Silvia Bluejay

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.

@Paolo85, if you can get hold of the tripod from an NS Design (or similar) and adapt it, or even modify a tripod from a drumkit - as a BCer* once did IIRC - you can attach any cheap EUB to such contraption and simply have it stand up of its own accord with no effort or contortion required of either your plucking/bowing or fingering hand. Some will say that the beauty of playing double bass is hugging the body of the instrument in order to hold it in the most comfortable position. -- slightly OT -- My experience: Since I'm so small that a 'proper' double bass would have to hold me upright, rather than vice versa, I have one of the abovementioned NS Designs (an NXT 5) and an Eminence. Neither, I'm afraid, would qualify as remotely 'cheap' as per your request. The former I simply couldn't afford to buy new now, as I did in 2011, and the latter is a present which, in any case, does need a spacer bracket; however, being slimmer and shallower than a DB, it's less hard to keep in place in a comfortable position, at least for me. Good luck with your search, don't give up on playing upright. * Can anyone remember who that was, or even better find a link to their thread?

Good. But I don't see any reason whatsoever to change the current state of affairs. 👍

Please don't default to most recent. That's exactly how I do NOT use the forum. If you prefer to add a setting that allows each user to choose their own default opening page when they log in, that's fine, but please don't impose such change on everybody with no way out. I'm usually completely uninterested in what the latest threads are. I tend to either have a quick scan (with mod hat on) or go to my favourite threads, which I also follow by email.

While I see your point, guys, in that there will always be scope for tinkering with the exact positioning of the PA forum - and possibly others! - I think we can stop fretting (😉) for now and leave the subforum where Steve has put it. While the PA is definitely not an Other Instrument, it's usually made of (power) Amps and Cabs and speakers etc. For someone looking for PA talk, finding the forum now is a slightly more logical process than before. Let's see how it goes. 👍

OK this has been fixed, I'll lock the thread. 👍

Excellent, thanks Steve, I think the new subforum will be a very useful addition to Basschat. 👍😎🙂

Again, guys feel free to tag me in those too!