NancyJohnson

I suppose the thing with MIDI is that I never saw a place for it in what I was doing, so that whole area of technology never really had any impact on the sixteen notes a bar noise I've been churning out for years. Anyhow, decision pretty much made here; I want to do a side by side with the A/O and the v2...providing I can nail the tone I want (which doesn't appear to be an issue; you know where I'm at now tonally), I'll just pull the trigger and then have a fire sale.

Yep, it works fine from the blend perspective, yes. Still a little flummoxed as to why there wasn't simply a button on the facia to achieve this; yes, I know it's Geddy's design etc. but not all of us are running stereo set ups.

I'm such an old fart that I just tend to set up so I sound lively and leave it at that.

As I'm not really doing that much live work these days, I had been thinking about dumping my rack set up at some point and moving to something a little more bijou...a mate of mine owns the V1 and is pretty pleased with it. Hmmm.

I'm enjoying the Andertons You Tube output, but really not seen anything (yet) that's made me sit up and go, 'Oooh.' On the regular guitar front, I'm still waiting for Gibson to pull the trigger on a proper doublecut Les Paul Junior (not the plastic monstrosities they're currently hawking), but they have git a singlecut now that looks ok.

Harking back to a similar period, and covered in the Anthony Reynolds book Japan - A Foreign Place, somehow or another 80% of Japan were coersed into signing away writing credits to have David Sylvian as sole composer on everything. In a roundabout way, this is telling us why Rob Dean relocated to Costa Rica and does birdwatching tours and Mick Karn, who died riddled with cancer while trying to crowdfund money for treatment, was pretty much penniless at the time of his death. Meanwhile, Mr Batt continues to reap the 100% rewards from his pre-solo career.

I've got a pair of Lull basses (combined purchase price c.£9k), a Hamer (lowish purchase price, but a high book value) and an old Aria Primary Bass that owes me about £100.00. I love the expensive stuff; nothing wrong in having some pride in owning gear you've shelled out a fortune for. I've been buying and selling since the early 80s and while the Lulls are amazingly good instruments, at the same time the Aria is a wonderful thing too. I can't quantify why I'm so attached to the Aria; its not a type I particularly like (a Precision style thing), but it plays wonderfully and I don't really have to worry about dinging it. Perhaps it was just that the stars aligned somehow when I got it.

I think this is it in a nutshell. It's just BBC populism tripe; the omissions speak louder than the people who were in it. The upcoming guitar one, it would have been great if Dave Grohl had done it; much as I dislike Nirvana/Foo Fighters as an individual I find the guy endearing, engaging and passionate about his subject matter in equal measure. I suspect the guitar one will follow the same right-on format favoured by Auntie; heavily weighted delta blues for the first 15 minutes, featuring loads of (black) blues players that no one has heard of, a bit about Elvis stealing his entire act from aforementioned blues players, Sun Records, Buddy Holly, The Beatles, Hendrix, Woodstock, a short piece on Page/Clapton/The Who/Fleetwood Mac, perhaps a few seconds on Eddie Van Halen, a bit of Steve Jones.

I need to relax a bit, so tonight's listening is Handel's Soloman. It's pretty epic.

Years ago, I was doing this regular Sunday lunchtime residency thing at a pub in Hackney. Let me cover the specifics; we're set up in the corner of the pub (The Cat and Mutton), three piece band, I'm sitting on a barstool, playing root notes doing covers (shudder), a 90 minute set in exchange for money, beer and a free lunch. One Sunday, there was some jostling at the bar over chicken wings and a fight breaks out. Now when I say fight, I mean a fight. It seemed the pub was full of two factions, both of whom were just itching to get it on and I'd say the place literally erupted and 90% of the clientele were punching the crap out of each other. Furniture is flying, people are on the floor hitting each other, glasses flying. It was like a brawl out of a cowboy film. Anyhow, let's get back on point. We're still playing. I'm laughing at the incredulity of what is going on, when I stand up and push my stool back closer to my amp to give the fight more room to breathe and from a selfish perspective, to offer protection for my gear. At this point, a bloke comes over to me and shouts, 'Excuse me mate, are you using that stool?' I just do this shrug and nod thing, he picks the stool up, runs into the melee and breaks it over someone. So there you are. The most ridiculous thing I've been asked is whether I was still using a stool.

Then Auntie should put it in a synth show.

The Tina Weymouth show was frankly a bit stinky poo. I'm just tired of these type of shows, trawling out the same old names. Dull, dull, dull. Where's Sheehan? Myung? Geddy? Flea? Entwistle? Why is it always the same old content? Crap.

I met him at Manny's store. I'd just gone in for a nosey and saw this bloke who I recognised from somewhere, he was pretty prominent in the adverts in Bass Player at the time. One of the staff asked whether I'd 'like to meet Larry' and it just clicked. I'd concur that he was genuinely interested in what gear I was using, the band I was playing in, whether I was gigging regularly and whether I'd heard about.the Hydrive gear. He watched some You Tube footage, listened to some studio stuff. Honestly didn't think I was going to leave the store with anything other than strings. Credit to him though. He sorted out everything with Korg and about a week after we got back from New York, everything was delivered. I just get the feeling he must bang out artist deals left, right and centre, much to the scourge of global distributors.

Following a chance meeting with Larry Hartke in New York, I had one with Hartke (I think it's probably still active). It was a somewhat lovely thing to behold; you just have visions of vans full of gear arriving, but in truth I only had three HyDrive cabinets off them, along with a replacement 10" speaker, as there was little necessity to keep swapping my backline out with fresh cabinets.

The voice of reason says: God, they look horrific. Message ends.

Ooh, I'd just like to direct you to this link. Same bass through the GED, pretty much the same settings, same interface: Let me know if you can hear the difference.

I'm having an issue with my GED 2112 unit and to support an ongoing query I have T21 and the UK distributor, if it's possible could I ask owners to dial up (for the sake of clarity) the Roundabout settings and record a short isolated bass clip and upload here please. If you listen to my mixdown it's producing a very uncharacteristic non-Ged tone, just a nasty phatty fuzz (there's two short pieces, the first is with the unit set to the manual's 'Roundabout' settings - which should be super bright - and for the second I've rolled the mid and mid shift forward to the two o'clock position which should enhance the drive...I've panned the drive to the left channel and the deep to the right. The deep side sounds fine, no issues with that). Getting a decent clanky tone from Tech21 stuff is as easy as shooting fish in a barrel, but apparently I've somehow lost the ability to do that with this unit. My BDDI and dUg stompboxes are fine, proving I have no issues with amps/cabinets. Thanks. Mixdown.mp3

Blimey, listen to you lot. When this was all fields, I used to drop the needle and play along with the track a few times. No tabs or software required.

A while back my old band were supporting a three piece punk band and their bass player was using an Affirma (or whatever it was called back then). No qualms about how it sounded, but it was the most ridiculous looking bass I'd seen in a while, especially in a punk band.

OK, here goes. Quite a while back I was listening to LBC radio (Robert Elms) and caught the tail end of a discussion in which someone was talking about the north side of Oxford Street. The guy was saying that when the old Tyburn Road was being redeveloped into Oxford Street, there wasn't wholesale demolition of the old warren of streets on the north side as Tyburn Road was elevated, higher that the surrounding land. As a consequence, there was little effort to raise the grade and in particular the location of one of the buildings HMV were using (I'm assuming the original site, but not 100% certain which one) had been built over the old street, literally by driving steel piles over it and that some of the houses and the original street still existed under the shop in the basement. I found this yarn fascinating, it has to be said. A while later I heard another radio phone in where someone was describing the houses and they were used for storing stock. I've not been able to find anything online to verify this; old maps seem to support there were streets and hearing the same thing twice from different sources gives the story a little credence.

Did anyone here work in either of the Oxford Street locations? I'm curious about something...

The Rock Box used to be wonderful...haven't been in there for years and it's only about ten minutes from me. Just as a trivia point, Ken put Muse on in the shop at a midnight show the day their first album was released.

Me and the good lady just watched it. I'll say from the outset that I never found This Is Spinal Tap remotely amusing and to describe the Bros: After the Screaming Stops as being comedy gold is a bit fallacious. Sure there's some truly terrible dialogue, but this isn't the Troggs Tapes or a documentary peppered with observational Tufnelesques such as, 'These go to eleven.' I found it very uncomfortable viewing to be honest; have no idea how much of it was scripted/staged, but some of the rehearsal footage reminded me of situations I'd been in in the past ('Is this what it was like in the Johnsons?' Asked my wife at one point.) Matt Goss just comes over like a mousy-haired and less-astute version of Jamie Redknapp, whereas Luke seems to be a little more switched on. Both of them seemed to be prone to turning on the waterworks at the mention of family/money. Sadly, no mention of Camberley life or Ken Craig (hopefully the lad distanced himself from this, but he seems to have landed on his feet). One viewing is enough!

Nail bars and coffee shops aside, pretty much every generic High Street in the country is dying. I feel that where electrical retailing needs to go is having more of a showroom and delivery type thing going down; no actual saleable stock held on the premises, so a Sony showroom, a Samsung showroom, an LG showroom etc. Just somewhere you can go to look and test a product, quiz a salesman (although the likelihood would be that the salesman would be just as clueless as the customer), buy it and have it delivered same day (or at least within 24 hours). If Amazon can do next day with Prime, I see no reason why manufacturers couldn't either work with them to expedite product to the customer on a next day basis or at least get their shizz together to do it themselves.

There's a short/succinct piece about HMV on the Guardian website, which pretty much sums up the how we all seem to think. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/28/hmv-music-high-street-chains-record-shops