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Thank you very much Ped!

Maybe have a look at the ‘Fitted Foam Bass Guitar Case’ on the Gear4Music site. I’ve had mine for over 10 years and it’s been fantastic, lightweight and yet sturdy. The best bit? £39.99 😊

For me the charity gig rule is really simple. MORE than happy to donate my time for free to raise money, but absolutely on the basis that the bar staff, sound engineers, promoters and doormen are all also donating their time, with all food and drink profits also going to the charity. If my band performing is helping fund wages for them rather than the charity in question, I'm not interested. I daresay in the vast majority of situations, bands are working at a much greater loss than any of the other staff would be.

Rob you might be the first person to try two of these cabs and just stacking them will change the off axis angle between your head and the cab on the top. What you'll gain will be subjectively quite dramatic and most people see it as a big improvement. The most significant is a 6db increase in sound level, even when you turn it down the speakers will be working over the more linear part of their travel so you might hear a reduction in distortion and power compression depending upon what level you were operating at before. Secondly you'll hear a clearer sound as you are closer to being on-axis and you'll also have some mid bass losses from the top cab but reinforcement from the bottom cab. For me a pair of these would be a really viable gigging set up. My current drummer is properly trained and his dynamics control is excellent I was using the 8 last night at rehearsal and it was fine in terms of volume. A pair would have given me plenty of headroom for a noisier gig environment. I'm dying to see what you make of a stacked pair You can already test how the cab will sound on a pole at home. Just stick it on a shelf or a table and sit down with your head/ears at speaker level. One reason I chose the Fane is that the off axis response is better behaved than many speakers of the same size. Speaker cones aren't rigid pistons but flexible bits of paper so off axis response is complicated. In any case the higher frequencies don't disappear off axis, mainly they just fade a little and eventually lobe, this is more of an issue with larger diameter speakers too. Small speakers have an advantage here with the cost being lower output. If you look at the chart below you can see that the reponse dip is dramatic at 60deg but minimal at 10-20deg. Bass guitar doesn't really have much content above 4kHz so the 8k line isn't really relevant.

Made for Showaddywaddy?

$299 in the USA... I suspect this is because it is digital, so much cheaper to manufacture once they have the core sound? https://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/BassDrElite--tech-21-sansamp-programmable-bass-driver-elite-preamp-pedal

I'm not close enough, sadly. I am really interested in trying it at some point. I saw the pic on Facebook and thought you were stocking them - maybe you should?!

We played at Artisan Tap in Stoke on Saturday. It was absolutely rammed, "sold out" and then some! Ace night with everyone singing along. We played just the acoustic songs but that was still over 1hr45. Still, the quieter sound means it's an easier gig for me on drums. At one point I noticed the gate on the acoustic guitar fluttering and had to ask the sound engineer to turn it off. To be fair he's always fantastic, but I wonder why anyone would put a gate on an acoustic guitar in a live situation? They want to strum a chord and sustain it, and a gate will always kill that.

I'm pretty sure even my privileged and well enough off self doesn't eat enough fruit.

In my experience, less is more when it comes to playing bass in a band. In most rock/pop songs the bass tone doesn't really change at all and that's OK. Personally I always stuck to the absolute minimum - an overdrive if needed and maybe (maybe!) a chorus pedal if I was feeling particularly fancy. Better to change the tone using your hands - dig in more, play somewhere else on the neck, etc - than be endlessly fiddling with stomp boxes.

I agree with a lot of what you have to say, but in my instance I would venture that people weren't wandering past free fruit to preserve their pride or dignity. It was more because they didn't equate fresh fruit with something they would want to eat as a snack. Distinct groups in society have different priorities and preferences when it comes to food. It doesn't necessarily come down to money and what people can afford, either, although that's part of it. It's more about what people think is important, and why. And on the subject of charity and food banks, yes they shouldn't exist. The fact that they are increasingly necessary and have become an accepted part of normal life in this country is a phenomena I never expected to see in this day and age. It's part of a wider trend to blame poor and unfortunate people for their own predicament, and the revival of Victorian ideas distinguishing between the deserving and undeserving poor.

Harley Davidson domestic sales are down 17%, down 12% internationally. Japanese exports to US up 8.5% Funny thing is both Fender and HD are owned by Servco Pacific 🤣

I love your post, thanks for posting Ben. I did just want to draw a distinction in relation to your last sentence, however (and I suspect that distinction could be part of the reason this keeps coming up and is such a contentious issue). At least round here, there are some pubs that call bands, saying they're putting on a 'charity' gig; but very often, the identity of the charity isn't entirely clear, what happens to the proceeds isn't clear, and realistically the only person benefitting from others' charity is the landlord. It's incredibly unscrupulous but happens quite often. My view is that if the organiser can't immediately say a) who the charity is and b) if not the entirety of money made, what proportion of the money is going to charity, then it's probably one of those. I/we turn those down flat. Conversely, as you say, if it's all above board, and you want to support the charity, you do so by playing. Or not if you don't.

Very good post in every respect Ben, thanks 🙏

I've honestly never got on with any of my 'dream basses'. Custom orders have never worked out for me for some reason. I've always been a 'try before you buy' kind of player. I bought my main Status bass 19 years ago as a stock bass after buying [and selling off] two custom orders. Most other instruments I've bought second hand and some have become mainstay working basses that I wouldn't sell on, like my 2016 Elite Jazz, GB Spitfire, or my Status Stealth. I would like an Alembic Series 2, but they are all the money these days, so hardly likely. Maybe a Victor Wooten Fodera Monarch Yin-Yang, but I'm never really comfortable playing someone else's signature bass. Apart from that, I'll wait to see what takes my fancy next time... I will say that I'm really enjoying gigging my simple passive American Fenders at the moment and am looking forward to the completion of my Walnut/Graphite Jazz build.

Lourdes Knows - 2Pac

We drop the 30 second organ intro to Faith but otherwise it's exactly like the record.

and the Blue Moon guitar..

Im sure potential buyers of a $350 Harley Benton will now buy a $1500 US made Fender or Gibson. Having said that, Harley Davidson would be long dead if it weren't for tariffs on far better imported Japanese bikes.

"Ted clearly didn't listen to his bandmates even when they repeatedly told him that a rubber bass was not a good idea in hot climates..."