Gasman

Any bass you caught could be stored in there with your bass too...

A bit late reporting on Mustang Sally's weekend, due to me being a bit cream-crackered yesterday! Friday was a private party in Beaminster in the Fleet Club, a few miles up the road from me - it's the only upstairs load-in we play at the moment, but with our roadie and some punters we got the gear in and set up, squeezed into a diagonal on the route to the loos and opposite a long table ominously placarded with various curry names! First gig with the 2-Notes bass boost pedal, worked very well with the HB shorty (no room for the Bongo without braining the drummer anyway). No crowd surfing but a very happy crowd, good pay, table-dancing from our singiste and a fairly early finish and a lovely 20 minute drive home instead of the hour-plus from our more usual North Dorset venues. Saturday morning I couldn't find any of the band clothes that I'd left hung-up on the floor - Mrs G pointed to the washing machine: "They stunk of curry, and so do you!" she trilled gaily "so get under that shower or you can go in the next wash too..." Yes, the half-time free food had been a Smorgasbord of nothing but curries, and the jeep and instruments inside it were well-Madrassed too. Saturday's gig was at the Coronation club in Gillingham - it's been recently refurbished quite nicely but there are now 'banquettes' around all the walls, so the amps and speakers had to be sat on top of them in the corner next to the bar through lack of floor-space. Using the same setup as Friday, I soon realised something was very wrong with the bass sound - hardly audible, very woolly. Changed everything I could between numbers, eventually mostly solved it by removing the 2-Notes booster from the signal chain, taking the cab off the padded seat and squeezing it onto the floor, and changing to the Bongo. A forensic investigation today revealed that I'd used the wrong AC adapter in the 2-Notes (9v 0.25amp) instead of the 12v 1.0amp that came with it. Stupid mistake, but in the semi darkness of the corner of the room when setting up and a bagful of cables and adapters to choose from, I'd f**ked up - lesson learned! Not proud of my performance that night, too much self-induced stress, but the punters all loved the band and most importantly everyone but me had a good evening!

"Final price drop!" (Bet it isn't!)

Just listened to it - nothing very hard here, Georgia, probably not worth the trouble of tabbing for anyone who really wants to play it. Pick up your bass and play along!

That fits the bill nicely, 😊 thank you! It’s on its way from Uncle Thomann, will report its arrival on NBD

I’ve been toting a long scale Bongo (for me) and a shortie HB (for our guitarist) to gigs for the past few months, ‘cos when I play sax he plays bass, but he finds that the shortie is kinder to his fretting hand. So at the rehearsal last night we tried out H&O’s ‘Maneater’ finding that in the key our singer wanted the HB ran out of notes low down. This may well happen again for either of us, so the search is on for a reasonably (say under £500) priced 5 string shortie. What would you recommend please?

Original NYE gig seemed too good to be true from the word go, 180 mile round trip to the north Devon coast, but a four figure fee, cabins to sleep over in, food & drink free. Over a month or two the offer of goodies faded away, the fee went down, then our gig was cancelled in favour of a disco - c’est la vie... Desperate to avoid a gigless NYE watching Jules do his boogie piano thing on TV we tapped up every pub and club In the area, doing a Dutch auction until we eventually got a local pub on the hook for our normal fee plus food and drink. Pathetic? Letting the muso side down? Maybe, but it’s a sign of the times, and we do love playing!

Not working harder on my lead vocals, just being content with doing BVs...

It was 1969. Lovely to see a lot of bands performing there that featured regularly in the Melody Maker ‘What’s on’ listings in that era of happy memory. The inclusion of jazz polar opposites of Chris Barber and John Surman is wonderful! btw, 15/- = 75p

Please Santa, I’d like a mega-pack of Duracell PP3s....

Yes indeed it is much better than TV, but my cat also gets the grumps about my unexplained absences, especially when I roll in past midnight without any shopping bags full of fresh cat food!

Our guitarist goes for the full Mark Knopfler look including headband - I favour black boots, jeans and one of my many logo-ed up black T shirts from Red Molotov - amazing range from this supplier! I fantasise that dressing in black makes me look slimmer...

Quite often it’s out of my control - the acoustics of the venue, what the sound engineer’s been taking to get him through the event, whether there’s a big crowd or not, these factors all contribute.

Yes, that sounds about right...

Great idea @Burns-bass but for us that train has left the station...

The zombie thread awakes... inevitably, one of the five original members of my band who contributed an equal £600 to the PA purchase gave notice two months ago. He immediately raised the question of getting his money back. I had previously (see above pages) tried to get the band to agree to a fair formula to cover this situation but herding cats would have been a lot easier, so the upshot was a pub meeting last night of the four originals plus the new guy to sort it out. Opinions covered the the entire spectrum of options, from ‘he’s gone, he gets nothing’ to ‘buy him out 100%’ . The new guy was embarrassed as nothing had been mentioned about funding the PA when he was recruited nor about buying in. After an hour we got fed up with discussing it and reached a compromise, with the new guy offering to put in £300 and the rest of us subbing up another £75 each to pay the leaver off completely. It wasn't elegant or even logical and depended on the new guy’s goodwill (and bank balance, I guess), but it was a lesson learned - or was it? We still don’t have a proper template for dealing with this next time, so it’ll require more goodwill and muddling through, usual British style...

They wouldn’t be looking for a bass bargain in a porn shop, but maybe an @ss bargain?

I fancy Lot 23, the Wings double deck tour bus... in Essex, fully restored with a drop down stage upstairs, currently just $70k!

One additional factor to consider is gig fees in comparison with the national minimum hourly wage. As self-employed contractors (not actually entitled to NMW but bear with me) we should however be able to charge for travelling expenses and set-up/teardown time. My average time away from home for a gig is 6 hours of which I reckon 4 are chargeable although it's arguable that they all should be; my average mileage is about 80 per round trip @45ppm, say £36 while my cut of a £300 gig fee is £60. Hourly rate (for 4 hours) is therefore £15 less £9 (reduction per paid hour for notional mileage allowance that I don't get for fuel and wear on my car) means my hourly rate is effectively a staggering £6! Of course YMMV and this is a slightly artificial construct, but it's indicative of the financial truths behind what I do for fun and social intercourse (careful!) to occasionally get out into the world away from the four walls of home - it's not really a paying business proposition unless you discount everything but the actual time spanking the plank. It would be interesting to compare earned value by substituting pre-Covid and 1970/80/90 figures for historic comparison...

£300 for 2x1 hour sets in a pub or club, £4-500 for one off special events such as birthday parties. Our NYE gig has just evaporated because the pub has gone broke, but it would have been £650.

Quite often one is enough!

Halloween night at the Two Brewers pub in Shaftesbury, also it was the farewell event for the landlords who have been forced out by unaffordable increases in rental and utility costs - so far no-one is prepared to take it on, which is sad. It's a venue for alternative types (LBGTQ+) as well as music enthusiasts so somewhere we've always looked forward to playing - as it was Halloween there were some amazing costumes and makeup... and that was just the band It's a pretty cramped stage area there for a 6-piece but as usual we crammed ourselves in somehow or other- it was another milestone being the last gig for the six-piece as it was the end of the handover period between our departing rhythm guitar/vox and incoming keys/vox. So how did it go? The place was rammed all evening! We played from 9-midnight+10 with a short break, and it was crowd-pleaser time all night. I know Mr Balderdash metaphorically spits on us low-lives who want to, and are paid to, keep the crowds happy, but I get a real buzz from a positive audience reaction, even if it's to see them going mental to Sweet Caroline! I used the passive HB shorty with the Aguilar booster, but its PSU started glitching near midnight (overheating?) so it was time to crank up the AG700. Our new Bose PA system really does the business, but I must get some iems sorted for my sax set - so hard to pick up what I'm playing out of the general mix. A couple of pix mainly featuring our lead guitarist dressed for the occasion, with our singiste Georgie!

True for just about every musical sound I guess... brings us back neatly to Madonna's show - 95% prepacked.

Interesting that some of the most regular and opinionated posters on Basschat don’t actually seem to see themselves as jobbing bass players but as composers, drummers, and maybe other types of musician. Would they perhaps benefit from a composers forum (TippetChat?), or a percussion forum (TympaniTalk?). Just wonderin’!

Yeah, for me it's Red House...