Happy Jack

An original on which I contributed the bassline and BVs was played this afternoon on the radio. OK, it was internet radio being broadcast from someone's back bedroom somewhere ... we're not talking Radio 2 or Capital here. But it remains my first ever radio broadcast. Box ticked. Next up? Television. 😂

Yup, well aware of that. 😂😂😂

For a fairly rare genuine Gibson, that doesn't strike me as outrageous. You're already well aware of the known T-bird issues, as would be any potential buyer as and when you want to move it on, so if the price is at least OK then you're unlikely to take much of a hit. Can you play it first or is this a punt on eBay or similar?

What sort of money are you looking at?

It took me ages to work out how to interpret those controls. Luckily, I managed to find an illustrated guide.

Ah yes, but I think you'll find that he was right all along. 😉😂

They did the conveyancing on my flat in Chichester, I think?

Perhaps it would be simplest if we just BOUGHT the Dog & Duck ...

Some great vids there Russ. We re-did the lighting in my studio a couple of months ago. I originally had two rather high-glare LED lightbars installed, but I couldn't cope with them after my eye operations so I had them replaced with loads of mini-spots on bars. We got the electrician to salvage one of the lightbars, attach a 10-metre power cable and a 13A plug ... instant white light for all occasions. Just a PITA to transport.

And I tried using DrumCam on Sunday ... OK, so that's a much harder trick to pull off than you make it seem! Getting the position right (distance, height and angle) turned out to far more complicated than I ever imagined.

Nah ... look what the camera has done to the guest singer's outfit! I bet he was really wearing a white t-shirt and a pair of jeans.

That's some great video you have there Phil, and yes that's very helpful. Not so much that score on the office cleareance, mind. I've just spent a fair bit more than that on a far lower-spec'd PC! Reckon you did well there ...

LINK!

I just bought something similar. Genuine case of "how on Earth can they possibly supply so much kit, and of such high quality, for so little money?". It's not (yet) perfect. I'm struggling with controlling the gain on the on-board mic, and battery life is only about two hours ... but then it comes with two batteries!

Ah now, the proverbial elephant in the room. Am I learning video editing so as to get in touch with my inner Francis Ford Coppola, or in order to better publicise my pub bands? Everything I've learned about getting pub gigs this last 15 years is that landlords/managers are turned right off by fancy studio-recorded demos ("Yeh, but what do you really sound like?") and I rather suspect that the same is true for video work. If you cast an eye over the vast majority of the videos on my channels, they are genuinely live warts'n'all recordings of actual performances in actual pubs. The camera angles are dodgy, the light is murky, punters keep wandering into shot, none of them are ever going up for a BAFTA. And they go down an absolute storm with landlords and managers. If @Silvia Bluejay and I can get The Boss to spend just two minutes in front of our tablet showing our videos, we always come away with a bunch of gigs. The hard bit is getting them to actually look at the bloody things! I'm practising the tricks I'm learning using footage shot under controlled conditions in a rehearsal space with a proper Green Wall ... I never lose sight of the fact that I'm preparing for the Dog & Duck.

We're using such a bizarre crop of cameras (five last Sunday for a rehearsal with a new originals band) that I'm never going to be able to determine in advance which shots needing digital zooming will be captured by the 'right' camera. Also worth noting that one camera's HD is another's fuzzy, pixellated mess. In time, I hope to get good enough to start worrying about this level of detail. For the moment, I'm just glad of the shot!

I don't know why you're making such a big thing out of it. We managed to get a bandage on it before you bled out, and the neighbours have apologised for calling the Police.

Why thank'ee, thank'ee kindly Young Master. Colour correction is just one of many new skills I have acquired in the last fortnight!

And here's #3 of 3, Damo's most recent original My Hot Rod Honey (written the week before the recording session, the drummer heard the track for the first time at a quick run-through before we went to the studio).

Here's #2 of 3, Damo's second original Look At That Chick (written in 2019).

OK, so 6th December has now been put back to 20th December and that's a bit of a delay too far for us, so we've decided to launch our long-heralded Media Blitz pretty much immediately. In the last two weeks I've done a helluva lot of video editing and my skills have moved along quite smartly. If I were to re-edit these videos today (which is perfectly possible, of course, but not overly attractive) then they would probably look slicker and more interesting. I'm leaving them alone as a decent example of what can be achieved in a week or so, from a standing start, by someone with no prior knowledge or experience of either a DAW or of video editing in general. Here's #1 of 3, Damo's first finished original Glove On The Gas (written in 2018).

The fret markers on those 185s were almost invariably made of celluloid. Be careful if you need to apply heat near them!

God, those were the days. It was 2005 and I was just getting into Hofners big time, and there was this strange new Internet thing with bulletin boards and the first forums. The second one I ever joined was Steve Russell's website where he was trying to pull together the first definitive source for all matters relating to vintage Hofners. I met (virtually) a large number of really nice, helpful, knowledgeable guys (including I suspect @Dad3353, maybe using a different Username?) and benefited enormously from their advice. I have two of Steve's books on my shelf (both co-written with the equally excellent Nick Wass) but strangely enough not the one that is being linked to here.