asingardenof

Black bass with tortoiseshell guard is always a winner in my book.

Having driven a Nissan Juke as a hire car I find it to be an utterly horrible car to drive, so whatever's wrong with them it started before they bought their car.

Back at The Plumbers Arms in Huddersfield last night. We usually end up really cramped there because there's football on and they don't move the tables for us, but this year we made a point of asking for the space so we had maybe another square half-metre to play with. Hey, every little helps! We were due to go on at 9, but while we were setting up we were asked if we wouldn't mind going on at 9.30. We grumbled a bit but there wasn't a lot to be done at that point so we said yes. We wondered why since the place was quite empty, until our singist did some sleuthing. It turned out that we weren't going to be the only band on last night. We were told that another band had come up from Wales to watch rugby, and were going to perform for free around our sets in exchange for a free room for the night. All very enterprising but not promising for getting us out of there at a reasonable hour. The band in question were a vox & guitar/sax duo from Anglesey doing covers to a backing track, and while I appreciated their technical competence it wasn't really my cup of tea, though I watched a few of their songs to show support and was pretty much the only person who applauded any of them. To be fair they watched the whole of our second set and their singist/guitarist said some extremely complimentary things about us afterwards, including that we should be doing a lot more gigs and he'd set us up with some on Anglesey if we ever fancied it! We didn't have our usual crowd there as they were all either busy or ill, and so the place seemed really quiet, and actually emptied a fair bit before we started which had us fearing we were in paid rehearsal territory, but people came and went throughout and there was always a good dozen or so in the immediate vicinity of us to keep us a bit interested, although applause during our first set was very hard to come by even though everyone seemed to be enjoying us. Out second set is livelier then the first so there were a few more people getting involved, helped by the arrival of part of a wedding party, including the father of the bride who wore a very natty red suit and a porkpie hat and who, along with one of his mates, created probably our first and only ever mosh pit (albeit quite a tame one) during Teenage Kicks. I didn't think we'd get any calls for an encore but we did, and so we didn't end up finishing until nearly midnight. A swift pack up and load out later I was home by 12.45, where at the request of my 8yo I slept in the living room on a pair of stacked foam mattresses that was Not Comfortable while he slept on the sofa, so I got hardly any sleep and am a fair bit broken this morning. Didn't get any photos because I forgot, but I used the Sire V7 - Elf - Two10S combo again that sounded ace. Shoes were black Converse Chuck Taylor Hitops.

Not paying attention and posted in the wrong forum...

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Only because I'm (hopefully!) going to be looking for one in a few months, G&L L-2500 Tributes that aren't in Japan (or which pretend to be in Japan but don't actually exist).

Our last gig I had to wear headphones to hear myself at all on the phone recordings, even when it was a bass solo.

Yep, been there, and am playing in the venue where that happens to us annually a week on Saturday - yay! Last time I played there I brained a dancer twice with the headstock of the bass before she learned not to dance so close to us despite the postage stamp-sized area for people to do so.

It's been a little while now but as I recall the main issue we had was that soldering the pickups to the back of the blend pot was a frigging nightmare. The solder just did not want to stick no matter what we did. Eventually we managed to rough up the surface of the pot to give the solder a better surface to attach to and that seems to have worked. Other than that it was just niggly issues: Wiring the battery harness was a pain Actually fitting everything in the control cavity was extremely fiddly There's also a free-floating earth wire you need to secure to the inside of the cavity so the bare wire touches the back of the shielding on the scratchplate, and if you forget about it you'll get an almighty hum until you take it all apart again to find out where it is You can rewire the blend pot so that the knob turns the more conventional way (i.e. clockwise = front pickup, anticlockwise = rear) because for all his wisdom Roger Sadowsky is wedded to the idea that they should work the opposite way. Soldering the pickups to the pot was so frustrating that we forgot to do that, so now I have to turn the knob both ways on a gig to remember which way round it is Overall though I'm extremely happy with how it turned out.

Second gig in a fortnight at a WMC near Bradford last night. We've played there before and went down well, so there was no reason to think last night would be any different, and so it proved to be. Our new songs are bedding in well, and the onstage sound was vastly improved over the previous gig so we could all hear each other and ourselves. Not a large venue so I went with the Elf as amp this time, and it sounded great, the first time I think I've used it for a gig since having the Sadowsky preamp in the Sire, and I'm definitely looking forward to doing that again. An appreciative but not lively crowd, apart from a hardy half dozen or so who were enthusiastically dancing at various points, with the other thirty-odd punters remaining resolutely glued to their chairs all night when they weren't at the bar. We lost a few towards the end but went down very well and have already been booked again for next July. A few minor mistakes, but we've become quite good at styling them out now so nobody noticed, it if they did they didn't mind. Back home to the joyous sound of our neighbours having a domestic. Which was nice. Obligatory "last night's office" photos below. I don't know why our guitarist insists on using that stand at every gig. Last night she was complaining that it was just firing at her arse all night so I don't know why she didn't just put the Katana on the stage like I did with my rig and save herself a foot of floor space.

Yep, that about sums up my gigging career to date.

I'd did that last week, had to forgo my drive pedal which is only needed on our second encore which we weren't sure we'd get to. It starts with a bass solo and I could barely hear it so had to go au naturel.

Gah! This is what I get for trying to update while having a conversation with someone.

One song we play a semitone louder lower than the original recording, but I hadn't yet figured out how to play back the track at a slower speed maintaining the same pitch when practising, so I'd practise with the original and make a mental note to drop the key when we played live. I'm sure you can all guess what happened next.

Our sound guy is our keyboardist, but our "soundcheck" usually consists of our singer wandering about the venue with his wireless mic checking if he can hear us OK. Keyboardist and drummer have monitors which apparently all sounded OK, but some sequenced bits need remixing to make them more prominent. I'm thinking I might need to invest in one to give myself a fighting chance.

Are we back to ranting about Scott Devine again? If you so forgot "super awesome"

If Ashdown will ever make a standard ABM with a smaller form factor then I'll stop doing this.

You've got to be careful with that sort of thing though, because the man who invented the Graphics Interchange Format thinks his invention should be pronounced "jiff", proving that inventors aren't always correct.

My personal unit-related bete noir is newspaper style guides that don't allow for the degree symbol when they write about temperatures, so they have them in Farads or coulombs.

Oof!