nekomatic

‘Bootsy! Always play on the one!’ - James Brown

Steve Swallow, asked if he had words of advice for aspiring young bass players: ”Travel widely; seek romance; sit up straight, clean your room, and chew your food.”

This is a bargain, because 35mm film pots now cost at least a fiver each!

I was going to say I was working behind the bar at that, but from the lineup it can’t have been. 1992 maybe.

It’s well known that all Jamerson’s bass parts were actually played by Carole King. But what’s less well known is that all Mark King’s bass parts were actually played by Danny Kaye.

Paging Spongebob. Paging Spongebob. Please report to the ‘Songs you didn’t realise were covers’ thread. Thank you. 😉

Unless I’ve missed it, we haven’t had this language (or this banger) yet:

Ooh, that must have been good!

This is true. Although at the same time, we have a pretty strong amateur choral tradition. It’s odd.

A guy I used to play with had a rule ‘never let a singer get hold of a shaker’. This is a crude generalisation of course, as I know singers who can wield a caixixi much better than I can. But it’s a good working principle.

I've seen many jazz groups in symphony halls and they can work, but it seemed to me they often used to be poorly set up for sound reinforcement, however excellent they were for unamplified stuff. I think things have got better over the years though. That reminds me of another great gig which was discovering the extraordinary Maria João who supported (I think) Wayne Shorter in (I think) the Royal Festival Hall one time. Unfortunately half the audience were only there to see (I think) Shorter and talked or got up to leave at intervals throughout João's set. Their loss though.

Mid '90s, a friend suggested we go to see Betty Carter at Ronnie Scott's. I didn't really know her. Surprisingly for a massive jazz fan who lived in reach of London he'd never been to Ronnie's, so he was amazed when we were seated right in front of the stage - which back before the smoking ban was where the non-smoking seats were. Carter used to hire young local bands when she toured, and I can't remember who any of them were unfortunately, but she really made them sweat, and we were close enough to see the terror in their eyes! They did well though. Melody Gardot at the Lowry in about 2010 was also pretty amazing - at one point she did Somewhere Over the Rainbow as a duet with her cellist, in which he strummed the cello across his knee like a guitar. (Somehow, inexplicably to me, my wife deduced from this that they were in a relationship - clearly a level of intuition reserved for either women or classical string players.) I don't want to nominate a worst, but I do remember being disappointed with Björk in Manchester in probably 1999 - I guess I had high expectations because it was Björk but she basically just ran through the tracks on her current album, which sounded like they did on her current album. I believe this was the period she was dealing with a serious stalker though so maybe her heart wasn't in it.

Ha ha, that needs to go in the top tips thread in Repairs and Technical!

I didn’t even know there was a bass, but we got the kids a Squier Mini guitar a while ago - which is a scaled-down Strat, in red - and it seems well built and capable of making all the right noises.

Has this thread had enough cavorting French women in it yet? No it has not:

I have an MB15 and it sounds great.

Cool! Let us know if there’s a recording.

To answer the first one, at low frequencies the capacitor in series with the HF driver will have relatively high impedance, and at high frequencies the LF driver itself will have relatively high impedance due to the inductance of its coil. So the nominal impedance of the design is still 8 ohms.

I don’t think it came with any particular specification for accuracy, but it seems ok in as much as it gives reasonable results for known components. I’m sure it’ll be using the built-in ADC of its microcontroller to do the voltage measurement, plus the tolerance of any extra components it uses to source or measure currents, but that should still be good to within a few percent I’d think. If you need serious accuracy you’d need to pay a lot more for a more serious bit of kit, but most of the time you really don’t.

The more B the softer, i.e. the more graphite. So for lubricating a nut I guess 6B would be the choice.

Get you, I just glued mine to a spare bit of plywood

Non English language songs that become hits in English speaking countries, maybe…

For electronic builds or repairs: you can get a component tester like this off eBay for fifteen quid or so that will identify the two or three terminal component (resistor, capacitor, inductor, diode, transistor/FET) that you plug in to it and tell you its parameters like resistance, capacitance, inductance, diode forward voltage, transistor gain etc and which pin is which. Absolutely invaluable for confirming that you’ve got the right part and have got it the right way round before you start soldering.

And you're not getting away without

I know it's not originally hers, but… she's Kirsty innit