Cato

I had an email from Ents 24 earlier today. The first part was apologising for the current disruption and explaining the refunds process. The second part was advertising events for Mother's Day, including a couple of spring tours that can only be days away from cancellation.

Mind you, you can get 72 for £15 from here. https://www.richtonemusic.co.uk/product/gibson-72-standard-style-guitar-pick-heavy/ No tin though.

I seem to recall they were about 50p each when I first started playing guitar, 30 odd years ago, so 7 quid for 12 doesn't seem too exorbitant. Back then they used to have the h for hard or, possibly heavy, on them, so they've been doing it for a while. I also remember that they weren't great for bass, the hard plastic was too brittle and the picks used to chip as I was playing, until there was just a jagged stub left, although that might have been down to my rather aggressive beginners technique.

Looks like the UK Govt is about to reverse position and ban mass public gatherings. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/13/uk-to-ban-mass-gatherings-in-coronavirus-u-turn I doubt the average pub gig will be included within the new rules, but it may well increase reluctance for any venue to put on live music.

Auto correct strikes again?

I saw Arctic Monkeys play Wolverhampton Little Civic to a capacity crowd of maybe 100 people, maybe spring/summer 2005, before any single releases or the debut album. I'd never heard of them, a mate of mine had bought the tickets on spec because we fancied a night out. It was a good gig but I don't think any of us thought that they'd be headlining the big festivals in 18 months time.

I had no idea he was in the Morisette touring band.

I saw her the first time around at the Phoenix Festival in 1996. What I mainly remember are the endless harmonica ad libs she managed to force into seemingly every song.

I reckon that's probably the going rate for a big arena show these days. Where it's changed from when I was a kid growing up in the Midlands is that there used to be two types of tickets for your average NEC Arena show. Standing and seated. Standing would be £5-10 cheaper than seated, but every seated ticket, no matter whether at the front or the back would cost the same. These days tickets seem to be price graded depending whereabouts in the arena they are, and some chunks of prime seating only seem to be available as part of some sort of 'VIP package' (whatever that means) which is where the really daft top tier prices comes from. Mind you, I've not been to an arena gig in over ten years, not since a friend dragged me along to see Franz Ferdinand and I realised how much I prefer smaller venues.

Do any of us need much persuasion to get a new guitar?

You can probably get a Harley Benton skinny stringer plus a Zoom G1-4 multi effects unit, all brand new for around £200, maybe £150 depending on the guitar. You can either run them through headphones or even through your bass amp and it'll sound decent enough while you decide if you want to take it further.

As everyone else says do both. If you've never played skinny string guitar before it'll take a while* to get the hang of chords, but the dexterity in your fretting hand should give you a bit of a head start. *when I say a 'while' I've been playing guitar for over 20 years and every now and then I still come across a chord shape I've never seen before.

Think about taps, for example, especially in a public or office toilet. People generally handle the taps at the point at which their hands are most contaminated, ie. just after they've done their business, just before they actually wash all the bacteria and microscopic mank off their hands. By the end of the day there's probably enough biohazards on the average public tap to wipe out a small country.

I'm not sure that's a particularly useful statistic. It's not 1 in 340 from a random sample of the population. Until quite recently the only people being tested were those who developed symptoms after visiting high risk countries or had direct contact with people who have been diagnosed with coronavirus. So that's 1 in 340 from a fairly small and very specific subject group that were thought to be at a much higher risk of contracting coronavirus anyway. It doesn't really tell us anything about how contagious the virus is or what's happening in the general population.

Without accurate data from China it's not really possible to predict what might happen over here. But what data there is suggests that coronavirus was spreading completely unchecked in Wuhan city and Hubei Province for one to two months before the government took action to contain it. In which case the official figure of 80,000 people in China getting infected, whilst admittedly a lot of people, is a drop in the ocean compared to the overall population of Wuhan city of around 11 million, let alone the 1.3 billion population of China. Bottom line, it's probably nowhere near as contagious as the 'worst case scenarios' currently making the headlines would suggest.

It's easy to appear perfect when you have as many takes as you like to get it right before posting the final video. Although in fairness I suspect that a lot of the guys and girls on youtube have put in a lot of practice to get to their current standard. Davie 504, for example, may be a bit divisive among bass players but there's no denying he's got some very impressive skills that I'd guess took him years to hone before he started putting stuff up online. I'd bet he's still putting in the practice hours now.

I'm fine with either rosewood or maple, but the slightly orange pau ferro board was the biggest factor in me not buying a Jazzmaster guitar last year. I wasn't sure I could live with it and there were indications at the time that the relaxation in CITES rules might mean that Fender will be going back to rosewood in the nearish future, so I decided to wait.

Yep. You can bet they won't be going after Jackson for their Vee and Explorer inspired shapes, because Jackson is part of the Fender group which can afford to contest these lawsuits. Gibson seems to focusing mainly on companies which would struggle with the legal fees needed just to fight a case, let alone win it.

Both the V7 and the P7 come with a 3 band preamp plus mid sweep and run in both active and passive modes so they cover a lot of sonic ground. Either will work well in just about any genre. I've got no personal experience with the P7 but I do have a V7 fretless which isn't going anywhere, I'd be surprised if the P7s weren't of the same quality so I suppose it comes down to which pickup configuration you prefer.

Personally I think rap tends to divide people along generational lines. My parents can't stand it, they still seem to see it as some some of unmusical upstart fad that will eventually fade away to be replaced by 'real music'. Where as for me growing up in the 80s, it's always been part of the mainstream and there have been rap/hip hop/whatever albums in my music collection since I was a child.

When Bruce Springsteen did his Broadway residency at the Walter Kerr theatre, (capacity of around a thousand), the cheapest tickets had a face value of over $1000. They were changing hands on the secondary market for far more than that. And that wasn't just a one off show, he was playing 5 shows a week over a period of months.

Powerful performance. I'm guessing he'll get a few negative headlines regarding the political elements of the song in the press tomorrow.

What's the capacity at Ronnie Scott's? I went to the one in Birmingham a couple of times and I'd be surprised if they could have got more than a couple of hundred people in there, even if they took the tables out.

I really like that. The Alternate Reality/Parallel Universe series has some really nice quirky guitars, which defy Fender's reputation for churning out the same models year after year. Hopefully they've got some basses in the pipeline for the near future.

I bought some double ball end GHS Boomers for my Washburn Status a few years back, looks like they may have discontinued them as part of the Boomer range but they still do double ball end bass strings.