NancyJohnson

I read a little piece yesterday about how Living Colour's Stain album was now 30 years old and how the initial US release had different guitar solos on tracks 2-4 (Ignorance Is Bliss, Leave It It Alone, Bi) - I was a huge fan (although it has to be said, I'm more Team Muzzy that Doug Wimbush) and have both the alternate and regular versions. This was kind of enough to kick off a bit of a Living Colour deep dive - been working though from the original demos, the official releases, bootlegs, the lot. This is a crazy mental version of Funny Vibe. Muzz was so great.

I adore Straw's entry for The World Is Not Enough (pipped by Garbage).

If you're interested: Two or three years ago, I was asked to do an oddish project. To explain, I'd go to this guy's studio and spend the evening doing bass; a few days later I'd receive emails with MP3s...rough arrangements. I'd absorb these, go back in the following week, re-do the bass from scratch. This continued for a couple of months, maybe more. The vision/concept the producer/guitarist had was that he wanted to record an album of Bond themed songs for the books (Fleing et al) that hadn't been filmed. Despite all the work, most of the work I did evolved into other songs, however one did get finished. Robert Markham's 'Colonel Sun'. End production really sucks - the mastering leaves a lot to be desired and the demos were way better, but the version that went up the streaming platforms kind of captures the spirit of the Bond ethic.

I had one a while back - it was one of the ones with the scratch plate and bell-control plate (uncertain whether this is classed as the export or non-export model). Black. It was alright, lightweight, sounded OK. Someone said it looked like something, '...that bloke in ZZ Top might use...' after which I lost any love I had for it and sold it on shortly after.

There's a guy on You Tube (channel name @twoodford) who does some frankly fantastic work on acoustics - a lot of which (kind of) have similar separation issues to yours. There's been some fairly interesting recent work done on a pair of 80 year old Gibson acoustics, a lot of focus on neck removals and resetting; the dovetail tenon joints on both really weren't that accurate and while you're looking for a reasonably tight fit in both the tenon AND where the heel meets the body, he's very much of the opinion that Gibson (and others) would get reasonable tenon fit and literally fill the joint with shims and use either hyde (animal) or fish glue to ensure any gaps from the manufacturing process were filled. Scroll along to the 25 minute point on the video below. Jikes.

He only needs one string.

I think most of my better work came post-50. You slow down a bit; you realise that it's not all about playing everything at 100mph.

I've always liked T-40s, but not really so much as to pull the trigger on one. I think this is something to do with seeing Ross Valory/Journey using one. If I were on the market for one, I'd sooner go the whole hog and buy the real thing (there's a nice black one on Reverb for £1.2K) rather than chucking £500.00 on a Retrovibe, that'll be worth half that if you want to resell it.

10cc.

Just flicking through Instagram and saw Nikki Sixx is now endorsing SIT strings with his custom set gauge coming in at 55-115. He's actually replied to one poster questioning the gauge saying the band tune down a full tone live. (Let's not let this thread deteriorate into claims about whether they're using tapes live.) I tend to favour lighter strings and I'm pretty sure I've used 5-string sets where the low-B is only 120 (so 40/60/80/100/120) and never really experienced flappy strings when I was tuned up. I can't work out in my what's going on here; these gauges are closer to what you'd use tuning B-G. If a 120 works for a B how can a 115 work for D-tuning?

Velvet Revolver today.

That headstock looks familiar. Didn't MusicMan put out a Bongo with something similar?

We've just had a band call on Zoom. Strategy. We're going into the studio in three weeks to record four songs. To be honest I was a little distracted with a work thing on another screen, so I'm just listening and sagely nodding my head. Turns out I've agreed to record one song is something I've never heard before and a cover of Suffragette City. I have absolutely no knowledge of these being discussed. Must pay more attention.

I started a band over ten years ago, we limped along (the various line ups read like a version of one of Pete Frame's Rock Family Trees), but there was chemistry and fun. We bought in a singer that needed us more than his old band; don't get me wrong, he was a great lyricist (let's leave it at that), but he kind of took over. Toxic personality. Guitarist left. Drummer sacked (because he didn't like him). His entire outlook was that despite the band being mine (in the purest sense) and although I was writing 95% of the material, I was made to feel dispensable and easily replaceable at his whim. When I'd had enough, I left. That SoaB broke me and it hurt deeply. They went through five bassists after I left (which must say something) and the band folded for good earlier this year. If you're doing something and you're made to feel worthless, just walk. It took a long time for me to accept that. Plenty more bands out there. I've done some of my best playing since I left.

To hell with auditions, every gig I do can't remember the songs until we start playing them.

I have a real soft spot for this; we had the soundtrack on vinyl when I was a little kid.

CD is a contraction, yes, but it's also an abbreviation of compact disc, with CDs representing the plural abbreviated term for compact discs. There's probably some term like abbreviated contraction that can be applied, but I don't know. It's all down to ownership; John's car for instance. John owns the car, so it's John's car. A pluralised CD's implies CD has ownership of something. It's no more valid than banana's or sprout's. In answer to @tauzero, the apostrophe in greengrocer can be greengrocer's (singular) or greengrocers' (plural). Right, enough. All this is making me giddy.

My mum (bless her) taught English and in later life taught English as a second language. She literally forced me to learn about so many grammatical terms before I was ten years old. In these times of the crazed masses adopting descriptive pronouns, oh how she'd chortle (if she was still alive) about how anaphoric words will probably become redundant in usage because we'd be too scared to use them. Anyhow, nope it's vinyls, not vinyl's. Gotta love those apple's. 😉

I've been listening to Journey all day.

Can we stop with the greengrocer's apostrophes when we're posting about CDs? Just because a word or abbreviation ends with an s it doesn't necessarily need a leading apostrophe; it's CDs, not CD's. Records, not record's. Albums, not album's. Does my freaking nut in. Going for a coffee.

My wife isn't a fan of having big hi-fi and all the playable media out and I'll profess this has forced us me into a solution to still have access to the media while not having access to the tangible element (CDs/Blu-rays etc.). All my music and film content is now housed on a NAS (where I have all my CDs ripped to in FLAC or MP3/320kbps), but in the main the majority of the music we listen to is from Spotify. It's delivered to four stereo pairs of Sonos One and One SL speakers dotted about the house with the pair in our lounge benefitting from being twinned with a Sonos mini-sub for a bit more oomph. In the little room where I work, I have a PC with a pair of M-Audio BX5s - this has the same access to audio as the Sonos kit. In addition, I have a few audio boxsets which contain Dolby 5.1/Atmos Blu-rays (these are predominantly XTC, Tears For Fears, Steven Wilson)...if I want to listen to these, the content is all ripped to the same NAS and is delivered to an Onkyo surround amp via Plex. I've got about 100 albums up in the attic, some of which aren't on Spotify, so I have been toying with buying a Victrola turntable that's a badged collaboration with Sonos, so it serves as an input source - it doesn't require a fixed input in a Sonos amp, the turntable works as an input device on the Sonos MESH network. Bit expensive at the moment, unnecessarily so.

You should leave that body as is, too. The bridge looks a dawg - stick a hi-mass thing on it - but the rest of it? People pay good money for distressing like that.

There's too many (Fender-style) basses out there that look great(ish) from a body perspective but have just awful headstocks - I suppose we all have a degree of familiarity to Fender (and they're ilk) and I'm certain that there's many of us who would happily pull the trigger on a cheaper bass (perhaps as a backup) if the headstock was more Fender-alike. Even Squier models have a slightly redesigned headstock to their Fender badged cousins. I'm not advocating the use of Fender decals, just a redesign of the headstock. If there's one thing about the Harley Bentons, Arias, Vintages etc. the headstocks can be converted to something akin to Telecaster/early Precision headstock specs if that's your thing, and quite easily too if you have access to a oscillating spindle sander. I'd love to see what people have achieved.

While we're all suspectable to make the odd speling, typo or other inaccuracy - and I understand that for @Baloney Balderdash English may not be the first language - but I find it quite tiresome trying to actually work out what was actually said on posts when they're constantly being edited seconds after they're posted and/or being quoted in responsive posts. It would be great if the forum worked in such a way that we could go in and look at the pre-doctored amendments to posts. Just saying.