borntohang

I think I'm officially classed as a multi-instrumentalist now as I get calls for guitar, bass, and keys, so I have started over at least three times plus dabbled in a few other instruments where I'm not totally fluent but have learned to play one or two tunes for a specific gig. Obviously playing within the fretted string family is easier than jumping to sax, but I find that once I can play a few chords/scales on something I can work the rest out as we go and I am by no means an unusually gifted or intuitive player - average at best and a lazy student to boot. A significant amount of musical information and ensemble-playing skills are transferrable between instruments, so you're in a much better position than a true beginner and should catch up very very quickly once you've got a bit of technique together. You already know the theory, your brain knows the relationship between note intervals, you know how to fit into a group context, and you have lots of gigging experience. The rest is just about getting your weedy sax fingers to catch up to the speed of your hench bass brain. Incidentally, horn players are nearly always in demand as they collectively tend to expect payment and mostly work on the session pro basis (turn up on the night, read from the dots, leave before teardown with cash in hand). There will be plenty of ensembles/bands happy to take on an enthusiastic amateur with previous experience in a band situation.

You might not be able to deliver blistering chromatic runs quite as fast any more, but I seriously seriously doubt it's a career-ending injury for you. There might be a bit of adjustment time and you might have to rely on your index and little finger more, but you'd be surprised how quick you can get back to a point you're happy with it. Incidentally from my time working in a venue I saw enough young and beginner bassists using one fretting finger and one plucking finger to play perfectly well, and they didn't have your years of experience to fall back on.

I don't know what Album charts he's looking at as I don't know when the clip was recorded. but 12-18th July there were either two or three bands formed this century in the top 40 (Maroon 5 were active but not under the current name until 2001) and the previous week there were either one or two (M5 strikes again). I don't think that's a particularly shocking conclusion for singles either though. Young people don't generally buy albums so the album charts are weighted to the elderly; labels prefer solo artists because they're cheaper to run; nobody can afford to be in a band on the pennies it pays non-songwriters; none of these rules apply to Taylor Swift who dominates the charts so completely they're going to have to create a new one for just her and Ed Sheeran to fight over. Incidentally I did some math earlier and out of the 184 weeks this decade, 79 had a band at number one in albums and 45 of those were from this century. I do disagree with his reading of 'band' as it includes Take That and Steps, but excludes Springsteen and Paul Weller; if you're prepared to branch out to 'solo artists who primarily work with a live band' you get another 20 or so which just drops you over 50%.

I was about to say yes, the very same but looking at the lineup to find the year they clearly never played... I DID however see Simian Mobile Disco who famously had a hit collab with Justice, which must be where I got all this from?? My brain actually made a little comedy brakes-screeching car crash noise reading through the lineups and realising I had created an entirely false memory. I distinctly remember the cross hanging over the stage and everything. Bizarre moment! SMD were very good. They had this brilliant stage setup with a central console of synths, right...

I saw Justice at Summer Sundae about a decade back. They had a brilliant stage setup with a central console of synths and sequencers that they both walked around with the glowing Cross logo hanging above it all - looked like some Star Trek/horror crossover. Very enjoyable and perfect evening festival closers.

Squier VM or CV 5s are both nice quality. Sire are probably a little more spec for the price, but don't hold resale quite as well.

Melvin has been back as a director for Glastonbury Events since 2022.

Glastonbury is organised by Melvin Benn/Festival Republic who do all the big festivals and (from working on the staff side of these festivals) have a generally excellent grasp of crowd dynamics which is why crowd crushes are luckily so vanishingly rare compared to the size of the huge crowds wandering around these gigs. Sometimes you can't predict whether an artist will catch a moment, sometimes you're hamstrung by what's happening with the rest of the line-up negotiations, sometimes they can only do a certain time slot due to other scheduling issues. There is also a difference between people feeling unsafe and the stage actually reaching rated capacity - ideal world you don't want either to happen, but A is unfortunate whereas B is an immediate intervention like the Sugababes shutdown. I will say that of the dozen or so festivals I have worked Glastonbury is uniquely difficult to police because of the site layout and size. Leeds/Reading is easy as you have two big open air arenas and two tents with plenty of wide open space between and exits from every side of the stage; Glastonbury is anywhere up to 20 stages of all sizes and some of the passages between them are pretty narrow for the size of the crowd movement.

They're really driving the price point down on these - there was also an Active 5 and 4 string with blocks & binding neck and 2 band EQ. On the six string side there was an affinity Jaguar for £279 which looked pretty neat.

My old man has been going as a steward for the last 15 years or so - albeit staying in a camper rather than a tent now he's the wrong side of 70. He just wanders around to catch random stages if not given guidance so I usually send him a few things to check out. Sent him off to Heilung this year and got a "what the hell was all that?" message back. I thought they were a weird lineup pick at first, but actually I've realised they're perfect - you want to wander round a stage you've never seen before, slightly wobbly on cider, and find a tribe of Scandinavians leathering drums with human bones over a drone backing. Glasto moment. He set off at 10PM last night and got back to Yorkshire at 5AM this morning, which isn't bad. Last time I went with him the flooding meant we spent 5 hours queuing to even get out of the car park.

Brian knows Nash quite well (he seems to know half of the industry, because that guy is a crazy gearhead) and Gaslight use a bunch of his kit. I briefly met up with them on the last UK tour and Ian mentioned that Brian had commissioned Nash to build two 335s for them after the Horrible Crowes album - apparently the only two he's ever built. Ian got a red one and Brian got a white one that ended up getting smashed up somehow.

I've been on Tidal since Neil Young took his back catalogue off Spotify (I realise he's on again now) and it's been good. Migration of playlists was as simple as using an app to transfer it over and the catalogue access has been 1:1 so far. I don't use the FLAC stuff for streaming so can't comment. Also don't know if my 0.00005p or whatever Tidal pays over Spotify per stream makes much of a difference to anyone, but every little helps. My main complaint is that I can't contribute to the communal playlist in the band van any more, so I just make myself inconvenient and get somebody else to add songs for me. 🙂

FC will be good. I assume they couldn't peel Lydon away from LA to do a couple of low key benefit shows? He lost his wife in 2023 so perhaps he just has different priorities now. Bush Hall is a great venue anyway. We played there in 2022 and it's an absolutely stunning room - would be a real loss if it went under.

That's called "being a pocket player" when you're putting it on your CV. As long as you hit the chord on time you can have an entire career in rock music not venturing out of the root-fifth-octave box. Never a bad idea to want to learn more, but nobody was born instantly knowing this stuff - they had to put the hard work in exactly the same as you.

I met a guy in the car park of a festival to buy a bass. We turned up same time as him, I asked him if it worked and was he really, really, sure and then we walked into the festival and onstage with it. Took it on live TV next morning too as we were playing Soccer AM. I don't think I actually had another bass for backup as all our rental guitars had just gone back after a tour and it was a travel date so wasn't gonna be home. Luckily it was great and became my main touring bass!

I had a keyboardist who insisted on wearing bright orange chunky trainers with his formal trousers. Luckily we weren't at function gigs and trended towards the bohemian look anyway, but it did spoil the mood a bit. We started stacking him further and further behind the horn section until eventually he was playing in the wings, but I don't think he even noticed as long as he got enough solo airtime.

I've been in a Devo tribute for seven years now - our outfits are as reasonably close as budget allows and our singer luckily has an uncanny resemblance to Mark. I happen to shave my head which matches my counterpart, but it wasn't intentional. Beyond that we just play the songs as we would want to hear them played with plenty of attitude and has always gone down well. We've done rearrangements of some of the synth-heavy stuff for more guitars and don't use any track or clicks. We have one singer instead of three and the 'wrong' musicians play synth so sometimes we have a real bass instead of a synth, or some other combination. I think our general attitude has been to recreate the energy and attitude of the early live shows rather than the recorded versions - I had three bootlegs I considered 'source material' and we worked from those. We don't do any banter at all because when we did people actually complained, so now we just play through with either transitions or jumping immediately into the next song. I can get 60 minutes into a 90 minute set before we pause long enough to need to say anything... I sometimes get compliments about the accuracy of my synth sounds which is funny because they're all pretty basic pads and basses; if the situation arose then I could actually live patch most of it on a vintage MiniMoog for authenticity, but we just use a little digital Novation instead. Very bare bones.

The first ever 'tour' I did as a teenager was with a wet indie band with a tendency towards 6 or 7 minute atmospheric songs. All very heartful but complete mood-killers. We were playing Whistlebinkies in Edinburgh on the Friday night and turned up for soundcheck to find a topless guy on the dance floor with the soundman pouring a bottle of vodka over his head - the evening went downhill from there. Eventually we played to three English rugby teams who, while totally uninterested in experiencing our wet but heartful indie ballads, had the courtesy to not physically remove us from the stage; I'm pretty sure the bar staff turned the jukebox back on before we could finish playing. There's a VHS of it somewhere which I've never dared to watch.

Seye is a cool guy and that's a really interesting design. I had a Map bass for a while and dug it, so would like to try one of these. Unfortunately with the Eastwood strategy I think they'll all be pre-orders and a single run so not likely to hit shops.

The VTDI is the same circuit just with a Blend, and also you can turn the Bite setting off (sub filter as I understand it). There's not much extra that you won't get out of the Deluxe but I do understand your dislike of the presets thing - I tend to use the DI as a single set and forget amp sound, but having the loop would be cool.

I'm the one entering the Richard O'Brien contest. Tattoos is Ray Loverock (hence the knuckles) who we also worked with when I was sessioning on guitar - nice guy and great player.

I felt he was putting himself in a precarious position regarding me not dobbing him in to his wife to be honest, but he knew how to play the game. One of the last old-school road monsters: two shirts is a costume change, that'll be an extra £50 thanks! Three disco cans on a stick is a light show, that'll be another £100 please. Sometimes when I'm chained to my desk answering pointless emails I look back on those quiet 3AM moments travelling back from some show at Dogcock Conservative Club, Nowhereshire. Three of us sitting in the back on a pile of beer bottles covered in carpet, watching the M1 fly by through the holes in the van floorboards while a pissed BL gently weaves between lanes, and I think "what a bloody stupid way that was to barely earn some change"...

Maestro are Gibson, yes. They have Steinberger, Wurlitzer, and Dobro under the brand too. Kramer just have the one bass , the D-1. We played the Kramer UK launch in what was the Gibson venue before it became the Garage, so you can see me playing it while pulling a stupid face at 00:47 of the below video. It was fine but nothing I'd ever use - weird setup where each coil of the humbucker had a volume control and I didn't get a lot out of it to be honest. We were supposed to be getting some gear as part of the deal but the little sod from the support band legged it with the one bass they had on hand after the show, so I didn't even get a freebie! We did get two of the guitars which were nice though.

I must admit that my final straw with those guys wasn't musical but entirely selfish. The few high points of the dep calendar were the shows during summer or Christmas when the students would come back from uni and be persuaded to come down the WMC with their parents. For a start this meant our audience would be 300% more engaged and likely to dance, but as an added bonus being the only man under 30 in the building almost but not quite made up for my many and various shortcomings. This show was one of those and I had been chatting to a lovely young student throughout the breaks. After the set the beer goggles had kicked in properly and she invited me back to hers for a game of dominos and a cup of tea. Of course I jumped at the chance: "Lads, if I stow my gear away can you do me a solid and just chuck it into the room for me to pick up tomorrow? I've only got my bass and board so won't take you thirty seconds" BL: "Not a chance, we'll be down hands on lugging the PA in. You've got five minutes to get in the van." As he was my lift home and also had the taking for the evening I didn't have much recourse so regretfully declined her invitation and got back into the van for a sullen drive home. As we're about to set off the driver's door opens and the guitarist jumps in instead of the BL. "Oh right, yeah. BL has pulled some owd lass so is stopping the night up here and we're on PA duties. He says chuck it all in the room and he'll see us next weekend, also that we need to park the van round the corner because his wife thinks we broke down." Arse 🙃

My first paying gig was a once-monthly dep for a guy I knew from a local venue and it was like a checklist of club band horror stories. It was all old-school WMC venues so you were going out to play set one to a room full of stony-faced pensioners waiting for the meat raffle during the intermission, and then them all immediately clearing out so you played set two to nobody. My main gripe was that I would often turn up to find out the keyboard-playing band leader was the only regular member and the entire lineup was deps. Everyone got a song list (usually the same one too) but if somebody didn't know enough to fill time he'd pull the old "let's do X/Y, everybody knows that!". Turns out that while many people know how to start Sweet Home Alabama, significantly fewer know how to stop playing it. The band had a house uniform with a costume change (black shirts with white tie set one, white shirts with black tie set two) because that meant you could charge more on the agency. I was warned about this and bought the correct shirts, but told I could borrow the bassist's waistcoat to match the others. Unfortunately he had two feet and six stone on me so I had to belt all the excess fabric in behind my strap. Between all the deps we often looked like a band of kids dressed in their dad's clothes. I didn't have a completely awful time and getting paid to play as a teenager was a game-changer, but it was a rough education. I saw the BL around town a couple years back and we got to reminiscing about the old days - he was keeping very quiet but about halfway through the conversation suddenly went "wait, you didn't play with us did you??". Turns out he was totally pissed for most of the two years we worked together and had very little memory of any of it.