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I plugged my new BAM200 into this speaker cabinet (Sound Town 2x10 also new) and am getting very little sound out of it. This is with both gain and volume set at max. Is this a mismatch or is something faulty? https://www.soundtown.com/products/bgc210or Okay I am officially an idiot. After swapping out amps, cables and then basses, the last was what made me realize that the battery for the active circuitry in the first bass (also brand new) tested was dead. But that brings up another question though, how do I keep the battery from draining so quickly (I'm new to active basses)? Will unplugging the instrument cable from the bass shut down the circuitry and safe battery life?

Has to be James for me. My brother’s love of Motown throughout the 60’s left an indelible impression on my musical journey in my teens, and it was the bass on these records that had me hooked more than anything else. I was the odd kid at secondary school who liked what many thought of then as ‘girl’s music’. Most of my mates were into dreadful prog and rock , whereas I loved soul, r’n’b and rock and roll along with a lot of chart stuff too. Stayed the same for decades, and hearing James ( and his contemporaries like Bob Babbit) still has the same effect on me today.

Agreed, it does happen, but that doesn't explain the lack of communication from the seller. Mark

The mighty Familyman Barrett. Then in my later teens i discovered Stanley Clarke

Defo loads of these, and this guy. Probably quite difficult to get but if you know you know

Might be that it sold but buyer never paid? Happens a lot on eBay 🤞

Hawkwind era Lemmy... and Burke Shelly of Budgie

You're depping with a band. . . . and you're saying you won't play certain songs? IMO the job we take on when we agree to dep in a band, is to play their set to a level that they don't notice their regular bassist is missing. . . . period. That includes all the songs on the list. Whether we like the numbers or not is irrelevant.

I just picked up an older-model RCF ART 735-A on Gumtree, for a pretty good price of £325. For comparison, the current version is £899 new. I've previously owned a 732-A (1x12") and that was too loud... so I imagine this 735-A (1x15") is going to destroy everything 🤘 The seller has a second one for sale if anyone's interested: https://www.gumtree.com/p/speakers/rcf-art-73a-speaker-one-only-/1479168783 Size comparison with a QSC CP12:

Mmm... Tea...

Discovering Japan ～ Graham Parker & The Rumour

Yes but Quo is sugar honey iced tea and simply knowing that is enough to swerve the “problem”

Guitarist and I nearly came a cropper with exactly that on Saturday. We went up the front side by side for the guitar solo in The Final Countdown, feet up and planted on a monitor that felt it like to was made of cardboard. Bore no weight whatsoever. Heft-less one might say. I think we managed to style it out 😎

By general band member agreement on the night, Mustang Sally's gig on Saturday was 'the worst we've done', but paradoxically the punters loved us and the 80-year old birthday boy whose party it was seemed delighted to hand over the wedge at the end. I've been trying to work out what went wrong to make us feel as we did - we're normally very tight. The venue didn't help - a large sports hall with high ceiling and a solid floor - took ages to get the PA right, by which I mean not feeding back randomly - after a generous 2 hour set-up. Maybe the other thing upsetting our vibe was the over-ambitious inclusion of several new numbers which I'm ashamed to say were under-rehearsed but thrown into the mix on the basis that 'the endings and verse/chorus structures will sort themselves out'. That's a recipe for disaster, as we found out. 'Footloose' is a speedy number, but not SR71 Blackbird-on-afterburner fast, leading to a triple- instead of a double-coda then a collapse into a silence that would have gone down a storm in a Trappist monastery. As for 'Money for Nothing' with me on bass+lead vocals, I actually got it all right only to find that after the last verse about banging on the bongos our gitrist had forgotten the need for a final chorus and had gone straight into that riff instead, leaving the rest of us wondering how to stop, but no worries, it just dribbled out like an old guy's piddle in a handy hedge after one too many Mackesons... Perhaps I'm being too hard on us - it was first gig for a month due to cancellations, I was feeling very tired and wobbly due to some meds I'd had to take that day, there's angst about the new PA which some members feel is no improvement on the old one but £4k dearer; in the end I guess it was just another day at the office, to be forgotten as quickly as possible!

Tried to start a Motley Crue tribute band up several years ago, we really were trying to replicate them musically and visually, after lots of auditions for the drummer, Tommy Lee, we had to give up as none of them had a really large penis 😄

Comparing the two Pink Floyd tributes I've seen in the last year, one was Australian Pink Floyd, 'nuff said. The other a local band with multiple keyboard players, a woman on keys and main vocals. Two guitarists, one of whom looks like Roger Waters(!) The other keys players doubled on sax and bass. Now the interesting thing is, I enjoyed the local band more as it felt more like a real gig, they clearly enjoyed being there and that was infectious. APF was like watching a musical to the extent it felt like a pastiche to me, and there was almost no audience interaction. I've also seen an excellent new Steely Dan tribute. They had ten people, eight of whom were wearing check shirts. They can't have eight Donald Fagens...

For me, a lot have already been listed here but this one was bigger than most to me in my teens. Simon Gallup, I just loved his sometimes melodic, sometimes frantic, but always driving the song approach to bass.