magee

Hope you get sorted with the amp. As to your original question I use a CTM-100 with a Barefaced Two10 and it sounds brilliant - all thumpy and warm.

I bought Paul's Ashdown CTM-100. There were problems with postage and a small problem with the amp - neither issue was Paul's fault. He was in touch the whole time, kept me fully informed and was keen to do whatever he could to resolve the amp issue. Deal with total confidence, Paul is a gent.

Absolutely this, and you see it so often. We all know the bits that are a bit different - a three bar phrase there, a two beat bar there. Audiences who know the songs love hearing these little quirks and it's just lazy to ignore them.

Definitely adapt to the band's style because: - I'm playing in a three or four piece with no keys: we have to make it sound as good as it can sound with what we have. This is always more important than copying what someone was playing when they had four horns, three keys players and a small orchestra at their disposal (example: I mostly play the riff in Superstitious because the guitarist/singer is doing chords. The root note on-the-beat pattern in the original is funkier but someone has to play the riff!); - the punters don't care* about bass line specifics, they care if it sounds good. My bandmates and I will make our own judgement on that, trusting our own musical sense. 'Because it's on the record' is not as good a reason to play a note as 'because it sounds good'. *Obviously any really prominent parts I leave as is because the punters will expect it (I don't mess with The Chain, for example).

I completely ignore lyrics - I just hear the sounds of the words. It's pretty extreme - there are songs that I've been listening to intently for 30+ years and I probably couldn't tell you a full verse's worth of lyrics. If I like a song or band it's always because of the music, and I think that's true for most people. The chances that someone in that band happens to be a world-class poet are vanishingly small, and no lyrics sheet I've ever glanced at has changed my mind. I'm with @Krysbass, if I want brilliant wordsmithery I'll look for it in a place where people have focused on and fine-tuned word-writing as their only goal: poetry or a novel.

It sounds worse than it is - it was very much an occasional fun band, we never expected to get paid. He emailed us a while after one of the gigs to say that it turns out we were getting paid, it was £150 and he'd just taken it cause he was so broke. There were four of us and he gave one guy his share of the money cause he was a student but not two of us because we had jobs. There's a sort of logic to that, and we had expected to do the gig for free anyway. By this stage it wasn't even that high up on a long list of things we were fighting about and the band was obviously falling apart, so it didn't really even get discussed.

I joined this v odd band because a mate was singing in it - we dressed up as vikings and played '80s anthemic pink torpedo rock to bemused people out for a quiet pint. It was fantastic fun as the singer had an amazing rock voice and the guitarist was a brilliant player of that riff-heavy, blistering solo style. Guitarist was a bit odd, though. I worked hard to arrange my work and young family life to make it on time to rehearsals. He had v little else going on (self-employed, no family or really any other commitments) but would breeze in 45 minutes late to a three hour rehearsal - every time. Drove me nuts. He was stone cold broke - so bad he couldn't contribute to rehearsal costs sometimes and actually just took a whole gig fee once without consulting us because he was so strapped. But he always drove a new Merc on lease 'because it gives the right impression'. We never worked out who he was trying to impress. He had other quirks, like being a bit of a conspiracy nut and carrying his thoughts/convictions to pretty extreme ends, but he could be lovely too. It all came to a head one night in a pub with a full-wall plate glass window looking out on to a side street. His gear gave him grief and he wasn't loud enough on a big solo so he got in a huff and unplugged his guitar. He walked out the door, took his guitar by the neck and started battering it on the ground, Pete Townsend-style. Trouble was he wasn't very strong (or the guitar was very well built), and not much happened. It stayed intact. So the rest of us keep playing on, just cycling through the chords as we and the bemused punters watch through the window as this guy in a viking outfit and Christina Aguilera wig ineffectually leathers his guitar at the road outside. We, and the crowd, were pissing ourselves. Best bit was when a homeless guy came up and tried to take it off him, thinking it a terrible waste. He came back in sheepishly, picked up his spare guitar and finished the gig. The band dissolved in acrimony not long after because of a bitter dispute about the ethics of giving to charity. Odd all round.

It's much smaller than your other venues, but you could try Swing on Hope St: https://swingltd.co.uk/ One of the Glasgow Uni unions? They sometimes close off for gigs: GUU and Queen Margaret Union. 23 March is out of term time, so might work. Cottiers. Good luck.

@steantval getting jealous about your Free tribute band. I've love to do that, I'm surprised (and pleased at humanity's good taste) that there was enough of an audience for it. I'd do one of them in a shot.

That's really helpful, thanks Dave. The singer gigs at The Box a good bit so that should be an easy one to tick off.

Thanks Dave. I'm not mad keen to get into the tickets-on-the-door / actually promoting a paid-for night ourselves (which I think would be the Ivory Black's/Audio type set up) as that's really more admin and promoting work than I have time for. And I think that's likely to be profitable for the kinds of bands you mention, the ones that go the whole hog and put on a stage show and dress like the band and do it really seriously. That's a good market and I'm sure is profitable, and I admire the commitment of people doing it, but I'm looking at something smaller scale and more local than that. Interesting about Classic Grand and Hard Rock Cafe, though. But I imagine they'll be looking more for the full package to bring in the punters, but you never know. The Shed, oddly enough, puts on a lot of full-scale tribute band shows too. It may be that there just isn't much of a market for the more scaled-down approach we're taking. If all it ends up being is a dozen rehearsals with people who really know how to play Led Zep that's fine with me.

I'm just putting together a Led Zeppelin soundalike band in Glasgow, playing the music but not doing lookalike. I've always wanted to play their music but never found people who could really do it. Now I have and it's such a thrill to be playing music I've spent much of my life listening to. Everyone in the band is busy gigging with other outfits so it's never going to be our main band, but we'd still like to to out a few times a year and do it in public and make a couple of quid. For those doing it a bit more casually (ie not theatre shows and outfits, which sounds amazing but isn't what we'll be doing), what kinds of venues have you had success with? Is it the same kinds of pubs you'd play general covers in? Or is it other kinds of places? I'm a bit stumped about where to try. Obviously any tales of Glasgow-specific venue success particularly welcome. Matthew

Been regular gigging for 10 years, and irregular for 10 before that, and I've never had an amp die on me. I used to carry a spare and only used it once, when the guitarist's amp died. He went through my main amp and I used my spare (main amp at least had a valve preamp, sounded surprisingly good). I haven't bothered carrying a spare for years, but after reading this thread will get a cheap DI to put in the kit bag.

Bought a Roland Cube amp from Shug - easy to deal with, amp honestly described, great communications, just a good deal all round.

The atmosphere was febrile and we thought something was going to kick off. So the singer and I bet each oother the petrol money home on whether there was going to be an actual punch up or not (rules: actual fists had to be thrown, pushing and shoving didn't count; it had to be inside the pub, the car park didn't count; it had to be during one of our sets). The singer took the 'there will be fisticuffs' side of the wager. So when the action started he turned round to me, didn't skip a beat mid-line, and made a fist-pump gesture of gleeful triumph. He'd earned it, though I did think the timing was a bit inflammatory, but nobody noticed.

I play in a general covers band and we had two gigs last year: a couple of days before Christmas and ten days before Christmas, in the same venue. We learned three or four Christmas songs and played them at the first one and they fell totally flat. Nobody gave a monkeys. So we just didn't bother at the second one and it was fine. I was quite surprised, I must admit.

This is all very posh. I play pubs not functions or weddings. The only time I've been fed was at a rough pub in Linwood (struggling, de-industrialised place outside Glasgow) where it was a teenager's funeral. Halfway through the night they put a board over the pool table and covered it in boxes from the chip shop - sausages, random kebab meat, spare ribs, pizza and about half a ton of chips. They told us to tuck in and we did. Second set was snoozy and greasy, but we were happy. Later that night two middle aged women started knocking lumps out of each other. We just played on, and loaded out later through a haze of blue lights - the police had the place surrounded as a precaution at chucking-out time.

Dave, I use Iain for my amps too - he's great and was my first call, he said he doesn't do hi-fi stuff. I'll give Falcon Acoustics a try, thanks everyone.

No joy at Wilmslow Audio I'm afraid. Thanks everyone else for the tips.

Great! Will do, and will update on progress. Thanks.

I bought a pair of speakers and one of the bits isn't working. The trouble is it's so incredibly specific I'm having a terrible time sourcing a replacement (well, the hi-fi repair guy is). I wonder does anyone on here have any ideas about where to look for out-of-date, super-specific high end hi-fi parts? I imagine the answer's 'no', but this place is such a fount of expertise that I thought I'd try my luck. What I'm looking for is the crossover unit from KEF speakers - it's faulty so the sound isn't reaching the mid-range driver. The speakers are: KEF Reference Series Model One - Two (ie the second version of the Model One). They are from I think about the late '90s. I've looked on eBay and looked for spares/repairs ones going cheap to cannibalise but there just aren't that many out there. Any pointers very gratefully received.

Learning this for a Led Zep band I'm trying to get off the ground and those runs in the middle are absolutely killing me.