lozkerr

Thanks! 🙂 Yes, sadly I will miss the Festival this year but we should be done and dusted for Christmas and Hogmanay. My flat's let for holidays at the moment, and it's booked solid until the 28th August. In the meantime, we're picking furniture, packing stuff up and sorting out mundane things like parking permits. It's a good time to be moving; the council's starting to clamp down on holiday lets. Although the headlines are still mostly noise rather than action, I've had a couple of snotty letters about the proliferation of key boxes at the street door, and from talking to neighbours it looks like there's a blitz on. The justification they're using is that most of the Old Town is a conservation area and UNESCO World Heritage site (which is true), and a lot of the tenements are listed buildings (which is also true), so the threat of the planning contravention ban hammer is being used. It won't affect me, as I only have one key box and I've got the OK from the council to leave it in place until the end of the month, but some people have loads of short-term lets, so they're in for some bother. We have some big jobs to do, and after that we'll be living in the flat while we get the smaller things done. Most of my gear will have to go into store, but I have treated myself to a Steinberger travelling bass so I can keep my hand in. I don't want to be too rusty when I start looking for a band!

Fabulous, thanks very much everyone! I'll try to get round as many as I can.

Thanks! I'll do that. It'll be nice to meet a fellow BCer if you'll have time to say hello!

Hi everyone, Next month, I'll be upping sticks and moving back to Edinburgh. There's a wee bit to do on my flat, so it'll be a while before I'll be heading over to JMB again. But in the meantime, I was wondering if anyone could pass on some insights into the live music scene in Auld Reekie? My local there does have live music, but it tends to be finger-in-the-ear folky stuff about auld reiver Tam and his twa grey dugs, accompanied by traditional Scottish instruments like the, er, banjo. Not really my thing. Whistle Binkies is just down the road from me, so doubtless I'll be in there a lot, but I'd like to know of any other good venues easily reached from the city centre. Ideally I'd like to take the Goat in Berkhamsted with me, but I suspect the owners might complain, even if it would fit under all the motorway bridges. If there's anywhere similar to there in Edinburgh though, I'd love to hear about it. And any recommendations for bass teachers in or around Edinburgh would be very welcome, too! Many thanks, Laura

Yup. Band T-shirts come in three sizes - skeleton, footy fan beer gut and tent 😊

Burn it. Burn it with FIRE.

Showing my age here, but as Vindaloo has already been mentioned, let's cringe along to: White Hart Lane is the ground For the best team around And to see them just fills you with wonder So we'll sing them along With a Spurs football song Tottenham Hotspur, The pride of North London Nice one Cyril Nice one son Nice one Cyril Let's have another one

Go on then...

Heh, sometimes you have to keep the guitards in time 😉 That's interesting about the signal split; the studio we rehearse at has a Hartke backline that includes a 410 and 115 cab, both of which are 8 ohms. I hooked the 115 up to the Metro last night and couldn't hear any difference at all; the Metro's 210 completely swamped the 115. There was signal going to it though - I could hear it when I knelt in front of it - but it wasn't anything to write home about. I'm wondering if an 8 ohm Eden 115 would be better... how do you find the split between your Metro and the Ampeg?

After a quick Google, I think that's one for the shopping list. Top tip, thanks 🙂 I might think about the castors, too; at the moment, I wheel it around on a trolley. I can lift it in and out of the Defender OK, but it's a struggle to carry it any distance.

I have an Eden Metro and I'm dead chuffed with it. It's basically a WT300 amp sitting atop a 210 cab. Lovely warm tone, although perhaps not as rich as a valve power amp, but the EQ is fantastic. Doesn't need much more than a wee bit of enhance and a touch of extra bass. I'm thinking of adding a 115 cab to get a bit more low end, but overall it's a fantastic bit of kit. Its only downside is the weight - it's a big beast.

I'd rather be paid money...

No, but I wished I had been! Jesus, Lemmy would have been proud of the racket we made. He might have been a wee bit deaf, thinking back - at the end, we did a bit of a jam and he called a song I didn't know; I twice had to ask 'what's the key and chord progression' quite loudly. Hey-ho!

Sometimes good things come from bad auditions. I've been trying to find a band desperate enough to want me, and had some ...interesting... experiences. Audition 1: answered an ad on JMB for a blues group. I tell them how long I've been playing - not all that long - as I want to be honest up front. I do a bit of recruiting in the day job, and know how narked I get when confronted with bovine manure. Better to be straight with them from the off. Anyway, he replies, telling me that there's a drummer lined up, plus someone on blues harp and maybe keys too. Could I learn a couple of songs and pop round for a twang? Rightio. I turn up at the BL's house and am treated to half an hour's talking about his guitar collection before we get down to business. He's provided an amp - an ancient Vox gee-tar amp that didn't look much younger than me. Hm. I'd have brought the Eden if I'd known. But I crank the low end and off we go. He's hunched over his chord chart and doesn't look up. With no drummer to lock in with, some eye contact might have been helpful. He then chases me out of the house before his wife gets back. Hmmmm. Then about a week later, I get a 'thanks but no thanks' email. Meh. Think I dodged a bullet there. Audition 2: answered an ad on JMB for a rock covers band. Again, I'm up front about my level of experience. I get their set list - wow! Fabulous! - and learn half a dozen songs, as requested. Then the audition's brought forward a week. Great. But I rock up at the appointed time - to a studio this time - to find that the BL was struggling with one of the songs I'd learnt and had to teach the singer one of the others. Oh dear. But the rest sounded good, although at the end of the evening, they said they thought it was beyond me to learn everything on the list before their next gig. They were quite decent about it though, so fair enough. Audition 3: answered an ad on JMB for another rock covers band. As before, I make it clear how much I do and don't know. I learn the requested songs and turn up to a slightly less-than-ideal studio - bare wooden floor, no sound insulation and a PA that didn't look much more powerful than my home stereo. As I'm getting set up, a guitarist walks in; he's being auditioned too. He sets up his backline - a lovely Marshall valve amp. Then the BL arrives and sets up his backline. Then off we go. The PA just about copes, but after the first song, the BL says to me, 'it needs much more bass'. Well, I was standing in front of the amp and I could hear it OK, which meant he certainly could from the other side of the room. But no sweat, up went the volume to just under half and we launched into the next song. Jesus. My amp was making the room shake. I went to turn it down and the BL said ‘no, leave it, it’s just right’. The guitarist turned up his amp as it was being drowned by mine. Not wanting to be left out, the BL did the same and we went into song number three. This time, the weedy studio PA was completely overwhelmed; all I could do was lock in with the drummer and hope for the best. Then things started to go south when the BL started playing something a bit different before stopping to tell us that we needed to follow him. By now the volume was up well past 11 and the only way to follow him was by lip-reading. The next song fell apart when he missed out an eight-bar sequence from the intro. By now, the negative vibes were starting to creep in. At the end of the evening, the BL thanked us for coming and said ‘we’ll have a chat and we'll let you know’ in a sarky voice. So much for that, then. The guitarist and I compared notes outside and we both reckoned we wouldn’t hear from them again. We swapped numbers though, and decided we’d look at doing something together if it didn’t go anywhere. After a week of radio silence, I pinged the guitarist a text and as expected, he hadn’t heard anything either. He then asked me if I was still up for getting together, as he had another guitarist and a singer who were interested. Oh, was I ever. So a few days later, the three of us (the singer couldn’t make it) assembled in a very nice studio in Cranfield. What a difference! No attitude, a lot of fun and some great songs to play. The Stooges, Black Sabbath, the Undertones, Tears For Fears, the Cult… all good stuff. Plus some originals that the guitarist had written that needed basslines added. I had a whale of a time, and when we decided to make a go of it at the end of the evening, I was on cloud nine. So I did join a band from a terrible audition. Just not the one I originally went for!

I went to see it when it was resuscitated revived a few years ago, largely because I'd been corresponding with one of the cast about a TV series I'd written. It was a lovely production and the whole thing worked well, but when I listened to the soundtrack in isolation... nah. All the childhood dislike came back and the CD was quickly promoted to a coaster.

Oh wow, does that chime with me! My mum's favoured instruments of torture were Mendelssohn's Four Seasons and South Pacific; and both my parents insisted that popular music (anything from about 1949 onwards!) was just rubbish and people who played electric instruments were not real musicians. That was at the back of my mind for years and gave rise to a head vs heart conflict that was only resolved when I finally picked up a bass. And when I got to the stage of being able to play rock songs with other musicians, I knew I'd finally arrived. It took a while, but better late than never. Now I'm busily making up for lost time!

Queen - Hammer to Fall. And My Generation. Still trying to play them properly, though 🙂

I don't think he's playing anything! I'm no Suzi Quatro but I'd feel embarrassed to get up on stage if I was only half as bad as that!

Aw, she's gorgeous! Such a little cutie.

Toss-up for me too, this time for the Passions - either Sanctuary or Africa Mine. Not exactly sophisticated numbers, but I really like them. Much better that I'm In Love with a German Film Star. Just MHO, of course.

Isn't getting soaked par for the course in Manchester? I used to work there so I know what it can be like. I tried one of those plastic poncho things the other night. Looked like Quasimodo wearing a wigwam, but the bass and I both stayed dry. I did have to stretch the back before putting it on though, so that the head of the gig bag was covered.

OK, so I lied... can anyone point me at an accurate bass transcription? Many thanks.

OK, I'll not post anything else about it. I'm sure no-one else will either

He was indeed... shame he's gone so far downhill. Should have quit while he was ahead.