EliasMooseblaster

I don't think it's entirely paranoia: Mrs Mooseblaster lost an entire library of music because of a bug in an iTunes update. Apple's army of so-called "geniuses" were spectacularly unsympathetic about it and tried to make it seem like the problem in their software was somehow her fault. It's a pity sites like Bandcamp haven't caught on more widely, as they give you ongoing access to anything you've bought (or even had for free, where the price is set as such), so you can still listen to the music even if you lose the file. I'll often buy downloads from BC for this reason, and the fact that it seems a bit much to ask a tiny, independent band to send me a CD all the way from Canada, Australia, wherever.

Even live, I know John Entwistle went through several iterations of signal splitting over the years for his stage sound, and didn't Chris Squire have his Ricks modded for stereo wiring to basically do what Mr Blood does? Not to mention Billy Sheehan's ever-so-subtle bi-amped bass tone...and Royal Blood are hardly the first bass/drums duo - Clatter, anyone? No, I suspect it says more about how little attention people pay to the bass player in most bands, that it took a pair without any guitarists or standalone singers in the way, and a good PR engine behind them, for most people to realise, "ey up, he's doing all that with one of them new-fangled bass gee-tars."

I had been thinking through the possibility that the engineers would treat it like any other band, as long as RB's guy was doing the signal splitting himself - i.e., mic up his "guitar" amp, and DI his "bass" signal...but then when you frame the timeline like that, it's starting to look like a moot point anyway!

I don't know whether this first one counts, as I do own one of these basses, just not the specific, offending items: I quite like my Epi EB-3, despite their divisive nature. I bought it from Macari's, where in hindsight, they'd obviously taken five minutes to make sure their stock was at least playable. Going out to bigger shops to test amps and pedals, it's not been difficult to find an EB-3 to test them with...only for me to get a horrible shock as the assistant passes me a bass with wobbly pots and a crackling pickup switch. And the action. Oh, the action. I don't know how it's possible to have the strings high enough to limbo under, and yet still have the bottom couple of notes choked off when they rattle against the frets. The other one, which definitely counts, is the Hofner Violin. I couldn't vouch for its origins, or its authenticity - it was clearly an old instrument, and it looked an awful lot like a Hofner, so I assume that it was Hofner themselves who put the logo on the head. In any case, it felt like I was playing a toy. It's not the guitar's fault I'm a big chap, but that fiddly little neck was completely unworkable. It sounded...fine, I guess. For a couple of combinations of settings. I was initially quite excited to test the array of knobs and switches, but none of the tones they produced jumped out and made me think "yes, I will learn to tolerate the neck as long as I can get this sound."

Back when Hawkwind had smaller ambitions...

I would always try to give John Peel the benefit of the doubt with his myriad and eclectic discoveries, but what he saw in that song baffles me to this day.

So the brown note is (very likely) a myth, but if anyone's feeling particularly mischevious, I am assured that the same effect can be achieved by pressing a certain nerve ending on the body. I used to know a karate instructor who took a voracious interest in the Eastern philosophies around the martial arts (mainly, we suspect, as a means to further his similarly-enthusiastic-and-possibly-not-entirely-healthy interest in Asian ladies...), and his studies had led him to a lot of theories and teachings about pressure points. Apparently he spent an afternoon with his brother (also a martial arts enthusiast) working through the points described in one book. Upon testing one point, his brother had told him to stop quite urgently, because he could suddenly feel his sphincters relaxing. He steadfastly refused to tell us where it was...

Just use the alien sound, and say you're playing that lesser-known variation, Abducts, Probes and Partially Wipes Your Memory Like Jagger

I've some more worms here, where's my tin opener? Years ago, I built a very crude theremin as an undergraduate project. (Good fun it was, too.) One day, I brought my chromatic tuner into the lab to see if I could determine the (narrow) range of pitches it was producing. It couldn't work out which pitches I was playing. One explanation I was offered was that it was only producing the fundamental (which made sense given the way theremins work), and the tuner, having been designed for guitars, basses, etc, was expecting a much more harmonically rich signal...dare I extrapolate further from this and speculate as to whether the tuner would use the balance of harmonic content to help it work out which octave the pitch sat in?

Yes, increasingly I'm convinced it's endemic to the copy of Firefox on my home computer! I seem to be able to operate BC fine from within Midori for the time being - or indeed Firefox on any other computer - so my predicament is far from urgent.

I'm sure that's already a piece by John Cage...

Bit of an oddly specific one, this. My home computers run Ubuntu 16.04, and my usual browser of choice is Firefox. I think I'm right in saying that Canonical keep the bundled version of Firefox more-or-less in line with Mozilla's latest stable release. Unfortunately, over the last week or so, when I've gone to try and "quick-reply" to a topic, the text box disappears, although the other buttons (attachments, notifications, etc) remain. Firefox on my work computer (Win7) doesn't have this problem, but I know they run an old version of Firefox. Similarly, I'm posting this question from Midori on my home computer, on which it seems to work fine!

Thank you for clearing up that mystery for me - I remember a bass-playing acquaintance describing my Schecter (favourably) as a "Cowpoke P-bass" and spend a fair while wondering what on Earth he meant by that!

I'm not sure I could name a Pretender other than Chrissie Hynde! The pickup configuration would probably be interesting to play with...can't help but imagine it might sound a bit like one of those Billy Sheehan basses, albeit without the stereo output. (Never mind the fact that I could probably buy an actual Sheehan bass for less money...)

The Planet Rock "Rockstock" Festival at the end of 2015. If you ignore the smaller details (that we were playing on a Sunday morning, on the secondary stage, to that percentage of the total crowd which had managed to drag themselves out of bed for this smaller lineup), then the fact that our name appeared on the same poster as The Darkness, Rival Sons, Joanne Shaw Taylor (to name a few) was almost certainly the high point for Cherry White in terms of prestige and visibility. If that remains the peak, as I suspect it will, I don't think I'd have too many complaints looking back.

You may find that the genre of music you want to make is another source of head-scratching. There are indeed lots of lively scenes up and down the country, but some of them are very heavily biased towards particular styles. We're good friends with a Cambridge-based group, who regularly complain that they struggle to get a look-in locally because they don't sit on the spectrum between Folk and Nausiatingly Twee Acoustic. I hear there's a similarly narrow focus throughout much of Oxford. In a similar (but perhaps not unexpected) way. Brighton seems to favour those who fall under the trendier corners of the "Alternative" musical umbrella, and Leeds seems to be dominated by Generic Indie Masquerading As Garage Punk.

I, too, hate power ballads. But the thing that irks me most about this particular one is that, if I hear the bandleader announce it or see it on the setlist, I always get my hopes up that they might play some Huey Lewis. And every time, I am disappointed.

To be fair, even now that I have a regular income I have a dreadful habit of not buying new clothes until the old ones start falling apart. At least back then I had the excuse that I was skint!

A jam I used to frequent with almost religious regularity was very explicitly a blues jam night. Unfortunately this did mean that you could play Blues-cliche Bingo and have a sweepstake on how long it would be before somebody wanted to do Red House, Stormy Monday or Texas Flood.

I don't know about "rock star" per se, but I think I've managed to a aqcuire a "look"...I recall going for a drink with some former colleagues a few years ago. Having not seen any of them for a while, one of them asked me, "so what are you up to these days?" Before I could reply, his wife stopped me and said "no, wait, let me guess...you're a musician, aren't you?" "Why yes," I (probably) replied, smugly, "Yes, I am. Though," I continued, somewhat less smugly, "...not really enough to make a living out of it."

They are great instruments, aren't they? I'm always surprised by how light mine is compared to other basses. Good to know it now comes bundled with a decent bridge! Does the 2018 model have coil tap switches? I've been aware of Gibson putting them on some of their more recent models, and I've often thought they'd have been a (potentially) useful addition to my 2011 'bird.

Does it have to be a 5? There's a lot of sound advice above regarding getting a cheaper fretless to see how well it works. (A MIM Jazz might fit the bill if you're looking for a departure from the Ibby). However, I am tempted to fly in the face of all this advice and suggest a Fender Tony Franklin. I *think* they only come in a 4, but they have an ebony fingerboard which is hard-wearing enough to cope with roundwound strings, and the tone control is sensitive enough that you can give it a similar amount of "clank" to a standard, fretted Precision. In other words, it's a fretless which can kind of do a fretted sound. Only drawback is they cost two grand new.

Oh, hell yes. It is a tricky balance to get right, though - I speak from some (limited) experience having covered one for a friend! Obviously you want to give all the musicians a chance to get up and play, but every new person that shows up is an unknown quantity - not just on the axis of technically good / bad, but also the essential axis of modesty vs incorrigible showboating! And of course, anyone who's not playing is there to be entertained. There's a fear that if you bring up too many howlers, punters will lose interest, and other musicians will start to regard the jam as having a low standard of musicianship. (And that's before you consider the internal politics between the regulars - knowing that you can't put Adam up with Ben because neither likes the way the other hogs the stage, or Carl won't play with Diane because she once forgot the chords to that one obscure soul tune he wanted to sing, even though that was weeks ago...) So in short, I can see why they find safety in the musicians they know. But it's equally counterproductive to play it too safe. If you're too scared to take a punt on someone you don't know, you're just going to micturate off the other musicians, and the punters will quickly get bored of watching the same dozen people cycling through the same dozen songs every week. And that's giving the host the benefit of the doubt, and assuming that he/she doesn't see the jam as a back door to having their own personal stage show, where they can dominate the stage with their own dreary guff, and feel alright about the "jam" aspect because they got nine other musicians up wth them. ...can you tell that I've possibly been to too many jam nights? The above are, sadly, all based on real examples I've witnessed. The best two I've known were: one where the host never played, and my current local one, where the host plays the warm-up set, then only gets back up if there's a shortage of musicians.

My thoughts exactly.

A bit like the John Entwistle school of belting them hard enough that you get noticeable clank against the fret with the main note? I did read one article which described that approach as "spanking" the strings. (Which isn't going to help with any forthcoming quips about your sexual prowess...)