peteb

My go-to in these types of threads is always the Pat Travers live album 'Go for What You Know'. The bass playing of Mars Cowling is nothing short of astounding - I'm still trying to nail some of his parts 46 years later! The rest of band aren't too shabby either, elevating what otherwise might be seen as pretty standard groove based blues rock! The 1972 Donny Hathaway Live album, featuring Willie Weeks on bass, is pretty good as well...

Even in the 00s, decent cover bands were packing out pubs. These days, if you get anywhere near half full, the landlord will talk about it being 'full' and the best night they've had for months! I was talking more about the 80s / 90s original bands, when if you put on any reasonably credible rock show you would expect a couple of hundred paying customers (more in many places). Unfortunately, those days are long gone, due to a mixture of changing fashions, more alternative forms of entertainment and (above all) people having less disposable income to spend on going to see bands. You still can get decent attendances in some places (especially in more affluent areas), but it needs to be more of an event and tends to favour certain genres or tribute bands of one kind or another.

It wasn't thirty years or so ago!

That's a frightening thought and almost certainly true. We are now living in a post capitalist world and the new world is a scary place.

You seem to completely miss the point! Yes, we all know how the housing ladder works, but what about those who for some reason haven't built up equity over the last 20 years? This is generally younger people trying to get on the property ladder, but can also affect other people, for example like me who earn decent money but had a chaotic personal circumstances in their 30s. The fact is that if you haven't been able to build up equity, can't get help from the Bank of Mum and Dad, don't have significant inheritances to come or are not otherwise independently wealthy then just putting a decent roof over your head is very difficult (if not impossible) and can leave you in very insecure circumstances. No wonder mental health issues are so common these days. No one is labelling house owners as wealthy and looking to tax them, quite the opposite. We need to help people afford a decent home against the backdrop of stagnant wages and a delinquent housing market. It is ridiculous that a person living on their own on the most common salary is condemned to living in poverty and that a couple living on twice that amount would have a very insecure lifestyle and struggle to bring up children. I agree with you about minimum wages and encouraging businesses to invest and employ more people, and yes, there are plenty of empty nesters who are worth a lot of money due to the value of their property, but may (or may not) be cash poor. The issue remains that wealth is flowing to the very rich, stagnant wages, the middle class is getting poorer and poverty is going up. It's not surprising that fewer people are going out to gigs, especially in the less affluent parts of the country!

There is certainly a lot of money still in this country, but the problem is that it is increasingly flowing from the middle class to the extremely rich. They are then using it to buy more and more assets, thereby pricing them out of the reach of ordinary people. Obviously, this is particularly important with housing. Add to this, an increasing problem with poverty. Twenty years ago, food banks were virtually unheard of by most people - now they seem to be ubiquitous, with certain sections of society reliant on them. What you say about house prices is evidently true. They make a lot of people feel rich, but you don't make money on the house you live in. At best, you just provide additional funds for the end-of-life care home you will probably end up in!

I live in Bradford, which I believe is one of the cheapest cities in the country to buy a house. Even so, we couldn't afford to live in the suburb where my wife has lived most of her life and where I went to school. Bear in mind that this is a pretty middling town, certainly not the poshest part of the district, and that we have a combined household income of around three times the average.

That's hardly the 'bigger picture', that's just your own personal small picture that you think is more important than that of other people.

At this point, the bands that I am in only ever rehearse if there is a point, i.e. if we need to learn new material, or if we've got gigs coming up and we haven't played together for a while. No regular rehearsals or anything like that. If somebody wants to get together for a jam session, then I'm happy to do that (depending on who it is) as long as it is understood that is what we will be doing.

This was very common with Fenders, especially from the 70s that were not thought to 'vintage' until relatively recently! I've got my 78 P bass on a stand next to me right now. These days it has a Badass bridge, a different p/up, new pots and (I think) a new nut. It's also had a re-fret and the back of the neck now has a satin finish. The only original things left are the wood, the scratchplate, the knobs and the tuners, which still work great. It looks, sounds and feels like a 70s Fender, just it's had a few tweaks over the years to ensure that it plays and sounds how it should!

Triggers? How very 90s! It's a long time since I've seen anyone use a set of triggers on an acoustic drum kit, although I'm sure that it must still happen on some bigger productions. Yes you can get good result with mics on bass and snare and a couple of overheads (especially in smaller venues), but the norm these days is still very much individual mics on each drum.

To be fair, I think that the music scene in most areas tends to be 'cliquey'. Musicians tend to get hired based on their reputation / who they know and people will recommend or hire bass players that they trust to not let them down and who they have a good relationship with. The trick is to build up your reputation and network to the point where you become part of the 'clique' that gets offered the best gigs! The second part of the trick is maintain your reputation so that you stay part of the clique and your place isn't taken by someone else!

Remember, these days there are lots of lightweight options for amplification for bass players. Personally, I'm not convinced that some of these options are as good as the gear we used a few years ago, but if it allows you to carry on gigging as you get a bit older then that's great.

I think that as you get older, you have to be careful that you don't talk yourself out of the game. I'm currently playing with three guys who are in their seventies (in two bands) and they all have different attitudes. There is the keys player in the tribute band (70), who has been a pro all of his life, who thinks of himself as semi-retired but still carting his full touring rig around and still quite busy/ making money. The keys player (75) in the blues band will take any gig in a variety of genres, but just carries round one keyboard and a laptop. The issue really is with the singer in the blues band (71) who has started to lose confidence in himself. He hasn't got the voice that he used to have, and the days of him belting out Child In Time are long gone (he used to be in a really good Deep Purple tribute), but he can still handle Freddie King numbers with the best of them. But he is starting to get overly nervous about gigs. For the sort of band you are doing, I wouldn't think that age is a big thing, as long as you still keep the same belief in your abilities as a player, even if you have to start thinking about things like the gear you use, etc where before you wouldn't need to.

Unfortunately, loyalty is generally not rewarded in music / bands, just as it isn't in the wider employment world. When I look back to my twenties, I think that I was way too loyal in certain situations, just as some of the guys I played with were. A couple of them could have gone onto bigger and better things if they had made the move. When you look at (for example) Ozzy's guitar players / band members, how many of them were in other bands when they got the call for the big gig? The answer is all of them. I think that usually, bands are accepting of guys moving onto a higher profile gig. What annoys them are when people are unreliable, or if they leave a project for no good reason or for something that they should have been aware of when they joined the band!

When it comes down to it, you have to do what you need to do. However, it's pretty likely that the band are going to be (quite understandably ) p*ssed off and it won't do your reputation for reliability any good.

You don't know the half of it! I'm guessing that you never played northern working men's clubs in the 80s or 90s!

As I said in my post above, I don't find that to be the case. There are parts of the north that are far more miserable! Probably why @BigRedX's goth bands do so well there! 🙂

From personal experience, it depends on where in the north you play. If you go to the north east or up into Scotland, you know you are going to get a great audience. But you wouldn't necessarily say the same for gigs in, say, Yorkshire. We play quite a lot gigs in the south east, which always have good sized and appreciative crowds. There is always a positive vibe, they react and sing along in all the right places. Of course, they're not quite on the same level with the north east, but more fun than most other places in the north.

Hi Mick. You have mentioned in the past that you want to start getting bigger and better gigs for your band. The thing is that to do this, things like having decent stage patter and getting a bit of a look together are non-negotiable! You have to be able to be able to do it. A few years ago, I did a few months of deps for a R&B type band with a decent following, while their bass player underwent treatment for cancer (thankfully, he's still playing and seems to be doing well). Now this band were not great, but they were all nice guys, had a good inter-band friendship and loved what they did. All of this came across to the audience and many loved them, far beyond their actual ability as a band. They also had a singer who was a good frontman, hardly Dave Lee Roth in looks or his stage act, but was funny and engaging with a crowd. They also had a lead guitar player who was sort of OK, but nothing special. However, they constantly namechecked him and talked him up as if he was Eric Clapton! A lot of punters bought into this and thought he was a great player, where other musos would just roll their eyes. I know for a fact that a number of promoters used to book them for festivals, despite not really wanting to, just because of the demand from the audience. These things just need sorting out if you want to play better gigs. It's not really that hard to do, but the whole band needs to buy into it. If they really don't want to, then perhaps you need to start thinking about playing with someone else.

Of course, a lot of this is BS! I love a good P bass, I've got two and it is undoubtedly a classic bass sound. But other good bass sounds are available, it's just the fashion for the past however many years has been for a P bass. In the 80s and 90s, it was all about active basses and everyone was playing a Spector or a Warwick or whatever!

Things have changed now. Tommy Tedesco was part of the generation that created the reference sounds that today's producers want to recreate. These days, a producer might ask a guitarist to get the sound Tommy got when he made a guitar sound like a mandolin! Similarly, the producer wants a P bass sound on the recording, because that's what he thinks a bass sounds like. They don't care if you want to play your favourite bass, they want something like the bass used on sessions from the 60 / 70s, which may well have featured Tommy Tedesco on guitar!

To be fair, I'm not too sure what the thread is about and I'm not convinced that the OP is either! People talk about how they are busy 'doing sessions', but there is very little paid session work about. The old days of people being called to go into a recording studio to play on albums, demos, jingles and film scores has pretty much disappeared and the work that is around seems to be dominated by a handful of very experienced guys in London. I do know a few guys who still regularly do sessions, even if it isn't normally their main source of income these days. They all have their own (pretty sophisticated) home studios and virtually all of the work they do is online. They are all knocking on a bit, varying degrees of eccentricity, great players and tend to have a bit of a reach / name in certain genres. There isn't a lot of work for bass players and even less for drummers (their parts tend to be programmed). I also know guys who have studios and make a living producing library music. Again, they may occasionally call in a singer or guitar player, but they tend to cover most of the parts themselves.

Being able to play is a given. If you're not a top player, it doesn't matter what basses you've got, you're not going to get the top gigs. However, many producers / band leaders have a very definite idea of what an electric bass should sound like and what they want to hear is based on classic sounds from the 60s and 70s. There are plenty of stories from guys new to the session scene, turning up for dates and nailing what they thought was a perfect take, only to find the engineer or producer being less than enthusiastic and trying muck around with the EQ on the bass track. They do another take with a P bass and suddenly, everyone is happy. The guys who get the most calls are the ones who can get that sound on the first take or so.

Unfortunately, in many situations (especially at the higher-end, well paid sessions), you would be wrong.