EliasMooseblaster

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...)

With apologies for splitting hairs, aren't the Youngs actually Scottish by birth? I'm sure I head they were born in this hemisphere but the family moved to Aus when they were still young (pardon the pun). Not sure how much difference it makes in the grand scheme of things (I think David Byrne is technically Scottish as well, but nobody questions whether Talking Heads were really an American band) but it might explain the non-Anglophonic French tribute band's cryptic name!

Bravo, sir! I was already in tucks reading this, and then I got to the end to see your edit, which perfectly cracked me up. An excellent tale, told beautifully.

So very true: I adore The Beach Boys' music, but that name has not aged well when you think about it. See also The Beatles...do you think if they'd known how revered they'd become, one of them might have said, "you know what, lads? I don't think we can carry on with this terrible pun for a name..." Mind you, one of my favourite groups have gone by "Hooverphonic" for over 20 years. Originally they were just called "Hoover." In their defence, English is not their first language.

I would be so tempted to set up shop as a promoter in your area, just so I could wind them all up by introducing each of the them to the crowd as "The Slaves", "The Arcades", etc.

Not to hijack the thread, but can anyone recommend a mic which works well in a live setting for a stupidly deep bass voice? I've managed so far with SM58s and similar, trying to keep half a mile away from the mesh to minimise proximity effect, but I wonder whether there's anything out there which might be more...erm, flattering. Bonus points if it doesn't cost a small fortune.

I shouldn't beach...but that doesn't mean I won't! One of our previous singers was technically excellent: great ear, plenty of power huge range, but...she used to insist on singing everything like she was Shirley Bassey belting out the theme from Goldfinger. With subsequent singers, obviously we'd use the studio recordings as a reference, but always with the subtle hint of, "that was her style, of course, but feel free to put your own spin on this one..." The improvement was remarkable...

I bought a copy of Rob van den Broek's Gibson Bass Book - mostly just for the gear pr0n photography, I'll be honest, but it turned out to be a really interesting read. I had never previously guessed that Gibson had experimented with so many different designs, especially in the '60s and '70s. I guess, much like Fender, they've become victims of their own success, in that a group of people will always just want a straightforward LP, SG or Thunderbird, but you have to wonder why they didn't at least push some of the variations a bit harder - double-cut LP Juniors (as you rightly say), "Melody Maker" SGs with single-coil pickups, or SGs with PAFs, or even - that radical idea which they only seemed to pick up on in the last couple of years - a f***ing 5-string bass. Seriously, did none of the bigwigs in the company pop the telly on during the last few decades and think "eh-up, some of these bass players have got more than four strings on them there bass guitars...I wonder if there's a market there?" I know I've stuck to fours myself, but I'm not so blinkered as to believe that a 5-string bass is still a strange and exotic variation on the bass guitar's design. FFS, if Mike Lull can stick a low B on a T-bird shape with minimal ballache, what was stopping them? I thought those EB models from the last few years showed a promising change of direciton, but clearly too little, too late.

I don't know whether to take that as a warning sign in itself...it does remind me of one band I quit where the singer showed his true colours pretty quickly. I decided to be as diplomatic as possible and explained that I didn't have time for the things they wanted to do (read: all the horsing around that went on behind the scenes), and the two guitarists and drummer went to similar lengths to write back saying they were sorry to see me go, but they understood that I had other priorities and wished me all the best. Response from singer? "no worries mate thanks for letting us know"

+1 for Warwick Reds as a substitute for Rotosounds. They're a good alternative and a fair bit cheaper, if you're in the habit of changing strings regularly. Personally I find there's some subtle tonal quality in the Rotos that the Warwicks don't quite nail, but I'd happily go for another batch of them if I were gigging more regularly.

As well as being reliably spot-on, skank's response hints at how things have changed in the last few decades. It seems that we've moved away from a time when the single reliable measure of success was "the charts." Getting a song or album to cause a small ripple in the appropriate Top 40 would have been a good indicator of an early success; being able to follow that up would indicate that you were more than just a "one hit wonder." Trouble is, now that everyone takes their music differently - whether buying physical reproductions, paying for downloads, not paying for downloads, paying for streaming, finding free streams, or just good old-fashioned shoplifting - it's much harder to put a single measure on success. Streaming has only recently been added to physical sales and downloads as a measure for The Charts, and even then in a fairly arbitrary and clumsy fashion. But with this, of course, it now seems more acceptable - indeed, more sensible - not to desire the old trappings of fame as a musician. Most of us have accepted that a Los Angeles penthouse with booze, drugs and groupies available via Deliveroo is greedy, puerile, and unrealistic, and would settle instead for our music being sufficiently important to enough people that we could make a steady income from it. Steve Lawson is the first example who springs to mind, of somebody who has embraced a different, more low-key model of success, and seems to make a comfortable living from a loyal following and a healthy ratio of fingers to pies.