peteb

I've gotta say that i just bumped into an old drummer mate of mine at a pub gig tonight and he was saying that we ought to appreciate that we're in our late fifties / early sixties and we're both lucky enough to be still gigging regularly. Make the most of it while you still can, I'm still looking for more gigs. @petergales of this parish has just turned 79 and is still gigging and I have every intention of doing the same!

Thanks Rob. I will have a look at it when I get the chance and try to see if my very basic reading skills are up to it! I know the song, but what I play is based more on what George Porter Jr and Andy Hess played on later live versions. I didn't even know that the bass player from the Dave Matthews Band was on the original. I learnt it for a band I was depping for, then they changed the key for the girl singer, played it on one gig and promptly dropped it for some reason! I did half a dozen gigs for them and then suggested that perhaps they should find a more permanent bass player. However, I always thought that it was a great song!

If you're listening to Gov't Mule, then perhaps you could look at the excellent 'Beautifully Broken'. Great song with a nice bass part.

One of my things to play on soundchecks!

Technically, there are many far better drummers than Peart! What NP was great at was 'orchestrating' drum parts that sound impressive and to build songs / pieces of music around those parts. But he wasn't one of the top guys in terms of groove or technique, etc by any means.

But they're really not. The last time I came across one was owned by a 20 something pro musician, who is classically trained and plays in orchestras, but also does lots of freelance electric bass gigs and plays the blues circuit with a couple of his friends (all pros, ex music school ). He wanted a simple bass that is 100% reliable and would always be suitable for the gigs he does. So, he paid quite a lot for a bog standard CS P bass, which he seems to use pretty much exclusively. I've played it - it's a really nice P bass, does exactly what you would expect it to do, well built, plays nicely and looks cool in an understated way. He is really happy with it and uses it just about every bass gig he does.

The thing is that the beauty of the original Fender designs, is that their virtue was in their simplicity. These original designs produced the industry standards tones that define what we think an electric bass should sound like, but it is relatively easy to make minor improvements i.e. swapping a bridge out or changing pickups. Of course, you might prefer the original BBOT bridge design to a badass of whatever bridge you could choose, which is perfectly valid. But you can easily tweak a P bass (for example) to make what you consider to be a marginal improvement, but without changing the overall characteristic sound of the bass. Which is what lots of us did to 70s Fenders back in the 80s (see @tauzero's recent post above).

I actually look for basses that have been modded (especially semi-vintage Fenders). That way I know that the price is probably going to be a bit lower than an all original and saves me the trouble of searching for a suitable replacement bridge or pickup, etc! When I first started playing (late 70s / early 80s), we all had 70s Fenders and we all modded them in one way or another. I remember seeing an interview with Rick Wills, where he said that you could never really say that a Fender P bass was really yours, until you had taken a screwdriver to it...!

I've got one of the early Xotic J4 basses - great bass! If you can pick one up for a decent price (and you can sometimes get them for a song), then do it. Certainly at least as good as the Japanese Sadowskys, but much better value.

Not these days! The richest men in the world are stone cold nerds / social misfits and they are branching out into politics / running the world's biggest economy and military power!

There is often a trade-off between tone and playability. There is no point in having the best bass tone possible if you can't physically play the damn thing! How many times have you come across guitar shredders, who can play really fast and really cleanly on low action guitars with light gauge strings, but have a cr*p tone and whose rhythm parts sound really unconvincing? Most guitar players worship SRV's tone - of course, he played a strat with a high action and heavy strings!

That's how I used to set-up my basses, but these days I have a touch more relief in the neck, which (for me) makes the bass come alive. Unfortunately, I have overdone it on my P bass and the action is going to have to come down. It sounds great, but it's going to be too tiring to play a whole gig with it like that.

No, it was choking out.

I agree. I used to set basses up with what I thought was a fairly low action, until Chris Dodson from Alpher basses did a set-up for me. The set-up was was great until I tried to play it in earnest, when it kept cr*pping out when I played in a normal fashion (and I'm not a particularly heavy handed player). I had to take it back to him to raise the action before I had a gig the following night! I have recently been experimenting with a slightly higher action on my P basses, which as you say, gives you a fuller sound and also allows you to use the same bass in both concert pitch or tuned down one. However, I've just got Jon Shuker set up a couple of basses with a fair bit of relief, where he queried whether I had overdone it. It turns out he was right, and I am going to have to straighten the neck to get a slightly lower action. It sounds great, but just too much of a struggle to play a whole set with...!

I'm surprised that only 1% of the rooms you play have a bad sound, but I agree with your point, and you should be able to get a decent sound with the right gear. For me, the point is to be able send the sound I want to the desk and to make it as fool proof as possible. I try to make the sound engineer's job as easy as possible, bearing in mind that not all of them are that great. First of all get a sound that you like that works with the genres / bands you play with, which doesn't have too extreme an EQ that is likely to cause issues. It also helps if you have a half-decent technique and can get a usable sound to send to the desk. I always use a bit of light compression and you might find that a HPF is a good idea for many rooms that have issues with bass frequencies and sometimes you might have to tweak your settings to get rid of unwanted frequencies. If everybody in the band takes the same approach (and they generally do IME), then you shouldn't have any insurmountable problems.

I used to play Turn The Page several years ago, in a three piece band with a completely different arrangement . Great song. Are you sure that you're not overthinking Hollywood Nights? I've just had a listen and it is pretty much just a chug in E, playing octaves and straight 8s! You just have to be aware of your damping. It doesn't have a chord change until it gets to the bridge (one bar of D and one bar of A, before it goes back to E). It's a good song, but surprisingly simple!

First gigs of the year for the Zep tribute, up to Kinross in Scotland on Friday then Cullercoats in the Northeast on Saturday. Quite tiring, driving for a 512 mile round trip in two days, setting off at 10:30 on Friday and getting home at 2:30 on Sunday morning. Both gigs were well attended (101 tickets sold in a 120 capacity in Kinross, with a 220 sell out in Cullercoats), which was good as we had just had to cancel a gig in Yorkshire due to poor ticket sales. The first gigs we've played since November, so we were a bit rusty, but we played well enough over the two gigs. A very good crowd reaction on both nights.

Bizarrely, knowing a few people connected with Magnum, that's a completely opposite viewpoint than they all have, especially regarding Stanway!

I'm surprised that 'Les Morts Dansants' isn't on Dave's list! A pretty good bassline to transcribe, from what I remember.

I was actually in a really good Magnum tribute band for a couple of years. It featured a guitarist who had been in Bob Catley's solo band and a keys player who had played on one of his albums. It was a cool band and some of the songs are great, but it was very niche / difficult to get enough gigs! Having said that, we used to have people who would follow us around - one guy from Durham came to every gig, even if we were paying in the Midlands! Magnum may not have been the biggest band around, but they do have a genuinely devoted following.

Kinross - Backstage at the Green. It's quite a big, plush hotel, with a converted concert room (that used to be a swimming pool at one point, I believe). It is a bit of a circuit gig where a lot of heritage / ex big(ish) names play, along with some of the bigger tribute bands. Still about 30 tickets left, as of Friday! It's a really pretty village and a great place for a night away if you fancy coming along with the missus (always rooms available). We get a few hotel rooms as part of the deal, so it's one of the those gigs where we get the chance to have a few beers after the gig. We play it every year, always great fun.

Just to add that one of these gigs (both 'mid-sized' venues) has completely sold out and the other is not far off (as of Friday, with a week to go until the show). It just goes to show how chaotic the market for live music is at the moment and how different things are in different parts of the country!

It's partly certain areas and partly the time of the year. No one seems to want to commit to buying advance tickets until they've had the first payday after the Christmas break! We have a couple of gigs on the weekend after next and they have done pretty well for ticket sales. But they are in a different part of the country (Scotland and the North East) and everyone has been paid again now!

Out of those three, definitely the first one - the other two are all the place! I've never heard the Bernie Marsden version before, but that's pretty close to what I've always played whenever I've had to do SG over the years.