NancyJohnson

I like the headstocks. Very Mike Lull. Shhh.

Well, last Friday actually. Long day. I'd been awake since 4.00am after four hours kip (the Indian I'd eaten the previous night rumbling through my guts). Left home (near Reading) about 8.30am; satnav advises there's a prang on the M25 anti-clockwise, so I'm clockwise around to the M11 junction (about halfway round the M25). Weather was horrific, heavy rain, people driving like Richards. Arrive at Engine Room Studios in Bow around 10.30am for a video shoot at 11.00am. After filming (1.00pm), we decamp to an adjacent room and rehearse that night's set once. Pint of IPA. Drive from Bow to Lewisham, where we loiter for a couple of hours at the drummers house. 6.00pm (and remember I've been up 14 hours at this point), we embark for The Bird's Nest in Deptford. There's no load in, just a single bass in a case for me, to be told we're not on until 10.00pm. We sit around, talk to punters (who despite all sounding like Ray Winstone are just lovely). We go on late, but there's a curfew at 11.00pm. Good crowd, appreciative. We do the full set and we're done by curfew. We're in the car by 11.15pm. Drop singer off in Godalming at about 12.40am and drive home, in about 1.30am. I eat a peanut butter and banana sandwich, drink a glass of milk and give the cat some attention (no, this isn't a metaphor), bed at 2.00am. Been awake 22 hours at this point. My body has forgotten how to do this level of musical activity. My back aches. My right knee (surgery last August) aches. My hands hurt. I'm dehydrated. I feel alive. Awake at 9.00am and jetwashed the drive. Rock and roll.

Siouxsie & The Banshees today.

It's been an interesting few weeks living with the Euro-X. For starters, I honestly haven't touched any of my other basses since it arrived. Due to the nature of my band stuff (we rehearse in a regular recording studio; all on headphones), it's fairly simple to dial in my desired tone through a BDDI/GED2112. I ran it through my Darkglass set up at Silent Hill in Guildford a couple of weeks ago and (the sum of the parts) sounded just amazing. Over the last couple of days I've been in two separate rehearsal rooms and I've gigged, both times having to use house backline. If nothing, the experience demonstrated how much I deplore Trace Eliot and Peavey kit. I stuck it cleanish through an SWR head and an 8x10 and the place shook. Post-gig it was shocking how much interest there was in the bass (so it turns heads too) and how much better it sounded compared to the other bands Fenders! Belter!

Not a cover, but my old band had this thing called Strip. God I hated it. Singer was deeply enamoured with the guitarist, guitarist could literally drop wind in a jam jar, say it was a new song and the singer would love it. Guitarist literally threw the song together while he was tuning up before the drummer and singer turned up to rehearsal. Strip was just awful, kind of a Guildford and Woking Alliance League Division Four homage to Ace of Spades, based around a two chord sequence that dropped a tone and went back up a tone, guitarist just hitting open strings and screaming Strip into the mic at random intervals. We played some sh*thole once, I forget where. About 15 people in and the singer decided we should do it as the opener or second song. I remember seeing a small group of punters watching and one of them shook his head, mouthed 'Nah mate, this is sh*t,' to one of his mates and they just walked out. Happy days. *An addendum here, a day or so after the original post. I've not really listened to the band since I left but @Wolverinebasshas. I believe he described their final recordings as sounding like scrap metal being thrown down a stairwell. Probably got out at the right time.

I listened to the extended version of Destroyer earlier. I'd concur there's an awful lot of fill in the home demos - it certainly would have been interesting to hear some of it done properly with Bob Ezrin. In hindsight, I think (for me at least) where things fall over are in the early studio albums; they sound very weedy and thin from a production perspective. I'm way more familiar with the bombastic element of the live album versions (irrespective of how much of a product of the studio they are).

I remember seeing Kiss on the Today show (the same one as the Sex Pistols)...unsure who was interviewing, Eamonn Andrews or Bill Grundy, so this would have been around the time of the first UK tour, so 1976. A mate bought Destroyer into school the next day and I was smitten. That weekend I was up in London and bought Alive! with my pocket money. Obsessively lived and breathed this band for the next three or four years, I suppose I started to lose interest when the solo albums came out; while I was familiar with the content on Dynasty and Unmasked (through other people), I didn't buy them and I had moved on (primarily onto Japan and other more homegrown punk stuff). Don't get me wrong, at the time I adored the two live albums and the three albums in between, although the only one I ever return to is Destroyer, which still rates in my top five albums. So, I don't need a knockout or anything for the best ones. C'mon and Love Me (Alive!), God of Thunder (Destroyer), I Stole Your Love & Shock Me (Love Gun). I also have a soft spot for Great Expectations off Destroyer.

I'm playing The Bird's Nest, Deptford on Friday. As it's our first gig, we decided to do a free one. Never played here before. Come along for a pogo.

She's a bit of an oddity for me. I suppose as a kid the glam rock wasteland was peppered with artistes like Suzi Quatro, whose primary success was based off material written for her by other writers; don't get me wrong, stuff like Can The Can, 48 Crash and Devil Gate Drive were just wonderful 3-minute slabs of wonderment (along with similar stuff you might find in the back catalogue of bands like Sweet, Mud, The Rubettes, Screemer etc.). My brother was a fan. Ten years older than me, he bought the first couple of albums and put them on cassette for me, but I didn't really bond with them. As a kid, the content didn't match up to the strength of the singles (I remember getting Sweet's 'Sweet F*nny Adams' and 'Desolation Boulevard' albums on cassette for Christmas one year and they were instant hits for me).

Delusional.

Did this sell then? Asking for a friend.

The bushings are made of a hard nylon type material that allows the machine head key to rotate against the underlying metal of the tuning shaft (effectively it's self-lubricating the joint) - it also allows different shaped keys to be installed on the same tuning mechanism. Personally, the design aesthetic of these is a bit Heath-Robinson; while I'm no fan of Fender generally, this is one aspect of their guitars that got it right. Moving along, if you're struggling to find these washers, you can adapt one of those little things that are used to close bagged up loaves of bread. Just drill a suitable sized hole in one, nip off the surplus and install. Easy.

I listened to Breakfast In America yesterday. Genuinely surprised that I knew most of the tracks. Today I'm dipping into Supertramp. Crime Of The Century currently spinning!

My old band would do 1-2 a week and gig Friday and/or Saturday. I'd say that live we were well rehearsed and pretty tight although we may have come over as a bit chaotic at the same time, but by and large we knew every song backwards and we were good enough to get out of jail if everything went down the sh*tter mid-song. Right now it's a little different. We rehearse in a recording studio, everything is miked up and we're all on headphones; it's a little bit clinical for me. Last weekend we had a room in a proper rehearsal room and it was marvelous to be able to ramp things up and play through amps. It made the previous studio rehearsals feel more worth it.

My perspective here. Current band is trying to get one in each week (3-4 hour round trip) until we're gigging properly (end of the month). I'm firmly with @tauzerohere; there has to be purpose to rehearsals.

I'm firmly in roundwound territory here, but about five years ago I put a set of Fender flats on my old Aria-P for a dep thing I was doing. Surprisingly, it didn't really go all that ponky, it pretty much sounded like it was strung with rounds that had been on for a bit. I didn't particularly like the smoothness of them and took them off after a couple of weeks. From an historical perspective (and perhaps someone can answer this), I'm assuming flats were always about back in the 40s/50s...no idea when rounds came out to the masses. It begs the question that if rounds were the order of the day 60/70 years ago and flats were the new kids on the block, would traditionalists be waxing lyrical about rounds at the moment? Ooh, and what if CDs had come before vinyl? 😂

I think most DiMarzio pickups had extra magnets hot-glued on the underside (the glue being prone to failure over time, the magnets coming off and flipping 180° in the pickup cavity).

Let's edit this. Over the last 20+ years, I've had an assortment of Thunderbirds pass through Chez Johnson, some still resident. About a dozen Gibsons, a Hamer FBIV, a Hamer Scarab, a Lull, one of the current Spector run, two Epiphones (junk). Despite my indifference to neck dive, the point here is so what? With the centre of gravity and the weight there's an inevitability the headstock will dip. It's a small cross to bear considering what you have in your possession. It shouldn't realistically mess up your playing; if you play close to the bridge, it's easy to keep the instrument aligned correctly.

If/when you watch any of the You Tube content supporting these heads, the prime focus seems to be on a handful of pre-set/emulated tones that can be tweaked/saved/utilised via the Darkglass Suite; these can only be used for post-DI purposes and it's hugely problematic trying to dial these in from the controls on the fascia. Both drive engines are extremely aggressive and it's a bit of a fine line between getting a controlled dirty tone and unlistenable mush. With this head I just kept adjusting and still not getting anything like the sound I wanted; I knew the tone was in the amp somewhere, but in the few times I used it, it was more a case of giving up and reverting to the tried and tested route of Sansamp>effects return. A few weeks back I just decided to spend some time trying to dial in what I wanted; I'm so used to the easy route tonally... I've never really worked at trying to sound right (I mean, if Tech21 could produce a 900w head with a BDDI engine, they'd clean up the class-d market). I sounded decent enough at home and within seconds I knew the head sounded great in a live setting.

I bought the Darkglass head about three years ago, pretty much as soon as it came out. I'll admit it was the headroom that appealed more than anything else and I was more in love with plugging a Sansamp into the effects return and I'd never really bonded with it. Had a session yesterday and left the Sansamps at home; 100% determination to get this amp to resolve the one box solution I've been looking for for years and spent a bit of time trying to dial in a gnarly tone earlier in the week. Ran the head through a pair of Darkglass 1x12s and took the Spector X. Man alive. I honestly can't get over how awesome this set up sounded; the amp was pretty much as I'd set it at home other than notching up the output volume and then tweaking the Spector Tonepump a little. Whumpy, dirty, gnarly. Beautiful.

Wouldn't that be a thing? I'm supposed to be keeping it quiet. Lol 😂

My band seem to have been in with a shout for Rebellion but it's gone very quiet. Two of our number are fairly well connected with the people behind it.

It honestly shouldn't be too much effort to build a scratch setup from BC classifieds. There's enough kit on there. My only observation with the basses for sale is the distinct lack of sub-£250 stuff (IE Sterling Subs) I'm playing some dives in the next few months and would prefer to use something I wouldn't miss if it got lifted.