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Silly question, never having owned a Mustang - I've never had to shield any of my basses with hum cancelling pickups. I was under the impression that the purpose of the split Mustang pickup was to cancel hum, same as on a P bass, is this not the case?

It’s really cool actually, a really nice addition, especially for small boards where a full Stomp is over kill and you just want a little extra flexibility. I’m always torn, I love a board this compact but I always end up scaling up after a week at which point I may as well pop the GT1000core back on.

Add a switch to the volume control pedal, activated when your heel is completely down, that switches on an illuminated sign saying "PUT THE VOLUME BACK UP!".

A 105 low string should be fine, plenty of E strings are 105 and they're tuned a tone higher than what you're looking at.

The Thursday night wedding trend continues, another Hey Yahs gig, this time at Lyde Court just outside of Hereford. Nice venue to play, big stage, loads of plugs, easy load in and a brand new FBT PA install to use. Free bar meant the crowd were very excitable. One or two tech glitches but nothing to spoil the evening, out by 11:30pm. Nicely packed van and drove home sober.

It's weird for me because everyone in the band drinks except me. Daryl

I like playing music in a band because it allows me a space where I'm in complete control. If I'm impaired or in some altered state I'm no longer in control. Daryl

No, but it must have been close from the reaction.

We Do What We're Told (Milgram's 37) - Peter Gabriel

I'm not sure why that's relevant to what I posted. Someone asked about the price of a 90s Korean P-bass, I said what mine cost in 1998, then worked out what it would cost in today's money and compared it to the equivalent current model and noted they were more or less the same. That's it. I wasn't referring anything back to that post about instruments in the US from the 60s other than to say it gave me the idea to work out the equivalent current price.

I should've bought that HX one. Is it awesome?

A DUI (driving under the influence) in the States after fines and legal fees could easily cost you 10k. No thanks. Daryl

Very true. Wealthy weekend warriors - lawyers, doctors and other professional types - buy an awful lot of premium instruments. They are rarely capable of using them for their intended purpose, but we shouldn't knock it, because it's thanks to them that many instrument manufacturers stay afloat. Real musicians tend to find and stick with a few instruments that we really like and change them relatively rarely. When we do, we often buy something old and used. Fender and Spector aren't going to stay in business because I have a couple of nice older basses from them, for example. The really wealthy collect vintage instruments. Few can play them decently or even competently/at all. Some years ago, some US multi-millionaire placed ad's in a number of the instrument magazines, such as Frets, looking to buy vintage stuff. The ad's, which included much bragging about how well he'd done and how much of the folding stuff he'd accumulated, carried a photo of him, wearing jeans with knife edge creases down the legs (always a sign that someone is deeply dodgy), sitting on the bonnet of the Batmobile (he'd apparently bought it from the film company), holding a '59 Les Paul and a Gibson Citation jazz box. He was clutching them like shovels - it was obvious he didn't even know how to hold them. He saw them purely as investments. I thought of parcelling up a dog turd and sending it to him, with a note explaining that he would probably be better able to use it than a fine vintage instrument, but I decided it probably wasn't wise.

People today are not drinking the way they used to. I’m driving home , and have to expect I might well be tested. One beer is my limit. It’s simple. I’m more likely to just have ginger ale. But I do remember a time when most musicians were as bombed as the audience at the end of the night. Those days are gone. And everybody would hop in their car and head home. Frightening.

this is the other driver for me to use in ears, Floor monitors are so depenedant upon the acoustics in the pokey little 'stage areas' we often play in. As is our bass sound whe using back line. IEM's give you pretty consistendt monitoring.

Very much so. The problem stems from a few things but mainly the bass from the PA. However good your in ears are they are probably only going to reduce the ambient sound by 20db give or take 5db, maybe a little better if you have customs. the trouble is that it is often less than this for bass frequencies. The PA meanwhile is omnidirectional in the sub bass frequencies of 40-160Hz so if you are 2m behind the PA you hear s much bass as if you were standing 2m directly in front of the PA. If your PA is banging out 110db of bass and your IEMs are trying to feed you 90db of your monitor signal then with 20db of attenuation you already have 90db of bass from your PA leaking past the IEMs and you need no bass at all. (very rough figures here but you get the point. On top of this most venues have you hard up in the corner of the room and in spaces prone to low frequency resonances. So, I now HPF the bass at 80 Hz and then also shelve it down a minimum of 6db below 200Hz for my in ear channel. I also boost the mids a little and roll off the highs at 3kHz. If anything in most venues that still leaves me with a bass heavy sound so I'm considering raising the HPF even higher. I'm not claiming any expertise here though so hopefully others will come in with suggestions. The same thing is true if you are using floor monitors so maybe we should run a separeate thread.

Who nicked six machine heads off the middle one?

This is for the guys in this for money. Not so much for those primarily in this for fun. I think this guy is credible. I always thought if you were on tour on a bus with a popular signed act you'd be rolling in cash. Let me know what you think Daryl

I'm in Wylam, happy to go with you if you want a more experienced eye. Edit - nope, not on Friday though! Good luck!

I did ask if he was open to offers, and he said not yet as it had just been listed. Might still ask on the day, no harm in asking.