Happy Jack

Well if they put the Home Counties on lockdown they'd affect about the same number of people as in Northern Italy, which would mean that ... erm ... most people who live & work in and around London would carry on as usual, because most people who live & work in and around London spend most of their time doing that, rather than on travelling around the country/world spreading viruses. The virus is going to spread & we know that. People will die & we know that. Is it the end of civilisation as we know it? Nope.

Gosh, you're all so negative. Don't trample on his dreams. If you want something badly enough then it's bound to happen - I've seen it in loads of Hollywood documentaries. If you build it, they will come. They may fall about laughing, but at least they'll come. Bwahahahahahahahahahahahaha!!! By the way, has he got the Lego Pirate Ship set?

Reading Basschat. Next question, please ...

CORONAVIRUS FEAR GRIPS WEST LONDON SCENES OF DEVASTATION IN CHISWICK PUNTERS HUDDLE IN DREAD AT HOME Or maybe not ...

When your gig becomes the past, I hope you'll let us all know how it worked out on the night.

Run your drum mics through a mini-mixer of some sort, get the mix right there, then just bring in a stereo pair to the XR18.

Try plugging an acoustic guitar or a double bass through the Hi-Z input ... you'll be very pleasantly surprised.

Incidentally, WFT is a bit like WTF, only with added typos.

This was SO what we crashed into when we first tried to use the XR18. "Oh look!" we said, "They've already got the perfect configuration for vocalists - let's start with that!". So we held a technical rehearsal in a village hall to test everything. Cue an appalling evening of howls, wails and shrieks from the system while @Silvia Bluejay tore her hair out (I haven't any to tear) and we tried to work out WFT was going on. System reset, start all over ... greatly improved by keeping everything 'vanilla' until we had a clue what we were doing. In our defence, I will repeat Silvie's earlier point about the manual being the most hopeless piece of 5h1t I've ever seen.

Nah, I reckon she's played drums before.

I do hope you've registered that Flame logo ... much nicer than the original.

For home stuff, where how you sound solo is more important than how your sound sits or cuts through in a band situation, I chose to go vintage. For around £300 you should be able to pick up a WEM Dominator Mk.III, preferably the Dominator 25 model with the 15" Celestion speaker. Classic valve warmth and goodness, seriously old school, looks the business, and will go up in value instead of down. If there are no Mk.III 25s out there, almost equally good would be a WEM Power Musette ... essentially the same combo but intended for use with an accordion. Charlie Watkins (the W in WEM) started out making amplifiers for accordions in the 50s, and long after the accordion fad had died a well-deserved death he continued to make combos for them.

So just for once we have a bass that really is both a prototype and a transitional model? I was beginning to think that was just something I read on eBay listings for badly-modified Squiers and Encores ...

It's like that guy who nicked the bag containing my new trainers and my hi-vis vest ... he can run, but he can't hide.

Makes perfect sense ... after all, there are no cases in the USA are there? Oh no ... wait ...

Gavin, that's one helluva way to announce your arrival on Basschat ...

Thanks Russ, that looks like a website to add to my Favourites.

Absolutely this ^. It is inevitable. But I don't believe it's helpful to greet every new virus as potentially The End Of Civilisation As We Know It.

1 in 340 out of a population of 60m means about 176,000 people ... assuming of course that the very small sample, already targeted at those considered to be most at risk, can actually be extrapolated out to include the entire population. OK, 176,000 is a big number, let's take it seriously. The first thing to note is that the vast majority of Covid-19 cases produce symptoms similar to a cold. Of those that are more serious than a cold, the vast majority produce symptoms similar to flu. Of those that are more serious than flu, most sufferers develop very nasty symptoms that can be life-threatening to a minority of the population. And finally you reach the cases that the media are drooling over ... people dying. You can do your own research as to the predicted death rate from Covid-19 for Western Europe and choose which number you prefer. For the moment, I'm sticking with 1% but that may not survive contact with reality ... it might be 0.1% and it might be 5%, nobody knows. Yet. We'll find out quite soon. 1% too cautious for you? Fine, let's run with 5%. That means that the 176,000 cases we (allegedly, based on a dodgy survey) already have might generate 176,000 x 5% = 8800 deaths. Hmmmmmm. Does anyone actually believe that? If at least a month of pandemonium in the most heavily-populated country on Earth (China) has produced fewer deaths than that, why would Brits be dropping like flies? Sounds like b0ll0cks to me. Back to 1% then. Even that would produce 1760 deaths. Unacceptable. Intolerable. Something should be done! We need to change everything so that this can never happen again ... eh? What's that you say, Sooty? There are 363,000 new cases of cancer in the UK every year? And 165,000 of them die every year? Maybe we're focusing on the wrong pandemic here? https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/health-professional/cancer-statistics-for-the-uk And don't forget, children, the proportion infected in China after over a month of this is still nowhere near 1 in 340. Just saying ...

I get that Phil, really I do, but that's a bloody big 'if' based on, putting it bluntly, nothing at all. Come to that, if it pans out as badly as the Great Plague of 1665, or (God help us) if it pans out as badly as the Black Death of 1347, or ... but y'know, actually it probably won't. Any sensible practitioner knows that you hope for the best but prepare for the worst. Any news source proprietor knows that you bang on endlessly about the worst case scenario (cos it's so much more exciting than saying "another virus has emerged - we'll be fine") until it fizzles out, then you claim the credit for solving the problem with your 'campaign against viruses'. Any politician, no matter how tiny-minded, corrupt and devoid of principles, knows that you make a big song & dance about how much you're doing to protect the public while looking for a scapegoat against the moment it all goes wrong. Very little of that helps those of us trying to live our daily lives and refusing to believe that the sky is falling, the sky is falling. Yes, we're all going to die, but not tomorrow. I'm not planning to, anyway.

Oh I like that, I like that a lot!