Happy Jack

Hey @Lozz196, see if you can guess which pub he's talking about. 😂

But there's no getting away from the fact that it's £600 for a cardboard bass. 😱

Yeh, but you won't catch me standing too close to them. I've bought three sets of new strings in the last five years. On each occasion, it was because of a new bass. Old guys with flatwounds rule ...

None of that even begins to surprise me. My point was, of course, that by the time you've amplified your single DB at a gig, the sound of the gut strings is nowhere near as significant in the overall sound as when a DB - or many DBs - are played acoustically. Your post also leads on naturally to the disparity in instrument prices between orchestral DBs and the sort played by most of us here on Basschat in blues bands, country bands, jazz bands. Putting a £700 set of guts onto an £8000 orchestral DB makes more sense (to me, anyway) than putting those same strings onto an £800 3/4 plywood bass.

That was your best attempt at raisin a laugh.

https://www.cases-and-enclosures.co.uk/roc-cases-grey-flight-case-l550-x-w220-x-h175mm-with-foam-insert

I've spent the last few days looking at exactly this solution ... or, more accurately, at the truly enormous range of solutions out there. You can start with BandHelper, OnSong, GigHelper and Camelot Pro. There's loads more. And that's just the Apps. All of these assume that: You are an Apple afficianado and already own loads of Apple kit; You have a background in software development and programming; You have spent the last 20 years using Midi for everything except wiping your arse; Everyone in your band is keen to fall in line with your solutions and let you control the set lists etc. I have spent literally hours just this past weekend scanning websites, watching YouTubes, downloading manuals (srsly), asking my friends over at https://www.facebook.com/groups/1096679527422725 and I haven't found anything designed for the ... ahem ... elder musician with no interest in falling down this particular rabbit hole. Essentially, "entry level" = a degree in computer programming.

For singers / guitarists / bassists I'm firmly in the NO MUSIC STAND camp. Echoing many others, if you can't be arsed to learn a couple of hours' worth of covers then IMHO you shouldn't be on stage trying to perform them. This applies particularly to dedicated singers who need only learn the lyrics to - usually - a bunch of famous pop songs that they grew up listening to and singing along to. If you can't remember famous lyrics, you're probably not actually a singer at all. Orchestral players - and that definitely includes the horn section for, say, a soul band - is a whole nother thang. Those people have to play perfectly in sync with each other and with the rest of the band (even when they're being 'loose') plus all their training points them at reading the songs from the sheet music. The crossover point seems to be keyboards. I play a 3-tier rig using each tier in any given song for one of brass, strings, piano, organ or synth. But it's not as simple as that ... I have a dozen different organ sounds for different songs, half a dozen different pianos, half a dozen brass sounds, etc. Every song starts with 30 seconds of frantic button-pushing to get the right sounds cued up for the next song. Inevitably, I have a tablet mounted on my rig which tells me what settings I'm going to need. Equally inevitably, since I have a tablet with all the songs in the set in the correct sequence, I also have the chords for some tricky passages. Does that make me a bad person?

Free-ish to a good home - best assume £10/£15 for P&P depending. I've had this for at least 10 years and it still works perfectly. At the time, it was the latest in Smart TVs. There is a possibility that things have moved on since then. Condition is pretty much as new. That looks like the original cellophane protective nonsense still on there ... at the time this was a very new thing. Now surplus to requirements. Easiest (for me) would be collection from Harrow HA1 but, as luck would have it, I am temporarily in possession of exactly the right packaging materials.

Clearly I should have charged you more ... 😂

... this isn't quite what you had in mind. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cg5677nq4ngo

OK, no need to worry about NSFW then ...

Certainly has a helluva lot fewer teeny-weeny little screws.

Jealousy will get you nowhere, mate ... 😂😂😂

It all rather focuses the mind on why anyone needs guts in 2024. Playing low-volume acoustically there's no real doubt in my mind that guts sound simply sublime, and are a pleasure to play. Introduce any amplification worth mentioning and the benefits start to slip gradually away, until you reach gig volume where you're feeling the notes as much as you hear them and the material used to make the string becomes of very limited interest. And then you go and spoil it all by saying something stupid like "but what about other people?". Ah yes, other people. your band members, other musos in the audience, bar staff, punters, drunks ... what do they hear, what do they notice? We've all answered tougher questions than that, right? I could afford the £700 if I needed to, if I spent my hours in recording sessions at Air Studios and if the sound would be valued and appreciated, but I'm a pub/club player. Seriously - what's the point?

Jane's Addiction have apologised after they cancelled an upcoming show following an on-stage brawl in Boston. On Friday night, the American band cut short their gig after frontman Perry Farrell threw a punch at guitarist David Navarro. The world's gone mad, I tells ya ...

And for today's delight & delectation we have Dickensian Victoriana Metal with Gothic Groove twist No, I didn't just make that up. They're a band based in Hemel Hempstead, I think ( @Lozz196 might know), called Tellers Scribe.

I've bought gigbags for less than £150. I've bought pedals for less than £150. I've bought amplifiers for less than £150. Hell, I've bought basses (and gigged them, for money, in front of an audience) for £150. Robin Williams was wrong y'know ... it's double basses that are God's way of telling you that you have too much money. 🙄

I'm sure I have NO idea what you are talking about ...