Cato

I reckon it's one of those entirely personal things where until you've tried it your'e not really going to know whether different gear for each band is going to work better for your particular situation or not.

I've got a Fender Hi Mass bridge on a Deluxe P. It's a nice unit, no sharp edges so great for palm muting and the saddles are locked into tracks on the base plate so you can't pull them sideways like you can on basic BBOT designs. It's a solid bit of kit and I prefer it to the standard BBOT, but if it makes a jot of difference to the tone of the instrument I can't hear it.

The only new thing I've bought in 2021 is more than a little bit niche. Ms Tedstone Glover is a PHD music student who's spent the last 5 years researching and trying to recreate the music of the Roman age. On the remote chance that anyone else is interested the album is available to buy on bandcamp but I think all the tracks are up on Youtube.

My main reaction is surprise that moving to full UK production results in such a relatively small price increase.

Generally speaking steel strung acoustic guitars are physically harder to play than electrics, they tend to have heavier gauge strings and higher string tension. I've always found it much easier to fret barre chords cleanly on electrics. Although as a longtime bass player I suspect fretting hand finger strength isn't going to be much of a hurdle for you. String gauge and type is all down to personal taste, although for a beginner you probably don't want to go any lighter than 10s, just because they'll be too easy to bend out of pitch when you're learning to fret chords.

I saw Jamiroquai a few times at Glastonbury in the early 90s. They were one of those bands who's albums I was never massively into but who's live show was just on another level. Every memeber of that line up was top notch even the didgeridoo player, with Zender's basslines being the engine that drove the whole performance along

With my active Deluxe Precision I always set EQ on the bass with the amp flat although I think that's as much down to convenience/laziness as anything else. The EQ on the bass is just closer to hand. I definitely wouldn't say the preamp on that bass is just for fine tuning, it's just not that subtle. As above though, no right or wrong answers here, just personal preference.

Don't want to speak too early but it looks like things are calming down in my little corner of Warwickshire. No queues at the Tesco forecourt in Stratford earlier this afernoon and none at the independent down the road from me, both still open. I suspect that the majority of those inclined to rush out and fill their tanks have now done so and the pumps haven't run dry. Fingers crossed anyway.

I suppose it depends how obsessive the person doing the tuning is. It's just about impossible to get any of my basses or guitars absolutely 'spot on' according to the tuner on my HX Stomp, they're always fractionally over or under the mark. The machineheads on the instruments just don't have the finesse to make to the tiny adjustments that would be needed to get them 100% on the money. Fortunately the Stomp also employs a traffic light system where the green light indicates 'close enough' and that's what I go by.

I imagine there will be a spot at some point in the room where the elements of the sound are in perfect balance. Everywhere else however.....

I have a similar thing with black basses with white pickguards. Doesn't mater if it's a vintage pre CBS precision in mint condition , it will still remind me of the Encores in the Argos catalogue when I was a kid.

Got to be the singer's dad. Anyone else and he'd be waddling down to Casualty to get the drumsticks extracted before the end of the song.

I can't escape the feeling that the combo is staring at me. It'll be an awesome little rig but probably not particularly lightweight, unless your Hartke 3500 weighs considerably less than my early 90s model.

That may be the first time I've heard church bells that weren’t jarringly out of tune with each other.

I'm disapointed but not suprised G&R were basically a one album wonder. Albeit that album was one of the defining rock albums of the 20th century so no small achievement. With the benefit of hindsight Use Your Illusion never really came close to those heights, and as for Chinese Democracy....least said soonest mended.

My guess would be that it was a joint project with a couple of students from her uni's media/perfomance arts departments. She does her experiment, they get to show off their skills putting together a glossy video, maybe there's a music production department that got involved as well. Costs are kept down. Everybody hands in a fairly impressive bit of coursework that ticks the right boxes for their respective studies and, as a bonus, gets to put creating a viral video on their CVs.

For the young 'uns (i think there's one or two BCers under 45)

What it mainly reminded me of was one of those Les Dawson piano skits. It's not just randomly bad, it feels like it's been meticulously arranged to be as jarring as possible. I'm not certain but I think some bits sound like they've been pitch 'corrected' to be further out of tune than they already were.

Does anyone remember the great avatar massacre from the big update of a few years ago? We're about to go through the looking glass, who knows who we'll be on the other side?

Axe bass ordered off the back of a copy of Metal Hammer c1989. Defretted with a pair of pliers c1992 when I upgraded to a Washburn Status. Left it with an action about half an inch off the fretboard at the 12th fret. I never got round to trying to lower it. As far as I know it's still at my parents house although it's quite likely they'll have taken it down the tip during one of their intermittent decluttering efforts in the intervening years. I did come across my knackered old Hondo strat in their attic though a couple of years back though, so who knows?

I was a huge Maiden fan between the ages of 13 and 18 before I left them behind at uni. Although even though I haven't listened to them properly in well over 25 years the Steve Harris gallop still seems to be my default setting when I'm noodling on bass so those 5 years clearly had quite a big impact.

I've never understood the urge to put labels on everything. It happens to extent in all broad categories of music but for some reason dance music and metal fans seem to to be the most obsessive about dividing everything into micro genres. I remember back in the 80s, when I used to listen to metal, friends arguing about whether various bands were speed metal or thrash metal, I never did learn the difference. Since then there seem to have infinite subdivisions, stuff I would have called 'Thrash' back then now seems to have subdivided with terms like 'doom' , 'sludge', 'math rock'. It all seems to have got a little bit out of hand.

In one of the hundreds of Andertons youtube clips Lee Anderton basically said that from his shop's point of view it doesn't matter how expensive or well done the mods are, they add no value to the px or resale price of the instrument. In a private sale a buyer might agree to pay more for a well modded instrument that particularly appeals to them but the general consensus seems to be that you'll get more of your investment back by returning the instrument to stock (if possible) and selling the upgrades separately.

I'd recomend going with one with built in drum loops. I use a boss RC30 a lot as a sort of sketchbook to quickly build up different song parts on guitar and bass and see how well they fit together. The weakness of the RC 30 is that is has, i think, 10 basic drum patterns, all of which sound like they were lifted from an early 1980s beginners keyboard. I also have a couple of other multi FX type pedal units that have a much better selction of drum tracks, but using these with the RC30 is where the problems start If you use the RC30s own drum function then the drums stop and start to repeat when you press the pedal to close the loop. With an external drum machine that doesn't happen. The drums that you've already recorded will start to loop while the drum machine carries on and the 2 sets of drums will now be out of sync with each other and any tracks you've already put down. It's not a huge problem for the way I use it because all I need to do is stop the drum machine and then carry on building the loop with the recorded drums. But it's more of a faff than it needs to be and if you were trying to do any kind of live 'one man band' thing where you needed to seamlessly build up the tracks then those moments where the two sets of drums are out of sync is not pleasant to listen to. As I understand it with a unit with a good selection of built in drum loops like the RC10 none of that is an issue. You just put the drums on at the point you want whilst building up the tracks and that's it. I hope all that rambling makes some sort of sense.

Well...you can never disprove a conspiracy theory there's always the 'no ones allowed to talk about it' defence. But realistically, after nearly 40 years and countless biographies, autobiographies and interviews with the people involved in making the track, from the band to the studio crew and the band's management, if John didn't play on it I reckon someone would have let it slip by now.