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Yes, I have to say that my trip to visit Will at Bass Bros was well worth it. The most expensive trip of it's kind [ever], but definitely worth it.

Given the thing that appears to be dictating the dimensions of said bag may be the double-bass stand, I would always advocate looking at Gator bags. Their website is nightmarish from a navigational/user perspective (Come on, guys! It's 2025. Do better!). That said, a search on Andertons and Gator throws up plenty of stuff. I think it's more a case (no pun) of finding something that suits sizewise, rather than discounting something that purports to, for instance, be a keyboard bag.

That looks lush

Glad it’s not just me. I’ve let it go for a couple of years, admittedly it’s not been a big deal with our old set, but we now have a few songs where its very noticable. I dont play bass in this band, but to do what you suggest above id have to teach my bass player how to tune his bass first……😂

I’m sure someone will come along to better it 🤣x

Soul II Soil

I drove to Will at Bass Bros, thats a 350-mile round trip for me from down here. It was well worth it, I must add. 👌

Mondo Bondage - The Tubes -

Oh my…

Umm, Crowthorne to Queen's Club, Hammersmith. 80 mile round trip. Lakland DJ5, black sparkle. What was I thinking.

I love that sellers shop, he has some very cool and interesting instruments 👍

I was quite surprised when I started looking more closely at PUP positions that there's more variation, for example among Fender Precisions, than I'd always believed/assumed to be the case. I suspect there's as much rhetoric as science in this space?

Yes, I was thinking it all looks like nice enough hardware, but not £800 worth.

Looks like you're missing a finger or two as well!

Slap and Tickle - Squeeze

It really cheeses me off too. No drummer I have ever played with ever thought it was a problem, until I brought it up. Then they looked at me with a stupid look on their faces. Have you ever showed your drummer how you can tune your bass guitar to the oscillation of his snare drum, it's an interesting trick.....and illustrates the problem of intrusive snare drum rattle pretty well.

Well it’s clearly a cheap style copy of the one Pino played. Can’t tell much else from the pic.

As I've ready posted my (embarrassing) felt puppet picture, and it really is about AI generated content (and not a gratuitous excuse to post 'something what I done', honest...), the band generated blisster pack action figures of ourselves which I used to make a poster for our next gig. It still can't generate a Fender with 4 string, our guitarest isn't that fat, and the drummers legs aren't really that short!

Turns up often in Christian Contemporary Music. I mainly play in church.

It sounds like you've been playing with amateurs. You either know how to play a gig or you don't. In my decades long playing career I've played over 5000 gigs. Whether I'm playing a multimillion $ Broadway Musical production, local pub gig or recording in a studio the same principles always apply. You play at the appropriate volume for the room and situation. As a rule of thumb in most situations the drummer tends to dictate the overall volume of the band which is why I find it puzzling that in many situations where everyone plays direct, they use an acoustic drum kit.

My background is in traditional folk music, and modes are the bread and butter of that type of music. Most British folk songs are in the Dorian/Aeolian modes or the Mixolydian mode. I say Dorian/Aeolian because a weird thing I've noticed is that a lot of traditional melodies don't use the sixth degree of the scale which would differentiate between the two, so it's not always obvious. I've often wondered if modes came instinctively to our ancestors, because the vast majority of people who came up with these songs would have had no musical education whatsoever, and were simply playing and singing the notes which felt right to them. I originally learned the modes in terms of playing the white keys on a piano starting on different notes, which makes a lot of sense if you're a piano player (as I used to be!) but not much help at learning to apply the modes in practice or understand how they're constructed. So more recently I have been thinking more in terms of 'a major scale with a flattened 3rd and 7th' etc, and that's been much more helpful. That said, I'm not very technically minded as a musician and thinking about scales too much makes my brain hurt, so I usually work with the modes in a more intuitive way. They each have their own character or emotional mood, which can be very powerful to experience. What works especially well with folk music is to use a drone (root or root and fifth) and then explore how the melody creates a harmony against it. The different modes do this in such a different way it is fascinating to experience their different characters. I love modes, even though I'm still a long way off properly understanding them!

I’m playing around with this project at present