chriswareham

Well appropriately for this thread, I went to sixth form college with John and was good friends with Sid from Inter until I moved away from the area.

Since someone has mentioned being told to eff off by Lemmy, I guess I'll mention my encounter with the great man. Twenty years ago, the singer of the band I was in had a friend at Metalhammer magazine who got us VIP tickets to their annual awards at the Kentish Town Forum. At one point I went to the bar, where I ordered a drink while stood next to my childhood hero Gary Numan and was then excitedly making a bee line for my singer to tell him about it. This meant crossing the central area of the balcony, where I was stopped by an enormous bouncer and asked for my pass. I showed him my VIP wristband only to told I needed a "VVIP" one to enter that area. As I was about to turn away and take the long route round, a gravelly voice said "It's alright mate, he's with me". I looked to see who had said this, and saw Lemmy motioning me to sit in his booth. He had a beautiful woman sat each side of him (I later discovered they had been paid to escort him all evening), and a bottle of JD on the table. I sat down, he offered me a drink and then he said "I love your jacket man". Said jacket was an army surplus East German thing I'd bought the week before at Camden Market. I ended up having a shot of his JD, before thanking him and making it over to my singer and regaling him with what had happened. The night got a bit hazy after that, but I ended up at the after party along with acquaintances who were also in attendance since we had a mutual friend who was playing in Cradle of Filth. That proved embarrassing, since the singer of CoF decided to pick a fight with the members of Murderdolls. Since they were all at least a good foot taller than the rather short Mr Filth, he got kicked down a set of stairs and a slagging off in the next issue of Metalhammer.

Two of my keyboard playing friends, one of whom I have played in a band with, have been touring members of Killing Joke. The brush with greatness is not mine though, but that of one of the keyboard players. When Tool did their first big stadium tour of the US after resolving their long running legal problems, they asked Killing Joke to support them. They were so impressed with my friend's keyboard playing that they actually had him play the synth parts on Descending:

Kicking myself that I passed on the chance to buy a black Alembic Spoiler about twelve years ago. Seller wanted £500 for it, and it was in very good condition. I'd been interested in one as Peter Steele of Type O Negative used one as his main recording bass (and live in pre Type O band Carnivore). I decided against it because I was lead to believe Alembics are medium scale and I prefer a standard scale length.

And another Turkish list. The most important instrument in Turkey is the baglama, or saz as it's more often known in the English speaking world. It's an instrument that can be found with slight variations spanning the Balkans to the Caucasus and Iran, typically featuring three courses of strings. My favourite version is the Albanian sharki, which I find easier to play than the baglama and quite an easy transition for a bass player. The most famous artist in the modern era is probably Neşet Ertaş, and this is possibly his most famous composition, Ah Yalan Dünya. What he lacked in technical perfection he more than made up with the emotion of his playing: Possibly the most famous baglama player during the era of recorded music is Aşık Veysel. He lost hos sight at an early age, and it was not unusual for blind children to become folk musicians. His songs are invariably very melancholic, and Kara Toprak is a personal favourite: Arif Sağ is someone who often uses techniques such as double tapping on the baglama. His Kirpiğin Kaşına is more traditional though, and in the traditional introspective style: Hopefully that's whetted your appetite for this instrument. Even if it hasn't, and I have included a very personal choice of songs here, I'd strongly recommend the fantastic documentary "Saz, The key of Trust" where the incredibly talented Petra Nachtmanova takes a road trip across the Balkans and Asia Minor to find the roots of the baglama. The full documentary is up on YouTube and for me it's the best musical documentary I've ever seen.

Anatolian rock. This was a genre that appeared in Turkey during the late 1960s, mixing the sounds of psychedelic rock with traditional Anatolian rhthyms and melodies. Baris Manco - Egri Egri Dogru Dogru (this could be a list of three of his songs, as he was the absolute king of this scene) Cem Karaca - Tamirci Ciragi Adimiz Miskindir Bizim · Mazhar Ve Fuat

Gothic rock: The Sisters of Mercy - Temple Of Love Fields of the Nephilim - Moonchild And a less obvious one, Altered States - Drowning Children:

They had what was claimed to be Gary "Mani" Mounfield's Rickenbacker 4005 in Hank's Guitar Shop a few years ago, priced at a *cough* reasonable £12,995 if memory serves. I asked to try it out, since I love a semi-acoustic bass and at the time I owned a Shaftesbury which was supposed to be a clone of the 4005. After a lot of bad tempered huffing and puffing from the staff (standard for most of the shops in London's Tin Pan Alley), they finally considered me worthy of playing said bass. It actually looked like it had been a great instrument at some point, but by then it was in a terrible state with an action you could drive a bus under. The neck was like a Rick 4001 or 4003, very wide and flat, so very much an acquired taste and totally unlike the skinny neck of my Shaftesbury. The sound though, even with pickups way too far from the rusty strings, was very much what I'd want from a semi-acoustic. if RIC under Ben Hall's control are going to be a bit more customer friendly, then I hope they also reissue the 400 series guitars - a six string in the shape of a 4000 series bass, and possibly the only thing that could tempt me to the dark side.

The Japanese made Hondo's were very decent instruments, probably made in the same factories as many of the Ibanez ones. For some reason their Rick copy was farmed out to a Korean factory before they had upped their game to match the quality of the Japanese ones. From what I've read, Hondo was actually a brand dreamt up by an importer from the US, something similar to the Univox brand. And a music shop local to me have just acquired a Japanese made Rick copy from an estate sale. It's minus its truss rod cover, but it looks like was most likely branded as an Ibanez or similar. They want somewhere in the region of £800 for it, which given what similar copies are going on eBay or Reverb doesn't strike me as unreasonable.

I've still got an old SparcStation 5 in the loft. If you come across that card then I'd love to have it to see if it I can get it up and running - I seem to recall it was essentially a single board computer with a 386 or 486 processor on it.

I honestly think that if there had to be only one model of bass guitar then it should be a Fender Jazz neck on a Fender Precision body. Probably why I like the Sterling RAY4 so much, as it's pretty much a Jazz neck on the body of something descended from Leo's attempt at a "better Precision than a Precision". I even prefer the RAY4 to the more upmarket RAY34, which definitely felt like a better quality bass (and on a par with the US made Stingrays I've owned) but with a neck that wasn't so easy to move around on.

I just posted in another thread about my time as a contract programmer for a big press agency (there seems to be a surprising number of IT related threads on Basschat this week). One of the agency's permanent staff was an utter bodger, and bizarrely proud of it, who went off to do PHP programming on the bit of that NHS system developed by British Telecom. Made me fear for the health of the nation.

Because I play in a Joy Division tribute act, so it's expected that I play something that resembles a Rickenbacker 4001. Peter Hook played a Korean made Hondo copy, and I did the same for about five years until the neck snapped near the heel. I now play a genuine Rickenbacker, and the Hondo was a far better instrument to play even if it was made from plywood.

When I first saw that thread I thought it was about the bass playing in rather excellent Anglo-Australian band The Church.

That was Interactive Unix, which was completely separate from Sun's port of Solaris to the x86 architecture. They had another product that would run Windows under Solaris which I played around with in the 1990s. Then Sun bought Star Division, who made the office suite StarOffice, and the easy availability of that negated any need I had to run Windows applications on a Unix platform. StarOffice became OpenOffice, which after Oracle mucked it about following their acquisition of Sun was, ahem, eclipsed by being splitting off to become LibreOffice.

Not true. Most Linux kernel development is by programmers employed by major companies that benefit from it, such as Intel, Amazon, Google, IBM/RedHat and MicroSoft. The latter may be surprising to some, since their ex-CEO once called it a "cancer", but they benefit from people using it on their Azure cloud platform or running it virtualised from within Windows. Most work on the other key elements that make up a Linux "distribution" (the complete operating system built on top of the Linux kernel itself) is also done by commercial developers. As for being "public domain", that is again wrong - and why Steve Ballmer called it a cancer - since the Linux kernel has a license that insists any changes that are distributed in binary form are also available in source code form. True "public domain" software, or even software with less restrictive licenses than the one the Linux kernel uses, can be sold in binary form without providing the source code.

I recently stopped using a Yamaha UX-96 USB MIDI interface, which I bought over twenty years ago and used with my laptop as my other USB MIDI interface is a bit bulky. I only stopped using it as a friend offered to buy it off me since it seems to have some special functionality when used with a specific bit of Yamaha kit he owns. And my laptop? A 2011 vintage MacBook Pro which has run Linux for the last eight or so years since I bought it. My main music composition tool is a Roland W-30 workstation, which is 1989 vintage (although the floppy drive in it has been replaced with an emulator that uses SD cards). When it comes to computer add ons, look for USB "class compliant" devices. There are standards for things like MIDI and audio that mean compliant devices don't need vendor specific drivers, and will use the generic drivers that come with Windows or Apple's operating systems. (Ironically, the UX-96 I mention above wasn't class compliant as I think it predated the USB standard for MIDI, but Linux has a dedicated driver for it).

I'd suggest the Aenima album, it's got everything that makes their later albums great but with perhaps a little bit more emphasis on conventional song structures. The earlier Opiate EP and Undertow album are also great, but the latter does have a rather horrible mix (thanks to the loudness war possibly).

HP went to the dogs when they went all in on Intel's attempted replacement for the x86 processor, the Itanium (or Itanic as it became known). I wasn't unhappy with that turn of events, as HP not long before bought Digital Equipment Corporation and killed off so many of their great products such as the Alpha processor. As for Sun Microsystems, the brand no longer exists. Similar bad feelings about Oracle for effectively killing off great products like the Sparc processor and Solaris operating system. I hate Oracle with a passion anyway, as they have horrendous licensing scams, sorry, schemes, and their database is an antiquated nightmare to work with. And ICL... My first full time job was at a company who were in one half of a building with the other half occupied by a division of ICL. After Fujitsu bought them, that office closed down. The dinosaurs they emptied out of that building were interesting (and no, I don't mean the staff), ancient mini-computers that were only kept in case various government departments that relied on them needed spares.

Auditioned for a new band last month. Other two guys seemed nice, songs were great. We went for a coffee afterwards, and that evening the guitarist set up a WhatsApp group for the three of us. I check the WhatsApp group the next evening, only to find the guitarist had misinterpreted something the singer had said and had broken up the band. So that band lasted less than 24 hours!

There's a very good reason for that. Rather than use the Android operating system like everyone else, they use their own thing called Tizen and an utterly appalling software framework called Enlightenment. There's a number of very long and - to a programmer like me - entertaining articles and posts about them.

eBay has that feature as well for items that are collected, but in my experience most buyers claim they don't have the app on their phone or just don't understand how to use it. Things usually go OK, but I've had someone collect something, say they don't have the eBay app and then claim that the item wasn't received. It resulted in eBay refunding the buyer and me being left without the item. eBay refused to help saying I should have got the buyer to confirm collection, so I reported it to the police as theft, but they took no action.

Thoroughly enjoyed that video. I discovered Tool when I was working in the States, back in 1999. I was driving around aimlessly one evening, since there was nothing much else to do in Santa Clara where I was stuck during the working week, when a song came on the radio. The station was KITS Live 105, which played alternative rock, often in back to back segments only broken by adverts. The song had this amazing bass intro and then built up to a massive crescendo over more than six minutes, but the lack of any DJ voiceover meant I was clueless as to who the band were. Cut to a few weeks later, and I'm again cruising around and another song comes on - different song, but clearly the same band and another fantastic bass part. I pulled over next to a phone booth, cranked the radio to maximum volume, and called a colleague who was more into heavy music than me. "What the hell is this band?" I ask him, and he tells me it's Tool. The first track I'd heard was "H", while the second one was "Forty Six & 2", both off their "Ænima" album.

I've got one of these, pulled from a skip at the local recycling centre a few years ago. It just needed the plug rewiring and has worked ever since. If you crank them up, they sound bloody great. Surprisingly heavy for such a small combo though, as I think the cabinet is very dense and thick plywood.

In an interview, Justin Chancellor says he switched from a Stingray to a Wal when he joined Tool and started to record the Aenima album. The weird thing is, the bass sounds on the demos for that album recorded with Justin's predecessor Paul D'Amour sound almost identical to me tone wise - and that was all Stingray.