peteb

I had a 57AVRI P bass with a 44mm neck and it was far from unplayable, it played really nicely in fact. It just made trying to get that Eb harmonic in Portrait of Tracy a bit more challenging...!

Yep, I've owned two P basses from that period - one great, one pretty poor. The good one, I bought twice...!

My 78P is about 41mm, so it could be a slight over measurement. Still, it seems like a reasonable deal - I paid £1.6k about three and a half years ago, but mine didn't have the original bridge and needed cleaning up a bit, so £2k doesn't seem to be a bad price.

Yes, I would agree that having good ears is by far the most important factor. But, if you have a working knowledge of musical theory then it makes playing by ear much more powerful and straightforward, not to mention making it much easier / quicker to learn new songs, etc. For example, I play in a Led Zep tribute band, and when I had to learn the San Francisco section of the live version of Dazed and Confused, there is a lot of nice but pretty busy bass playing that sounds quite complex at first. However, when you realise that he is playing over a repeated Em > C lydian phrase, then it is a lot easier to work out what he is playing and to work out what the right part should be. But if you don't know what a lydian mode is, then you could take forever learning it and still not get it right! By the way, I have had next to no formal musical training and still get the names of the modes wrong sometimes (I double-checked that I had got correct mode before I typed the above paragraph), but it is understanding and applying the concept that is important.

Now that looks like a proper Fender! You say it's a bitsa, is there a story behind it?

I've actually got a gig 15 minutes away next week, with two about 40 mins away the week after. These will be the only local gigs I've done in months! Most are an hour or two's drive at least (last one was just over 200 miles away).

They may well have been simpler and happier times, but they weren't necessarily better! I remember a rehearsal where there there weren't enough plug sockets, so the guitarist took the plugs of two amp leads, wired them together on the same plug, then we used them like that for the rest of the evening. Nobody died, but they could have done...!

At the last gig I talked to a few punters, packed the car up, said goodbye to the promoter / stage crew and then drove to the Travelodge around the corner. It depends - usually I'm driving, but if not I will have a couple of beers while packing down and talking to punters / promoters, etc. The last couple of gigs have been as above, but the one before that we were hanging out in the hotel bar for a couple of hours until it closed, chatting with the rest of the band and any punters still around (including a drunk Scottish couple, both ex-military, neither of whom we could understand except that the bloke kept telling us that we were 'magnificent' in an extremely thick Glaswegian accent).

I'm not in the market, but in a couple of years time,who knows! If I was, then this is the sort of bass / price point I would be looking at.

Fender Precision Bass, sunburst, m/n, 1976 https://www.facebook.com/commerce/listing/278741381841522/?media_id=4&ref=share_attachment

Led Into Zeppelin (obviously a Zep tribute). Just played the Black Frog in Chelmsford last weekend and Nick (the promoter) was talking about JV and Del having played there (recently I assume), so presumably with you.

We did Backstage at The Green in Kinross a few weeks ago (both the the Friday and the Saturday). It turned out to be really good weekend. I played at the The Boot and Shoe in Greystoke a few years ago. A tiny pub, but quite good fun in the end (and a great Sunday lunch after the gig)!

And sometimes people make decisions that make sense at the time, but things change and they then make different decisions.

All the time. Musicians drift in and out of bands all the time, for a variety of reasons. Generally situations change over time and what was an issue might not seem a big deal a couple of years later. If you need them, they can play and are not complete d1cks, then why not?

There are jam nights and jam nights, often confused with the dreaded open mic nights. To me, a jam session should be where you get a group of musicians together to play through a song or musical idea that someone has that hasn't been rehearsed before. The idea is that you don't have a firm arrangement or know exactly where it is going to go, but you follow whoever has an idea that might take it to different places. Therefore someone might extend a solo (hopefully not too long), then give you a nod when they want to finish, someone might want to bring it down or even to try to a reggae feel over a middle eight or whatever. It encourages people to listen, support whoever is soloing and get used to busking. Of course, if you have guys who are not used to doing stuff like that or even being onstage, then it's about helping them get through the song until the end. Obviously, it's not going to work every time, but often it can be great as well as give you new ideas and improve your playing.

Tenuous maybe, but still pretty cool...!

Yes, although there were usually quite a few electric guitars among the brass instruments. Ray was a bit of a 'character', rather seedy older guy with a flair for being economical with the truth. Nearly every guitar or bass in the shop had once belonged to Paul Kossof or Jack Bruce or someone similar! Even at thirteen, none of us believed him. He had a habit of over-pricing his better stock, so it never he sold it. I remember that he had an old red semi-acoustic Gibson bass hanging on the wall for years - I considered putting in an offer for it when the shop eventually closed down. I wish that I had done, probably worth a bit now!

I am guessing that you would have bought it from Ray Allen Music in Shipley, where I got my first bass about a year earlier. As a teenager, I used to live just up the road...

This is rather pertinent at the moment, as my mate Tony is closing down his small independent music shop at the end of the month. Unfortunately, despite keeping going for years against the odds, he just can't carry on any longer in the face of competition from online stores, the fallout from the pandemic, falling footfall, higher costs (rent, rates, etc), declining interest in music and the appalling way that many of the big distributors treat the smaller shops. I used to say that if he could stock stuff that he needed I would buy from him rather than online, but he said that he just couldn't put in big enough orders to get the gear that I would want. I did buy a Les Paul Special off him a bit ago (a commission sale), which was cool, but he just couldn't get the turnover to keep the shop viable. It is a shame to see a friend lose his business, but that is the way of the world for many smaller independent retail businesses these days. When I was a kid, there were quite a few, reasonably large music shops around. These were places that we would all go to hang out, try out gear that we would then save up to buy, meet new friends and potential band mates, get advice and ad-hoc lessons from older musicians, etc. You don't get that from the big online box movers...

If only that were true. Many of the most successful people I know have the right contacts and bucketloads of self-confidence, which quite often has little relationship to their abilities...!

I think that you are overthinking it. The point of a jam session is to play with different people, take a few chances and take yourself out of your comfort zone. Sometimes it will be quite magical and sometimes the wheels will come off. Inevitably you will make mistakes, but the idea is that you learn from those mistakes. It's not a bad idea to just watch a couple of times to get the feel of it and get comfortable with the people there. But don't let it put you off getting up again when you're ready. I've been in the house band for lots of jam sessions over the years, playing with everyone from Texan blues semi-legends whose albums I had bought (scary, but fun) to guys who have never played on stage before. For the smaller ones, part of the fun is to get guys without much experience and see their confidence grow as they get better each time they get up.

It's all about establishing yourself and then networking. You have a build up a reputation as a decent player and, just as importantly, being reliable and not being a d1ck to work with. I'm looking to move abroad in a few years, so gawd knows what will happen with bands then. However, even out in Spain, I have a couple of friends who used to be promoters and who have got involved with the music scene in Andalucía. There is also a well established English guitar player in the region who has played with someone that I've played in bands with, so obviously I will be getting in contact with him (even though I've never actually met him).

it's not just bands on the level of Metallica - I haven't auditioned anyone, or done an audition from an advert or whatever for 30 years! Generally, you know people by reputation or you get a call from someone that you played on the same bill with somewhere. The last time I did anything like an audition was for the solo project for a guitar player who is in a household name old pop-rock band. I was recommended by the bass player, who was leaving his band. He had four guys in the frame (all recommendations), which he whittled down to two At that point, his old bass player decided that he wanted to re-join the band, so that was that!

Always loved this, but certainly somewhat eccentric...!