TimR

I would be looking for another band to join if you're not being challenged. Although with 45 gigs I don't see you'd have any time. I'd suggest he is struggling because no one can concentrate on songs they've been playing every week for 7 years. I start thinking about what I'm doing tommorw or what song is next on the setlist during most of our set.

The odds were slightly better when it was £1 on a 50:1 shot of winning a tenner. £2.50 isn't a huge amount when the prize is £150m so I just do it when it's triple roll over or whatever. Hence very seldom.

I spent £25 on lottery tickets last year. I'm sure £1.50 on an odd bass raffle when a nice one pops up isn't going to turn me into an uncontrolled addict.

I had this very conversation just before Christmas. Trying to explain to someone that you use an "instrument cable" and not a "speaker lead" between a mixer and a powered speaker. He said he'd been doing that for years, and yes "You must always use speaker leads for speakers". Might go someway to explain why we have so many issues with our powered monitor speakers.

Has anyone had a punt on anybody these fantastic chances to win a bass? It's a very well constructed facebook page with seemingly good reviews and comments spelled correctly and from people in the UK. Obviously they make their money from selling more tickets than the guitar is worth, so slim chance of winning. https://guitargeargiveaway.co.uk

Yes have had 6 of them on some pages I manage. Usual precautions. Report and block.

Not many albums I listen to end to end, the one that used to be on full play on long journeys was Powerslave - Iron Maiden. The last 3 tracks. Back in the Village Powerslave Rime of the Ancient Mariner. I've just seen they're the entire second side on the Vinyl. All the Pink Floyd albums run seamlessly from one track to the next. Great band for concept albums. Meddle - pick any 3 from side 1.

I think a lot of people are confusing what happens in theory and what happens in real life. If everyone 'learned their parts' before 'rehearsal' then it should take no more than 15minutes of a rehearsal to play the songs perfectly. And you shouldn't need an entire rehearsal to work on them. So something is amis with what a lot of you are saying and what you're doing. 😁 In reality, everyone is altering the arrangements to suit the ability of the musicians and the instrumentation. If you don't have a keys player, any tunes with strings, brass, piano etc, someone will have to fill the sound somewhere. Same if you only have one guitarist. That doesn't factor in overdubs and solos where the recording has a rhythm parts added. This altering of arrangements will be happening during band practice. And there will be no guarantee the tune will work. As per @Lozz196 comment above, they ended up with 8 songs fairly quickly but had to throw a bunch out because they didnt work. Practice at home, band practice and band rehearsal all have different components and objectives.

How do you learn your parts if you don't know the arrangement until everyone is together? Being generous 2 tunes every 2 weeks, sometimes all 3 will work, sometimes none of them will work, that's 6 months to get a set together, that's without revising previous tunes as you go. If you're starting out as a band, you need to flood a setlist and bare-bones the songs and experiment.

If you only learn 3 songs every 2 weeks it's going to take months to get a set list together. It's unlikely that every one of those 3 songs will work, and then the next 2 weeks after what will you work on? Honestly, having a big list of songs for everyone to try, and keeping in communication over those 2 weeks as to how you're progressing, takes away a lot of pain and disappointment. I can't tell you how many times bands I've been in have agreed to learn 3 songs and none of them have worked. And you're 2 weeks on... Picking and learning tunes as a band is one of the most frustrating aspects of being in a band. Making it simple and quick, and recognising when a tune isnt going to work is key.

'Learning' is a subjective term. I'm quite happy to cover 10 or 20 songs in two weeks. Good enough to be able to play verses and choruses and mid sections. Bare bones of the tune. Return and sketch them through with the band to see which ones have legs. The problems really occur when you go away for 2 weeks and everyone tries to learn 'only 3' songs exactly as per the recordings. You return and find find - actually everything needs rearranging for the instrumentation and half the band can't actually play the lines anyway. That's a waste of 2 weeks if the songs get scrapped. I don't think it's fair on guitarists who will go away and learn solos, or even bass players who have worked on tricky lines and are then invested emotionally in a song, only to find out it doesn't work and you're going to bin it. So yes. Work on 10 songs to a level you can sketch through and then reconvene in 2 weeks and work out which ones have legs. But make sure that's what everyone understands you are doing.

Yet the gigs are sold out. Even Geddy Lee was sold out at £100 a ticket for just talking. West End show tickets are in excess of £150 a seat. It's time poor people who are making decisions based on a huge variety of things to do. And then there are just people with no money as their energy, rental, and mortgage costs are high. I only have 52 weekends a year, a lot of them last year I was working, I'd get home and sleep if I wasn't gigging. Music pubs and venues are closing and people are complaining about noise. Venue owners are complaining about electricity and rates costs. There's no one thing to blame.

Most people will be consuming on the move using mobile phones.

Maybe it's me, I don't know many musicians names full stop. Obviously the famous ones but that's where it stops. It amazes me that the guys at work seem to have an encyclopedic knowledge of football players names, what teams they played for and when, even being able to tell you who scored goals in games long past. I guess that might be the same for some people who are just so much into music. I know a guitarist who talks to me about musicians I've never heard of as if I should know who they were. I often go home and Google who they were to find out what band they played in. So I'm not sure which bass players actually influenced me, I probably couldn't name more than 20 bass players; Harris, Lee, King, Lemmy, Trullio, Sting, Sklar, Carol Kaye, Pastorius, Dunn, Weymouth, Wilkenfeld, Karn, McCartney, JPJones, and now I'm struggling off the top of my head.

I'd worry that someone needs Tab to learn a ZZTop song.

Can you do greenscreen and experiment in post production to see what works best?

Yes. Same in London. We did a few 'pay to play' gigs in Covent Garden. If you bought a big enough crowd* on a Wednesday night (on a multiple band night) they'd give you Saturday afternoon. *They'd always fiddle the numbers so you never got your money back. In the end we would book our own hall and PA and make money. I'd guess booking whole music venues now might be easier, but more expensive outlay to start with.

I think most of us have been in bands where we thought it would be a great idea to record a CD and sell it. I know people who spent a lot of money on a minimum production run of 500 CDs and still have 490 of them in a shed once every member of the band and their girlfriends had been given a copy. Spotify just shows <1000 if you've only had a few plays of your track. I don't think there's anything different between now and the 90s in that respect. £1000 would get you a week in a studio and a massive box of CDs. Which on reflection seems a lot of money but a decent bass and amp would cost you that. Cash flow has always been an issue. We used to scrimp together money from gigs to pay for gear, recordings, PA hire etc. I wonder if there's more parental pressure now, I knew a load of "full time musicians" in the 80s, who basically did nothing all day, other than day dreaming, and just practiced and gigged. They didn't make any money from gigging, they were all on the dole. I wouldn't be surprised if some of those guys still are. 😁 I worked as a temp for 2 years, you could turn up to work, or not, depending whether you had a gig that day. Was very low paid, some of it was hard labour and some easy office work, but I lived at home. My parents complained all the time. I don't know if temping is still a thing, seems to be all zero hour contracts now. So I'm guessing there's plenty of scope to being a "full time musician" and pizza delivery guy on the side.

What do the strings sound like when it's unamplified? A flat battery will give you more of a distorted sound but for £4 that's the first thing to try.

Lemmywinks has just spent £135 on one service.

Strangely enough, I'm an old duffer, but have been asked to play bass in an originals group made up of guys who are under 30. And one of the bands I saw at the Jam night were all early 20s. Once you start following these bands you quickly see how many other musicians are using traditional instrumentation. I was also asked to record bass for a young solo singer songwriter who had written keys, strings and programmed the drums but couldn't "get the bass to sound like a real bass". All done in garageband in their bedroom. I recorded the bass into an iPad while cooking dinner in my kitchen.

Compulsory purchase. Usually at market value plus some compensation. I belive the option to do something simlar is also available to councils if people buy land to develop and fail to develop with 5 years. But it's costly and to what benefit?

All kids go to college now. Very few go straight from school to work. I play in an annual jam night where we have loads of musicians from the area come to play. The youngsters don't 'jam'. They come with preformed bands and arranged music. The art of jamming to a bunch of chords is getting lost. I put a lot of this down to 'modern' music being over produced, and we see it a lot on threads here where people in cover bands want to recreate the original with high accuracy rather than get the format and chord structure down and just make music. I did play with one 'young' girl who called the chords and the drummer and I followed along to a bunch of fairly modern pop songs. But that was the exception.

It's the algorithms of social media that determine what you are exposed to. If you don't actively look for new music, the algorithms will just serve you up what it thinks you like. There's tons of new music out there,it does get more difficult to wade through the nonsense.