Monkey Steve

yeah, this sums up a lot of my issues with them these days - no patience, or faith in their instruments (and I'll declare an interest - I have a few Gibson guitars, and I really like them). They do make good, sometimes great instruments (my 2004 Les Paul Standard is a fantastic guitar) but they only seem to want to make limited runs rather than putting out a consistent product. They make a Les Paul Standard, but the 2017 spec is a little different to the 2016 model, which is tweaked from the 2015 version, which isn't the same as the 2014 LP, repeat to fade. They seem to think that people collect them like Pokemon, and that we all want to have a room full of LP Standards in each colour and for every different year's spec. So when they do something that is genuinely a great idea, it gets made in fairly limited numbers and forgotten about before the market get used to it. The long scale LP got brilliant reviews, but was only released as a short run of Custom Shop guitars. And where is the five string Thunderbird? (yes, I know the answer, it's being made by Epiphone, which will never have the same appeal as a Gibson)

Tom Jones and New Model Army - Gimme Shelter. Admittedly it was a deliberately strange mix for a charity single - I seem to remember Sam Fox with Hawkwind also doing a cover of the song. But the Tom Jones/NMA version is an absolute cracker

must admit, I've had GAS for a ten string (2 x 5) Warwick for a while now, from when it came up on the list of options when I bought a custom shop Streamer. Don't know if they do them off the shelf or if it's a custom only order (I suspect I know the answer to that...)

Bass Heaven - writing a really satisfying bass line for a new song, complicated enough to keep it interesting, hitting all the right melody and drive, locked in with the drums and supporting the song Bass Hell - the guitarist saying "just play A"

I seem to remember that Warwick explained it somewhat weirdly, like the bass has 3 band eq really, but we've only given you two knobs. That was my impression anyway

this stop doing stuff you hate and start doing stuff you like, and if you're not inundated with offers from new bands, why not start something yourself. In terms of quitting, I'd suggest doing it on as friendly terms as you can manage, and as others have suggested, try a clear the air chat first. Personally I'd offer to do the gigs that are in the diary if they can't find a replacement in time, but refuse to book any more.

Not sure i agree with this - I've had superb service from the bottom end generalist shops - there used to be one in Woking (pretty sure it was seen off by Andertons some time ago) run by a guy who bent over backwards to provide a great service. Of course these are exactly the shops who will only stock Rotosound and not Ernie Ball (or vice versa) and definitely no sign of D'Addarios, and only basic starter instruments so you'd never go there to buy a bass unless you were starting out, but the one I'm thinking of would always offer to order in whatever strings or picks or leads I wanted (provided he could get them from his suppliers), and once sold me a Warwick Rockstand 7 that the shop was using for the guitars on display for the same price as the Rockstand 5 that I'd actually popped in to ask him to order, on the basis that I could have it straight away and rather than me having to wait maybe a week or two for it to turn up, he could make do using other stands for a couple of weeks instead.

I quite enjoyed QJ's rant. very "angry old man in the corner of the pub". Given the rambling nature of the interview I doubt very much that he really meant that McCartney is in fact the worst bass player he's ever heard, he was just shooting the breeze. But even if he did, it's just his opinion - no point getting upset because somebody doesn't agree with you over something as trivial as whether they like your favourite band. thank god he didn't say something nasty about One Direction - he'd be getting death threats reminded me a lot of Keith Richard's autobiography, where he gives himself credit for everything he ever did being brilliant

A mate of mine had a similar experience in a guitar shop that I would say is usually absolutely brilliant. He wanted to try a Gibson Nighthawk, with a view to buying one, and the shop, who carry a lot of Gibsons, had one listed on their website as "sold - available to order". So he pops in and asks if they can get one in for him to try, and has the same exchange - "only if you're going to buy one" "well, how do i know if i want to buy it unless I try it?" Their explanation was that they'd had a couple in when they first came out, and everybody hated them It's not a sale or return business and they'd had to knock them out at a loss a couple of years later in a sale, and just didn't want to order in a guitar that they were pretty sure my mate wouldn't actually like, and that they wouldn't be able to sell. Didn't help my mate, but can't really argue with their reasoning - was a bit more solid than "we don't get a lot of lefties". And he was happy enough that they did it in a manner that may not have been the answer he wanted, but didn't put him off the shop at all. they even offered a huge discount if he did want them to order one for him to buy (which he didn't take them up on). Top customer service And he did then track down a Nighthawk to try out. Hated it

Had a corvette $$ 5 and had the same pickups put on my Streamer Stage 1 Custom 5 Personally I love the p/u's -very powerful and full sounding, but the 2 band eq (compared to the 3 band on my Stage 1, and on a previous Jazzman that I had) makes them seem less versatile. the $$ only has bass and treble, and the idea is that the mids are set in relation to those two. So if you want a mid boost, you drop the bass and treble, if you boost the bass and treble then you will get a scooped sound because the mids will be lower. Took me a while to get my head round it (and hence why i got a 3 band eq on my Stage 1)

Always worth ringing them. In general very helpful staff, and when I've got them to order something for me (only a couple of times) it's always arrived on time. Obvs that's subject to their suppliers - I may have just picked items that they knew they could get quickly. slightly off topic, but if you're going to pop in to buy something because it's in stock on the website then it's worth ordering it on line to be picked up. Went in on the morning of a gig to get some new valves for an amp that were in stock on the website and had a long wait while they sent someone to the warehouse to track them down and bring them to the shop.

I took two Les Pauls into a small, local shop in the town where I was working on secondment at the time - they advertised that they did repairs and I wanted a couple of bits of tarting up done - one needed new pickups and I wanted the binding on the body changed from white to black and some rewiring on both of them. Since i was going to be in town every day for the next few weeks it seemed like an ideal opportunity to get it all done without having to go out of my way to drop off an pick up the guitars. "yes sir, of course we can do that, I'm well known for the quality of my work, ask anybody, loads of experience *quotes a surprisingly low price* But just drop one guitar off for now, and when we've done that we can swap it over and do the other one." They ring me later in the week to ask if I want the EMG pickups that they're removing back, because they have somebody else asking about putting EMGs on a guitar and if i want to sell them then that'll pay for all the other work. Great - I have no use for them and it saves me flogging them on eBay. Weeks pass. No word. I pop in and ask how it's going, it's been a while now. "Ah yes, replacing the binding isn't going as easily as expected and is taking much longer than I thought it would *I've never done it before and thought it would be easy, I was wrong*" More weeks pass, with a weekly call or visit where he promises that he'll be working on it over the next week, it'll definitely be finished soon. Finally, about three months after dropping the first guitar off, by which time I'm no longer working in the town, I get a call telling me that the guitar is finished and ready to pick up. But also telling me not to bother dropping off the second one because there's no way he can do the work on it for the price he quoted and doesn't want the hassle of having to do it all again. I then find a local luthier who does it on the other guitar for a similar price to what I was originally quoted - turns out that changing the binding isn't that difficult or costly a job if you know what you're doing. I've never gone back

yes, a Portuguese friend pronounces it like the fish too

I do remember some people pronouncing it as Epiphany, but not for years - back in the pre YouTube days and before it was a bye-word for cheap Gibsons, when people might only have read reviews and never heard it pronounced I was thinking about a very similar topic the other day: Us Brits pronounce Warwick "war-ick" because we know the town of the same name, whereas our cousins from the US tend to pronounce it War-wick because of Dionne Any Germans on here?

agreed - in an ideal world I'd have both, but I've played too many gigs where it didn't happen so now I'm just happy to let it go, let the soundman worry about what's out front and not what I want to hear on stage *gratuitous namedrop alert* I once had a chat with Chris Slade (a singer from an old band of mine is now in Slade's Timeline, the band he plays in clubs with when he's not on arena tours earning proper money). he said that when he was in AC/DC (the chat was prior to the last tour he did with them) he only once got on stage sound that he liked, when the regular soundman doing his monitors was away and somebody else stepped in. He said he did this nightly pantomime of asking for a bit more of this and a bit less of that in his monitors, and then when he played it was the same awful mix that he got every night, because the soundman "knew" what he liked, apparently better than Slade knew himself

It really doesn't bother me - the purpose of the gig is to entertain the crowd, not the band. Not that I don't prefer to hear myself perfectly on stage, only that if I can't then I don't let it worry me. For me, the singer is the only one who should worry about how well they can hear themself...of course it's usually the guitarists who spend three quarters of the soundcheck wibbling about their on stage sound...

On the subject of monitoring, I’ll always just have the bass through whatever stage monitors the venue has, and am happy to play without any backline. I’m also happy just to be able to hear enough of the bass to be able to tell if I’m out of tune - not fussed about the on stage sound if it’s good out front

worth having a look at the Ampeg SCR DI too The amp simulator stage is clearly aimed at Ampeg sounds and has some of the SVT tailored eq stages - but includes a fuzz box. I'm not a huge fan of bass fuzz (I was actually after the SVT eq) and I tend to use it with a Sansamp VT pedal which has (to my ears) a better SVT impression, but if you're not after that level of SVTness it may be a neat solution that includes the fuzz.

This, all day long. A mate who is the lead guitarist in a signed band (and who I have played with in previous bands) - great bloke, great lead guitarist, and acknowledges that in order to be the lead guitarist you have to be something of a massive c#nt with a huge ego - had an issue with the new bass player in his band. Who was the friend of the singer who was a bang average rhythm guitarist and had never played bass before. Culminated in him not being allowed to play bass on their last album, and was shown the door shortly afterwards. Having to deal with that for longer than they should have put up with it, and also having to learn how to play bass to record the new album (one lesson from me, which boiled down to "don't even try and play with your fingers, you're terrible at it so use a pick") has suddenly given him a new found appreciation for the bass player's role. That we turn up, do our job, usually have a much better ear for melody and drive, and don't make a big fuss about it. He reports that his dealings with their new bass player are along the lines of "you're the bass player, you do your thing if you think it's better than the stuff we're suggesting" Perhaps they all need a bad bass experience

Deliveroo actually won their case: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/nov/14/deliveroo-couriers-minimum-wage-holiday-pay specifically on the basis that the couriers were self employed because the system allowed them to find a mate to do the deliveries for them and there was no requirement for them to actually turn up and do the work Uber and Pimlico Plumbers are the most high profile employers to have lost a case although the plumbers are appealing to the high court http://www.pimlicoplumbers.com/media/news/pimlico-plumbers-to-take-self-employment-case-ruling-to-the-supreme-court The irony isn't lost on them that the plumbers that they employ typically earn very good money, whereas for Deliveroo and I suspect the likes of DPD, the "self employed" isn't just about avoiding things like sick leave and holiday pay (and employer's NI, let's not pretend that it's all about the benefits) it also keeps the rates they pay for each delivery very low because the minimum wage doesn't apply

love ska, and especially the influence in ska-punk - Mighty Mighty Bosstones, (early) Flatliners, Sonic Boom 6, etc, as well as Two Tone. like (rather than love) reggae, but don't know much beyond Bob Marley. However, the singer in an old 70's/80's punk covers band of mine absolutely loved it, and he refused to let us do any reggae songs from the period that we suggested on the grounds that the rest of us were white men who liked heavy metal and would undoubtedly make a horrible mess of it. He was probably right.

the problem here is that, as far as DPD are concerned he wasn't an employee, he was a subcontractor, and they weren't refusing to let him take time off, they were exercising the clause in the contract for services which occurs if his "company" failed to complete any work that day. It'll be things like that that flush out the true employment status for the gig economy, but it's a horribly confused and difficult legal landscape. One of the tests for "employed vs self employed" is whether you are solely responsible for, in this case, making the deliveries, or free to accept other work and if you can arrange for the work to be done by others. On the face of it, this doesn't seem to give much room for somebody to arrange for somebody else to do the deliveries...but having seen some legal briefings on the topic I'm only sure that I don't understand it all in nearly enough detail to guess how the courts would interpret it.

I can see it from that perspective (though I've no idea if Adele is one that sells the "backstage experience" to her fans for a bag of cash, don't want to devalue the product by letting just anybody talk to them) and from another perspective I recall that, I think it's Miles Kennedy from Alter Bridge/Slash, who does his best not to speak very much on gig days - won't do interviews for instance - because he sings better if he rests his voice all day. All that seems fair enough But back to the OP, it would be like Adele going on stage and complaining to the crowd that all her musicians are miserable because none of them will talk to her

In my experience there isn't any particular rule about this - some bands like to hang out, some don't (and apropos of bands not wanting anybody to speak to them, a mate of mine was working doing fencing at a festival and had to put one up so that nobody could see Rammstein walking between their dressing room and the stage...then had to take it down after their performance for the next day's headliners, Iron Maiden, who far from hiding from everybody wanted to hang out and put on a BBQ and handed out beers), but it tends to be up to the headliners to set the tone Without knowing exactly what went on, it does sound a bit like the headliners wanting to a put a better than anticipated support act in their place - I've seen/had it a couple of times, nice to your face, then snidey comments to the crowd to reestablish their position.

I can see the costs and hassle aspect making a difference for how we deal with an individual purchase. I may have mentioned it on another thread (I tend not tell my stories about CITIES a lot elsewhere), but a few months ago I was talking to someone who is a friend of the guy who makes Black Machine guitars, and he was discussing the change with him. His guitars as so very, very expensive that he can get away with telling any overseas buyers (mainly from the US) that the cost of any guitar that includes rosewood includes a return flight for the buyer to come to London and pick up the guitar, so that it can be taken home using the "personal allowance" exemption rather than the business around certification and import and export licences. I've seen one USA custom shops say that they're just not going to bother so if you're not in the US, don't even ask about rosewood. I reckon that if it does create an issue following Brexit, at the higher end there will be a compromise where there will be bulk imports of US guitars to the EU, and then collections in person for the cost of an EasyJet ticket