Happy Jack

Message received from a pub we (used to) play regularly: "Head Office have decided that we must now use a centralised booking system for live music. As I understand it at the moment, the main changes will be: I need to register every performer with a company called Events UK as soon as possible. I will tell Events UK when I want to book you, and they will then contact you directly. After your gig, you will need to send an invoice to Events UK, who will then make payment directly into your bank account. The lead time for making payment is 3 weeks. If you become "resident", they will speed up payment to 1 week. You do not need to be registered for VAT. I realise that this is far from ideal, but unfortunately there appears to be no way around it."

Yes, I keep it tuned to Low B ...

I have absolutely no idea where this topic should go so I'll just chuck it into General Discussion and see where it gets moved to ... I keep my bees in a lovely beech forest near High Wycombe. The canopy is so dense that for the whole year (excluding Winter) very little sunshine penetrates and the bees have been suffering. After five years I have finally decided to something about it. What have I decided? This: Those four trees total roughly 12 tons of timber, nearly half of it in that last tree alone. I have no problem with leaving those trunks to slowly rot over the next 20 years, providing a variety of habitats for wildlife and looking awfully picturesque, but there is a short-term opportunity here. If there's a Basschatter with a chainsaw and a pickup who could make use (profitable or otherwise) of some of that lumber, get in touch with me. As I understand it, beech is hardly ever used for luthiery (weight? grain? anyone know?) but obviously it is very widely used in furniture manufacture. The woods throughout the Chilterns were planted with beech largely to support the British furniture industry when it was based in High Wycombe. That in turn led to people like Ian Waller and Pete Stevens setting up Electric Wood in High Wycombe. So there you are - this post is actually bass-related after all ...

Item Title Status Quo Bass Guitar Description No description.

I'm currently involved with five (yes, 5) bands. Two are frontline commercial gigging bands (I have eight consecutive double-header weekends coming up, starting this Friday), two are active side projects which would be interested in gigging maybe 1/2 times a month, and one is a new side project in formation which would never get weekend gigs because it will be insufficiently commercial. Over the last five years I have been rejected by at least 20 bands - it wouldn't surprise me to find that it was actually twice as many! By far the most common reason given has been that they're unhappy with me playing in other bands, and that's really not an issue for me ... much of the time they're probably right, and it would turn out to be a problem for the band. I'm able to make five bands work because: ALL gigs for the two busy commercial bands are brought in by @Silvia Bluejay and myself, which rules out any chance of diary clashes on Fri/Sat nights. Neither frontline band wants to play more than 3/4 gigs a month, whereas I'm happy to play a dozen if they're available. I'm always scrupulously honest with side projects, from first response onwards. I make it absolutely clear that their band will be a side project for me - most immediately say 'YUK' but occasionally the response is "Great, that's exactly how we feel too". I choose side projects that play music I'd really love to be playing, but which I don't get to play in my commercial bands. There have been times when playing with my Classic Soul side project has been like juggling with soup, but I'm compensated for that by the opportunity to play some of my favourite songs with a decent bunch of musicians. A further side benefit of playing in all these outfits, many of them short-term, is that when the next project comes along and it turns out they're missing a guitarist or a drummer or whatever, I always have a pool (or at least a puddle) of musos who I've actually played with that I can trawl to make up any gaps.

Given that the two-and-a-half years since this review included the entire Covid 5h1tstorm, we've still managed to gain considerable experience with using the Mark Audio set-up. A lot of other stuff has happened in that time. The Junkyard Dogs became a 3-piece; Damo & The Dynamites (3-piece r'n'r outfit) became successful; And the real game-changer ... we started using an XR18 wireless mixer. Net result is that we now have much broader experience with the Mark Audio, and we always route (almost) the entire band through the PA at every single gig. By that, I mean we mic up a small combo for the guitarist and I run a DI from my bass rig. The average age of the five musicians in my two bands is 60 and none of us have much experience with IEMs - although I'm dabbling with them out of sheer curiosity - and trying to introduce them would cause WAY more trouble than it's worth. The only exception to the through-the-PA thang is that we don't bother to fully mic up the drums unless we're using the leccy kit at a small venue, but in that case we wouldn't be using the MarkAudio. Kick drum always, and sometimes I'll stick a condenser over the drummer's left shoulder, but a 7-piece drumkit mic-set is something I'll start using only if we end up playing really big venues. 😉 In terms of what @P-T-P asks, the outcome is that we have pretty much abandoned monitoring. The drummers in both bands sing (or try to) so I'll usually kit them out with a personal monitor, a Wharfdale WPM-1 or similar, if they ask me to, but that's it. On-stage volumes are low enough that we can hear the band's overall sound plus our own voices with little difficulty. That leaves the Mark Audio free to do what it does. Will it cope? Oh yes. To get the best out of the system, you really do need to have it fairly cranked. At the George IV for example the sound can be a bit light on the mids for the first two sets, but when the dancefloor is crammed for the third set and the volume can go up, the Mark Audio sounds simply righteous. In all this discussion, though, it's important not to lose sight of the Mark Audio's USP. If I played in bands with fit young roadies then I'd be perfectly happy with a pair of enormous f***-off RCFs or Mackies, in fact I might well prefer them to the Mark Audio. The reason we sold our RCFs was that a 735 mk.4 weighs a whisker short of 20kgs and lifting that up by 1.5 metres twice at each gig, and then lifting both down again later, seemed like a bloody stupid thing for someone my age with a dodgy back to be doing. I can roll the Mark Audio base units into any venue on a folding sack trolley. The only lifting is getting them into and out of the van. This might be the moment to mention that I MUCH prefer describing 'lifting 43lbs by five feet' ... I'm not really a metric person. The improved visuals are very helpful too, but that's not why we bought them.

Bin there, dun that, got chilli oil stains all over the t-shirt. The whole music-in-the-community thang can be a lorra lorra laffs and very satisfying UNTIL you find yourselves dumbing down the song structure to suit the ukelele player who could never be bothered to learn the rest of the chords. Not that ... ahem ahem ... I speak from personal experience, you understand. 🤨 Ahem.

Now that really is beyond parody ...

I'm guessing that he needs the money to buy a camera that can be focused.

If my other bands weren't so busy, I'd have called you myself. Things change, and not always in a good way. If I find myself more available, I'll PM you on FB. 😉

My Mike Lull P5 is slowly developing insurmountable problems. Still plays, still sounds great, but every few months I have to tweak the saddles a bit higher to avoid choking. The trussrod is either jammed solid or at the end of its travel, and proper professionals have tried to de-banana the neck without success. Time to move on. I'll tell you what I want, what I really really want. I want a 35" scale graphite neck, preferably 4-bolt (in case by sheer blind luck the holes line up), suitable for a 5-string with 19mm spacing at the bridge. Although it's to be fitted to a P-bass I would actually prefer a J-neck though I'm not precious about it. I'm thinking maybe Modulus, maybe Status, y'know - the usual suspects. Happy to be told I've missed someone. Suggestions? Contacts? Anyone here actually have something suitable they'd be happy to part with (for money, natch)?

Just saw your recent FB announcement ... hope it's not permanent.

Combine that number of pedals with that many knobs and that close together, blend in my bloody great clod-hoppers, and I'd be tap-dancing through a minefield at a gig ...

What on Earth would you do with a 300W valve amp? 😂 200W would be overkill for almost any venue, 100W is more than adequate. Anything over 100W is just willy-waving, frankly.

I don't think you've been any unluckier than most, Steve, solid state amps - whatever their class - seem to be inherently more fragile than old-school valve amps. And yes, I know how weirdly that reads. I've had at least a dozen vintage valve amps (I still have three of those right now) plus a modern Matamp. Not one has ever given the slightest trouble. I've had perhaps the same number of modern SS amps in qualities ranging from cheap'n'cheerful Chinese jobbies to very high end stuff indeed. At least four of those have failed completely, including one which burned out in a spectacular, sparkily sort of way in the middle of a gig. The failed units include an AI Clarus and a Powersoft Digam, so we're not talking about any old crap here. Both of those two incidentally were fully repaired at no cost under (expired) Warranty and without quiblle by the manufacturer. As a user, I am paranoid about NOT over-loading an amp, any amp, and I always ensure that I have tons of headroom. I use no drastic FX or silly EQ settings, and my greatest extension is to use 5-string basses with a Low B. Each failure can be traced back to a single component (although it always feels odd to describe a complete Motherboard as a single component 🤨) and in some cases the failed components were not cheap items with a limited operational life. After many years of hands-on, in-depth research in the field, I think I can safely say that the link between all these failures is that stinky poo happens.

You and your mates were probably using speaker cables as instrument leads ... 😂😉

Ha! I've played with worse drummers, and heard worse drums too ... 😂

https://www.generators-direct.co.uk/frame-mounted/honda-em5500s-petrol-generator-electric-start

Without soundclips, this thread means NOTHING ...

Hi Seva, the most common places ONLINE are https://www.joinmyband.co.uk/ and of course Facebook, both of which are free. If you're prepared to pay then there are more options, such as https://www.bandmix.co.uk/account/, but I'm not sure they're actually any better. You might improve on that by searching (Google) for the Jam Sessions and Open Mics in pubs near you. Every part of London has pubs which run these on midweek evenings, and they're an excellent way to meet local musicians, show them what you can do, establish some sort of relationship. From your name I'd guess that you're not English (forgive me if I'm wrong 😉) in which case that opens up another route, which is to find your local compatriots. There are places in London with bands formed entirely/mostly of ex-patriate Italians or Spaniards or Poles or whatever.

This ^. Absolutely this ^.

Welcome to world of Real Bass. If you haven't already sorted this, I strongly recommend getting at least one 1-hour lesson from a pro/teacher. Some skills are definitely transferrable from EB to DB, but there are some really basic things which are radically different and you'll want to get those right from Day One. It's not just a question of improving your technique - you won't want to give yourself wrist / shoulder / back problems down the line from poor posture or playing with your limbs twisted! Your string choice will (of course) be guided by a number of factors, the most important IMHO being what sort of music you want to play and what state your hands/fingers are in. I've personally always favoured gut-alike strings, i.e. strings that emulate the feel & sound of gut strings. Genuine guts are unbelievably expensive, give endless tuning issues, and don't even last particularly long. A decent set of (say) Innovation Silver Slaps will last for 10 years and there is no requirement to actually slap them. 😉 Have a look at this for a starter:

I know it's deeply unfair of me, but I see those cabs, I see where it says Ashdown, and I just assume they'll each weigh a ton! 😂