me he's renowned in jazz circles but you don't see him mentioned in drummer circles very much at all. Absolutely incredible musician.

I have a real life situation here. A drummer based in Stoke started posting some pretty extreme things on social media. He would describe it as simply expressing his own opinions, but in a lot of people's minds he's crossed several lines. He's lost all of his gigs, been barred from a bunch of venues, and lost his job as a drum teacher. I have absolutely no problem with people who are opposed to immigration to whatever extent, as long as they can express their point of view without any hatred. I suspected this guy was crossing lines by accident. Because I like the guy, I imagined that he has some reasonable views about problematic immigration, but that he expresses them by sharing some unfortunate memes etc. 

So, specifically, he shared a meme about a convicted sex offender called Zainal Osman. The meme grabs a headline describing him as a yorkshireman, and then laughs at the idea that he could be from yorkshire. I thought I'd give the drummer a private message, just to point out that he could very well be born and bred in yorkshire. There's absolutely no evidence that I can find online to the contrary. This drummer just laughed at me and argued that he couldn't possibly be British. I explained the facts of the matter IE he could very well have a British passport which would make him just as British as the rest of us, and he stopped replying for a couple of weeks. Then he sent me another meme: 

I replied "I've no idea whether they're German. You can't tell by the colour of their skin, if that's what you mean?" and again he stopped replying

So, publicly he's trying to walk the "I'm not racist, I just..." line, but privately, he's being openly racist.

This guy has basically lost his livelihood because he couldn't turn off youtube, and I think that's a pretty sad state of affairs.  What's worse is it seems more and more common. People around here are openly talking about how "islam is not compatible" etc. and it's all driven by social media. It's worse than crack!

if you're using it as a limiter (smoothing out peaks) and you place it between your bass and your distortion, then the distortion will not react to your playing dynamics as much. It won't get dirtier when you dig in harder, because the limiter will tame that. For that reason, I would like a limiting compressor to be after distortion in the chain.

I love your band so much

There's loads of information on this in the Effects sub forum, but yes it makes a difference where in the chain you put it. You might be using the compressor to add punch, or you might be using it to even out dynamics, which are very different applications. The best position in your effects chain depends on what you're using the compressor for. 

Well I feel a little silly now. "use the search" indeed! 

😂

I have both a squier musicmaster and a bronco and could do with a replacement bridge to give me adjustment on individual saddles. I've had a look around. It looks like either £15 on Aliexpress (never ordered from them before) or quite a lot of money. Surely there's something fairly cheap I can buy in the UK and drop in?

And another single...

15 minutes ago, Leonard Smalls said:

It was, at least in the acoustic stage! Couldn't see you because of the acres of black cloth on the sides of the stage!

I found the Empress, Opera and Casbah all suffered from over loud kick swamping everything at the bottom. Insufficient gating, perhaps coupled with metalhead drum obsession?

On the videos I've seen you can clearly hear everything FOH at our Opera set. Obviously the phones have a built in hi-pass which will help with the old "Subs go brrrr" problem. For us it seemed like the stage crew couldn't be arsed. The monitor guy didn't turn up until 3:06 and we were due on at 3:05, which I think tells you all you need to know

The acoustic stage is always a nightmare for sound, or at least it is since they moved it upstairs. I just get on with it. The guy running the stage is such a weird funny old punk, it's worth doing the gig just to have a good/bad natured argument with him back stage 😂

9AM start for me yesterday to pick up the guitarist and a bunch of gear, then a long drive through constant traffic to Blackpool. A bunch of jobsworth's checking the gear at the load in bay which is unusual for Rebellion. One lad stopped me

"I need to put a tag on your hardware case"

What's the point of that?

"It's a security measure, it shows that it's been searched"

Do you want to search it then?

"No, I trust you, you don't have any drugs in there do you?"

No mate, the drugs are in my other bag 🤷‍♂️

Then the stairs. So many stairs. All the way up to the Opera House to play our first set. It's such a massive stage and they barely even line checked us. The sound on stage was abysmal. They had the guitarists' amp modeller clipping so it was just a horrible fizzy mush. We struggled through but seemed to go down really well. I've seen some footage since and the sound was fine FOH so they must have had separate feeds on the guitar. Very reassuring! 

After that were more stairs up to the Almost Acoustic stage. So many stairs. For this "acoustic" stage, the only hard and fast rule is "no bass drums". I'm sure I've posted on here about this before but my work around is to put a mic in a tupperware tub and hit it with a standard kick pedal. It's so weird that they prefer to plug in this contraption than mic up an acoustic bass drum, but it is what it is, and we've done it loads of times before, so we cracked on. This room is a nightmare for sound. A very distinct slap back echo on everything. It's OK when I'm in charge of the groove but when the guitarist is on his own it can put him off. Anyway, once again, we seemed to go down really well

Lots of new fans, sold loads of merch, and had a good laugh. 

So many stairs on the way out. Then the lift was broken at the carpark. I was on the top floor. My legs would like a rest now

Ace to see @Leonard Smalls sounding tight AF, trousers in full effect!

We've not been as busy recently, feels like ages since I've posted! We were supposed to have a big slot at Northern Kin festival on Sunday but that festival, along with a load of others, went bust. We managed to put together a show a Billy Bootleggers in Nottingham instead. One support act, then our 30 minute "acoustic" set for Rebellion Festival next weekend, then our latest album in full, then another 10 songs.

We arrived at 1:30. The sound engineer was outside, "no staff here until 2pm". Apparently this was known to our front man so god knows why he wanted to get there so early. He was desperately hungry and went to order some over priced pizzas while we waited. Then it turned out the staff had locked themselves out of the venue so we had to wait another half an hour for someone else.

Finally load in at 2:30 in the world's smallest lift. I was soaked with sweat by the time I'd set my drums up. Boiling in there! 

Sound was fine and the venue was rammed by the time we went on. The acoustic set was fun, but I really was soaked by the end of that. Everyone else got a nice 5 minute break while I re-jigged the drums for the "proper" set. Our latest album has some very intense and difficult drumming on it, for which I can only blame myself, but after playing it all the way through, and then another 8 songs from our back catalogue, I was absolutely done. I could literally wring out my t-shirt. 

Anyway, absolutely wonderful gig in every way but I really, really wish I'd booked today off to sleep and hydrate.

22 hours ago, AlexDelores said:

Last night was a frustrating one. All day wedding so we did the ceremony and then I hit my cajon for an hour during the drinks. 
 

The evening was okay. Very receptive audience! But, possibly the highest ceiling we’ve ever encountered made the low end so boomy. First set sounded terrible in my ears but apparently wasn’t that bad out front. Spent the break tweaking the eq on my B6 and our Bass drum pedals’ module. And, the second set was a lot better.

 

The frustration with of weddings of course is the quick evening turnaround not allowing a fantastic soundcheck & the fact that it’s just the two of us. It’s hard to tweak on the fly when we have issues. 
 

That paired with the fact that I’m still recovering from a pretty bad fall a few weeks ago which blew my knee up like a balloon, thus making it hard to kick my bass drum pedals for 1.5 hours made it one of those gigs where I was in my head a lot and not really as present as I would of liked… Oh well, still a great night enjoyed by all it seems. 
 

4 weddings coming up this week starting tomorrow so on to the next 🙏

What's the bass drum setup if you don't mind? It sounds like something I could use

On 27/06/2025 at 20:22, Happy Jack said:

I'm using Timetree but most of the musos I play with are technophobes so actually it's only me using it.

 

I've had problems with shared Google calendars, because of course you have to log out of your own Google account in order to access them.

 

At least, that's how it used to work.

It's never worked like that. You share the calendar with your own google account, and it appears (or not if you like) overlaid on your own google calendar. I have loads on mine

A jubilee clip came off a pipe under the bonnet of our old band transit. A lad fixed it for us with a ratchet strap from his pickup. I assumed the boss had had it fixed but I asked him about it a few years later and apparently it had sailed through 3 MOTs before he swapped it for a new transit

couldn't you have a little lamp on the floor pointing at your pedals and set list?

The album is out now! Streaming links here: https://headsticks.ffm.to/thebestthingontv

CDs, Vinyl and bundles here: https://headsticks.co.uk/shop

And the only other video we've managed to do so far...

On 01/04/2025 at 21:41, binky_bass said:

Still don't get it... Doesn't sound like anything particularly remarkable to me! 

you listened to Vulfpeck and didn't find anything remarkable about the bass playing? Wow!

Very late here, last week we did Wednesday 6pm and Thursday 9pm at Bearded Theory Woodland Stage. It's a big festival and really suited to us. I camped over for the weekend after the Thursday set which was loads of fun. Great crew, great sound, great crowd, doesn't get better

Sometimes you just have to leave before the end of the gig. I think there's a polite way to do it. Say bye to the band(s) before they go on if possible. Should be common courtesy really. 

I'm on drums in Headsticks but our bassist is awesome. He's playing a Fender American P into an Ashdown Rootmaster into a Barefaced stack. Impeccable timing, tasteful fills, a proper bassist's bassist. The full album is out 1st June but there are a couple of singles out already. Here's God Song featuring the legendary Steve Ignorant in the video

P.S this is recorded, mixed and mastered by myself and I always welcome any constructive criticism

6 minutes ago, PaulWarning said:

it's certainly a young man's game, there's a lot of truth in the saying "if you've not made it by the time you are 30 you're not going too"

Our latest guitarist is 22, brings the average age of the band down to slightly under 50 🤣.

it's hard work gigging all over the country, I guess that's why there's personnel changes invovled with some bands, I don't think Headsticks have had that problem have they?

Yeh, same line-up for almost 14 years now! I think the main reasons we've done relatively well are

1. We're all pretty flexible with our jobs so we can finish early to get on the road and take random time off etc.

2. Our frontman makes and sells merch for a living, so in the early days, he'd sell the merch to the band on credit giving us time to build up cash. He's also constantly changing designs etc. so merch became a big thing for us, and brings in the cash to fund the physical product.

We've been keeping the diary pretty clear the last year or so hoping for more support slots to bigger bands akin to BigRedX. Unfortunately it's not paid off for us. The one offer we had was a full tour for £80 per night. We're too old to be sleeping in the van so it'd cost us circa £500 a night for hotels, fuel, food etc. Worth the risk in some opinions but we didn't take it in the end.

1 hour ago, PaulWarning said:

surprised that you're not getting playlisting or airplay, I last saw you at at last years Bearded Theory, you had a decent crowd, I guess the fact I see you get on at smaller festivals has skewed my judgement, just looked at your plays on Spotify, and yes they're not that great.

You do do a lot of gigs around the country which is good for album sales, Verbal Warning have been stained by doing mostly covers gigs locally, we struggle to get any originals gigs these days, one comment for a local promoter when we asked about a support slot for a punk gig (999) he was putting on "Why would people pay to see you when they can see you for free in the local pub?" 

There are some local originals bands around but they struggle to get any gigs at all, a conundrum for sure

Yeh it's frustrating Paul. Bearded Theory went great, then they put us on on the Wednesday afternoon this year! We played Beautiful Days a few years back, went down a storm, never asked back. etc etc. I think maybe we're just too old to really get anywhere. Anyway, it's good fun and pays for the beers!

1 hour ago, BigRedX said:

 

Thanks!

 

We've been toying with the idea of a vinyl version of the album, but as we'll be funding it completely ourselves, it's difficult to justify the cost when it's 2-4 times more expensive than CDs depending on the quantity and packaging. And as I said previously I still have 300 copies of the Terrortones album that right now are unsellable, plus the fact that for our audience CD still seems to be the most popular format.

Extensive gigging for decent fees means we've always had the cash for physical products. We're a very lucky band in many ways!

1 hour ago, nige1968 said:

 

Pick in pic

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5ylnyrydl0o

hah, nice one, I should probably go see it for myself, it's only round the corner!

Just now, BigRedX said:

 

That's excellent. Can I be cheeky and ask you who you are using for the CD and vinyl production, how many of each you are having done and what it is costing? You can PM me if you don't want to share that info in public.

The album is going to be distributed physically through FOAD Records, not sure what the deal is there but I think they made the vinyl. 100 each of 3 colours. 

CDs are through a company called Birnam https://www.birnamcd.com/

I'd guess we went for 1000 of them and it'll take 18 months to shift them all - that's been the case for the last few albums

I'm not sure about costs sorry, as you can tell, I don't get involved in that side of things.