Nicko

We play in West London pubs and £200 to £250 is the norm if the venue is putting the music on free. At a place that charges on the door £400 is more like it. We also got a NYE gig at £400

[quote name='paul_c2' timestamp='1504789103' post='3367321'] Its not independent, but then it can also be related to tab (which is a representation of shape/position on the fretboard). For some people after, but most people during, I'd say notes, intervals, patterns, shapes on the fretboard, chords etc all interlink in a fairly logical way and can't really be isolated as independent aspects. I'd agree that tab (at least on bass, which is tuned in fourths) has a more direct relationship eg 1 string up and 2 frets back is always going to be a minor third; but those things are also fairly logical when presented as standard notation - with the caveat that funny intervals such as the augmented 2nd (for example C to D#) are enharmonic equivalent to a minor third, etc. But there would be accidentals to alert you to this occurrence. [/quote] To be honest this is like saying knowledge of maths is dependent on the ability to write arabic numerals. Its not and never has been.

[quote name='ambient' timestamp='1504707644' post='3366781'] I know the note and it's relationship to the other notes and within the piece I'm playing. I'm not thinking patterns. I play a lot of chordal stuff, whether played as a straight chord or more horizontally, a good knowledge is prerequisite I think. 98% of what I do doesn't require sight-reading, I'm improvising solo, which again I think does require a thorough knowledge. I'm certainly not locked into a way of thinking, my knowledge frees my thinking. [/quote] Yes, I get all that. But knowledge of the notes, intervals and theory is all independent of the ability to read notation which was at least the original question. In some ways learning theory using tab is more difficult (eg for C minor the standard notation will tell you which notes are flat, tab wont). You have to work backwards or remember the intervals.

[quote name='ambient' timestamp='1504702968' post='3366719'] I just know what all the notes are. It's never occurred to me that you can play an instrument without knowing what note you're playing. [/quote] Why would knowing the note names make the slightest difference? I know the fretboard well enough to find a note if someone asks for it, but if I'm playing a phrase the intervals are important, not the notes. If someone asks me to play an E# Major scale I can do it. In order to tell you the names of the scale tones I'd have to work backwards from where I put my fingers. My brain works better on patterns than on names. BTW I picked E# deliberately before you pedants start mocking me. Seems like you might have locked yourself in to a way of thinking purely because you read standard notation.

[quote name='Dad3353' timestamp='1504696540' post='3366617'] In fact, I'm 'thinking' in French, and translating it into your idiom. [/quote] So vous pensez en francais?

Surely, even when you count the custom shop, there aren't 100 different colour options for a PBass.

Currently leaning towards an Epi ES339, just trying to find somewhere that I can try both options back to back.

I went to a youth club with Cait O'Riordon's (bass in the Pogues, now ex-wife of Elvis Costello ) brother. Coincidentally my now brother in law used to deliver papers to Elvis Costello. I was once held up getting into a practice room in Streatham by the drummer from Razorlight who was parked at the entrance to the car park while he packed up to go. Typical for a drummer to be in the way I suppose, although IME they're normally late coming in .

[quote name='drTStingray' timestamp='1503821906' post='3361001'] Or a thread hijack - dependent on one's perspective �� The OP has said his query was answered in the first few replies. That tends to colour my view. [/quote] Well, as the OP I quite enjoy lighting the blue touchpaper and lobbing the metaphorical firework into a forum. Don't stop on my account I definitely haven't said the questions been answered either. I think it has simply polarised opinion.

[quote name='lojo' timestamp='1503416875' post='3358065'] The great thing about most Dylan covers is they are always very different from his versions , so you've got options [/quote] That's probably because no one wants to sound like Dylan. Listening to Jimi Hendrix's live version of Like a Rolling Stone is a semi religious experience for me. Metallica's version of Bob Segar's Turn the Page is awesome. The complete back catalog of Me First and The Gimme Gimmes is also worth a listen.

[quote name='Happy Jack' timestamp='1503662239' post='3360073'] Strangely enough, something quite similar applies in London too. The combination of crap parking, high booze prices, aggressively anti-noise neighbours, and no space for beer gardens (i.e. smoker's paradise) in Central London means that surprisingly few good music pubs exist within five miles of Charing Cross, and frankly not that many if you push the radius out a few more miles. In my experience you need to be at least out in the suburbs and preferably in the small towns and villages just outside London to get a traditional music pub with a good, lively, interested crowd. It helps that London is so big that each significant suburb is itself a decent-sized city. There are 32 London boroughs and each of the suburban ones (e.g. Harrow, Brent, Hillingdon, etc.) has a population in the region of 250,000. [/quote] I think increasingly its not just Central London but also town centres that lack music venues (and indeed pubs) these days. Hillingdon has rich hunting grounds for some reason - possibly because its on the very outskirts of London. Your example of Hounslow has I think one music pub, and Harrow has AFAIK no town centre music venues. There's still some in the smaller "villages" of these boroughs. As for the OP there's a few places that do attract good crowds (the Horns in Watford but you'll wait a year for a gig and it ain't really London), the Tropic at Ruislip (more like a working mans club and they tend to do Tribute bands and it ain't really London) and loads in Cambden obviously who from visiting the venues are more originals based. As someone said earlier, finding a place that has music is difficult, getting a booking takes time and patience. If it was easy as booking three gigs a weekend we'd all be doing it.

[quote name='The Jaywalker' timestamp='1503651608' post='3359906'] No, it couldnt. Categorically. TAB cannot be given to musicians as a notated part they are expected to perform in the manner of standard notation. Thats one if the most ridiculous notions I've ever heard. I'm glad you weren't "attacking dots" given the lack of knowledge displayed. Thats the issue here. A deep dislike of musical learning and any (perceived) hint that A may be better than B. [/quote] Apologies for truncating the post, and accepting that Dad is more than capable of defending himself. Speaking as a lesser mortal who was either too stoopid or too lazy to learn dots, the same could be said of standard notation when you give it to me. I'd have no idea what it was supposed to sound like. Your earlier posts were quite helpful on Tab (basically its OK but limited), but where someone suggests it can do some of the things you say it can't you have launched a quite vicious attack on it and reading the last post in isolation would certainly give me cause to think you're coming down on the side of "tab is evil", not in itself but because it creates lazy anti learning sentiment amongst the unenlightened. If I write a song, I do it in tab and annotate as necessary so that I can read it as if it were notation - I include rests, repeats etc as much as I need to record the part, and will tab the guitar parts and bass parts as a "score". So although it might not be as good as standard notation it does do what you say it cant. Could other people read it - probably with some effort. Conversely, with standard notation there are techniques that I'm not sure how one would represent. How do you differentiate between a thumb slap, hammer on, pull off and picked note for instance.

Does anyone on this forum ever listen to anything that was released in this century? Most of these suggestions would be what the kid's grandparents grew up listening to.

[quote name='fftc' timestamp='1503408253' post='3357968'] Have you spoken to your band about it yet? [/quote] [quote name='chris_b' timestamp='1503413970' post='3358033'] If you can make the pain bearable, do the gig. If you need to change the lines, change them. I did a gig after a skirting board incident with a sharp implement that meant that night I could only play root notes. But I played them well, so everyone was happy. [/quote] I haven't spoken to them as I did manage to do the practice last night with them. The pain was bearable when I was playing but it feels like its taken a backward step today. I managed to play most of the bass lines using just 3 fingers. The pinky is not usable, and I have no extension between the fingers so I'm shifting position a lot. On most songs this is OK but not ideal, but theres a couple where people will really notice eg: the intro to Somebody Told Me, When I Come Around. We can possibly drop one of these though.

[quote name='TimR' timestamp='1503406598' post='3357948'] Have you had a decent x-ray? [/quote] The hand wasn't x-rayed, they didn't seem that interested in it, although they x-rayed other bits of me.

I was knocked off my motorbike last week. Fortunately it only resulted in a few cuts and bruises, but my left hand is pretty bad. We have a gig coming up on Sunday, and having tried to play the setlist last night I'm fairly sure I can get through it but i'll a.) be in pain and b.) be a long way from my best. The band has been looking forward to the gig for months and the venue is a potential regular well paid gig. We also have another gig the following week at a pub where I know the LL quite well and I'm confident that if we do that well then we'll get a few more bookings from them. The chances of my hand recovering for that gig would obviously be better if I don't play this week. I could cancel, and hack off the band and the venue, or play and know that we won't be as good as we should and potentially end up making a mess of both gigs.

I was knocked off my motorbike last week. Fortunately it only resulted in a few cuts and bruises, but my left hand is pretty bad. We have a gig coming up on Sunday, and having tried to play the setlist last night I'm fairly sure I can get through it but i'll a) be in pain and be a long way from my best. The band has been looking forward to the gig for months and the venue is a potential regular well paid gig. We also have another gig the following week at a pub where I know the LL quite well and I'm confident that if we do that well then we'll get a few more bookings from them. The chances of my hand recovering for that gig would obviously be better if I don't play this week. I could cancel, and hack off the band and the venue, or play and know that we won't be as good as we should and potentially end up making a mess of both gigs.

[quote name='Steve Woodcock' timestamp='1503230253' post='3356552'] TAB is a mechanical instruction rather than a musical one, i.e. 'put your finger here' rather than 'play this note, on this subdivision of this beat, for this duration'. It is a crutch, it may give you a short term gain but reliance on it will ultimately hinder your potential to be a well rounded musician. As has already been acknowledged, TAB does not contain all the information you need to perform the piece, meaning it needs to be viewed in conjunction with something else - i.e. either a recording or notation - therefore, as a means of communication it is flawed. Notation enables us to do the following:[list] [*]Perform a piece of music at sight, accurately and authentically, having never heard it before. [*]Read and write music intended for other instruments - '3rd fret on the A string' means nothing to a pianist, horn player etc. [*]Identify the key of the piece and the harmonic movement contained within [*]Discern the harmonic rhythm of the piece (the rate at which the chords change) [*]Recognise familiar melodic or rhythmic groupings of notes - the benefit of this is that these groups can be recognised as a 'whole', much like you are recognising the words in this sentence rather than reading each letter separately, and executed promptly from muscle memory [*]Quickly see the ascending and descending contour of a line, identify where things move by step or by leap etc., spot potentially tricky passages [*]Easily recognise sequences and other repeating patterns, even if they modulate to another key [*]Combined with a rudimentary ability to sight sing allows us hear the piece in our head, and therefore learn it away from our instrument [/list] By using notation rather than TAB, you are having to think [i]notes[/i] rather than simply positions - this will increase your knowledge of the fingerboard far more as you will make the association of 'this is an A, this is a C#, etc.' each time you play a note. More work in the short term but the rewards will pay dividends. True, this existed for keyboard instruments and lutes in the sixteenth century but it was found to be unsatisfactory and was replaced by notation for good reason; the systems used also differed from country to country. But here's the rub, TAB [i]doesn't[/i] help a player learn their instrument, it merely tells them where and in what order to put their fingers, it doesn't even teach them what the note is. In the same way as being told to move your Pawn from b4 to b5 in chess doesn't teach you anything about how to play the game, nor does painting by numbers teach you how to paint. To be clear, used in conjunction with another source (recording or notation) TAB may help someone learn to play a song, but they are not learning anything about the instrument. [/quote] I'm not sure that your post is 100% accurate. In some tab notation people include rhythm instructions and rest notes so that you know whether to play a quarter note or a whole note, and where in the bar to play it. A tab notation for guitar enables me to play the same notes on any instrument (provided I know how to constuct the note - so I can translate Tab onto keys, or trumpet but not sax because I don't know sax fingering. I can visually look at a tab and define the key from the notes. Just because the key is not defined in sharps and flats on the stave doesn't change the notes that belong to a key. The only exception would be where the standard notation uses a lot of sharps or flats in which case the key is pretty much irrelevant other than for the purposes of the notation. Tab, when written efficiently uses extensive use of repeat info - just not the same as formal notation. Learning tab is a quick and effective way of learning to transpose. If you know a Cmajor scale pattern, move it up two frets and you have Dmajor pattern. Its much easier to transpose in this way and quite frankly who cares if everyone knows the name of the note they transpose to as long as they know where it is and where it repeats on the fretboard? As was said previously, Learning the fretboard and your scales is additional to learning to read notation or tab. It really doesn't come from it. Did you really learn the major scale by looking at standard notation, by Do Re mi, or by tone, tone, semitone etc.?

P Bass, roundwounds. Volume backed off just a tad, tone full up. MXR graphic with a sad face. Littlemark blackline. 102P traveller. Fingers or pick depending on song, but I don't change any settings when I switch..

Rather than hijack the "where do I start" thread I thought I's start another on the specific subject of tablature. Some pretty strong opinions have been aired but I'm gonna say here and now I don't see anything wrong with using it. I know my scales, I know my chord tones, my ear could be better - I'm Ok at intervals but struggle with chord harmony. Many tabs on t'net are not 100% right, but I see a lot that are pretty close. I am a poor reader of dots, mainly cos I never bothered to learn past the basics and to be honest unless you're playing jazz standards or lounge music its hard to find sheet music. If I'm learning a new song whats wrong with picking up the tab, listening to the record and deciding if the tab is right or wrong? If I'm learning a song and there's no TAB, I can do it but it takes longer and the only way I'll retain it is by writing it down in TAB form anyway. I think this anti Tab thing is more a bassplayer issue. I've never heard a guitarist say that you should n't use a chord sheet.

[quote name='discreet' timestamp='1503050786' post='3355312'] When it started to get a bit chilly at night, I suppose. ...I'll get me coat. [/quote] beat me to it

[quote name='Stamford' timestamp='1503058751' post='3355377'] Has anyone got advise on how to stay loose when gigging? I'm having problems with my fingering hand when playing live. Clearly nerves are playing a part but even when I've relaxed my fingers become stiff and I lose speed in my fingering. The stiffness comes right up my forearm to my elbow. Any help would be much appreciated. [/quote] Theres a thread on here somewhere with exercises which help a lot. Damned if I can find it though.

[quote name='Dad3353' timestamp='1502982660' post='3354858'] Do you gig with your pre CBS? No, you don't, I would hazard a guess You'll leave it behind Even though you're inclined In your playing, to slowly regress Noob question! 3rd's 5th's 7th's 10th's? Just ignore them, but play to your strengths You'll be at your ease Without this Chinese Unless you go to great lengths Does anything sell on Basschat? Pretty much, at the drop of a hat It flies from the shelves Excepting the Elves That TE still have to work at To J Bass or not to J bass! This is neither the time nor the place Get the playing just right And, with luck, you might Find your present guitar is just ace Simple but perfectly formed To this subject my heart has been warmed It's not merely a whim I'll go out on a limb In suggesting that I've been brainstormed [/quote] Good stuff, but clearly you have too much time on your hands.

I use it in a few songs, mainly where the song is more bass driven. I use an EBS multicomp which does more than compression and TBH I really use it for the non compression aspects it gives..

[quote name='skankdelvar' timestamp='1502041579' post='3348920'] Threads like this reinforce my opinion that we should all learn how to do a basic set up. It's easy enough to do if one follows the guidelines, everything is reversable, there's loads of YT vids and a fantastic knowledge base here on BC. Most of us have (most) of the basic tools in the kitchen drawer while Allen keys, radius gauges and truss rod adjusters are cheap enough on the web. [/quote] Agreed. Adjusting my rod worries me slightly (gfaw gfaw) as does taking a file to my nuts.