Japhet

David Garibaldi (Tower of Power) is one of my favorite drummers. Somewhere on Youtube there's a great tutorial from him where he moves the snare beat around to push or pull the feel of the song. He had a very serious accident a while back which I'd forgotten about - anybody know how he's doing?

Anything with Mick Karn on it. Totally unique player.

Rikki Lee Jones self titled album. Some lovely stuff on there from Willie Weeks. Close to the Edge - Chris Squire.

I feel very lucky because as I have got older, gear has got smaller and immeasurably lighter. If I still had to lug around my old Trace stack I think I'd be fit for the knackers yard by now, but I have no problems with the new lightweight stuff. I'm 14 years older than the next oldest in my band and 24 years older than the youngest and they all seem to find it more tiring than I do. I want to keep going for as long as I can. The drummer in one of my previous bands now suffers from Parkinsons and he would give anything to have a nother chance. This isn't a rehearsal - it's the real gig.

Youtube is your friend.

Each pedal needs 9 volts to run it. Option 1 is to put a 9v battery in each pedal and use a patch lead to link the pedals together. The patch lead carries the signal from one pedal to the next and has nothing to do with the power supply. You can get them from ebay. Alternatively you can use a power supply unit (PSU) which converts mains voltage (240v in UK) to 9v. You can then 'daisy chain' the power supply to more than 1 pedal. You need to know how many mA (milliamps) the PSU puts out and then check on the pedals to see how many mA they draw from the supply. Look up Guitar Power Supply, Patch Lead and Daisy Chain on ebay to see what all these things are.

I regret selling my old Torque combo. Why? Because I needed the money then but today i could afford to throw it out of an upstairs window and laugh while i did it.

You'll have women coming up at gigs and tickling it going 'You're soooo cute, icky wicky lickle icky wicky woo'. Blokes will just think it looks cool.

You can use either speaker output on the back of the amp to go to the cab. You can also get any sort of cable configuration off ebay. If it's a valve head, make absolutely sure you have the cabinet connected to the head before you switch on.

Lakland 55 01 is a cracking bass for the kind of money you're talking about. As for the confusion issue in swapping between 4 and 5 strings, I took a bit of advice from a guitarist mate and started to take my points of reference from the G string on the bass instead of the E or B. Helped me a lot and now it doesn't take any extra thought to play either bass.

I don't like distortion or fuzz on bass but I've found that a bit of both with plenty of clean signal blended in can almost sound like a bit of rhythm guitar in the background.

The drive channel in the Rumble is quite sparkly anyway and you can shape the sound to suit guitar with the preshape buttons. I'll take it to our next rehearsal and crank it up just to see what it can do.

Guitarist in my band was playing through my Fender Rumble 100 combo and it sounded really nice. Plenty loud as well. He said there were Dumble-like tones, which was encouraging since a Dumble is around £49,700 dearer.

Switch it on and off while you're playing. The limiter should cut out volume spikes. Play aggressively and try to create volume spikes to hear the difference. Compression is more subtle because it brings up quiter sound and squashes the louder stuff for a more even overall sound.

Have to say that none of Waters solo stuff or Floyd's stuff after he left has really done it for me. They were, to me, bigger than the sum of their parts (but I might give RW's latest album a go if you recommend it.

Been mentioned already, but pretty much anything from Dark Side of the Moon. So much of is still very pertinent today over 40 years after it was written. Roger Waters was a lyrical genius back then.

The Birdie song and Agadoo were extremely popular at one time. Esperanza Spalding on the other hand is virtually unheard of outside certain circles so must therefore lack talent. Just saying.

The Chowney is a cracking little pedal and you can get all sorts of usable sounds out of it. Clean blend is a must for me. Price is crazy cheap in comparison to the competition too.

Obligatory mention for the Fender Rumble series. Combo or head and cab, these are cracking amps for the money

In which case, Van Gogh became more talented after he was dead. Popularity has never been any indicator of talent - you only have to listen to One Direction to prove it.

I'd go for the Fusion because it's a cracking amp and has 2 foot switchable channels.

Was listening to some music on Mp3 earlier today. It sounded crap so I threw a Yorkshire pudding at it and it still sounded crap. Did I do it wrong?

I use a 500w Tecamp Black Jag. I assume it's basically a Puma with some whistles and bells. I use it through a 4ohm 2x12 cab and it has more grunt than I would ever need. If you need more volume on stage than this you need to go through the PA because this thing will fry your ears.

Got to be Rhythm Stick. Loads of effort to get it down and then the band decided they didn't want to do it.

Think it would be Santana for me.