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Certainly odd. Lol

That bass drive is a odd one. Its so hot. I use it as my dirt but with the gain at 8 and mixed quite low.

Exactly this

What if theyre vintage? Or made of tone-plastic, or fender-badged? Surely they would be truly magical from the moment of manufacture and defy all reasonable expectations from first use? ✨

I play in two tributes; one I do purely as I love the band (Cheap Trick) and the 2nd I joined as I liked the band (INXS) and it was an ideal opportunity to play better/bigger gigs (but not necessarily for more money). A couple of observations. Be sure you like the material, nothing worse than playing a couple of hours of stuff you don't like. Network with anyone you know in a tribute band, you'll likely get any gig/band through contacts. Be prepared (if you aren't already) to use IEM and compromise on 'your' sound because you may be doing gigs where you have a 15-30 minute turnaround with other bands. Don't take for granted you'll be getting good money; we've done gigs where I'd have been paid more for a pub covers gig. Some gigs 'might' end up being percentages of ticket sales (your band can of course refuse these). If you choose to do a tribute that is often covered, you'd better be significantly better than the local competition. If you choose a less obvious tribute, you could end up with very few gigs... it's a fine line. The singer/frontperson is where it is at (unless it is something like VH), so you'd be a numpty to join a band that doesn't have that main ingredient. If you elect to play 'Fake Festivals' you might need to travel considerable distances for gigs (does anyone in the band work on a Fri/Sat/Sun?), you are likely to be ofeered a series of gigs and you can't cherry pick otherwise the organiser will need to work twice as hard... and they don't like that!

If you set the pre dirty, you can stack it into the dist block, and also use the drive from the bass amps. On mine I'm using the bb preamp into the gain of the mesa amp block. but for me the bass drive is rubbish - as I can't seem to get enough low end for my taste

Really enjoying mine now I have it. I think I prefer the dirt in this compared to my GX-100. It's a shame you can't stack dirt though. And the Mesa amp sounds great with a bit of EQ changes to suit the bass. The reverbs and delays aren't as good as my Boss unit though.

P bass Rotosound swing bass 50-110 tone fully open slight drive with my Marshall DBS amps eq set as a british frown rather than california smile through 1 or 2 410s

Ooh, that might be a short term fix. Something to consider

2010 Mesa Catalogue 2012 Fender Magazine 2010 & 2013 Aguilar Catalogues I'm happy to post them free in the UK

Down in a hole - Alice in Chains

yeah - as noted above, it's all about the contacts. My main band atm is an Ozzy/ Sabbath trib that I've been doing for 12 years or so. We started small and have built it slowly over that time, but due to the sad news in July, things have been mental. Also through some of the contacts I've made, I pick up work depping with a Metallica trib show among others. IMO You're better off finding an iconic band that ideally doesn't tour here or very rarely comes here and forming a band around that. JMB can be useful as can forums similar to this

Received a message from my sister in law asking me to email as she wanted me to do a favour. I replied positively, and then received this. It immediately smelt a bit odd, then I discovered my wife had also received the same email (allegedly from her sister) Contacted her sister, who told us that she'd just discovered that everyone in her address book had just received the same message 🙁 Be careful out there.

Yes there are some 'genre' tributes but I think it can be trickier to pitch. For instance, if you did a Britpop show, you would somehow need to differentiate your act from a thousand pub bands knocking out covers of Oasis, Pulp, Blur etc. It's important to have a unique selling point (USP). If all this sounds very business-oriented, that's because it is!

Let Down - Radiohead

@Woody1957 any progress?

To add to this and illustrate just one of the points above, you don't necessarily need to "tribute" a specific artist, there are two (that I know of) acts out there in direct competition that tribute the genre that is the punk and new wave scene (1976-83), there's Punk Off! and rePunK'd. In some cases they play the same venues but well spaced on the calendar. Both have well-produced showreels and they are very savvy with social media. Ticket prices get up to 35 quid for theatres and the amount of graft that goes into the production, planning and stagecraft exceeds that of a function/covers band by an order of magnitude. There's up front investment as a business proposition long before any profits of ticket sales come in and at that level someone needs to be "on it" pretty much full time.