Happy Jack

You shouldn't take these things clitorally ...

Troo dat.

Very satisfying, but at certain times of the year really quite demanding. If you're retired (like me) or self-employed then fine; if you have a 9-5 or a young family then best postpone for a while!

Not a paying audience ... we'd be doing it for the exposure.

I have about two acres (think a square 100 yards on each side, or two football pitches, or about 50 Olympic swimming pools, or 200 London buses) set in the middle of many square miles of mature beech trees, planted before WW2 to supply the furniture industry centred on High Wycombe. By the time the trees had matured, Ikea had happened. No more furniture industry, so the big forestry estates parcelled up their woodlands into small plots of 'leisure woodland'. When I stand in my measly two acres, it feels like I own the entire forest.

Had to learn this for a dep gig with a Northern Soul outfit ... great track.

As an aside, a full colony of bees in their bee hive will routinely count 50,000 bees during the Summer. I currently have 12 hives on the go, building up to full strength after a series of 'splits' (don't ask unless you're genuinely interested), and if they were all to reach that full strength then there will be about 600,000 bees in my wood. I'm confident that I'll at least hit half a million this year.

To quote a politician, any politician, "well, yes and no".

'Twas a lot of fun, especially since it was our first rehearsal in 10 weeks, and also the first time I'd played DB seriously in the same time. Won't be letting the guitarist use a bloody resonator guitar again, though. Those things are as strident as a banjo.

A guitar amp for a 12-year-old sounds like a fair swop. I'd say go with it.

My home studio does have aircon BUT cheap aircon like mine is usually recycing the air in the room rather than pumping in fresh. Our last rehearsal was on BH Monday in a wood above Great Missenden. Seriously.

Catering almost entirely for the local Polish community, but a very well-kept and friendly place. Food is excellent. Managed to get an unplugged gig there some years back, but didn't go down well enough to get re-booked.

Now that I never knew (or noticed) despite living around there for a big chunk of the 80s.

That is SO open to misinterpretation.

By and large, my hands don't sweat much, and my sweat doesn't seem particularly corrosive anyway, so no I don't bother.

Update - a pub where we were booked to play on 4th July believe that they will be allowed to open (with social distancing, natch) that weekend. They want to do an early-evening outdoor event in their large garden with a BBQ, and with us performing unplugged outside. As a band, we'd never actually need to enter the pub if we didn't want to. Two of us have said we're up for that, the third wants 48 hours to think it through. I'll keep you posted.

They couldn't hit an elephant at this dist ...

Yup, three great bands from (essentially) the 70s, though for some reason nobody has yet cited The Glitter Band. And you need VERY good hearing to detect that there are actually two drummers playing at the same time with any of those bands. Basically, there are drums supplying the beat. So if it was so great and sounded so awesome, why has nobody (much) done it for the last 40 years?

Why?

Good grief - feel your pain, bro!

Interesting responses here. My head is somewhere else entirely from most on BC by the look of it, and I'll be gigging again the moment venues start putting bands on again. If that's 2021 then it's 2021, if it's next week then it's next week. My choice, no preaching happening here.

The important thing is to place your finger where it produces the note that you wanted. All else is nonsense.

This is an excellent post. My only addition would be that lined fretless is an abomination, and completely pointless at that ... when you're playing a bass, you can't actually see the frets! What you need to see is the ENDS of the frets. Ibanez recognised this 50 years ago and produced this: It's a rubbish photo (sorry) but you get the idea. The bass (Ibanez 2366 FLB) was supplied with these fret end markers in place. I liked them so much that I later had a guitar tech do this: That's a Lakland Skyline Duck Dunn where I switched to a fretless neck. The job of installing those fret ends was (apparently) very simple, and was not at all expensive.