nige1968

I bought Dave's Filter Twin pedal and am very happy with it. Cheers @davebass66!

I bought a BF Big Baby cab from Neil and suggest you all do the same. He’s da man and so are his labradors. @P-ZARN Thanks for a straightforward and pleasant sale, and for coffee and fancy bass fondlage. 👍

A (moderately) famous (at the time) touring band cancelled their gig at our polytechnic ents hall *on the night* because their drummer was sending the noise-o-meter off the scale and they wouldn't/couldn't make him/it any quieter. I helpfully suggested they could use the support band's drum kit and I wish I could convey in words the dirty look I got in response.

No, that's coyotes

Four pages in and nobody said 'cajon' yet? (For the drummers in the house, it's a fancy word for 'wooden participation box').

I have attention issues. Any time I become conscious of what I'm doing, my chances of f***ing up rocket. At best I look to the audience like like an ape trying to work out algebra. At worst I lose the rhythm completely, or miss the first beat, or embark on an ill-advised and needless fill, or even produce no sound whatsoever for whole seconds at a time, then start up again in the wrong key. So instead, I try to go by feel and hope that most of the notes work. As people above have noted, you need to know where the changes come to do this confidently, but that's not the same as being note perfect. Bum notes are sometimes bad, often inconsequential; bum grooves and missed beats are way worse. My last band was highly improvisational, by which I mean that half the time the guy who wrote the songs would forget bits, or randomly change the structure without realising, and we became used to working around that. Listening to recordings helped me a great deal – you can immediately hear what works and doesn't work, things that on the night went unnoticed by all. It also gives you chance to properly hear what everyone else is doing, and think about how you can better support that. You can then work out your changes at leisure, without having to simultaneously hold down a groove. Most of all, though, it's the way the song feels that people really respond to, way more than the bassist's consistently perfect note choice. So I learned to empty my head of everything but that. I practise often enough to keep the tunes 'under my fingers', to feel the cues subconsciously so I don't have to think about them. That's very different from rehearsing songs repeatedly in search of note-perfectness, because that's just setting myself up to fail. All of which is kind of the same thing everyone else has said, plus get a £75 digital recorder and listen back. Clearly if you're applying to the LPO, it's definitely best to ignore me. Maybe ask your GP about beta-blockers instead.

I feel your pain

Thought y'all might not be able to sleep until I updated on this one ... Turned out there were some domain-level issues that needed sorting ('from' address with a different domain) and things were looking pretty fixable. But I've now quit the band so it will alas remain unsolved. Thanks all for your suggestions, though! Genuinely helpful.

Again thanks, but I really am au fait with the legal and regulatory frameworks of email marketing, cookies, competitions and the like. I was really only after recommendations for services that might succeed if I try to send mail on behalf of my skint/skinflint BL. Obviously, thanks on behalf of those for whom this is new and useful.

Thanks for the tip about multiple accounts -- will let you know if it works -- but you're just being daft now. They're all opt-ins and can opt out whenever they choose via the website. But feel free to call the ICO if you're worried.

Well, it's a moot point since to my knowledge they haven't had an email in years! Will have to have a look at the 'separate accounts, same email' thing.

Aren't them barrel jacks all much of a muchness? A bit of a flawed design that always goes wrong eventually? So luthiers have told me, anyway. Anyway, last time I got mine replaced, it turned out it was actually a dead battery causing the cut-outs and funny noises, so just posting on the off-chance you could save a few quid.

Mmm. The band leader tried this and ended up locked out of his (cheap/free) email account for a couple of days. It seems there was a daily limit plus a monthly limit, which he unwittingly hit. Not sure anyone got their newsletter in the end. That's when I ended up with the job. It doesn't seem a practical solution unless I can persuade him to change email provider on his personal account, which is also going to cost him. (My Mrs, who is in the computer boffinry trade, gets ever so upset at folk who expect everyone to do stuff for free, but as BL hasn't got any money it's a moot point. Wonder if they'd do it for "exposure".)

That would be great, thank you. If just some of the emails arrived it would be an improvement.

I like the idea of email newsletters to keep our hordes of fans engaged, and over time we've built up a big enough mailing (700-odd) list that we're way past the Outlook mail merge stage. So I've been looking at 3rd party email solutions and wow, what fresh hell is this? It doesn't help, of course, that the bandleader has given me a budget of £0.00. Still, there are a lot of free packages out there, so I've been trying them out, generally with very poor results (0% deliverability, anyone?). It turns out that the better the free deal, the more appealing to spammers, who then get the sending IP addresses a bad rep. So to anyone who has actually had success with any of theses systems, who do you recommend? And is there anything at all to be said for self-hosting?