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As a tribute, we needed a Showreel, so we did a mash of DIY and pro. Recorded audio ourselves at a rehearsal space (individually not as a live take), guitarist's brother is a bit of a whizz at recording. Went to a theatre to mime to the track on a stage, where a guy did mate's rates for multiple shots of video. The guitarist has the know how to then edit the audio and video to this end product. Probably cost us £300 to rent spaces and pay for video recording but would have cost x3 that if our band didn't have the knowledge and contacts to bring it together.

Tube Snake Boogie - ZZ Top

Love Me Like A Reptile - Motorhead

I have to stop playing too much. The Bluegrasss band has two booking agents and we’ve got 60 dates in the book, including 4 European trips. As a result, I’ve canned all other projects (aside from a Blue Note jazz band) as it’s not fair on the family.

This'll be our biggest challenge!

This is excellent advice. Last function-style band I was in we rented a studio and paid for a professional to film and edit it. Paid itself back within 2 gigs.

Another fine Bass Chatter. Great comms and no messing about.

A band I am rehearsing with recently made a showreel. The BL has his sights set on theatres, for which you need something that an agent can send to a venue. First we made multi-track recordings of a couple of rehearsals, and I edited together acceptable (but not perfect) versions of the 6 songs we’d chosen. It helped a lot that the drummer plays an electronic kit! We then hired a small theatre and a videographer came along and filmed us miming to our live-in-the-studio recordings. We got mates’ rates because the BL knows him and he is trying to break into band showreels. Afterwards the videographer edited together a draft and there then ensued considerable back-and-forth over what did or didn’t work. I think it’s finished now and will be launched in the New Year.

I love the caterpillar one 😄

They look brilliant, what a great find!

Have you missed out on any gigs because you didn't have a show reel? That's probably the most important question to ask. If you do think you need one, then do it properly. A badly produced showreel will probably put more venues off than no showreel at all. Unless you have lots a spare time and are interested in learning all about filming and video editing, pay for a professional. IMO you need good sound - the ambient live mix picked up by the camera is not going to cut it. The band need to look like a band and not a bunch of middle aged blokes who happen to have picked some instruments and the venue where you film should be as undistracting as possible. Good luck if you decide to go for it.

I wouldn't have used the word shocked. I would have said surprised. A lot of the Artists they have on are not musicians. They play bass in bands.

If you post the dimensions of the circuit and battery I can tell you for sure, but I suspect the answer is no

Two quite different jams to finish the year: Sunday's was very busy; we went for 3 hours rather than the usual 2.5 and still couldn't fit everyone in. Lots of horn players, singers etc. A saxophonist commented that he liked my ballad playing on bass. There were some good tunes called. Wednesday's had various people call in sick at the last minute. We ended up with: - Horn player good at reading heads from the real book but not confident at soloing. - Gypsy jazz guitarist good at comping from iReal but not confident at soloing. - Drummer who is learning the trumpet and was keen to step away from the drums and play some heads. Not able to do trumpet solos. - Me (unamplified DB). - Er... - That's it. Somehow, we were accosted by pub patrons who said they enjoyed it. There were, out of necessity, more bass solos than I would have liked.

My band has local pub gigs every couple of weeks but we're now trying to up our game a bit and think a decent showreel would help - but we haven't really got a clue how to do it. What have you done? Just record it yourself/friends in the audience on phones and edit it together yourself, or pay someone to do it professionally? Was it worthwhile or a waste of time and money?

In 1975, when fantasy themes were prominent in rock music (think Roger Dean’s classic Yes album covers and H.R. Giger’s eerie pre-Alien artwork on 1973 Emerson, Lake & Palmer epic Brain Salad Surgery), artist Bruce Wolfe illustrated six surreally colorful and cleverly conceived fairy tale-themed Fender advertisements. Elaborately trippy in imagery and copy, these popular ads ran in 1975 and 1976 in publications such as Guitar Player, Rolling Stone and National Lampoon, and in Fender’s highly collectible Collected Works of Fender 1976 catalog. They represent what many consider as Fender ad design at its most artistic. At the bottom of some of the ads, they printed, "For a full-color poster of this ad, send $1 to Fender, Box 3410, Dept.575, Fullerton CA 92634." These must have been the ones the public could order.

Thanks for the info. I must have confused the 500 and 800 where this happens. I suppose it isn't much of an issue in real terms as you mention. Good to know though!

The sad fact is that without the McCartney connection Höfner would have probably folded decades ago. Even so there's a limit to how many "Beatle Basses" they can sell, and they have obviously reached now.

Banknotes will be replaced by Crypto and blockchain in the next 5 years and yes a blockchain ledger is totally traceable.