Happy Jack

I'm loving the idea of the band leader announcing to a bunch of half-cut office workers on a Friday night in Huddersfield, "and now it's time for our Captain Beefheart medley".

Your start point shouldn't be "what materials are available" ... try starting with "what do I want to use this EUB for?". Simandl and similar is wonderful stuff if you're going down a particular route but if what you really want to do is to play simple 12-bar blues or 2-feel country lines, then I suspect you'll find Simandl horribly OTT and off-putting. That is just my opinion and several much more competent upright players will be along any moment now to tell you why I'm wrong. And yes, you can combine the Simandl method with playing blues, country, rock'n'roll, rockabilly ... it's a method after all, you can apply it to anything. All I will say is, the best investment I ever made when learning upright was to get an introductory lesson from a good teacher. Literally on Day One, get someone to show you how to stand, how to hold the bass, how to pluck, how to finger the strings. Get the really basic stuff sorted from the start, and you won't have to spend years unlearning things later.

This sounds to me like a covers band playing pubs to punters who get steadily drunker as the evening wears on ... pretty much like my band The Junkyard Dogs then. Much as I love the blues, and much as I admire the work of John Martyn, very few of these recommendations could possibly be considered 'crowd pleasers'. I spent YEARS trying to get through to the Dogs that "we play what we want to play and if you don't like it, well tough titty" is a rather soggy sales pitch. A few years ago we finally reached the stage where we could play three straight sets of crowd-pleasers which the band ALSO wanted to play. Guess what? We are fully-booked every year, turning down gigs by mid-Summer, and pretty much all those gigs are at £300 - a decent rate around here for a pub band.

Edit: It helps that the drummer and I can contribute decent 2-part harmony BVs where needed.

We do all of these (and more) as a 3-piece, no problem. https://www.lemonrock.com/junkyarddogs?page=songs

Phone quality these days being what it is, I don't see why not. I always use a Zoom (H2 or H4n) but then I have them knocking around anyway.

@Teebs, that is just outRAGEous and I love it to bits. Who knew that TE kit was scaleable? Now awaiting the audio clips with great interest ...

In the Home Counties your best bet is probably Join My Band. Finding bands is easy. Finding good bands is hard. Finding good bands who think you are the answer to their problems ... well that's another thang entirely.

https://hackaday.com/2017/05/08/a-queen-mystery-the-legend-of-the-deacy-amp/?fbclid=IwAR1m4Ik_uQrQTEbcBV4mMnosn5dEfSf36xcpVA2LZCYJX3bzNJpCwjTMdgg

Paging @FinnDave ...

I tried one of these in the Warwick Custom Shop in New York some years back. I was never a fan of Cream, I don't like Warwicks (we were there because @Silvia Bluejay is a BIG fan), and I hate SG-style basses, so I expected to really really dislike that bass. It turned out to be one of the nicest basses I've ever played. After half an hour of delightful noodling, I was so impressed that I asked the price. When I heard it was $4500 I lost interest very quickly. 😂

Playing with the Dynamites last month at a big WMC (bear in mind that we are strictly rock'n'roll & rockabilly) the table nearest the band spent the entire evening requesting Mustang Sally, over and over again. They weren't trying to be funny, or even post-ironic, they were just ignorant bubble-heads. We kept telling them that it would be "in the next set".

My favorite was the teenaged girl who pproached me between songs, asked if I'd ever heard of Keith Moon and told me that he'd been the Lead Drummer for a famous pop group ...

Ride, Sally, ride?

Fruit machine ...

I wouldn't mind so much, but just two hours earlier I'd asked @gary mac if there was anything to watch out for at this pub and did he warn me? 😂

https://www.facebook.com/commerce/listing/380497400227690/?media_id=0&ref=share_attachment&__cft__[0]=AZWaCoxiGenbjDEe4k5AfAtpPTqVebY43hWlOMz1TKSYQyS_2PQ0QfaeeOIIH4LWDRAutE6UgkxAkgA3u-f4GztUZVious97xpF9FoxaR0RujfQxkap96ju2NjuyNbl31yeMWCvQ1aJgbfXkg7cnCwBmwZFgVlDVg4XHCBJYQ9G1Dx_KVhhDkIToh1Gcwa06a0BfgGuGPjA4O4phV8DbTdTv&__tn__=*bH-R He bought a 610 a month ago, and now says that it's "too big for what I'm looking for". So ... erm ... what exactly WERE you looking for? And have you mentioned it to Bono?

So glad we got to see him at both the Reunion tours. Still absolutely love playing his lines at gigs.

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/164007215631?hash=item262f97820f%3Ag%3A39sAAOSwPGBeBfrW&LH_ItemCondition=3000

That's worth the money just for the neck shim!

That is excellent - real world stuff.

This is what I run my Hotone head through. Sounds simply lush.

Don't you just LOVE this piece of weapons-grade marketing BS? INSPIRED BY CUSTOM SHOP QUALITY HAND MADE GUITARS AND BASSES In exactly the same way, my life is inspired by the lives of Julius Caesar and Errol Flynn. 🙄

I wonder if it weighs as much ... 🙄

They're all going this way, have been for years. Greene King were first (I believe) with 'Concur', that was so unpopular that they replaced it with 'Invapay', which was such a disaster that ... erm ... they're bringing back 'Concur'. Fullers tried to solve the problem by insisting that every Fullers pub HAD to get an invoice from every band, but then paid cash. Going forward, the manager at another regular gig has quietly warned me that we will need in future to be able to accept payment (as a band) by card. All pubs in the Mitchell & Butlers chain seem to be doing this Event UK thing already, and the pub that sent us the above message is owned by Star Pubs so clearly they're going the same way.