Silvia Bluejay

IIRC the strings supplied as standard by NS on their uprights are D'Addario Hybrids, in order to be reasonably useful to all kinds of buyers of the EUB. I think most experienced players recommend choosing a set of arco-friendly strings (and there are lots of differences among those as well) if arco represents the bulk of your playing. I almost exclusively do pizz, so I'm afraid I can't be of any help in this case.

Does the war in Ukraine imply we should forget about, say, violence in the street or the climate emergency? Or anything else that we find intolerable and worth fighting against? Do we only have space in our brain for being appalled at a limited number of unsettling, unfair or downright horrible happenings? If that's the case, could we please have a list of currently acceptable topics to be appalled by?

I tend to find most of such banter extremely tedious, because I'm old and I was alive and in my teens in the 1970s, so nothing much offends me any more. This kind of stuff does occasionally still p!ss me off, however. I've said this before - try imagining a similar situation to that described by the 'joke' or 'banter', and replace the female with a black person or a gay person, and see if telling or laughing at such 'joke' still sounds acceptable to your ears. Most of the times it won't.

Doesn't it depend not just on the type of gig, but also on your role in the band? Of course for plug-and-play gigs where backline, PA, lights and sound engineer are provided, it's just a matter of carrying an instrument, a lead and a tuner. When the gig is in a pub or club and the stage (or corner by the gents') is bare, that's another matter entirely. For our main band @Happy Jack and I carry absolutely everything except the drumkit. PA, backline, desk, cables, microphones, bass guitar and double bass, all stands, lights, recording equipment, cameras, band banner with name and logo, plus the frontman and his two guitars and combo. We also always carry spares for most of the above - although not for the frontman... 🙄 😉

I've moved it, as it still has more to do with Build Diaries than any repairs. I'll be keeping an eye on that website, as a spectator rather than a builder.

Should I move this to Build diaries perhaps? It's a pity they only seem to deal with 6-string guitars as opposed to basses.

It may again be something to do with the server running out of disk space, and some functions either struggling or having been deliberately switched off for the time being.

Not true, we would take equal notice, as below:

Well, I imagine for us lefties there are a lot of impossible desires if we're after basses with slightly less common colours or combinations of hardware etc. and we can't afford/don't want to order a custom build. For instance, last time I looked, this simply wasn't available in LH, full stop: And don't get me started on LH double basses (not electric uprights, they are usually OK). You learn to live with the situation, and it keeps your GAS under control.

We heard you the first time @christhammer666. As discussed above, in certain contexts - although not Join My Band or similar - the ad would definitely fall foul of the law, but that isn't the main point we're looking at.

Agreed. And that started me thinking, and mentally doing my usual substitutions. No women in the band. No blacks in the band. No whites in the band. No Asians in the band. No LGBT in the band. No non-Brits in the band. No over-25s in the band. No under 60s in the band. Etc. Pick and mix those you're comfortable, or feel uncomfortable, with.

LOL. Gee, I wonder why? Typical pub and club stuff is there to entertain the punters. They want something they can sing along to and dance to. If you want to be booked, and to get an audience, that's what you've got to do. He's making it clear that he's favouring the creative point of view. Fair enough. As for the rest of the ad, he has his own ideas of what he wants, and again fair enough. The whole ad would completely put me off, anyway, irrespective of my gender or indeed his.

I think the main point of the law is that there has to be a good reason for excluding one or more sections of the population from applying for a certain job. It works across the board, with race, gender, sexuality etc. I can live with that, without necessarily crying "woke".

In this country, such an ad may, in certain contexts, be illegal, as falling foul of the Equality Act.

I would ask, if you're curious. There may be acceptable reasons - as mentioned above, perhaps the band(s) they mainly cover are all-male, or they want to target a mostly male market. I think we've mentioned before, on Basschat, that it appears some bookers aren't happy with, say, a band with a female lead, because they think it's going to be all about emotional, "girly" stuff. Sometimes they have a point. If, instead, they mean they wouldn't want a woman on bass, then I'd really be curious to know why. I'd also be curious to know why if the opposite was happening, a band not wanting a male bassist.

I imagine you will have checked Gollihur's information, but if you haven't, this is the relevant page and you can ask him questions via email, despite the fact you couldn't buy the bass from him even if you wanted to (it's out of stock).

My Eminence has a sound post and a bass bar, as normal for a DB, albeit obviously in proportion. I'm not sure if the sound post can actually be moved or is glued, I can't tell. As you note, the bridge is adjustable for action; also, both the fingerboard and the bridge are as good for bowing (should you wish to) as those on any DB. If you expect the unamplified sound of an Eminence to match that of a DB, you'll be disappointed, as it simply doesn't have the size, so it doesn't project as well as a DB and it can't be as loud. Amplified, though, it's fine. My pickup is a Realist, again like on many DBs, only smaller so it fits the Eminence bridge. I wasn't happy with the steel strings it had on from the manufacturer, so I swapped them for Silver Slaps. YMMV.

And, to continue with the 'random things Youtube does' theme, I've just noticed three new subscribers, all of them from here (thank you!). I'm sure that at least two of you did not press the button right now, but did it days or weeks ago. The Dynamites channel's subscriber count has just gone up by three, but I've only received notification of one new subscriber. Apologies again to all of you who subscribed after reading this thread - only a minority actually get notified to us. 🤔

There is also usually a chasm between what we, as bass players, like when we focus on playing on our own - refining our technique or reproducing our idols' sound or look, finding the tone that's perfect to our taste, the strings that feel like silk under our fingertips, etc., and what matters, or is needed, to play live with the band. The latter will very often bear no resemblance to the former. For instance, @Happy Jack knows that, no matter how perfectly he dials his favourite sound in his rig in our home studio, by the time he's on stage with his bands I will have completely changed the EQ of not just what comes out of the PA but also of his on-stage rig ("Could you please roll off the low frequencies completely? [cue horrible, harsh, nasal sound] Perfect, thanks!". ) He may hate it at the time, but the live recordings usually vindicate me. As for the make and model of bass we may play, punters usually can't tell the difference between a bass and a guitar, let alone a Status and a Precision. Even when the former is headless!* * From an anecdote relayed by late, much missed Basschatter Colin Payne (Barneyg42). A punter at a gig asked him what Fender he was playing, as he'd never seen that model. He was playing a Status Mark King headless.

That seems to be the fate of all these music shows, doesn't it? At least you guys oop north still have a Bass/Guitar show to attend if you so wish. The one in London appears to have fallen off the radar completely, after the fiasco of 2019 where it had to co-exist and mix in the very same area with all things guitar, which were more numerous, more vociferous (read: v. noisy!) and far better attended. It seems that, if you want a show to survive, you have to involve 6-string guitars and their players in some way or other.

I do most setup work on my bass guitars but stop at swapping pickups or anything to do with soldering. Not because I'm not able to solder - I am, my Dad taught me when I was a kid - but because I never seem to have at hand the correct worktop, rigs, accessories, lights etc., indispensable in the case of a small, awkward thing like a bass cavity where a wrong move will have you burn a wire that was never meant to be touched. As for upright bass, I have turned a right-handed electric upright left-handed, including filing the nut, re-shaping the bridge, adjusting the tailpiece and re-positioning the spacing bracket. Great fun. I wouldn't want to work on a proper DB or similar though - opening the damn thing in the first place, and then repositioning the bass bar and the soundpost, and reshaping the fingerboard, are definitely best left to a pro luthier!

That's still nowhere as bad as the drunken woman repeatedly invading the stage area and yelling into Damo's microphone at that Dynamites gig in Ware a few months ago. (That particular woman had to be escorted away by a male punter who looked like he's done that before...)

Some pubs do - they ask you for an invoice, pay you on the night, then claim from their breweries or owners. However, that's open to the old trick of "we agreed to pay you £250, but we want you to write £300 on your invoice." so the LL gets £50 for himself every time he has a band. It looks petty, and it is, but it has happened to us a few times. In those cases it all happened after the gig, so we were there at 1am wanting to go home and unwilling to start a row. We made a point of never playing in those places again.

I'm not sure about that, if by customers you mean the punters. The punters pay the bill presented by the pub, which replaces the exchange of invoices in cases like hospitality, retail etc. It's still proof of payment, of course.

Distributing the money among the band members and getting receipts - or being able to get receipts if needed - should be OK to avoid band leaders looking like they're getting rich (HAHA....!). It's up to each musician to declare their income from music if it's deemed to be high enough to be taxable.