borntohang

I did a year or two with a big (as in 10 members) pseudo-latin group featuring some amazing players. We started off doing basic latin standards to moderate success, but after a few shows we had a chat about marketing and I pointed out that while most people don't actually like jazz, they do want to think of themselves as the kind of person who likes jazz. From there on we got a couple of good-looking singers and made decent cash off playing pop covers quickly arranged for three part harmony with a percussionist and a nylon guitar - maybe a trumpet solo if we felt flash. Unfortunately we just were a bit too early to get in on the youtube Postmodern Jukebox movement!

I like the headstock in a classic Burns/Shergold kind of way. The branding is a bit excessive but I don't know whether they'll actually print those covers like that?

Touch of overdrive, boost the highs, keep your action low, and pick hard to get some clang off the frets. Tone control all the way up. If you're wanting to get more specific he did use Hiwatts early on but basically all Hiwatt amps are built off the same circuit with different power sections anyway so there's not much in the guitar/bass distinction - anything valve and loud will get you there. He has an Ashdown signature designed to get that sound without blowing speakers.

I've used a Jag SS with the top four strings of a VI set as both a DGBE and piccolo bass tuning. It's a fun sound but not a VI really. I also found I had to remove the ball ends from a set of strings and slip the VI strings through them to keep them in the Squier bridge.

A couple of years back I depped with a soul group who had a particularly unpleasant keyboard player who was also incapable of holding his drink - after a week or two we were all thoroughly fed up with him and only one of the eight of us was still willing to bunk with him. On the last night of the tour we were booked into four doubles at a Travelodge, so we finally get in at 2am and discover to our delight that the hotel have given me and the guitarist two double beds in our room. After a fortnight in a van this was sheer luxury! We did the usual hotel room appreciation things (sink vs. kettle game, hotel olympics, spot the naked neighbour, etc) and then nipped back out to the van for the spare bags only to find the keyboardist and his unlucky roommate sat glumly in the foyer. "They've given our room away somehow. They've booked us a taxi to the next place down the road and we'll get a room each, but it'll be at least half an hour drive each way and we'll have to be up at 5 to book a taxi and make van call..." They looked so miserable that I actually felt obliged to offer them our spare double, but before I could open my mouth the guitarist looked over at me and right then I understood how people could believe in psychic communion, as our understanding was both instant and complete. "That sucks mate. See you in the morning." Slept like a baby.

Great fun that and a lovely team to work with. Doing the instrumental walk-ons was a laugh too. https://twitter.com/SoccerAM/status/1167735213172154368

Just done soundcheck and this live mix is brilliant. Not sure whether any bass will come out at other end but my IEMs are wicked! Declined to take a volley on account of a weak constitution or something.

Who said live music on TV was dead?? OK, so it's actually a football show but still... I'm actually a terrible choice for this as I have put considerable effort into avoiding sports since I left school and will therefore be invoking my session player rights so that I don't have to take a free kick on national TV.

What are all these bullcrap harmonics and sustain about? 😠 Sounds like a goddamn fence wire being struck with a stick. Why doesn't it go "burrr burr burrrr" anymore? In seriousness, I'm aware they make short scales with a bit more harmonic definition but I've been firmly in the mudbucker camp for a few years now. I've just picked up a Jazz for the first time in years and a very weird tonal experience - I was using a backline GK rig and in-ears for the first show instead of my usual Ashdown so there was spare top end flying around everywhere and I had a few moments of "ohhhh, so that's what that line sounds like!". I'm tempted to drop to flatwounds just to lose a bit of the sustain and get more fundamental but we'll get through a few more shows in the current setup before I dispose of the child with the waste cleaning byproduct, if you get me.

I'm VTDI to FOH nearly all the time but I haven't been brave enough to drop the amp for monitoring yet. If you've got your own engineer then I wouldn't hesitate but I do like having the gut rumble there if needed - I'll happily use any old garbage the venue has onstage as an amp though.

Purchased a Tech 21 preamp from Gillento; posted next day and arrived within three or four days. Very neatly packaged and everything as advertised - a pleasure to deal with.

Gonna be a few clunks in this story so I apologise in advance! About three weeks back we were at the Montreux Jazz Festival as support for Sting in this big Stravinski Auditorium place. I was buzzing because a) Montreux! and b) Josh Freese is drumming for Sting at the moment and I'm a big DEVO fan; didn't get to meet Josh in the end but was great to hear them soundcheck. We'd just come offstage and were hanging around waiting for the risers to come down when this tidy American lady in a comedy cowboy hat/camo t-shirt combo starts talking to our singer. Assumed she was one of the promoters and left them to it, but when we came back after loadout our singer sat by herself having a nervous fag break: "She started chatting about the set and I was just doing the usual diplomatic answers cause I really wanted to get to the bar but couldn't help feeling I knew her from somewhere. Then as she walks off one of the management team goes past with a "Hi, Shania!" and I twigged. It was the cowboy hat that did it." All together now: "So you're Shania Twain..."

Sub'n'Up is a fantastic POG killer but will really struggle with an OC2 sound sadly. Does sound absolutely huge with the right tweaks and can also do various modulation options if you dig into the software but the latency killed it for me a bit. I swapped out for a Brainwaves which has slightly fewer options for straight octave but at least properly lays into the weird stuff. In terms of analog octaves my two recommendations would be the Aguilar Octamizer (massive, phat, and incredibly stable tracking) and the Red Witch Zeus (glitchy in a good way, lots of fuzz options, probably overkill if you just want an OC2).

You're obviously entitled to not believe me here, but there's not much difference between fifty and fifty-thousand. 🙂 Once the audience is over a certain size they all just become the multi-headed hydra of Crowd, which is mostly a lot of noise and a bunch of dots that you can pretend aren't there. I've been a lot more nervous doing theatre gigs to thirty people where you can see every pair of eyes in the room and in between every song there's this awful hushed silence that you feel the need to fill... Enjoy the show tonight and play as if it's Wembley regardless of the size of the room!

She really does. She's one hell of a front-person too. If I'd been performing at that level when I was her age I'd have been extremely happy! Honestly (and whisper it) the big stages are a bit of an anticlimax... I mean, I wouldn't change it for anything in the world, obviously, and there's nothing like seeing 60,000 hands clapping to your tune but 95% of them are so far in the distance you're basically playing for the front rows anyway. Apart from a few pre-show jitters on the first night it's been smooth sailing nervewise. Berlin was probably the closest - I walk out first to get to my station so our camera guy caught my expression as I came up the stairs and there was a definite moment of "OK, that is a metric sh*ttonne of people!" but I recovered gracefully.

A little bit of fluff for sure but she's at the level where she gets to tour with who she wants. From what I remember she picked Vance up after seeing him at a festival; Kid Cut Up she saw in some club somewhere and he's been on tour with her for two years now; there's a songwriter called Wrabel who was on one song on her last record and she's taken him out every night to sing it. She doesn't have to do any of that, but she looks after her people. For us the agent saw us at a showcase, got a recording in front of her, she approved it and we were on as long as we could afford the travel costs. We've got a full set of Montreux but it's not up on YouTube yet unfortunately. I'll definitely drop it in when I get it though.

Hello Basschat; my name is Richard (formally Richard II when onstage), I am a session musician of the (currently) semi-professional variety, I have just returned from my first genuine big boy tour, and I would like to tell you about it! A couple of months back I mentioned this would be happening in another thread and it was suggest that I post a trip report - the last month has been something of a blur and this will mostly be an attempt to collate some of my memories into a parsable format so I thought there might be some interest in reading about something not many people get to do. Wembley - Night 2. Please excuse the hair... For roughly the last 18 months I have been working with a lovely set of musicians called Bang Bang Romeo covering various roles including bass, guitar, and keyboards. They aren't famous (yet), but are a little higher up the ladder than most club bands so it's been a real pleasure to drop onto most of the gigs they've been getting. I've known them on and off for a long time as we're all from the same town and there are only so many people working at that level in the local area so it became inevitable that our paths would collide. About a year into my stint our agent told us to clear our summers and kiss our wives goodbye as we had dropped onto a big tour. He admittedly says this a lot, but this time it turned out to be a genuinely life-changing run of 14 dates supporting P!nk on the UK Beautiful Trauma Tour around the UK and Europe, with an option for another 6 dates if we didn't manage to show our entire asses on the first leg. I was nervous but just about keeping it together until I received the tour manifest through and found that the SMALLEST date on the run was a 30,000 cap stadium... The next six months were mostly a blur of rearranging songs for maximum impact and paring the set down to a machine-precise 25 minutes until about a month before we left when it really started to hit home that this was happening. In particular there was a moment of panic where the other guitarist and myself were doing a stock-take of equipment and realised that we had no cables long enough to reach our pedal boards from where the amps would be at the back of the stage. We'd all played some big events before, but this was a whole new kettle of fish and we were very much the amateur chancers on this tour - yes we were playing two nights at Wembley but right now we were still fitting rehearsals around our day jobs! In the end it was probably the best introduction to the touring life that we could hope for. Pink hires the best in the business and every single person we met was lovely to us. I was however reminded on regular occasions that this is unusually cushy for touring life and I shouldn't get used to this standard in the future... Her band introduced themselves to us early on and we got quite chatty with them over the course of the tour; Justin Derrico is the loveliest guy as well as a MONSTER shredder who incidentally has not just the best LP with piezo sound, but possibly the best acoustic sound I've ever heard in a live setting. Regarding gear, we are luckily good friends with the Hiwatt UK guys who kitted us out with rental amps and overnight shipped a replacement when one went down at Paris, so I can't give enough love to those guys. Initially I took my Tokai SG and a second guitar out, but after a string of equipment failures in the second week I was left with no usable guitars. I contacted Gibson Germany in a blind panic who very kindly talked me off the ledge and provided me with two gorgeous black SGs as loaners for the remainder of the dates. In the middle of the run we also flew from Belgium to Switzerland to play Montreux Jazz Festival with Sting and before you ask, no I can barely believe that particular sentence myself; at one point I actually burst into hysterical laughter in the airport shuttle because the whole thing had begun to seem so ludicrous. I think we stayed in Switzerland for about 18 hours before catching another flight back for the Wembley run (see above regarding hysterics) but we were privileged enough to play a full 50 minute set in the Stravinsky Auditorium with the best in-ear sound I've ever heard. While I can't hope to entirely do justice to the legendary spirits of improv that have walked those halls, we certainly gave it everything and it was possibly the most technically perfect set we've ever played. We also dropped onto the lakeshore to do a session for Swiss national radio with me on bass in the traditional four piece lineup while our tour bassist (Phil) chilled in the lake for a bit. I initially thought I got the better half of that bargain until we spent an hour sweating under a brutally hot tent canopy trying to parse the French-speaking interviewer's questions as Phil gambolled and frolicked in the blissfully cool waters of Lake Geneva behind him. I'm incredibly sad to be back now, but at least we have a few dates left on the run as I go back out for the Scandinavian leg of Copenhagen, Oslo, and Horsens in August. I'm not counting the days, honest... I'll spare the gory (and fairly tedious for those who aren't interested in tour buses!) details of each individual show, but here are a few highlights: Mercedes-Benz Arena, Stuttgart Mercedes-Benz Arena, Stuttgart - "Hello... gods, where are we? Hello Stuttgart!" Olympiastadion, Berlin - screw Wembley, what a venue! La Defense Arena, Paris - the gig prior to the SG taking a tumble! Montreux Jazz Festival - extra fly date supporting Sting. HELLOOOOOO WEMBLEY! (Night 1) Thanks for bearing with me this long - I'll be happy to answer rig questions or anything anyone might be curious about in later posts. If anyone is still interested in checking out more informal pics of backstage/touring life then my tour instagram can be found HERE.

I had the same issue with the PB Mini powered from a daisy chain - my soundman referred to it as Ming the Merciless because it was making an awful buzz through the FoH. Annoyingly, when I switched to a Truetone CS6 I STILL had the same problem which panicked me a bit until I realised I was running it on the daisy chain output; as soon as I switched it to an isolated output it was fine and my two drive pedals don't mind the daisy.

I suspect Lemmy might have struggled with just a clean DI from the bass!

The headstocks on those are a bit neck dive inclined, but I doubt you'd lose much weight with those piddly holes! The small ones might be for guitar tuners for a VI conversion considering there's been a bridge replacement too, but damned if I know what those big ones are for!

I'm not fond of MAGs, but I've got an EVO rack and we're using an ABM head and 410 on tour at the moment. I really like the cab but I'm unfortunately under-utilising the head a bit due to the presence of a Sansamp in front of everything. I really just use it for monitoring and room EQ but I'd be happy to gig it straight with the valve kicked in. Met some of the team last summer at an industry do and they were really helpful. Chatted through some options for fly dates and similar and got a business card and an open invitation to call from the MD, which was nice of him considering he'd never heard of me before I rocked up to his stall.

You'll need to investigate a work visa if you're getting paid - wouldn't like to risk a visitor visa if you're doing something prominently public. If you're dealing with an events organiser they should be comfortable arranging that for you or pointing you to someone who can. If they can't then that's a bit of a red flag! Regarding the legal system and complications arising thereof, Bahrain isn't Saudi Arabia so just don't take any drugs on the flights with you or get involved with politics while you're there and you should be good.

We're at that awkward phase where there are enough people coming to shows that we get recognised, but not so big that it isn't still awkward when they find you at the next one and ask why you declined their friend request! On our last tour we pulled up at a service station at about 3 in the morning feeling extremely weary and the instant we opened the van doors got mobbed by teenagers who apparently had nothing better to do than hang around a McD's on the M6 in the early hours. They didn't know who we were but there's only so many options for people travelling in vans at that time of night and we weren't dressed like brickies. "Are you in a band? What are you called? Who's the singer?!" We told them we were the Arctic Monkeys and that our roadie was Alex Turner, then legged it inside while they mobbed him for pictures. Sorry lad, but someone had to go under the bus and you're getting paid to be here... On a separate note, my singer is extremely distinctive so she gets recognised a bunch. Her dad is also a well known soap actor - not exactly rich or famous but you'd probably recognise his face if you've watched much British TV in the last twenty years or so. We've really enjoyed watching his growing discomfort as people have started stopping him in the street... to ask if he can take a picture of them with his daughter!

It's an incredibly pointless feature and I have no idea who they think it helps!