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Open mic night at the Rhodehouse in Sutton Coldfield last night. This was a sort of audition slot for the Bonnevilles in order to try and get a gig there. Backline is all supplied and there's a PA with sound engineer. The house band was impressive, there were a couple of good solo artists, and we did five songs and got a pretty good reception. Provided bass setup was an Aguilar Tonehammer head and pair of Aguilar cabs (SL112s I think). Must get Mrs Zero and me booked in there some time. I only did backing vocals on a couple of numbers. My mic wasn't on initially but when the SE saw me singing into it, he unmuted me - I'd never heard my voice so clearly in a monitor before and I was rather startled and only slightly horrified.

Haha. to be fair they were black, I was playing keys so stuck at the back, and it was a Walkabout pub where you aren't even allowed in if you're sober

I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s been looking up Thumpinators again…

Working For The Weekend - Loverboy

Baseball caps generally aren't great, but the way they are worn is also a factor in how repellent they are.

Plus if you have a compressor, it won't be trying to act on sub-audio frequencies and messing up its response to audible sound.

The band I was in at school band had a trumpet, trombone and sax and my first pro band had 2 sax's, trumpet and a baritone. I've played many times with single sax players as well. If they're good players I love them. You usually find guitarists playing at normal volumes in bands with brass players. . . which is a bonus! Sadly, these days, it's pretty uneconomical to run brass sections if you want to make money out of gigging. Apart from the money aspect, I've had nothing but positive experiences with brass players.

Always the option of shipping a cheap hard case to the seller if they aren't keen on posting in a gigbag, Thomann do a hard foam case for about £50 delivered and you can usually find the tweed ones for around £55 shipped on eBay.

You should have been thinking "Do I really think I know better than Leo Fender's (or John Hall's) accountants?".

Last night was probably the biggest and best gig of the year so far. We played "Twisted Firestarter" which is the InFest Festival warm-up party at Rebellion in Manchester. Six bands all in a post-punk/Goth/Electronica style from various parts of Europe. I did this last year with the other band I was at the time and with drums and noisy guitars we were very much at odds with the rest of the line-up. This time we were the only band that wasn't all synthesisers, although my Bass VI is pretty heavily processed, and musically we were definitely in the right genre. We played second and I was a little worried that the event wasn't going to be as popular as last year when it was noticeably busy from when the doors opened; but this time the venue looked a bit sparse during the first act. However by the time we were ready to come on the bar area was heaving, and there was a noticeable rush of people to the front of the stage as we launched into our opening song. Excellent sound from the foldback and the large stage allowed our singer to really get into the performance. Even though our set was heavily biased towards new songs that have yet to be released, the reception was excellent with plenty of people down the front dancing and singing along, and even managed most of them to light up the room with phones and glow-sticks during "Calling Out". Surprisingly we didn't sell a lot a merch afterwards, which suspect was partly down to the fact that most of the people who liked us already have CDs and T-shirts and the strange decision for the merch table to be cash-only; this year the vast majority of our merch sales have been paid for by card. The promotor seemed to be impressed so hopefully we'll get some more gigs from him. There were a couple of professional-looking photographers in the audience so hopefully some shots will surface soon on Facebook. Next is a bit more down-to-earth as we'll be playing a small-scale multi-venue "festival" in Newark in just over a week's time.

If you would like a horror story then there's one horn player I recall who emailed 15 minutes before we were due to start the set (he lived over 30 minutes' away) to say that he had been feeling a little unwell all day and had now decided that he wasn't up to dong the gig. As we were heavily reliant on said horn player to pad things out with lots of soloing, this was a bit of a pain. "They all tend to arrive 5 minutes before downbeat and leave 5 minutes after" seems right to me. I wonder if I'd do the same if I had an easy instrument to carry (probably not). Reading ability amongst the ones I know varies; most are better than me at reading and most (usually saxophonists) are good at improvisation. I recall seeing a discussion on a trombone forum where a trombonist asked why saxophonists were always so much better at improvising. One answer appeared to be than when it came to a practice session the saxophonists were ready to start noodling away after 5 minutes of adjusting their reed, and so got more practice at it than trombonists, who would have to spend 30 minutes warming up with long tones etc. to get the best out of their instrument (I don't know if this is true). If they've played any jazz then they should be happy with taking a break when they're not soloing.

When I was 15 I had saved up enough money to buy a Fender American Standard Jazz or a Musicman Stingray. I went to Denmark Street in London for the first time, tried a bunch of basses and ended up buying a 1974 Gibson EB3 purely because 'Jack Bruce and Andy Fraser played them'. I rarely use it, but I still own it 24 years later. The other one would be a Boss ODB3 (the yellow bass overdrive) because every bass player I knew had one. I used it a lot, but ended up selling it for £30 during lockdown because I was fed up of even looking at it after 20+ years. I probably should have kept it.

I posed about this in another thread, but I once turned up to a gig with the wrong bass. It was one I had swapped pups out with and had just put the pups from the other bass in to this bass as a place to store them. The whole bass needed wring with gaffer tape at the gig.