Doctor J

It's inoffensive, yes, but I like more than that in music and there's not really anything else there which will make me want to listen to it again or buy the CD.

Time for a 'drunken mates' one. Our first gig of 1994 was in Dublin's legendary Baggot Inn on lineup with 3 somewhat stylistically similar bands. Things were looking very promising when a group of nice young ladies who, I think, were friends with one of the other bands, invited us to a party after the gig. Our good friend Big Al was helping out with carrying gear and general bonhomie, which was nice, too. We went into the set in high spirits, but it was not to last. Our singer was a lovely guy but could be quite divisive, on first encounter. The Baggot Inn had a very low stage, no more than a few inches high, so you were just around eye-level with the audience. Some nights you click and some nights you don't and this was one of the latter. We had a song called "What's Your Name?" where our singer would ask members of the audience their name and introduce people to each other, over our smooth jazz backing. Sometimes, there was a follow-up question - "Where are you from?" - to which the audience member would say where they were from and our singer would usually say "That's... my kinda town" and it often went down well. This night was not one of those nights. He encountered someone who wasn't really playing ball and, of course, after really having to work to prise this information from the guy, it meant the guy's town was not our singer's kinda town. The guy was not so happy about this and walked right up to the stage, almost eye to eye with our singer, and made the deekhead sign at him, right in his face, then sat back down. I noticed he was sitting with the party girls who, I also noticed, were uninviting us from that party through the mean expressions on their faces. Back then, we would sometimes finish the set with a cover of Paranoid and it seemed quite apt on this occasion. When the guitarist would play the intro riff, our singer would rip off his jumper to reveal a ruffled pink silk shirt, to which he had crudely added home-made white tassels and do the oul Vol.4 pose. It usually went down a storm. Not this night, as you may have guessed, with one exception. Big Al was, by this point, in a state which is often known as "heroically" drunk and loved his Sabbath, as do we all. I noticed him crawling slowly across the stage behind me as we played through the first verse, reaching our singer as the second verse started to play and slowly, in the Rocky vs Apollo Creed in Round 15 style, used the mic stand to try to drag himself upright onto his uncooperative feet. He then proceeded to sing what was left of the song in the jazz style, you could say, several seconds behind our singer and with no respect for pitch or melody. It cane across as some kind of demented delay effect. Alas, not even this could win back the crowd and, after we finished, Al crawled slowly back off the stage as we packed up and left. No parties were attended that night.

Congratulations, SH73, fantastic piece.

Off the top of my head... this could get expensive 😂 Alembic Series 1 Warwick Thumb G&L L2000 Rickenbacker 4001/4003 Ibanez AFR Ibanez SR Spector NS Kubicki Ex-Factor

Guitars and drums. I play both. I have more basses than guitars but it's still too many guitars, really. With drums, I am strictly limiting myself to one kit due to space but... you know... a kit is made of many pieces but everything must fit on the mat, that's the rule.

How do you feel the day went? Did you get 9 tracks down?

The first thing I do when I buy a used instrument is strip it, clean it, then put it back together again. It gets all the old users out of the picture early on, the best for everyone. People can do stupid and often disgusting things with instruments. Never live with someone else's stupidity or bio-crud 😀

Nothing of the sort. Basses are not complicated to set up, they're really not. There's a lot of money in making people thinking there's black magic and sorcery involved but there are just a some basic principles to understand and that's it. It can be easy to be intimidated by it but if you take it step by step, understand why you're doing what you're doing, there is very little to it. No self-aggrandisement to it.

Basses are not complicated at all, your comparisons are very wide of the mark.

Yep, I do it. I see it as a fundamental part of being a player. If you don't understand the basic nature of how your instrument works, well... that's not very good at all.

Mine changes depending on the music I'm playing and listening to. Even within sub-genres I'll dig different tones for different things and it is educational to hear what others are doing. I still like the aggressive tones of much of the music of my youth but, even in my heaviest metal-teenager days, I was listening to Chic and digging the Stingray with flats tone too. I'm currently building 54 style P which I've got a set of Chromes waiting to be put on for that kind of tone but it's something I've wanted to have for over 20 years.

When I was around 16 or 17, I was in a band with my schoolmate, drummer Glen and some older people from where he lived, playing 80's-style hard rock which, since this would have been 90-91, wasn't too much of a crime. We were playing some multi-band event which was going to be televised and got to record our song in a real studio which we would then mime to on the night of filming. All good and very exciting for a pair of kids like Glen and I. On the day of the event, we were asked to show up to the venue, a large ballroom in a very posh hotel, at noon and it was explained to us that we would be going through several rehearsals for the show so the TV cameras could get their angles right and all that other technical stuff we we oblivious to. They ran through the entire show, so each band got up and played in sequence, eight bands in total. Our band were second in rotation. Hearing yourself coming loud through a PA was very exciting and quite surreal in the sense that if you stopped playing, you could still hear yourself playing. Glen and I were getting great craic out of this. Hey, we were kids. Tearing down, then watching the next band set up, play their song, tear down, then through the rest of the bands, then repeat the whole process three times in all, it got fairly tedious quite quickly and the other three in the band, who were a good few years older than us and quite grown-up, were acting grown-up and schmoozing so Glen and I were popping to the bar and getting a beer or two as we hung around and watched the other bands. Glen was 18 and I looked older than I was, so we had no trouble getting served. By the time of the show, we were both unintentionally rather tipsy and, with the venue now filled with comfortably the largest audience either of us had ever performed to, quite giddy on a mix of beer and adrenaline. The first band played and then we were up. Our song was a power ballad type of thing, keyboards and clean guitar to start, then bass drum and rimshot snare and I came in with the first chorus when it became more power and less ballad. I was standing there on stage, looking moody and emotional as I waited for the bass part to come in. Just before the drums started, I heard Glen calling my name. I turned around to see him waving his right foot at me as the bass drum played loud and proud which was probably the funniest thing I had seen in my life, or so it felt at that time. We both spent the rest of this moody song trying, and sometimes failing, to suppress the giggles in front of several hundred people and the TV cameras. During my two close-ups, I'm not playing anything resembling the real bass line. Glen was a top fella, brilliant drummer and has played to slightly larger audiences since with The Script and I reckon has learned to keep his foot on the pedal 😁

Another thing to be alert to with old Arias is that those MB pickups, great as they are, are prone to dead coils. Despite being soapbar shaped, the coil pattern is the same as a Precision - one coil for E and A strings, one coil for D and G. The quickest way to know is test the serial/parallel functionality. If one side of the switch doesn't work, it's usually the series side sending the signal into that dead coil, not a faulty switch. They're sealed with epoxy, too, so there's no way to repair them. There are replacement pickups now available but they're not cheap and I've yet to find one which sounds the same as a real MB pickup - definitely keep this in mind if you're ever looking at an old Aria with two pickups.

Just be aware that many of the Arias imported have really, really narrow string spacing at the bridge. If that's not an issue, cool, but it would be a deal breaker for me. The ones with the oval and dot inlays on the neck are usually normally spaced, the necks with just dots are usually very narrow.

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While subbing for a mate's blues-rock cover band, we played a Sunday night gig in a pub which had recently been renovated/transformed from a dingy hole well known for live music, into a trendy, modern superpub with jukebox pop music blasting loudly in every corner. The gig started with us playing to the barman. After a while, an oul fella came in and stayed for a few songs. Then he left and the barman left too, so we played to the empty room. The drummer then announced he had to go to the toilet, something which required ascending two flights of stairs, so that took a while. While the remaining three of us stood around like idiots, waiting for the drummer to come back, my amp -an old Peavey MkII - made an odd squealing/ farting sound and then went silent. When the drummer came back, we packed up and left.

Have you heard Black Shabbath? They're a cross between Sabbath and Mr. Loverman himself, Shabba Ranks. It really doesn't work. I'll see if I can find a link. Shabba!

All this guitar smashing reminds me of my numb-handed friend, though in a different band. He had been having trouble with the signal cutting out and, for this gig, had bought a new lead. During the gig, however, the problem came back, intermittently at first but with the guitar eventually going entirely silent. Realising the problem was the guitar all along, not the lead, he lost his temper and threw the guitar hard onto the stage a few times, then fired it into the audience. He must have suddenly copped-on to what he was doing because he then dived in after the guitar to try to get it back 😂

Same band as above but this took place a few months before that story. We had a decent support slot on a Saturday night with a quite popular local band at the time. When we went into the dressing before soundcheck, there was a guy in there who we didn't know but was quite chatty and seemed sound. He was damp, though. Damp, as in wet, from head to toe. He claimed he had been "in the Liffey" earlier. As I said, though, he seemed sound, so, no harm done and assumed he was meant to be there. At some point, our singer and the main band's roadie got chatting and, eventually, shared a spliff - something our singer had never tried up to that point. I went about my business for a while and returned to find the lads a bit stressed out. They had been getting along with the damp guy, who turned out to be a harmonica player, so he and our singer had a harmonica jam, which I'm glad I missed. The damp guy then said "Anybody messes with me and they get this!", took an iron bar out of his jacket and started whacking the dressing room wall. The lads had to get security and this guy was removed. This had spooked our singer immensely, which would have repercussions later on. We were stinking out the place, really going down badly with the biggest crowd we had played to up to that point. The singer from the main band used to dress up as a Vegas-esque character, which our singer was not aware of. The main band guy came on stage to try to get the crowd on our side a little. Our singer, quite stoned, seeing another weird looking character coming towards him, reaching for the mic, rammed his elbow into yer man's throat, screaming "You're mad!" and an onstage scuffle ensued. Security swiftly entered the scene and we wisely left the stage.

Ah I have so many of these, mostly with one band. Back in the 90's my band were doing our first headline show and, foolishly, the guitarist and I consumed a quantity of... let's say... stuff before doors opened. As we were getting ready to play our set, the guitarist came over to me, looking quite pale, and said "I can't feel my hands." He couldn't really feel his feet either, as it turned out, so had to do the gig helplessly wobbling atop a small bar stool, his hands fumbling for notes in the fog. Not a great look for a rock band, it must be said. I was physically fine but, instead, was experiencing intense paranoia and every gap between songs seemed to take an excruciatingly long time. As a result, I was giving the singer a hard time between songs, pleading with him to hurry up introducing the next song so we could finish and I could hide somewhere. Unknown to me, what had started as banter between him and some mates in the crowd, had turned nasty as the set progressed and there was huge tension between him and a lot of the audience. During one of the following songs, our singer simply walked off stage, went straight through the crowd, out the door and did not come back. When you've tried to figure out how to do the second half of your set without your singer while a rather hostile audience looks on, in the midst of a paranoid meltdown, it changes your perspective of what 'train wreck' really means 🙂

If those legs get tired, rub in some dancing cream, make them feel much better.

For some reason I had tonight in my head as the deadline for this and only started it yesterday so it's rough as foook. I wanted to do some jingle-jangling with the 12 string I picked up last year so this is chord based in a way I don't usually do stuff. I still wanted to have a little space freak-out in there somewhere, though. The technical stuff : Drums are Yamaha kit into Behringer pres. Bass is a PRS EB4, guitars ares are a Gretsch 12 string and a Bacchus strat, all into an Avid Eleven. Poorly screeched vocals into an SE mic. Noises are courtesy of Reason, space voice from Talk Any and all mixed in Protools. About the song: We've never been able to see further away but, these days, rarely gaze past our hand

50/50. I had a 4003 and went between both, depending on what I was trying to achieve at the time. However, much as I loved the sound, I was unable to ever find a way to play it which could reasonably be called comfortable, so I ended up selling it and bought something with a forearm contour and which didn't have that poxy metal bracket.

I managed to put off even starting mine until this morning so will have to do a sneakeroo submission before Lurks gets home from work tomorrow.

More of an assembly job than a build, but anyway... I have an old ESP 51-style Precision, single coil pickup with a slab top. I love the fat, farty sound out of it, but I need a forearm contour and I'm much happier with a J-sized neck. Last year, I ordered a 54-style ash body in trans-white (the Mary Kaye finish) from Warmoth which has been waiting for an accomplice. Today, the postie delivered the neck, ordered from Warmoth late last year - roasted maple, Jazz nut width, tele headstock, side-dots only with banjo frets. The smell of the roasted neck is utterly delicious 😂 Anyway, I'm thinking a humbucking old-style P pickup is the way forward, rather than a proper single-coil and, perhaps, a serial/parallel option via a push/pull volume knob could be very interesting. A Cabronita style scratchplate in mint could be very tasty, too. I'll go with something a little sturdier than the original early-50's style bridge and, of course, it won't be strung through the body anyway. I'm undecided whether to add a bridge cover or not. I think a pickup cover would just get in the way. I have some parts but need to get more before I can really start putting it all together, but this is the starting point.