KingBollock

[quote name='51m0n' timestamp='1356218053' post='1908186'] Perfectly adequate for live. Recording, well, its a bottom of the range compressor. It will work fine, it shouldnt be too noisy, it wont reek of mystical mojo, but if you know what you're doing it should ok. Plus points - it has great metering (the importance of which is not to be underestimated at all) [/quote] Cool, thanks. It will be my first foray into the world of compressors and stuff. The only other one I have ever had is the rather simple thing that comes in a Behringer V-Amp Pro... From what I have read and seen about the 3632 it's not too noisy, certainly better than the 3630. I was hoping to get one that would cover more stuff than just Bass, to justify buying it. And I really would like to learn how to use it properly.

[quote name='MiltyG565' timestamp='1356299316' post='1909029'] Is that really an american term? We had a headmistress, so he would hardly be called the vice headmistress. [/quote] We had Heads and Deputy Heads.

Now then, I only have experience with the ones I made. The thickness of the pick makes a huge difference to the amount the sound is muffled. My 3mm one sounds like playing with a wet thumb, but my orange Dunlop is relatively bright but still a very smooth sound, like the one you get in your clip Discreet. Of the picks that you have bought, can you see the edge of the pick between the pieces of felt, even at the tips? Like it was two pieces of felt just stuck onto the pick, one each side? Or maybe they're made in bulk by covering a sheet of the pick material with felt on each side and punching out the picks? The biggest difference I found was when I folded the felt over the tip so that no pick was exposed at that point. It sounds a bit like the felt that has been used isn't very dense, though obviously I can't tell for sure. I didn't use the red felt that we have because it was the least dense. They seemed to go less dense to densest by colour Red, Purple, Green and White. I don't know if that's a standard thing or not, they were all from the same pack. I didn't use the white because I thought it would get very grubby very quickly, so I went for the green. For the first few days of playing I found the tip getting a bit stringy, but it wasn't scattering or anything like that. I just chopped it back with some small scissors, it doesn't happen now, and I use it most days, and the tip is still covered with felt. If anything I have said helps to explain any problems you might have, you might not want to totally give up on felt picks in the future, I love mine, the ones I got right. You might even try making your own using the advice I gave in an earlier post.

Come on people, let us know what they're like!

[quote name='mentalextra' timestamp='1356210000' post='1908089'] OK, but is that what he meant by "doubling up"? [/quote] No, sorry. I was just trying to say how I get the best out of my broadband while keeping my router upstairs. If I remember correctly, the two middle cores of a 4 core phone line are no longer used, so by doubling up I assume he is twisting the ends of two cores that are used[b]*[/b] (1 [b]2[/b] 3 4 [b]5[/b] 6) with two cores that aren't (1 [2 [b]3[/b]][[b] 4[/b] 5] 6), thus doubling the amount of wire. [b]*[/b]There are 6 terminals but only 4 core cable is used anymore, and the first and last terminals aren't used but are still there, so they are numbered too. All of this could be wrong, though, it's been a long time since I last meddled with phone lines, and if BT ever ask, I have [i]never[/i] meddled with phone lines, you ain't seen me, right?

[quote name='AussieBassman' timestamp='1356206619' post='1908021'] What a ridiculous statement! Is the converse true? If you post a message that's blank, have you said everything you need about the (unstated) topic? [/quote] [i]Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt. - Abraham Lincoln[/i] ?

[quote name='mentalextra' timestamp='1356116876' post='1907173'] Can you explain this a little more. I have to use a router upstairs on a long phone extension too. What exactly do you mean by double them up? [/quote] Because our phone-line comes to the house at roof height, I have it so it comes straight into the upstairs room that has the computers and router in it, so it is the shortest route possible. The main land-line phone base is in the same room, the handsets are wireless. The PC and the Wii in the livingroom are wireless and the PC in the conservatory is connected to the router by a network that goes through the mains. The PC in the livingroom will also me on the mains network soon, too. This way I get the best broadband speed possible for where we are, which, considering that I live in the middle of nowhere and on a phone-line, not cable, isn't brilliant, so I have to get the best out of it I can. My current download speed maxes out at about 1.4gb/s, but is normally only 1gb/s.

[quote name='BILL POSTERS' timestamp='1356198301' post='1907915'] Sounds like you've played in Atherstone... [/quote] Gah! Another place I can't stand. A mate of mine, one of the genuinely nicest people you could ever wish to meet, was nearly killed while out in Atherstone one night, by a gang of 15 blokes just looking for a fight. They attacked him out of nowhere and didn't stop hitting and kicking him until he was thoroughly broken and unconscious. Took him months to recover, physically, he was never the same again mentally, though.

[quote name='BILL POSTERS' timestamp='1356183667' post='1907719'] Yep. I live about 5 miles from there, played there a lot, and I couldnt agree more. Funnily enough, i have an old Unidyne that still works great, cant for the life of me rememeber where it came from.. [/quote] I used to live in Nuneaton, which is about 17 miles from Tamworth. By the time I got out of Nuneaton that place had turned to sh*te too, even the kids from the posh areas aspired to be chavs. So glad to be away from there.

[quote name='Myke' timestamp='1356120871' post='1907241'] I had thought of doing that but unfortunately where I have sanded it, it's become quite in consistant and kind of made it a bit patchy so I'm going to paint it. I do quite like the purpley bit on the side though. [/quote] That's a shame. But yeah, it really does depend on the ply. It is a shame that people will often automatically cover it up without taking its aesthetics into consideration. Mind you, if you claim that it's made up of several sheets of really rare wood, illegally logged from right under a nursing Orang Utan, you can add a couple of zeros to the end of the sale price.

That ply actually looks quite nice like that. I have made a few bits and bobs, like photo frames and stuff, out of ply, and left natural, because I think it looks quite pretty. Obviously it depends on the ply. The trouble is, even though yours looks nice, there is a stigma attached to guitars made from it, it would be a brave thing to not paint it.

[quote name='MiltyG565' timestamp='1356118001' post='1907198'] Haha, why would you play some random guys guitar when you have a 20 year old LP sitting right there? anybody with a guitar that has any value will not be bringing to along to the pub and asking somebody else to play it. [/quote] He was in Tamworth, that's enough to know. I used to hate going into Tamworth, they are the rudest people I have ever had the displeasure of meeting. Obviously there are exceptions (he says, covering his arse because there is at least one person on here from there, who seems relatively normal as far as I can tell) but I have personally never met a single likeable person from there. It was a bloke from Tamworth that stole my old Shure microphone. "I'll sing in your band", says he. "Can I borrow a microphone?" He asks. "Sure", says I. "Where did he go?" I wonder.

Get some kind of malware killer, I use [i]Spybot - Search & Destroy[/i]. Run it. Then restart your PC in Safe Mode and run it again. Then restart normally. If you use Firefox then get the addon [url="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/noscript/"]NoScript[/url]. There may be other versions for whatever browser you use. I used to run both Spybot and AdAware but newer versions started clashing with each other and as I preferred AdAware I started running that on its own. Unfortunately it is now bundled with a dodgy Virus Guard so I now just run Spybot.

Status Quo - Roll Over Lay Down - 1975 There are other really good songs from that year, such as Bohemian Rhapsody and Stand By Your Man, but the Quo track is my favourite to play along to, even if it is rather simple, or maybe because it's simple.

[quote name='Tuono' timestamp='1356033019' post='1906113'] I am not very good and just play in a pub band but at least I have more sense than to pester people in a good band. [/quote] It's not always a bad thing. When I was a kid working in a guitar shop, the chaps at work finally convinced me I was good enough to join a proper band. They said I was much better than the Bassist in my favourite local band who I was banging on about because I had gone to see them the week before. One day I saw the lead Guitarist and said to him that I play Bass, would he be interested in me? He said he already had a Bassist so I just said that if he ever found himself in need of one, let me know. They rehearsed in a place about 100 yards from where I lived so, a couple of weeks later I decided to go have a listen through the window, something my brother and I often did there when rock bands were rehearsing. I was just knocking around outside the building when the Guitarist saw me. They had sacked the Bassist and he told me to go grab my stuff. They liked me and I got into my first proper band! But then, I was rather more subtle than the twerp in the OP.

[quote name='Count Bassy' timestamp='1356023178' post='1905928'] Well yes, hopefully we can all agree that both Vinyl and CDs go round in circles! Waiting for some to contradict that now..... [/quote] Some of Big Red X's vinyl used to have a more elliptical orbit I believe.

[quote name='KevB' timestamp='1356022948' post='1905922'] Vinyl......CD....Hmmmm [/quote] For the side of CDs:

There used to be a recording on Anne Rice's website that used to play automatically. It was a very, very old recording from the late 1800's I think. It took me a long time but I found out who it was singing and what the song was, it may have been a hymn, but I can't for the life of me remember what it was now. At the time I searched desperately for similar recordings but found nothing. It was hissy and spitty, crackly and poppy but it had amazing presence, proper heart swelling stuff that left me with wet eyes. About as far from hifi as you can get but it was lovely to me.

The way I saw the argument was that Billybob* says they prefer A to B, but as B can technically be better than A, it might be that the reason for preferring A is erroneous and with a little more insight, from Trevor*, into why, Billybob might come out of it with a better listening experience than when he went in. Now then, Billybob doesn't care what Trevor has to say, as far as he's concerned he's right and adamant about it and would rather that Trevor just shut up. But Trevor feels as though he has more advice and perhaps someone will learn something and so is kindly trying to educate anyone interested. But Billybob thinks that Trevor just wants the final word and is determined to have the final word for himself by constantly popping up and accusing Trevor of trying to have the final word. Then it all goes in circles. [i](Names changed to protect the guilty)[/i]

Anyone know anything about the Alesis 3632 Dual Channel Compressor/Limiter/Gate? [url="http://www.alesis.com/3632compressor"]http://www.alesis.com/3632compressor[/url] It's £99 and a 1u rack unit. I was thinking about it for Bass but also to hook up to my mixer for recording and PA. Is it any good? Would I be better off going for one dedicated to Bass?

Many, many years ago I was given a Guyatone Distortion/Chorus pedal that didn't work. I was told that I could keep it if I got it to work, chuck it out if not. I had a look but couldn't figure it out, proper stumped me. The light would come on and it seemed to do everything it was supposed to but make a sound. Every couple of years I would stumble across it and have another look. This year I finally decided that it was its last chance, if I couldn't fix it I was going to cannibalise it for its parts. It turned out that the long tab inside the input jack socket was ever so slightly bent so that it shorted out across the input jack. I stuck a screwdriver in there and bent it back all of half a millimetre, an lo it was fixed! It's quite a nice little pedal too.

[quote name='chrismuzz' timestamp='1355883386' post='1904080'] Why doesn't this hilarious sh*t ever happen to me? [/quote] Does it happen to your other band members? Perhaps it's you someone wants to replace...?

I can sort of see why people think the OP was bigging his band up and showing off, but it looked to me like he was just setting the scene, saying "We've done a lot of good stuff, we get one well together, I respect their skills and others' obviously do too, else we wouldn't have been able to do the stuff we have.". Otherwise, it's possible to believe that the tosser with an attitude, slagging off the guitarists purely to get himself into the band, might have had a valid opinion. Where as if everything is taken at face value, and there's no reason not to, then it wasn't truly his opinion, just a malicious attack to, somehow, make the band want him over one of their current guitarists. If it had been me, I'd have just stuck it in the Daily Annoyances thread rather than start a fresh thread about something many others would have experienced, but I can imagine getting in after a night with that goon and wanting to let off a bit of steam. And it's not exactly the OPs fault that it went on for so many pages.

Instead of having a new email address for every site you sign up to, you can use the name of the site as your sign-in name. So say you're registering at a site called fluffybunnies.com, you'd register with your real name as fluffybunnies. Then if you got spam generated from the email address you used for that site, it'd come addressed to fluffybunnies and you'd know where it came from. Though that probably wouldn't work on a site where you have to use your username as your register info. An old email address of mine was hacked once because I allowed my browser to remember its password so that I didn't have to type it in every time. It spammed everyone in my list with stuff about iPods, something I have never owned. It even sent one to my Dad who thought I was trying to get back in touch after a couple of years of not talking to him, that was annoying. Not had the Newtown spam myself.

I remember desperately searching for a VHS copy of the film Holiday Inn for my wife, for Christmas, back in the mid 90s (before we had internet), took weeks for it to arrive and cost about £20. Bought it on DVD about 5 years ago and it took just 2 days and was about £5 Bing Crosby's White Christmas is in the film, that's what made me think of it.