Happy Jack

Not sure why anything needs to be flipped? I won't bang on about readily-available lefty basses as I'm sure you already know all about them, but a whole generation (and then some) of lefty bassists simply played a righty bass upside down. You can either learn to play with the E at the bottom or - more sensibly IMHO - reverse the nut so the E can go at the top.

Ha! I've always loved this analogy. Back in the 70s, the guys who first got me into biking were obsessed with 'fettling' their bikes. I remember that John's idea of a perfect Saturday afternoon was to take the carbs off his CB250, strip them down and clean them (on the kitchen table 😨), adjust the needle, refit and re-balance. If all went well, he ended up with a bike that ... erm... ran exactly the way it had before. He could never understand why I avoided fiddling about with tools and mucky things like oil and grease and chainlube, and instead I got my fun from actually riding the bloody things.

Don't forget to take the other factors that matter to you into account. 🙂 In my case, that would include low weight, wide string spacing, and simple controls. YMMV

Fascinating. I routinely double with DB and electric at every Damo & The Dynamites gig, and I own quite literally every suggestion that has been made above! 😂 Oh yes, and an EA Doubler head, of course. Of all the solutions I've tried, I like the MicroBass II by far the best. I use the DI to the board for my bass signal and also to get 48V phantom power (no need for a power supply or a battery, though of course I keep a battery in there just in case), and the Line Out to the Trace Elf which drives my Crazy 8 for stage monitoring. I put the DB through Channel A and the electric through Channel B, set my levels at sound check, and thereafter I have no need to touch the unit except to use the foot selector & mute buttons. Similarly, since the Elf is essentially 'fire & forget', it lives on the floor under the old PA tripod I use to raise the Crazy 8 to ear level. This arrangement allows me to have instant access to each bass, preset to the correct level, without groping around for the right button on the front of the head. Once I'm up and running with the first number of the evening I can just forget about it and focus on reducing my error-score for the evening. It also means that no valuable real estate on top of the PA case is being used by my bass rig. "This seems ideal - but there are lots of dials & buttons on it, and it'll take a wee while to get used to." True, but almost all of them, on close inspection, are either easily-ignored or (again) fire & forget. Apart from maybe the Boost control for Ch.A or the Drive control for Ch.B I can't imagine what else you would want to be tweaking after soundcheck.

The argument that a limited company offers protection or, worse, guaranteed protection is something to treat with caution. Depending on how and why you end up owing megabucks, you can easily find that your creditors can come after you personally. From the POV of succession planning, losing and replacing band members etc, I'd recommend forming an LLP as a far better, more flexible option. GET PROFESSIONAL ADVICE!

Ah well, if it comes out of the marketing budget ...

I imagine you'd get a few people prepared to hand over a fiver for a pretty piece of cardboard, but only if they were drunk enough. You'd need to be offering these for 99p each and there comes a point where the game's not worth the candle. Thing is, if you have a band with a decent following and a good social media presence, then downloads (for 99p each) are by far the simplest, most cost-effective way of dealing with this. With my rock'n'roll band, the talent (Damo) has written four songs in four years, all of them excellent of their type, but he ain't exactly the new Lennon & McCartney. He's also a technphobe so dealing with every aspect of the download biz would be left to me and @Silvia Bluejay as was the recording and production of the 4-song CD during Lockdown. Given that all royalties would be going - rightly - to Damo, and that we'd be dealing in pennies, life's too short. In a successful 4-piece originals band with a shedload of great songs and a real desire to 'get our music out there', I imagine things look different.

Interesting - you wouldn't know that from the ticketing.

Stumbled across this, and was genuinely tempted. https://www.seetickets.com/event/the-steve-hillage-band/o2-forum-kentish-town/2395747?fbclid=IwAR248tnd4X-AiTgQA_O8mccF6PHF6RkLrX0omcpDVh2iU_stA0UC94yAwAA I have vivid (if somewhat stoned) memories of the 1977 Rainbow gig, including the journey there on the tube for some reason. Motivation Radio was riding high and almost permanently on the turntable, I had just discovered that there was more to life than four cans of Fosters and 20 Rothmans, punk was a happening thing that most people knew very little about though I'd pogo'd for the first time a few months earlier (Pretty Vacant). Ah well, the Kentish Town gig offers no seats and anyway - I'm gigging that evening. Shame.

After a lot of research, I ended up using http://www.torchmusic.co.uk/ We were pretty happy with the outcome. For context, we went for the cheapest options available throughout, because we were well aware that very few people have any interest in buying CDs these days. We sold JUST enough to cover production costs. You really REALLY want to enclose a download code with each CD.

Hopeless technique ... look at the way her hair strays across the fretboard. 😂

I have relatively recent experience of trying to run a US bank account and a US cellphone with a US SIM. My advice? Don't even try. American banking is decades behind Europe, even the supposedly big international outfits like Chase and Wells Fargo. All of their systems work on the assumption that you are a Yank, you live in the Land of the Free, and the only currency on the planet is US$. You WILL need to supply a valid US residential address, and quite possibly the Yank equivalent of a Social Security number, though certain banks are so obsessed with new business that the individual you are dealing with may well fudge that issue so that he/she can collect their next bonus. This WILL backfire on you if and when it all goes horribly wrong. All assume that you can 'pop in' to your local branch to deal with certain issues. Very few have any system for dealing with, for example, an email from an English customer living in England, still less a phone call (transatlantic!) to their "Free Helpline - Just Call This Number". None are prepared to bend or amend any rules, no matter how obvious it is that something doesn't apply to you because you're a foreigner. Running a US cellphone sort-of works so long as you are NEVER out of the country for more than a 6-month period (they have so many burners that any number unused for six months is recycled). And of course you need a US bank account. Oh no ... wait ... I stress, this isn't "a guy in the pub told me", this is "I personally lived through this nightmare a few years ago". Sometimes you just need to know when to walk away.

DOH!!!

The "electric thing" is a variation on the TENS machine sometimes offered to women in labour as an alternative to pethedine or to gas & air. I never tried one so can't really comment, but I always suspected it was more of a placebo thing in the case of back pain. (I certainly can't comment on how effective it is in childbirth. 🙄) I've had back issues for years and they have been well documented here on Basschat BUT those issues did not arise from injury or damage, they came from poor posture and not using my body correctly. What I needed was several years of Pilates (others recommend Alexander Technique or yoga instead) at the end of which I have a far better understanding of how to avoid screwing myself up. In the case of @police squad I really don't think I have anything useful to say; dealing with an injury is NOT the same as dealing with poor posture. I just tried to page SixFeetFour (he's an osteopath) but his name no longer comes up ... has he changed it?

Blimey! When did you last buy a banger? Or are cars particularly cheap in your neck of the woods? I had to help a mate buy a pre-loved vehicle a few months back. With the whole of NW London to choose from, the best we could come up with was a 10-year-old Zafira for £3k, which needed new tyres, a new battery, and now a new clutch.

https://snap-dragon-guitars.com/products/snap-dragon-e-bass Bought for me by @Silvia Bluejay after seeing the guitar version being wielded by @MacDaddy Devilish cunning, and very playable.

Follow the link mate! 🤣

I bought something pretty much identical to this: https://www.japanesempv.co.uk/vehicle/toyota-alphard-30-v6-petrol-4wd-in-uxbridge-london-29523ba4-b30f-4455-a48e-20f63077b9e8 It's a 3-litre V6 with permanent 4WD and, as a top-of-the-range MPV in Japan, it arrives fully-loaded. I ripped out the rear pair of seats and chucked them in a skip, reversed the middle bank of three seats, and ended up with the fastest and most comfortable small van in London.

I more-or-less run the set lists for both my main bands, and I always tend to err (if it is indeed erring) on the side of crowd-pleasers. I leave the more obscure stuff for my various side-projects, especially those where nobody expects to make any ... y'know ... money an' that. Obviously it's vital to know your audience, if that's at all possible. With The Junkyard Dogs I play some large town-centre cattle-markets on a Saturday night and pretty much every bloody song needs to be recognised by the third bar, but I also play some tiny music-afficianado pubs where they welcome something a bit different, or at least unexpected. In a vaguely similar fashion, with Damo And The Dynamites I play plenty of WMCs and Socials where it's the obvious that gets the applause - Elvis, Buddy, Chuck, Eddie Cochran - but when we play the more specialist venues it's all about the Rockabilly stuff.

There have been developments.

I reckon that's a Yes. I played two truncated sets ... 11:30 - 12:00 and 12:15 - 12:45. By my standards that's a very short gig, but the key thing is that after pumping out more-or-less full power for an hour I still had two of the three blue LEDs lit on the Pocket 50. These things are rarely linear and I doubt that means it could keep up that output for three hours, but I'd be pretty confident that it could handle at least two. Besides which, assuming a 3-set gig then that's 2x15-min breaks in which to retire to the pub and plug in the recharger. And, of course, batteries respond poorly to the cold. On a warmer day - or at least a milder one - I imagine that the battery would anyway last longer. So far so good.

So ... what happened next? Well that busking gig got cancelled at short notice (the guy is much younger than me and had family duties on the half-term) so there was a 3-week delay before I could join him and a friend on congas this last weekend. I don't know where you live, but around here Sunday was barely above freezing and absolutely NOT ideal busking weather. The guitarist was playing with his teeth quite literally chattering throughout and his fingers refusing to obey his brain. Also, I forgot my 'dead cat' for the mics on the Zoom H4 and it turned out to be far windier than I'd expected, so the sound quality wasn't great. Bit what the hell? Could you hear the GR Pocket 50 in a busy-ish market, up against a guitar using a battery Orange Crush 30 and a pair of mic'd up congas going through a mini-tower batter PA?