borntohang

Usual items at usual price currently up under Tom Bannister in Sheffield - account picture is of a muppet which gave me a brief laugh at least.

A nice venue if I remember right. Come over and say hi if you make it to Birmingham. I'm the one not playing bass, obviously.

Thanks! Was that the Art Centre show? I've started to lose track now the gigging is more of a regular thing than novelty...

'ello. I'm second from right in a very silly gig indeed. Do you have to be a fan of the original artist, or maybe you become one? Wasn't to start with, then listened to nothing else for six months to get into shape, then couldn't listen to them again outside of gigs for the next three years. I'm finally getting round to enjoying them casually again now. How important is it to be visually/musically identical? How much latitude are you allowed? Oh, lots and lots and lots. If you get the broad strokes right people fill in the blanks; even the hypercritical snobby fans (who are thankfully few and far between) don't notice as much as they think they do. We try to be true to the spirit if not the letter. We have an authentically upside-down left-handed bass player, and I'm a bald guy on keyboards/guitar, and that's about it. Our singer looks uncannily like Mark when she wears her glasses which is a nice co-incidence. The really odd bit is that we have a nice little sideline in logo branded t-shirts that do quite well. I think we've built up a bit of a following now so we get a fair few people coming to see us just because they specifically like what we do, as opposed to just liking the material. DEVO aren't touring over here and even if they were they aren't playing the early seventies vibe that we're trying to cop, so I'm happy to fill that niche. Do you ‘get into character’ or is it just a gig? A bit. It'd feel a bit daft to pretend to be the exact Spuds, but we go for the attitude and vibes and people seem happy with it. We have a lot of handy folks in the band so we've gradually built our own props/costumes/instruments over the years. It's helpful that our bass player is usually allergic to anything sniffing of 'commercialism' so we have a finely tuned barometer of "that's a right womble idea" to run ideas past; if he's game for it then it's probably not too cheeseball. Does it feel musically limiting, or is it fulfilling your needs? (Maybe you have a side band?) We all have other projects. I wish writing with these guys was as easy as touring with them because we've made it six years or so without any major fallouts or line-up changes. They're very accommodating of me dropping the odd "sorry chaps, but I have to block two months out of the calendar for this other tour" as it's not a full-time gig for any of us. Do you have any qualms about tributes ‘stifling original music’? I don't think putting a silly hat on is going to stop garage bands from playing original music. It doesn't even stop me. Have you ever met or been seen by a member of the ‘originals’? What did they say? DEVO shared us on their facebook page a couple of Halloweens ago and they were asked about us in a Guardian Reader's Questions feature (Jerry was very diplomatic) so they know we exist. We've spoken to their team a few times and they've politely requested we don't use certain bits of artwork which we're happy to do. My requests to be the UK franchise of the band have been politely ignored. What is the overriding thing being in a tribute act has taught you? I try to take something away from every gig I play with, but I suppose it's been an interesting exercise into really deep-diving into one particular catalogue. I can't think of many other acts where I know 30-40 songs to gigging standard. Having done it once, would you do it again? If so, would the musical angle be very different? Oh, probably not. I like the idea of doing brief dives into a catalogue to do a one-and-done Stars In Their Eyes tribute night or something, but it's been a bit intensive learning all the music plus co-bandleading really. I auditioned on keys for a Foos tribute a couple of years back but my heart wasn't really in it even though the money would be better and the material significantly easier. I sometimes see other tributes post audition lists and then go away and learn them just as an exercise (Slade and Blink 182 recently) but I don't think I'd connect with them quite like WAND.

The old short scale PJ Jaguars were great - borrowing mine persuaded a friend of mine to retire his vintage (very tired) Musicmaster from live shows in favour of one. Only thing I didn't like was the unfinished or barely finished neck which got grubby after a lot of shows. I'd have preferred a gloss like the CV or VM series necks, but you can't expect too much at that price point and would have been a low effort project to remedy. Definitely deserves a heavier E string than shipped too.

The steep drop in quality after Pinkerton is nearly vertical. I just pretend that they broke up in '97 and the occasional single of note after that (Hash Pipe, Keep Fishing, not much else) was just scavenged from unreleased Blue sessions.

The full-size Spark booster is excellent for pushing a driven amp over the edge without altering your tone too much. If you wanted something with more 'character' to it's drive perhaps the EHX Hot Wax would appeal - has a variety of interesting pushed tones plus a clean blend and master EQ, and you can stack both of the drives for three different sounds on top of your basic clean.

Again, having worked festivals for ten years or so, there was a massive and obvious change when Leeds/Reading started introducing late night entertainment. After the move to Bramham initially everything shut off at 11 every night and there were some real rough nights. 2006 was an especially bad year - the crowd burned down the campsite beer tent, raided and emptied the Carling lorry parked behind it, and it all ended with security heavies suiting up and doing full crowd-control charges with batons to try and clear the area, which just got people even more riled up. I was actually walking through the site off-shift and got slapped into the mud by a heavy who thought he was a cop in hot pursuit. By dawn you had the bad optics of hungover teenagers cable-tied to fencing under 'arrest'. Nasty business all round. Next year there was a 'come to god' chat between festival management, security, and police and they brought in the Silent Disco and other entertainment that went on till 2-3am. They also changed the security meatheads out for a firm with a bit less inclination to start cracking heads. Both aggro and property damage dropped significantly over the next few years until the Sunday Riots became a bit of an old-school meme like the Wave of Bollocks or Pop-Up Pirate. Melvin at FR runs a lot of festivals and knows what he's doing. Wonder if the resurgence this year had anything to do with Rage getting replaced by 1975 and people leaving the arena early for a last night rager instead. Not as popular a choice as they anticipated!

Not a camping kind of demographic, Rebellion. We're all getting to the age where you don't want to get dressed and booted up just to nip to the bathroom three times a night...

If you herd 100,000 drunk teenagers into a field and then cut all the entertainment off at midnight then they're going to end up finding mischief. Leeds/Reading has always been a smash up on the last evening and now it has a rep there's some people go expecting it. That said, I worked festivals for ten years and there's not been a single one without some level trouble or substance abuse. Latitude is about the most middle-class, arty, Tarquin and Kate festival you've ever seen but I still got threatened with violence on a number of occasions!

We were booked for BlueDot in 2020 but sadly didn't make the reschedule - shame as it looked brilliant. We've played with Henge before and they're a great party.

I use both the VTDI and the Leeds and can report you're not missing a huge amount just with the DI. Don't get me wrong, the Leeds is by far my favourite drive for both guitar and bass, but pushing Character and dropping Mids and Treble on the VT will get you just as close to the Glover thing as the Leeds will and it will also do all the other stuff as well. I use the VT as my 'rig' at the end of a chain and then the Leeds works as my 'gain' channel. I'm definitely interested in checking out the new dual Leeds with the Muff circuit they're releasing so I can run a wet/dry dirt setup though.

Nice! I took the second volume out of mine and went Vol/Tone and On/Off for the bridge pickup as I never used it solo. Made switching a lot easier, but yours looks slick with the custom plate.

Heads up that our favourite scammer is now posting as James Smith. Still the same listings from the looks of it. https://www.facebook.com/marketplace/profile/100029983509089/?ref=permalink

279 USD, so probably about that in GBP too. Not great, not terrible. The distortion pairings all seem fairly obvious to me though - SRV, Gilmour, Hendrix, and Brian May respectively. I already use the VT as my main sound and a Leeds as the drive, so having a second DI out to run a dirty channel parallel to my VT seems to be worth the entrance price to me! The fuzz is just a free slot at this point. Shame there's no Dry Out option so I can run wet/dry delays into the clean VT, but I think I can work round that.

You should be able to swap the covers out for closed ones if you like that pickup. If not then Alegree do cheaper ones where the poles are flush, and Warman do covered passives. https://www.alegree.co.uk/collections/old-timer-pickups/products/old-timer-quake-precision-bass-pickup https://www.warmanguitars.co.uk/product/p-bass-stealth-pickup-8-01kohm-and-4-86-henries/

If you go into the editor there is a setting called 'Make-up Gain' or something similar. Turn that off and it's a lot more manageable. You'll still have to tweak a toneprint to your liking but that does a lot of the work.

I oscillate between flats and rounds on a regular basis. Love them on a P bass but then I start to miss the clang, so I change back to round. Couple of weeks later I start to miss the woodiness and so... I've been getting good mileage out of rounds with a bit of sponge for that muted attack and sustain you get on flats, which I actually enjoy a lot more than the actual flat tone.

The MJ's are far more jazzy as an internal parallel pickup with 500K pots - lots more treble in there then. Wired series they're just huge and brutish in all formats. I hear they're ridiculous with a preamp but I think that would be just too much output for me.

Series is absolutely the way to go for a big beefy jazz sound. I'm also fond of the Dimarzio Model Js which are almost so far from a stock J that they're different pickups entirely, but they do sound huge in a mix. You don't get the toppy 'acoustic air' of singles mind, so Series/Parallel is a more versatile option if you want to switch on the fly.

Hahaha. That reminds me that we once sent a lost drummer into a Newcastle petrol station for directions. He stood in the window for about fifteen minutes nodding and chatting with the attendant before climbing back into the van and driving off with a single comment of "Didn't get a word of that." This was of course pre sat nav apps but late on enough for Google Maps to be a thing, which meant a copilot with a stack of A4 covered in directions and inevitably at least one band member in a huff after we missed out a step and rendered the rest of the pile useless.

Headlining a stage at Truck festival which was the culmination of a week of reasonably high profile festival gigs that have all gone off with successively bigger bangs. Singer pushes herself too hard the day before after doing a festival headliner plus a BBC live set and consequently can barely talk so we're running through the setlist trying to work out bits we can drop or that we can fill out with backing vocals. "That's a cosy ten minutes" indeed. The stage was the only indoor one and it had been raining all day so we were confident of pulling a decent crowd, but it turns out to be in a recently vacated cowshed which smelt like it had only been vacated overnight - turns out there's a certain penetrating quality to cow fosters on concrete that even a couple of hours of serious scrubbing won't remove. After about thirty minutes your nose just shuts down entirely and your earwax starts melting instead. We can see the crowds turning up at the entrance but they inevitably get about twenty feet into the venue before The Whiff hits them and they make a sharp exit. Acoustics are exactly what you'd imagine from a concrete floor, breezeblock walls, and a tin roof. Guitarist ends up snapping a string halfway in and passes his guitar offstage to our tech for restringing while he used the backup, but tech is actually a driver and moreover has never strung a Bigsby before so is totally stumped and eventually just lumps the guitar back onto side-stage unstrung. I think we made it to 30 minutes in the end to be fair to the hardcore few who stayed it out, but it was clear that nobody (audience or band) had their heart in it when Artic Monkeys are playing just across the field in a venue that doesn't smell like a nervous farmer's market. Drive back North was a couple of hours of heavily reconsidering life choices. edit: reading this back it strikes me that both Cow Fosters (thanks swear filter...) and The Whiff would be great band names.

My mate used to DJ a club night called Black SABBAth which had the obvious gimmick. Can't say it's something I'd want to visit often myself, but always seemed to go down well.