TimR

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.

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.