JoeEvans

Can's 'Future Days' is one of my favourite albums ever. I love Holger Czukay's bass playing.

Forget the Volvo, just get a Berlingo, cut out eight ten-inch holes in one side, and mount eight decent speakers in there. Then you can save back strain by driving it straight onto the stage.

It actually says 'collect Leeds' in the main heading so I'm guessing that the delivery charge is an error and that it's pick-up only. I don't think I'd ever be able to trust a courier to deliver a DB anyway, unless it was prepared by a luthier (bridge off etc) and in a massive hard case.

Photos now up, this looks like a real bargain! I'd grab it if I lived near Leeds.

I guess the bottom line, as ever, is dependent on where the money is coming from. A pub with free entry needs to sell a heck of a lot more beer than usual to pay a band £400 - I don't know what the mark-up is on drinks but Im guessing that to pay a band £400 the landlord would need to expect to sell £1000-worth more beer because of the band's presence. With any ticketed venue you can just multiply up: punters x ticket price - some agreed amount of fixed costs = band fee. If the promoter also runs the bar then the fixed costs can be lower but if the promoter is booking the venue then fixed costs will include venue hire and the promoter's cut too. So it's not about how much you want to get paid, it's about how much money you bring into the venue. Weddings (funerals, private parties, Mitzvahs both Bar and Bat) remain the musician's best friend, as they probably have been since the Neolithic era, because the fee is just down to the perceived value of the band, so that's where a band can just set their fee and stick to it, perhaps with some flexibility up and down depending on the details of the day - two 1.5 hour sets with two hours in-between and the soundcheck needing to take place three hours before the first set would cost more than one 30 minute set...

This ought to be worth a look once the pictures go up. I've got one of these and it's brilliant - bigger sound than much more expensive instruments, if a bit rustic in finish. £400 would be a bargain if it's in decent condition. http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Boosey-Hawkes-Golden-Strad-upright-double-bass-collect-Leeds-niccccce-jazz-club-/281783337744?hash=item419b988310

But on the other hand, at 8:40... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R88k3h6AzAc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAzESJ62irI

I like jazz, but not most of the other genres listed, which seems to present something of a paradox...

The question is, what kind of musician would a dentist be? I would say that you want to show that you're calm, steady, capable of long study and careful practice, relaxed under pressure and able to carry off quite tricky pieces of work in a reliable way. So maybe something not too fast and flashy but with some delicate twiddly bits, as elegant as you can manage and not in any way giving a 'party animal' vibe. Bach sounds good to me.

When it comes to CVs I rely on Microsoft Word, my rich and fertile imagination and my finely-tuned sense of what you can and can't away with...

A little amp is a good move, down by your feet and angled upwards so that you can hear it - as much a monitor for you as a volume boost for the audience. It also helps you not to play too hard just to be heard, which is not great for the finger dexterity. I currently use a cheap Laney with most of the treble rolled off, to boost the bottom end rather than to produce the full sound on its own. Obviously bigger gigs are a different matter but for acoustic plus a little bit / singer-songwriter stuff that works for me.

I use Petz #3 and get on ok with that. I suspect you're going to get a lot of different answers here though...

Someone once said to me that they hadn't really noticed my playing until I stopped for a bar or two, and then the arse fell out of the whole tune. I couldn't have asked for more, really.

How about "Great! What's the charity? Is everyone involved doing it for free - sound engineer, bar staff, marketing? Are the promoters taking any of the door money to cover their costs?"

Look at it the other way around - how boring would work be if you didn't have bass to think about?

I think Noel Redding used to be a guitarist though? Possibly not a bored one but a very good one nonetheless, in what you might call the ultimate blues rock band...

One of my most memorable festival experiences was a DJ set by System 7 (I think it was Steve Hillage and Alex Patterson actually onstage). It was nothing at all like their recording output but it was fantastic - a mix of vinyl and laptop and largely their own material as far as I could tell - very minimal, big squelchy bass sounds and drums and not much else but amazing sense of building excitement, tension and release and such. There would have been no point in doing it 'live' because it was all made on computers anyway, and in effect it was semi 'live' as different elements from vinyl and laptop were blended to make a new, seamless piece a couple of hours long.

It's the highest form of flattery: they've seen you, and now they want to be you!

[quote name='leschirons' timestamp='1439015775' post='2839364'] There is only one "good" it doesn't exist on multiple levels. "Good" only exists in the minds of those who think something is good. It's only an opinion, so McCartney's releasing of Mary had a little lamb proves nothing other than, (if it sold well) that lots of people thought it was good for whatever reason. [/quote] There obviously is that kind of 'good', but I think there's at least one other kind too. The Beatles don't do anything for me personally. If I was on a desert island with no music apart from a stack of Beatles CDs, I'd barely bother to play them. But they must be one of the most loved and most influential bands of all time, so whatever my opinion might be they were certainly 'good', to say the very least.

I've always seen the Beatles, just like Harry Potter and The Wire, as one of those things that are evidently extremely good but which I still find tedious and irritating.

I'm guessing that everyone must know the joke about the drums on the Polynesian island?

Get a 'Beginners Yoga' book if you haven't ever been to a class. Need to keep the body relaxed and strong...

Another way of looking at it: there are exactly as many good bands as there are good drummers. (Actually the maths doesn't quite work out because some of them are in more than one band, but you get the idea...)