Mudpup

I was so confident! However the pleasure of the new toy far outweighs the shame and ridicule that I shall now suffer....

Last night's one was a saga! Our scheduled gig was scratched due to a double booking by the venue. Nice to know you're the ones to get binned isn't it.... So I put a post up on Facebook to see if anyone needed a band that night and we were rebooked in about 5 minutes by a venue that we had played at once before a few months back, went down well but didn't have space to book any more as our diary was full. All good and made even better when the original gig got in touch and said the other band had made a mistake and couldn't do the gig and we were back on. Oh no we're not bucko - we're somewhere else now. Sweet revenge!! So this new one is 20 mins up the road from me, an easy load in, got loads of lights so we don't need to take so much gear and a brilliant crowd usually. And I had my new amp courtesy of @40hz to try out. The scene was set. Gopro clamped to the PA speaker in front of me so the bass is a bit high but here you go

Dammit, I'm out. I was super confident this year that i would make it to the finish line as well 😡 I sold my Handbox a few weeks ago and there was a little envelope of cash sitting in the toy fund. I put it in the draw to try and forget about it and was doing well until @40hz listed probably the only amp that had a chance of knocking me off the wagon. He's a great guy that I had dealt with before and the amp was at a great price. My resolve failed miserably and within 24 hrs I had grabbed it and gigged it. It's bloody brilliant..... See you all in 2023!

The M-Pulse 600 changed hands today again. Good to briefly meet up with Simon again and everything is good! Deal with confidence :-) I'm just waiting for him to offload my old S.U.B bass now....

I'll eat pretty much anything that i can find! I have no shame.... Rather partial to a Lamb Shish or a banana Yazoo milkshake and a Snickers bar. McDonald's is best avoided though.

I can't remember TBH - i did it years ago. If you're not a full time musician the tax man probably wouldn't be massively interested in you anyway - remember every bit of kit you have, strings, travel costs, admin costs, promotion costs would all be factored into a tax calculation.

We've been getting paid via them from various venues for years. Never had a problem with them yet. Just submit an invoice by Sunday evening and the money goes straight in the nominated bank account within a couple of weeks. The last one took 5 days....

And here's Stevie again with another amazing bass player - he knows where to find them.....check out the solo at 3:00

One of my faves was TM Stevens. A total monster groove player.......there's nothing difficult in this video other than sitting in exactly the right place and injecting energy into a band that's at their peak...

I was only controlling the pin spots last night as a first attempt but there are 15 scenes set up in them to monkey around with. The rear sweepers are too bonkers on sound to light so we leave them on a slow autorun macro which I can change on a remote and we leave the front lights on a slow 3 colour fade as well. The fazer is on a remote programmable switch as well. It's not so bad really - most things have been set on autoruns historically but we're going to get them a bit more organised with the DMX thingy.

Last night's gig was at one of our favourite venues. Great crowd and we tried a couple of off the wall new songs out which worked out really well. We've invested in a DMX foot controller that muggins has been tasked with operating and I spent a week programming it and the whole gig tap dancing on it. But it worked pretty well. Here's some pics that someone in the crowd took...

Loving the STP stuff - Robert DeLeo is a fab player. Really creative and Plush is a great shout

Personally I prefer a kettle lead - they just feel a bit more robust and there’s always a chance of an adaptor going pop at a gig.

Its a standard guitar jack to 3.5mm headphone jack on my Aftershock I did wonder what you do if your phone doesn't have a headphone socket.......you may have to use a laptop USB instead

Maybe sort the keyboard player out first? Restore your sonic space and get out the front for a listen.

I recently looked at getting some sort of fuzzy thing and went down the video review rabbit hole. Went totally distortion deaf and blind after a few days of searching and figured that it would probably take me about 7 purchasing attempts to find one that i liked. Maybe. So I bought a Source Audio Aftershock that has about a squillion of them all built into one pedal. Love it..... I reckon i paid about twice as much (£150) as I originally budgeted for but saved £300 in pedals that I liked for 5 minutes and then sold on.

I've only got a couple of instances. Here's the earliest one.... My first ever 'proper' gig back when i was about 16 was an unusual one. It was at the very back end of the punk era so didn't seem to be quite such a shambles as it would nowadays - artistic improvisation and being pretty different was still encouraged. But we really were dreadful..... We had somehow snagged a support slot to a jangly/indie style band at the local main music venue (The Square in Harlow if anyone has ever played it) and needed to play for 45 minutes. Problem was that we only had 5 songs and about 20 minutes of material. I was ready to bail out of it but was persuaded by the guitarist/singer that we could stretch the songs a bit and he would fill out the gaps in between to help. We decided to dress up a to try and make a bit of an impact and Drosso (the singer/guitarist) informed us that he was going to make a grand entrance after the bass and drums had jammed around for a few minutes. I turned up a bit late (dressed in a tails suit and with Dave Vanian style white/black make up on) and literally walked on to the stage, plugged in and the drummer kicked the pair of us into action. Drosso came running up the stairs onto the stage a few seconds later. He was dressed in thigh high cavalier boots, a g string with his knackers hanging out, Sgt Pepper jacket and had a hollowed out teddy bears head over his head. We stretched out the first song for about 10 minutes. When we had finished the song Drosso reached behind his amp and grabbed a bucket he had stashed there earlier (I hadn't seen any of the prep work so this was all totally new to me). He then threw its contents straight over everyone in the front couple of rows. It was full of liver, fish guts and general entrails from the butcher shop. The crowd were not massively impressed and we spent an uncomfortable 30 more minutes playing total rubbish with Drosso generally abusing and taking the wee wee out of the crowd (all cardigans and chinese slippers) whilst they all glared at us waiting for us to finish. We reached the big climax and as we hit the last note Drosso triggered the 4 big flashbombs that he had set up (and not told anyone about) behind the gear at the back of the stage. It was like being on stage with Motley Crue! Except you don't get curtains at the back of the stage at a Crue gig. Which then caught fire and necessitated the evacuation of the venue.... Fortunately we didn't burn the whole place down. We just about escaped with our lives but were never invited back

I'll pop it over when i get a mo' It's off my Classic Lacquer and is a 10 hole plate