Happy Jack

That red weave is a thing, and it's an expensive custom option. I have it on my Streamline 5 (along with LEDs and stuff) sitting next to me as I type this.

Agreed, which is one good reason for not putting the pieces down in the first place. Not trying for a smile here, I'm perfectly serious.

I make no effort to keep practising the set lists of the bands I'm in if we're not gigging. I know the songs and I'm unlikely to forget the basslines in anything less than a decade. My solution to the whole 'lack of music' thing is to get involved with other bands and projects. Last week I was rehearsing with a Pink Floyd tribute in start-up mode, this week I joined an established soul band that has just lost its bassist, next week I expect to do a bit of session work for a singer/songwriter. For the first time since I joined my first 'proper' band, it's virtually impossible to have a diary clash, at least for gig dates, so being an active member of half a dozen different bands is a perfectly reasonable thing to be doing. I'm learning new material, meeting new people, finding new uses for old pedals, you name it.

I'll still be a few months older than you, and I'll still be gigging.

OK, interesting times. The Xvive units are very neat and attractive (even though I couldn't get the 'wood effect' ones that Gollihur advertise), and very well packaged and presented. They have a USB charging cable that is a standard USB plug at one end but the cable splits into two about 10cm from the other end and each of those ends in a micro-USB; this means that you can recharge the pair simultaneously from any phone charge unit you may have knocking about. Unless you own an Apple, of course. The units arrived about 50% charged so I was able to plug'n'play and that's exactly what I did. There was no setting up, no configuration, I literally plugged in the two units, switched them on, and started playing. I had a gig that afternoon (20 Sep) in the beer garden of The Oddfellows Arms in Apsley, playing my custom Safran Iris ½-sized DB (played as an acoustic bass guitar), so I took the Xvive with me and played the entire gig through a brand new, largely untested system. Didn't miss a beat. The next week (26 Sep) I had another gig with the same band, same instrument, in the car park of The Wonder in Enfield - same result. The following day I finally got to play a doubling gig with DB and Precision (a Mike Lull 54 P) and the Xvive units suddenly stopped working just before showtime. I used an instrument cable for the first set, and then swopped in the Smoothhound wireless for the second set, and it performed impeccably. The next day I spent an hour testing and reading the manual. Sure enough, and as I suspected, one of the units had accidentally changed channel. The On/Off switch is a small slider on the edge of the unit, and immediately in line with this switch is a tiny button which (if held for a second) will change which of the four available channels you are using. If you have big thumbs and fingers like me, and especially if it's a bloody cold outdoor gig, that's an accident waiting to happen and I didn't have to wait long. Very poor design. Something else that cropped up as part of the testing - and this applies equally to the Xvive and Smoothhound transmitters - is that a 54 P or a decent copy/pastiche of one will have a concave, countersunk instrument jack. I was already aware that these things make using L-jack instrument cables virtually impossible, but it also turns out they prevent the wireless transmitters from locking into place. Well this afternoon I finally got around to properly testing the Xvive units with a DB being played like I mean it ... remember, this is why I bought them in the first place! It turns out that the Xvive apparently struggles to cope with the signal coming from - wait for it - the G string. Seriously. It's fine with the E A D strings no matter how hard I overplay, but makes an unpleasant farting noise over whatever note I play on the G. On this bass, the E and A are Pirastro Evah Slaps while the D and G are Red Mountain guts, so I don't think that this is a string choice issue. Move to a cable and of course the farting noise disappears. Use the Smoothhound instead and still no farting noise, so it's clearly just the Xvive. Colour me confused. So the outcome is that the units I bought specifically to use with DB turn out to be excellent for electric bass, while the unit I was concerned about is flawless for DB. Go figure.

Understand what you mean about the health issues - my main band had had exactly that with the singer/guitarist having one set of serious issues and his wife having an even more serious set. They were both on full shielding for over six months, and that's the main reason we got so few beer garden gigs once they re-started in July. I've been finding that most venues are as confused and puzzled as everybody else, and that there's a certain element of 'rabbit in the headlights' and people freezing. I've been talking to about 20 venues where I gig regularly and trying to gently steer them towards pushing the envelope a bit and seein g what music they can manage. At the risk of re-starting a tired old debate, it helps a lot if bands recognise that the current economics of running a pub do NOT stretch to paying for a band!

My guess is that, regardless of whether or not a 'magic bullet' vaccine suddenly emerges, 2021 is already FUBAR and there will be no return to normality before 2022. I don't like it, I'm not happy about it, I wish it weren't so, but I feel that I'll be better placed to weather the storm if I just accept that this is the way it is and I have to deal with it.

I gigged last Sunday (20 Sep), and then both days on the weekend just gone (26 & 27 Sep). The landlords/landladies took "all reasonable measures" and were greeted with complete cooperation from the punters at all three gigs, no table was allowed to have more than six people, people danced by jiggling in their seats, everyone seemed to enjoy themselves - a lot - and video is available to back all that up . I would refer you to my esteem colleague @Silvia Bluejay for this. Gigging is indeed dead for anyone who wants it that way. All anyone has to do is to decide not to bother trying to find gigs. I prefer to be a bit more positive, and as a result I am now landing my first indoors gigs of the Autumn.

85 dB examples: Car wash at 20 ft (89 dB); propeller plane flyover at 1000 ft (88 dB); diesel truck 40 mph at 50 ft (84 dB); diesel train at 45 mph at 100 ft (83 dB). Food blender (88 dB); milling machine (85 dB); garbage disposal (80 dB). 2 times as loud as 70 dB. Possible damage in 8 hour exposure.

He's beHIND you ...

Last 'proper' gig of 2020 yesterday. Too bloody cold to be playing outdoors from here on in, and the indoors gigs we're getting or discussing are for unplugged solo or duo artists. Drummers are now officially Satan's Spawn. What has it got in its pocketses?

In all fairness, having wonky pickups sometimes costs £7222 (at today's exchange rate).

I've never tried uploading a spreadsheet before ... StewBlack's SS.xlsx

Have they arrived yet?

I s'pose I could contact him through eBay ...

Always leave them wanting less.

And luckily enough I missed it. Lucky, because I'd probably have bought it, and quite frankly I cannot imagine what purpose I would put that bass to except to drool over it!

Bizarrely enough, I was actually being serious. A piezo (as I understand it, within the limits of my very limited knowledge, alternative facts are available) generates so little power compared to a magnetic pickup that it requires power to operate at all. Some piezo rigs get their power from the instrument cable, but your bass has a battery which implies otherwise. If you have a piezo pickup and an on-board battery, it would be odd to not have a preamp on-board too, also requiring power. So your signal path is presumably battery --> piezo --> preamp --> amplifier and suddenly you have pretty coloured wires everywhere and blobs of solder where perhaps they shouldn't be.

It shouldn't draw current when no jack is plugged in but hey, it's a piezo, and there's probably also an on-board pre-amp. Lots of room for wiring to be done badly. What you need now is for someone who knows what they're talking about to come along.

Are there any LEDs or similar? If an electro-acoustic, what about the preamp and tuner? In fact, is there a piezo pickup at all?

Get back to Valladolid then.

God, that takes me back. "Read the bloody Wiki ..." Wasn't it Old Git that used to say that?