chriswareham

Biggest problem with Bax (and Thomann) is that they usually send electronics with "deathdaptors", those wobbly converters from EU two pin plugs to British three pin ones. I kind of expected it with Thomann, but got fooled by Bax having a .co.uk website address. At least I already knew to not order from DV247 (the former Digital Village and now known as Music Store), who did a "flat pack" restructure a few years ago, with many suppliers left out of pocket and the company basically moved to Germany. I was actually working in an office above their Barnet branch when they restructured overnight, and came in to work one Monday to find their confused staff standing outside a locked and empty store.

Well, woman actually: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yx_Sqq6jooI

The Korg one seems to work very well on bass, better than the Snark ones I've used before (they would also break quite quickly - the little tabs that hold the display to the stalk are very fragile). The "no clip on tuners while we're playing" thing is an aesthetic choice - we're heavily influenced by new wave and post punk music, so we make an effort to look like those bands did. So our equipment is either old 70s and early 80s stuff or indistinguishable from it.

Very few purchases this year, but best is an HH V-S Bassamp, an old solid state amp head from the late 1970s. Desperately needed a lightweight head for a gig where cabs were provided and transport was a problem. The only thing available locally, and my only memory of them was from teenage years when reharsal studios were full of knackered HH kit that had been absolutely thrashed. This one had been serviced with new power transistors and even the backlit display works perfectly. Tried it at a rehearsal and was amazed - it's very loud, very clean and even the "Valve Sound" proved useful on a song where I play double stops and root-fifth power chordy things high up the neck. Switching the V-S on made me sound remarkably like Lemmy! Worst purchase was several Korg clip on tuners. Actually great bits of kit, but the singer insists we remove them during shows. So I've now mislaid two of them after checking my tuning and then leaving them on the top of house amps, from where they've probably fallen down the back thanks to the vibration.

I can confirm that Strings and Things in the UK are super helpful. I bought a second hand Ray 34 last year, and it was only after I got it home that I noticed the "treble side" machine head was bent. Strings and Things sent a replacement free of charge after I made an enquiry about spare parts. If you have no joy with the Belgian distributor, perhaps one of us Basschatters in the UK could try getting the parts for you and sending them on. Worth noting that most it not all parts on the US made Stingrays are not compatible with the Indonesian made Rays.

Good joke. You are joking aren't you? Actually it seems like you're not. Well f*ck me. Microsoft are utterly incapable of making secure software. They've made a rod for their own back by having to be backwards compatible with the horrendous APIs they've put out since the 1980s. APIs that are absolutely so full of holes that they simply can't be fixed without breaking the legacy software that are the sole reason they still exist.

Ah, Manic Street Preachers. The band that have been releasing the same one f*cking song their entire f*cking career. I remember when the NME and Melody Maker journos first started claiming they were the next big thing, and saying they were the "new Clash". If the band member who used to mime on guitar hadn't disappeared, making said journos guilty about starting their "we built them up, we'll knock them down" ego w*nk, than they'd have been consigned to history a long time ago.

We've had people known for other endeavours than bass playing, but how about bass players that use fretless bass in unexpected settings? I recently discovered that James McGearty, bass player of seminal death rock band Christian Death, used a fretless bass. Not something I'd expect in that genre... There again, he might have taken a cue from David J of Bauhaus, who also prefers a fretless bass: And Stuart Morrow of New Model Army was also a fan of fretless basses, having defretted a cheap Precision copy of some sort:

Wow, just checked out a few of their other songs and they're brilliant. Kind of what Royal Blood could be if they actually tried to be original rather than just recycling tired hard rock cliches. Which brings me back on topic, as I loathe anything by Royal Blood, since everyone assumes that as a bass player I must like their neanderthal plodding.

Got confused and thought this thread was going to be about a terrible "Oi!" band. Turns out I was thinking of C(o)ck Sparrer.

"Yellow" by Coldplay. It's a terrible song to begin with, but my wife is a piano teacher and several of her students are learning it for grade exams. Even played as an instrumental version it's utterly irritating. Anything by George Ezra. Before the virus I worked in an office where I had to endure the musical tastes of the boss, which extended to the fag ends of Britpop like Oasis and contemporary "singer songwriters". Ezra's "Budapest" with that grating "ooh" brought me close to quitting at one point. My plan was to initially try and get signed off work for as long as possible with mental health issues by running around the office with nothing on below the waist, while urinating and shouting "it won't stop". Thankfully the whole office complained that we should take turns at putting music on. My turn started with the entirety of Einstürzende Neubauten's "Kollaps" album:

And playing with a pick as god Lemmy intended.

I think it was still open as a pub up to the fire. There was a covers band called something like "Metalworks" who played there every Sunday evening. Unfortunately the fire was an opportunity for more gentrification of the area - Camden council don't seem to have a clue when it comes to what makes the area special, which is the non-chain store shops and the market.

The Hawley Arms burned down in 2008 along with a bunch of other nearby buildings - not sure how similar the rebuilt place is to the one that Amy Winehouse hung out in. I've not been near The Good Mixer since the late 1990s, but glad to hear it's got a decent crowd in it now as the regulars back then had a very seedy vibe to them.