Silvia Bluejay

I have been attentively listening to songs' basslines - as opposed to lyrics and other instruments - since I got hooked on Saturday Night Fever the soundtrack when I was 13. At the time girls weren't supposed to play bass, there were no lefty instruments AT ALL in shops, and the received wisdom in my family was that we had no talent for music anyway. Fast forward nearly 30 years spent taking photos and doing primitive sound engineering for friends' bands, standing in front of, rather than on, stage, and at age 41 I split up with guitarist partner of 16 years. I missed music, I did not miss guitar, so I bought a lefty bass online and started the journey; happy to be still on it. No interest in playing live or indeed in playing in front of anybody - just for myself. It makes me happy.

That wasn't our case (we used usually max 2 devices, 3 if we count the wired laptop) but yours is a valid point.

They are a pain to set up, Dave, unless of course you work in IT (I used to, but my knowledge is now mostly obsolete!). Apart from that, we've had no problems, but TP-Link isn't the only option obviously. I would describe £70-100 for a router as mid-range rather than high end. 👍

We always had our laptop physically connected to the XR18 (Ethernet port), ready for emergencies, but that obviously implied me getting on stage and fiddling with a mouse, which we prefer to avoid. This is what we have as an external router in our Soundcraft Ui. We have its correspondent older model in the XR18. We wanted something reliable that uses two channels. No point replacing the crap internal router in a PA system with another crap, external, router. Hence the price tag.

@stewblack, I remember this particular night as being an effing nightmare with connections to tablets and phones. Spot the culprits all over the marquee's roof... You can even see them flickering in the vid, as they were spooking the cameras as well! 😱

Off the top of my head: a. The router might be going west b. Interference. There are places where the connection is faultless throughout, and places where it's a constant struggle, and it's not the router's fault. In addition to the actual WiFi routers in the venue, we found that WiFi printers may interfere, and LED lights (especially the decorative ones you can route all around marquees etc.) seem to have a bad effect on the connection too, when there are a number very close to the unit or even worse, when they're plugged into the same circuit or an adjacent socket. Unfortunately, unless you have a residency in a certain venue, there's no way of testing. We are now using a Soundcraft Ui 24R and we've occasionally encountered similar problems, but to a far lesser extent.

Great to see you back, Yolanda! 🎵🎶💛

I hear what you say, but he doesn't seem to have that approach even now, he's still the one who does most of the work, I don't think he has a large team around him, and those who are there are probably admin and perhaps a coder (Mac is the main coder still, as far as I know). When discussions and arguments arise in a forum about venues cancelling and/or not paying, the main potential problem is probably libel/slander and life's complicated enough without having to firefight stuff like that....

I think Mac had to close the discussion forum because of the increasing number of trolls and spammers, and he had no time to moderate it as well as running and improving the site itself.

You guys are correct re. Lemonrock being very much limited to, basically, London, Beds, Bucks, Berks and a bit of Herts. Fantastic resource if you're in or around those areas, pretty pointless otherwise. Definitely worth googling to see if there are one or more equivalent websites/communities in your particular areas. You will obviously find a lot of agency type websites who only look for tribute and function bands and members for function bands' ever-rotating line-ups, and they cost a fortune to join, but there may be non-agency ones that more closely resemble Lemonrock.

Yes.

Re-post. @Happy Jack's toys. Nuff said - and I'm his missus.

@TimR - Snap! Some engineers never walk out front, they only look at the signal on their tablets or screens. In the past I have had to go and yell at them that, say, there were no backing vocals, or bass, or whatever, and at first they didn't believe me because the signal was there! There's one particular festival where the guys are lovely but really can't be ar$ed to work and we always sound cr@p.... @MB - Cheshire - When we have to use the venue/festival's sound engineers I go equipped with all sorts of Stage Plans and Tech Specs. I even stay in the vicinity of the desk, waving the relevant bit of paper in the guys' face when some drastic intervention is needed. But as above, most of these people try to do as little work as they can possibly get away with, once they've erected the stage and set up the PA, especially if they are part of the organising team. They know that bands won't complain, as doing so will kill their chances of playing on that stage again.

True, but playing fingerstyle should not mean you sound muddy or don't cut through. It's all down to the sound engineer.

You usually can't have your own sound engineer for your performance if it's an event organised by a pro team. They won't let you touch their equipment. We have done festival gigs with our own PA and in that case, yes, we sounded as good as ever because I already know what I'm doing.

Being a brash southern European, I have no crippling British politeness whatsoever with fellow sound engineers, so when we play outdoor festivals I tend to befriend the poor sods, who have to deal with engineering 3/5/15 or however many different bands in a day, introduce myself as our band's sound engineer and offer to make suggestions for the finer details in the mix. This is usually well received, although my suggestions are not always actioned on. However, I always assume that they know best about the overall volume level of the PA - in theory they should have tested and adapted the system to the intended location and radius - so I've never made suggestions about that. For indoor venues we have to assume, being in London and the Home Counties, that their settings will have been checked with/approved by the local council etc. for excessive noise, and I probably wouldn't choose to interfere with that either, even just to ask to turn down. I'm quite surprised to read that your festivals appear to have free reign on volume levels indoors. If that's the case, I totally agree with you, it would cause me to walk out even when I'm wearing my earplugs. Bass and bass drum in a live setting indoors should not produce too much low frequency, as it reverberates and makes the sound horribly muddy. The lower the frequency, the longer the waves, which need bigger rooms to sound acceptable. No wonder the bass players are desperately trying to cut through. The sound engineers should reduce the volume and gain, up the mids and low mids, use the HPF properly and give everybody a break. (That obviously goes for the other instruments, of course, with their particular frequencies.)

Singing properly while doing complicated and spectacular dancing for most of the show must be impossible - having to choose between doing one or the either, Madge clearly went for what she still excels at. She never was the best singer in the world anyway, but that can be said of so many music stars. However, you're more likely to get away with that if you're male, not if you're female and over 50 and certainly not if you're Madonna.

Assuming the first gig was a cracker and we see no reason why the booker wouldn't chase us with their diary open, we suspect the following. - We're judged to be great but too expensive and the booker/manager doesn't want to say - The repertoire is too niche and the booker/manager is aware that their regulars are fickle, so next time there won't be any novelty value and far fewer punters. - Another similar band is offering their services for less money (even if the booker/manager can afford us - they are going for the lowest price, not the best band) - Power struggle within a club's commitee Preposterous reasons we've been given: - We were NOT deafeningly loud on the night, unlike the DJ we shared with. (We wouldn't have wanted to go back there anyway, due to the noise levels!) - Booker/manager decided before even hearing us once that our genre would not go down well at his venue. (We finally persuaded him to try us and guess what, it went down a storm and we're getting re-booked!) @Happy Jack may add to the list if I've forgotten something.

Not at the time I posted it wasn't!

I think it might be less intrusive if it had been set up to slide out only when you hover/press on it, while simply appearing as a thin orange line at all other times. What grates most is that, in any case, we haven't got complete control over the cookies we're having to put up with from this new, intrusive collaboration, so having constant access to a fundamentally unsatisfactory Privacy Settings panel looks very much like a joke being played on us.

Not me. Strict Firefox and Adblock on everything, no Facebook, Amazon, Ebay etc. apps on my phone, no logging into anything via my social media. It's all actually far less inconvenient than those sites are trying to make you believe.

I share everybody's displeasure at the situation. We do not need Ezoic to ruin our enjoyment of this site. My default Privacy panel on this site was almost completely unticked by default - which is OK - but had a few ticked items that can't be unticked - which is bad. I have unleashed both Adblock Plus and Firefox against this plague, but I'm still feeling very uneasy. Firefox: Adblock Plus:

LOL the last time I was single, in my mid-40s, music was my obligatory topic at dates. I don't mean I wanted my date to be an accomplished musician or able to discuss the finer points of musical composition, but music, as a player or as a listener, had to have some role in his life. No interest whatsoever in music? Next please, don't care if you look like/are worth as much as Brad Pitt. If something is important to you, you do need a partner who can at least understand, but preferably fully share it, whatever it may be. I'm now married to a musician and only a small number of my friends are non-musical. Even those I've known since childhood are fans of bands and sometimes go to concerts, so we talk music even if they may not share my own taste. It's rarer for me not to end up talking about music with someone than the opposite.

Plus one! : D

@Paul S, I may have been thinking about your solution, rather than a drumkit modification. Thanks for adding that info on here. @Rosie C, @Paolo85, incidentally - and sorry if I sound prescriptive - with anything long scale and held vertically you should always use the proper double bass method of plucking and fingering. Never play an upright like a normal bass, your muscles and tendons will soon let you know that they're not happy. Hence, as you both note, the need for the damn thing to be comfortable to hold. In theory I could get away with playing my NS NXT like an oversized bass guitar when the action is low, because it's been designed to basically play itself (like butter? Let's not go there!). However, I deliberately raise the action a bit and play it like a DB. Just to be safe.