Leonard Smalls

As you say, Yes is for people who don't dance. Or understand what it is to dance. Or what you would actually do if you wanted to dance; I remember 'em at school discos, with their pristine denim jackets their mum had sewed a Yes patch on, looking absolutely mortified if Sarah Jones came up and said "come 'ed'n'dance wiv us!". However, us young punkers would also be suitably appalled if said Sarah asked us - mainly because in those days, as a wannabe cool newpunkwaver with our homemade bumflaps, you didn't dance to Oops Upside Your Head because it was Deeply Uncool. But jumping up and down to "Saturday Night Under A Plastic Palm Tree" somehow was... (It wasn't really!)

Probably! Though I prefer Rush to Yes, despite Geddy's voice - simply because there's far less of The-Worst-Of-Fusion with them. At least in fusion you only have to sit through the annoying stop-start chords and keyboard flurries for a bit before it gets meaty and grooving, unlike Yes where you have to sit through what feels like hours of it, then to make matters worse there's that terrible wailing like a calf being castrated for another 3 eons before your 2 minutes of The Good Stuff. I mean, if they just did The Good Stuff without the filler and That Singing they'd be tolerable. Not groovy enough, but tolerable! In fact, thinking about it, perhaps it would have been better if he did sing about goblins a bit more - at least it'd be less po-faced!

I suspect that the only way for me is to avoid anything either before or after Relayer...

In that case I'm most certainly not part of the target market! Last thing I want to hear is somebody warbling about Dungeons and Dragons at a frequency only dogs and adolescent boys can hear 😎😁 Proper lyrics go something like this: Said, "I go by the name of Lois Lane And you could be my boyfriend, you surely can Just let me quit my boyfriend called Superman" I said, "He's a fairy, I do suppose Flyin' through the air in pantyhose He may be very sexy or even cute But he looks like a sucker in a blue and red suit" I said, "You need a man who's got finesse And his whole name across his chest He may be able to fly all through the night But can he rock a party 'til the early light? He can't satisfy you with his little worm But I can bust you out with my super sperm!" I gon' do it, I gon' do it, I gon' do it, do it, do it 🤩

No idea what he sings about - I'm just guessing based on the song titles and album covers 😁 I rarely listen to actual lyrics, and especially not when the sounds of the singer is like nails on a blackboard! However, to show my Philistine-ishness, I can't be doing with Genesis either (annoyingly pompous) or opera (especially sopranos, nails/blackboard). But strangely, I like Gently Giant and Magma (not po-faced, definitely crazed)...

Can't really be doing with any Yes I've heard (and I used to live with a yes fanatic)... There's far too much annoyingly pitched vocals about whoknowswhatnonsense, the keyboards are on the most annoyingly pompous sounds possible - plus they only play arpeggios and inversions. And the songs have far too much BIG CHORD {space} BIGGER CHORD A BIT UP THEN ANOTHER UP AGAIN {much longer space filled with cymbal widdle) BIG CHORD {space that's about 5.372 beats} HORRIFIC KEYBOARD FANFARE SOUNDING LIKE FOLKY TUNE. This continues for about 10 minutes, then Mr Anderson gives it some falsetto about goblins for another 5 minutes over gentle keyboard arpeggios and cymbals. Finally, 20 minutes into the song there's a good bit which is quickly spoiled by yet another keyboard fanfare and unnecessary stop-start stuff. Sure, it's skilful. But it DOES NOT GROOVE!

New Bootsy, featuring George Benson!

You won't say that when you've heard it!

Shan't need panpipes this month... I have members of the Borborygmus Eructation Ensemble camping in our garden so I shall record their beautiful dawn chorus. Through Future Impact and Fwonk Beta pedals it should sound identical to a fretless bass!

My ears are the £50 type... I use 2x5m Van Damme studio 6mm... Extremely low resistance and capacitance, so definitely electrically sufficient!

Don't even think of looking into Machina Dynamica... And anything that boasts a quantum mechanical explanation for why it actually makes a difference is ripe for sniggering at. Just ask James Randi! As for Cryo treatment 🤣

Funnily enough the only bits of Les I don't like are with Lennon... Sounds like a re-hash of Sergeant Peppers with a good bassplayer 😁 Here's some Colonel Claypool's Bucket of Bernie Brains, odd, whimsical and killer bass:

I'm currently using my studio set up more to make my own music, but I do have a hifi - here with the Leema Xavier speakers - also have some Ditton 66 series 2. Kit is Clearaudio Revolution/SME3009/AudioNote cart into EAR 834Pdeluxe phono, plus Advantage CD player, Denon dvd all into Bow Warlock Pre-amp and Bryston 14bsst power amp. Sounds alright!

Not strictly funk or soul... But still funky!

Having just bought a Lightwave Saber bass (fretless to boot!) I'd say it's distinctly un-fender like... There's a huge range of tone controls, sustain to die for, weighs 2/10 of sod-all and no annoying pickups to get in the way. And they're relatively cheap in the US!

It's new fangled to me! But then I've just graduated from a single string attached to a broom handle in a tea chest 😁 And it's a Lightwave Sabre fretless. I'm hoping it'll make me sound just like Remco, though I've failed on the hair already!

I've done it... Bought one of those new-fangled optical pick-up fretless thingies. It's arriving tomorrow and should look like this: Now our band will be able to do proper punkfunk versions of all those Paul Young hits of the 80s!

I've had a bit of a fiddle, and just to keep Douglas happy I've done a fuzz-wah bass disco punk song containing lots of deep and meaningless shouting...

We had compulsory music lessons only in years 1-3 at secondary school, and they were largely a waste of time - definitely for me and most probably for the rest of the class. Firstly, as my mother was a piano teacher I'd had lessons from about age 7 or 8 and had done grade 5 practical/theory at about 13 so the music teacher gave me different end of year exams from everybody else (!). Not only that, but he was very poor at imposing any sort of discipline so everybody just messed about, taking absolutely no notice of the rudimentary theory and multiple record playing of Peter and the Wolf and Jesus Christ Superstar... It was only in 6th form when we got a one-off band together to play very average versions of our RE teacher's favourite Crosby Stills and Nash/Dylan songs that I realised, thanks to @lurksalot's brother, that playing keyboard was for losers and that Bass was actually The Place. 😃

Lyrics are invariably angry, and by (mostly) Sam!

Our streamed set from the Punk 4 The Homeless benefit last Saturday... Drums programmed by me!

Me too - and I was born there! However, I don't mind Kraut at all; it's as derogatory as the French calling the English Les Ros Bif, or Americans calling British Limeys. It's nowhere near as bad as people shouting "Nazi" at you while doing the raised arm salute - as I did when aged about 6 growing up in rural Cheshire!

You found it then! I found recently that just one open Bias FX caused cpu loads of 120% and horrible glitch distortion... The problem was the buffer was set at 64kbits - I'd set it to this a year ago to get latency down to less than 8ms... Changing to 512 gave a 5% load with 4 bias, 1 mixroom 1 bassroom and 4 neutron elements!