BigRedX

Not really. Apart from those sounds that rely on a specific playing technique that I haven't mastered (like slap) I can get all the sounds I want using programmable effects.

They were most definitely Bono and The Edge even back then. Still nice people though. Much the same for me. Apart from U2 (and they were terrible when I saw them at Rock City the following year and consequently lost interest) none of the bands I really like get to the point where tickets cost over a hundred pounds. These days most of the bands I like I get to see for free because I'm playing on the same bill.

I saw U2 in 1980 at The Boat Club in Nottingham with about 50 other people. One of those I went with knew them from when they were just a local band in Dublin so after the gig I got to meet Bono and The Edge.

As I said in the other thread, if you didn't see them in a little club back in 93 or 94 you've really missed your chance. IMO you'd be better off spending the money you'll need to fork out for Oasis tickets on going to see one new band a month at a local venue where you'll be able to pay on the door and, if you like what you hear, buy a T-shirt from them afterwards. You never know one of those gigs might include someone who goes on to be a massive household name, and then you can claim to have seen them when they were still good and you could talk to them afterwards.

Sorry to make you wait, but I was away on holiday and there was no way I was going to type this reply on my phone... I ran The Terrortones' email list and designed their monthly emails for 5 years. We used a desktop application called Direct Mail which is Mac OS only but it operates under the same principals as MailChimp except you can do everything apart from send the actual emails off-line without an internet connection. These days if you don't want to pay anything, the free version of MailChimp is really the only serious contender. Direct Mail has very useful spam count indicator, where it will tell you how likely your email is going to be marked as spam and highlight any obvious "spammy" wording or design so you can change these to something more likely to allow your email to land in your audience's in-boxes. It's a while since I used MailChimp but I would hope it would do something similar. The biggest problem you will have is that what is supposed to be one of the most useful features of any decent marketing email tool - user engagement reporting - is of very limited accuracy due to the never-ending war between the marketing email services and email providers privacy features. We had a mailing list of just under 1000 addresses and at best we'd get reports of around 100 of those actually looking at what we sent. The number of links that appeared to be followed was on average 10 per email split between everything in the email. This is for an eye-catching email design that was easy to ready and had all the links well marked. The reality will probably be that the actual number of people who look at and engage with your email will be closer to 150% of the reported figures but that's still a woefully low audience number for the amount of effort you will need to put in. So assuming you want to proceed you'll also need the following: 1. A "return" email address that is not a free webmail service. This normally means the band having its own domain name and an associated email address. You might be able to get away with a Gmail or similar address but it does massively increase the likelihood of your emails going directly to your audience's spam folder. 2. You must include an actual postal address in the email contact details. This is legal requirement for many countries. 3. An obvious and easy way for recipients to unsubscribe. Your other big problem is getting your email reported as spam. The strike count for spam reports is very low - under 1% for most email services, which means for your email list of 700 you'll only need more than a couple of spam reports for a single mail-out and you'll be suspended or banned. Use any features you mailing service supplies to ensure your email is less likely to trigger spam filters, and even more importantly ensure that the email addresses you have are from people who have specifically signed up to receive the kinds of emails your are sending out. We used to get audience members to fill in an email sheet at gigs. e could guarantee that at least 25% of these were completely illegible and another 25% resulted in bounced emails. Of the remaining emails there would nearly always be one that resulted in a spam report. These day my advice would be, if in doubt don't add it to your list. Use an on-line form provided by your email service to get new email addresses. HTH.

Lets stop trying to kid ourselves that seeing a bunch of semi-motionless blokes in the their 50s at some enormous venue is going to have a fraction of the excitement of seeing them when they were young, hungry and playing the sorts of venues where you could be stood right in front of the stage. Admit to yourselves that if you didn't see them back in 1993 or early 94 you've missed out, and instead go and see some gigs by new bands where it will cost you less than £15 and you'll be able to turn up and pay on the door.

Nice to see one in a colour other than sh!t brown.

If that doesn’t contain a Born To Rock F4B I’ll be disappointed.

AFAICS all the songs mentioned in this thread that are actually disco are in 4/4 with a shuffle or triplet feel.

Next gig for Hurtsfall is supporting Midnight Danger at The Bodega in Nottingham on Thursday 5th September. Tickets available here.

The bridge is definitely a John Birch. The rest? Who knows? No name on the headstock, no apparent custom switching options and non-original pickups. Just no.

I was expecting it to be purple…

If you can wait a week for when I can type on a proper computer, I can give you all the details of the system I used. However expect at the very best a 15% reported engagement and probably 10 people asking to be unsubscribed each time you do a mail out.

A couple of photos by Kevin Stevens from last night's gig:

Because of the non-GDPR compliance of the WhatsApp EULA, any serious business using it for transactions with an EU country could find themselves in legal trouble should anything ever go wrong. I used to work for a client whose business terms and conditions and NDA which I had to sign, specifically forbade me from having WhatsApp (and Zoom - although that has got better since the pandemic) installed on any device that I used for my business activities. If you've got a web form for initial on-line contact then there shouldn't be any reason to publish your email on your website, and if you do use email then you need to take steps to ensure that both your emails and your customers reach their proper destinations and don't end up being marked as spam or even worse being blocked completely.

I play in a genre that is image conscious (goth/post-punk/dark wave). So far I have been able to disguise that fact that I'm in my 60s by still being relatively slim, having enough hair to actually have a suitable hairstyle, a bit of make-up, and doing my best not to act like an old man. The fact that I still look quite a bit younger than many of my contemporaries who haven't aged particularly well, definitely helps.

In this case the song isn't particularly well-known, although it's one of those songs that people remember when they hear it. We'd picked it because it's a song we all like but haven't heard recently at any of the goth nights or between bands at goth gigs that we've been to in the last few years. And no-one other than the band knew we were going to be playing it last night. I'd have been happy to drop it in favour of one of our own song,s and also because IMO we've been struggling to capture the feel of the original. Despite the fact we play it a couple of BPM faster than the record our version still sounds slow. However the rest of the band were insistent that we played it.

Last night In Isolation played the Infest warm-up event at Nightrain in Bradford. A venue that, judging from the posters, normally puts on rock tribute acts, but for one night was taken over by gothic electronica and us. We were a little out of place with all the other bands being much more electronic than we are (we were the only ones with a drum kit) but we'd got the gig because we'd had to pull out of a previous year's event with a more suitable line-up due to a last-minute date change which then conflicted with our singer's wedding. Having said that we seemed to go down well with a surprising number of people dancing at the front and plenty of applause between songs. One embarrassing thing - for the last three weeks we've been rehearsing a cover of The Bolshoi's "Away" which we have managed to keep quite about, so guess what the DJ chose to put on just as we were getting ready to play... We left after Deviant's set which meant I was home at a slightly less stupid time in the morning, but disappointed because the two bands still to play had sounded awesome during the soundcheck. I will probably be listening to Tilly Electronics on Spotify while I work today...

K&M are highly regarded because not only are they more robust than most of the competition, but should something break they make spares easily available. My band doesn't have any speaker stands because everywhere we play has in-house PA systems but all our instrument and equipments stands are K&M and personally I would have to have a very good reason to consider anything else.

US local sales taxes are significantly less than UK VAT.

The large bridge base plate only makes sense if it has the string dampers attached.

Certainly if you are an originals band having a unique band name is more important than ever. The name for my current band was chosen by joining two slightly related words together, even so when using any of the search engines I still need to put quotes around it otherwise they think it's a typo and also bring up results with the two words separated. Also it is important to consider the title of your band's album(s). When my first band were asked to produce a retrospective compilation we decided to call it "Richard, Roger, Rodney, Rastus, Raoul, Roderick, Randy, Rupert" which is a line from one of our songs. Unfortunately that means that lots of on-line resources think it's an album called "The Midnight Circus" by Richard, Roger, Rodney, Rastus, Raoul, Roderick, Randy, Rupert. And when they do get it right and provide a link to a download or streaming version of the album it's turns out to be a different album by another band also called The Midnight Circus.

But were the cabs EXACTLY the same in EVERY respect other than fact the port faced the front or the back? If not you can't say for sure that the port direction is the defining factor. As has been said previously in this thread front porting generally requires a larger baffle area and therefore maybe a larger cab, and when you consider that a lot cabs are technically too small the increase in size might be what makes them sound better.

To be fair, having owned a two antenna theremin, to get anything other than spooky/sci-fi noises out of it you really need the volume one.

IME having the cable on a drum makes it a lot less likely to get damaged when coiling it away.