Happy Jack

Any Basschatters with decent experience of this app? @Silvia Bluejay and I are wondering whether it's worth upgrading from the Behringer XR18 (decent product, utterly lousy control app) to the Mackie DL16S and there's surprisingly little available online to inform the decision.

Reckon that headstock shape needs work ... 😉

As an added no-cost bonus, you get a reminder of my Lockdown-special porn-star moustache ...

Most profitable item sold in a pub? Your cup of coffee after the meal. Factoid.

... is starting to look VERY interesting.

@Ricardo Alves - read this:

Oh come on Tim, it was you who introduced the notion of "makes about 80p on a pint". If you don't see how it can be calculated on a per pint basis, perhaps you should have told your Landlord friend to stop talking out of his derriere. So anyway ... is this the 5-minute argument or the full half-hour?

Trouble is, it all depends how the pub is operated and how the figures are presented. There are so many different business models for running a pub (owned, managed, tied house, free house, etc.) and so many different ways to remunerate the person in charge (owner, tenant, landlord, employee, etc.) that the results from selling a pint for a fiver can produce pretty much any answer you like. If the guy running a tied house is forced to pay £4 for a pint that will sell for £5, then he's making a gross profit of £1 out of which he has to pay his overheads. Boom! There's your 80p. But then he doesn't need to share his profits with the PubCo and can keep whatever he makes. One thing seems sure ... you're never going to get a straight, honest answer!

I realised this too, but I wouldn't say it happened 'soon' in my case, or cheaply! 😂

Something that @Silvia Bluejay and I have pondered many times over the years. In our experience, it's very rarely as 'straight line' as that. For example, where the pub is owned and/or managed by a brewery or PubCo, there will routinely be an annual subsidy in place to encourage entertainment and to market the pub to the local community. 10 years ago a mid-sized Fullers pub could expect to receive a subsidy of £15,000 p.a. from head office. Broadly speaking, that's £300 per week that the landlord/manager could allocate as they wished in order to attract punters. At the Fullers pubs that I played at the time, this translated into one band per week getting £250 and the other £50 being used to run a Quiz Night or a Poker Night or a Karaoke session. Reverting to your original question, this all meant that the pub didn't actually 'need' to sell a single drink in order to cover the cost of the band. The assumption was that the band would bring in extra revenue for the pub, which would show up in their sales figures. Obviously a pub that took the subsidy but then routinely turned in lousy sales figures would soon lose the subsidy. The other aspect to this system is that it made it easy for dishonest landlords (and yes, unbelievably some such folk really do exist) to simply pocket some or all of the band fee. This is essentially what led initially to pubs demanding invoices from bands, and then to 'direct payment' sytems whereby the band gets paid by head office and not by the pub.

What on Earth makes you think I'll ever get up that high? 😂

So for those of us of the non-luthier persuasion, it looks like any other jack once it's installed?

Can someone please explain the difference between a barrel jack and a normal jack?

It's a Rockabilly thing. We interviewed Lee Rocker just before Covid and one of the things he mentioned was that The Stray Cats never soundcheck before any gig.

Seeing as this thread has veered off into Soundcheck territory, my covers band has sound-checked with the same song for the last 12 years. Every gig. Every single one. On those all-too-frequent occasions where we don't get a 'proper' soundcheck, we simply make that song our first number. All three of us in the band plus @Silvia Bluejay our sound engineer know exactly how that song is supposed to sound, and we hardly ever run into problems. Except when the lead singer suddenly decided to ramp up his personal mic-stand monitor to the max due to a loss of confidence / stage fright / whatever. It was the only piece of kit on stage that Silvie couldn't turn down!

That would be me, and there was a perfectly logical reason for that choice at the time. That reason is now gone, courtesy of £16,000 worth of eye operations last year, which is why those super-sized dots no longer serve any useful purpose.

Damned right - superb!

In truth, Mick, I'm loving this. Seriously.

Next stop ... my Seasick Steve Tribute band.

OK, I'll bite. What makes a bassist - ANY bassist - somehow "perfect to play steel guitar"?

Well string choice is going to have a major impact, obviously, but in the final analysis it's all about how it feels & plays as far as you are concerned. I'll be interested to hear what you end up with.