TimR

Nobody buys £1m homes as their first house. The people who live in them didn't pay £1m for them. I'd suggest most people move up the ladder using inherited money along with equity they have in their previous property. My peers in their 50s bought their first houses in the mid to late 90s for around £120-150k and spent a lot of time and energy doing them up and moving up the ladder as they went. A big 'problem' on London is active retired people 'blocking', living in properties they can just about afford the rates on and who have no reason to be living in 3 and 4 bedroom houses. Ideally they should be the ones buying second homes and living off rental from their 1st property. Which I suspect is the case and a lot of these 'evil landlords' are just people trying not to lose money.

Was always true. Looking back at the 80s, I'm kind of wondering why all the fantastic music we used to listen to sounds like utter rubbish now. 😁

I had a car for 2 months recently. My insurance alone was over £50 a month. The VED - £15 a month. MoTs are close on £50 a year now. An oil and filter change, even if you do it yourself is going to be close on £200 a year. Then you are losing money on depreciation that you need to put away into savings ready to buy your next car. I really don't think people realise how much they're spending on their cars. It's one of those slow drip things. HMRCC allow 45p a mile for a reason.

When I used my Zoom B1 I just had the first patch of each bank set as neutral always on. A1, B1, C1 all did the same.

Many EU countries have exemptions for artists. Check the Musicains Union.

University cities will be full of people playing music. Either music students or just general students, and a good smattering of lecturers. And they won't be full time musicians.

Physiologically your bass should be at a height where there are as little sharp bends in your wrists and elbows as possible. Down the line your nerves will thank you for it. There's a reason most players have their bass at a common height. Not sure the strap length is telling you much as it'll depend on your shoulder and waist measurements. But 6cm would straighten out your elbows and wrists quite a bit.

Yes. I used to gig in the 80s with a 100w vocal PA where the vocals were just about audible above the drums. My bass amp was 100w combo. We now gig with a 2x250w PA and my bass amp is 500W. Not that we don't play appropriate volumes for the venue, but many bands have that kind of power and don't.

The music market is flooded with lowest common denominator music. It's not really worth paying for to own. Add in Spotify pay a few quid for as much as you can listen to and music is further devalued. So many artists are either just copying what someone else has done a million times, or trying so hard to be different that what they're producing doesn't have a market. It all went wrong when you could record music and sell it en-masse. Whoever owned the means of production or distribution was going to be the one who controlled the cash. Same has happened with TV. The streaming Box set means people are addicted to a series and won't leave their sofa until they've watched it. I struggle with a lot of my friends who tell me I'm lucky to be playing in 3 bands and go running and stay thin, and ask me where I find the time. Then ask me if I've seen the latest 'season' of X. Not the latest episode?! The latest season. On Netflix a season of anything is about 8-12 hours of watching. So how do you create FOMO for your band? That's the marketing win. Make going to see your band an experience that everyone wants to be part of. And that's by engaging people and making them feel special. In the old days having a mate who played in a band was enough to get you out. Regardless how rubbish that band was, it was where all your mates were going and it's what they'd all be taking about for days. Not some rubbish TV island celebrity jungle pizza fest. Very often your mates band didn't even have t-shirts or tapes to sell, anywhere.

I'm not sure this is true. It's very difficult to keep a vehicle running for less than £400 a month. However you slice that pie, £5k a year seems to be about the rate money disappears on any vehicle I've ever owned. Insurance, tax, MOT, servicing, repairs, depreciation etc.

Property prices are killing live music. Business rates are based on property prices in any area. You can't enjoy living in a prosperous area and then complain about the price of everything. It's an oxymoron. Lack of imagination at live venues and pubs is killing them. Many pubs are "we are a pub, we sell beer. Have live music Friday night and karaoke Saturday night." mentality.

Another One Bites the Dust and The Chain. Lots of imagination used there. Although I like the idea of filling with depth and grandeur.

My take is if, as a bass player, I didn't know I was playing it differently, no one else will. I've only once been told that "the bass line doesn't go like that." to which my reply was "Well, it did tonight." I usually try and find a live version as quite often even the original bass player couldn't play live what they recorded. The other issue is - can the drummer play the drum part, the guitarist play the guitar part. It's quite often that you will have to adapt the bass line for a new arrangement/lineup.

Mine used to annoy me but never took it off. Just got used to it. It'll take several months to get used to wearing a ring anyway. I put it on a chain when walking in the hills or climbing. What do you do as a job? I took my ring off about 10 years ago (after wearing it for 15 years). We had a big project on at work, I sat through the safety briefing, and it's sat in a draw ever since. Just before the pandemic one of our guys lost a finger due to wearing a ring. I'm not a fan. YMMV.

Sorry. The full saying is. Better to be a jack of all trades and a master of none though oftentimes better than master of one

Happened in a band I was in. We all got an email from the band leader saying he was disbanding us. Then got an email asking some of us to form a new band playing the same gigs and tunes. Followed by a phone call a few weeks later from the person ejected telling me not to worry, they knew I had nothing to with it, and then venting their spleen over the cowardly band leader. In hindsight the writing was on the wall as he did several other underhand things to eject other members over the next few years. Eventually copying the wrong people into a sensitive email and showing his true colours. Quite humorous looking back on it now.

Yes. That Mariah Carey musical theatre woman. All over the place. Never get anywhere in the pop world.

If you can't hear the words of the play, you get a bit lost. Whereas nobody really cares what the singer is singing in a pub band.

The discussion was about trained singers. Often people get trained and then specialise. Better to be a jack of all trades than a master of none though oftentimes better than master of one.

Are singers in the music industry trained?

All the kids coming through theatre schools and stage schools are being trained in all aspects now. Modern and traditional. It's no longer true that you're either a classical singer or a rock singer. Especially when you look at what's going on in the West End in the way of variety across the board. My nephew has just finished in Les Mis, his contemporaries are doing all sorts of stuff.

Most trained singers can do all styles now. That's why Simon Cowell is struggling to find people with the X-Factor now. It's like all actors used to be able to do Shakespear.

Yes. The conversation is pretty easy. "We've given it a go, you're just not suited to it. Think it's best we move on." Dealing with the aftermath is the sensitive bit everyone doesn't like doing. But that's down to her friends so find one of her good mates to help. You may find they're not actually that into it. If they were they'd probably have been trying a lot harder at it. The whole thing does highlight when choosing musicians for your band: get it right at audition stage and if its not working within a few rehearsals, move on quickly and find someone else. A bit cut throat but performing in bands isn't a place for people who get offended easily.

It's really mainly someone's attitude to risk, which depends on the outcome of any potential failure, along with experience. Once you start paying lots of paid gigs and have one or two failures it becomes a no brainer to chuck in a cheap second hand £50 bass. I played hundreds of gigs over 20 years and never had a failure. Never took a spare, didn't even consider it. Then one night lost a machinehead. Playing a 3 string bass all night that could have been solved in seconds. Had another one go 10 years later but had a spare bass. No impact. I've since upgraded all machineheads instead of just swapping with OEM. 2 manufacturer failures (that turned out to be common on that manufacturer) in 40 years of playing. That's pretty good odds and most people would take a bet on that never happening to them.