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Sometimes good things come from bad auditions. I've been trying to find a band desperate enough to want me, and had some ...interesting... experiences. Audition 1: answered an ad on JMB for a blues group. I tell them how long I've been playing - not all that long - as I want to be honest up front. I do a bit of recruiting in the day job, and know how narked I get when confronted with bovine manure. Better to be straight with them from the off. Anyway, he replies, telling me that there's a drummer lined up, plus someone on blues harp and maybe keys too. Could I learn a couple of songs and pop round for a twang? Rightio. I turn up at the BL's house and am treated to half an hour's talking about his guitar collection before we get down to business. He's provided an amp - an ancient Vox gee-tar amp that didn't look much younger than me. Hm. I'd have brought the Eden if I'd known. But I crank the low end and off we go. He's hunched over his chord chart and doesn't look up. With no drummer to lock in with, some eye contact might have been helpful. He then chases me out of the house before his wife gets back. Hmmmm. Then about a week later, I get a 'thanks but no thanks' email. Meh. Think I dodged a bullet there. Audition 2: answered an ad on JMB for a rock covers band. Again, I'm up front about my level of experience. I get their set list - wow! Fabulous! - and learn half a dozen songs, as requested. Then the audition's brought forward a week. Great. But I rock up at the appointed time - to a studio this time - to find that the BL was struggling with one of the songs I'd learnt and had to teach the singer one of the others. Oh dear. But the rest sounded good, although at the end of the evening, they said they thought it was beyond me to learn everything on the list before their next gig. They were quite decent about it though, so fair enough. Audition 3: answered an ad on JMB for another rock covers band. As before, I make it clear how much I do and don't know. I learn the requested songs and turn up to a slightly less-than-ideal studio - bare wooden floor, no sound insulation and a PA that didn't look much more powerful than my home stereo. As I'm getting set up, a guitarist walks in; he's being auditioned too. He sets up his backline - a lovely Marshall valve amp. Then the BL arrives and sets up his backline. Then off we go. The PA just about copes, but after the first song, the BL says to me, 'it needs much more bass'. Well, I was standing in front of the amp and I could hear it OK, which meant he certainly could from the other side of the room. But no sweat, up went the volume to just under half and we launched into the next song. Jesus. My amp was making the room shake. I went to turn it down and the BL said ‘no, leave it, it’s just right’. The guitarist turned up his amp as it was being drowned by mine. Not wanting to be left out, the BL did the same and we went into song number three. This time, the weedy studio PA was completely overwhelmed; all I could do was lock in with the drummer and hope for the best. Then things started to go south when the BL started playing something a bit different before stopping to tell us that we needed to follow him. By now the volume was up well past 11 and the only way to follow him was by lip-reading. The next song fell apart when he missed out an eight-bar sequence from the intro. By now, the negative vibes were starting to creep in. At the end of the evening, the BL thanked us for coming and said ‘we’ll have a chat and we'll let you know’ in a sarky voice. So much for that, then. The guitarist and I compared notes outside and we both reckoned we wouldn’t hear from them again. We swapped numbers though, and decided we’d look at doing something together if it didn’t go anywhere. After a week of radio silence, I pinged the guitarist a text and as expected, he hadn’t heard anything either. He then asked me if I was still up for getting together, as he had another guitarist and a singer who were interested. Oh, was I ever. So a few days later, the three of us (the singer couldn’t make it) assembled in a very nice studio in Cranfield. What a difference! No attitude, a lot of fun and some great songs to play. The Stooges, Black Sabbath, the Undertones, Tears For Fears, the Cult… all good stuff. Plus some originals that the guitarist had written that needed basslines added. I had a whale of a time, and when we decided to make a go of it at the end of the evening, I was on cloud nine. So I did join a band from a terrible audition. Just not the one I originally went for!

I have several spare ones. If you PM me name and address I'll pop one in the post.

With this potential project, there’s obviously an element of ‘walk before you can run’, professional quality audio etc etc probably isn’t an absolute prerequisite at this stage. As long as things aren’t too messy, and everyone is audible and understandable, it’s more about interesting content, everything else is learned along the way. I’m always happy to edit audio, that’s easy enough. Skype is just an easy way of getting started, means you’re not restricted to people who are able...and willing...to record audio via a mic into a DAW themselves.....but maybe that’s a good thing at this point?! Don’t know. Si

RE: getting sponsorship. Don't approach any potential sponsors until after all the snags have been ironed out, the podcasts have been running successfully for a while, there's some firm audience stats, a planned 'broadcast' schedule for the next 3-6 months and some quality material available to be cut down for inclusion in a sales pack. One blows one's best chance if one goes to the market too early or unprepared

Oh, what a shame. It was my elder brother the expert on these matters, but I'm afraid he left us just over a year ago. He had some remarkable pieces of rolling stock and specialised in sub-miniature mining shunter locomotives, similar to this ... Twenty minutes wouldn't have been long enough, of course, except for the briefest of overviews. There's still time to get the lowdown on armchairs, though (but don't delay too long; I'm not getting any younger ...).

I'm finally in a band with a great drummer AND a guitarist who can play quietly and I'm very grateful for that. Those who say they have to play loudly 'to get my sound' are talking crap, basically. Even rock bands can sound 'heavy' without being really loud. My view is that some people like to be loud to direct attention away from their playing, paradoxically.

Commenting on and discussing music and bass related stuff is surely what the entire forum consists of, isn’t that what we are all doing here? Perhaps we should rename the site Basschtum.

Totally off topic, but Rietveld does a beautiful solo here:

Thats some great question/answer playing with Miles and Foley on the first vid at 4.00. his playing is just wow onwards. really enjoyed that . cheers.

Yeah, some lovely stuff.

It looks like this might be a thing folks, I'm going to try and put decent pilot together with @SpondonBassed by the end of the month, so we'll see where it goes from there. I'll PM people individually to sort out the specifics. Thanks to everyone for showing an interest in this and feel free to keep posting any ideas in the mean time, but it's not the end of the world if this thread sinks, I'll be sure to bump it once the episodes out! 😁

Music for musicians. Yeeeuch. I wonder if the bass player dresses in stage gear when he's out sweeping the streets during his 9-5?

The guitarist in my country band was ousted, due to being a bit of a git (and having atrocious BO). The replacement is not as good a guitarist as the guy he replaced but a much nicer person. Harmony has replaced discord and the band is in a happy place.

The best recording session I ever did on DB was a couple of years ago now. I was (and remain) far too inexperienced to modify my technique as between live and studio work, so I just played the bass. The professional sound engineer knew exactly what he was doing, and my playing has never sounded so good. He close-mic'd my Andreas Zeller with a microphone which cost roughly twice as much as my bass. It all seemed to turn out alright.

Done, as best as I can.

Practice practice practice. It always pays off. Heeheehee

Ah fair enough, I think I'm just defining slickness with a different threshold but I totally agree with that. I'm a freelance audio engineer on-top of my part-time day job, I'm not just a hobbyist, the last job I did was for the "The 8th Asian Awards" and I've done a tone of audio restoration work and production on different podcasts. Plus I'm a fairly eloquent and charismatic fellow too on the sly, 😜🤣 so i'm up for putting a pilot together if folk are cool with that? Personally I think https://appear.in/ is the way to go for the first punt, it's like Skype or google hangouts but with less delay and better audio. That's if everyone's cool with me capturing all the audio at my end to minimize fuss for this first pop at it. If we want to go for better audio after then; we could use something like http://www.pamela.biz/ and everyone capture audio at their ends and we comp it afterwords but that means we'd have to use Skype. If no one objects to me kinda taking the rains for the pilot would you @SpondonBassed be up for co-hosting? We could do a few segments and then interview @Chownybass? Providing your still up for it Chowny? Then once its all recorded I'll do a rough edit and possibly pass it to you @project_c to do a QC listen through to catch anything I've missed? Then if you'd pass it back to me I'll master the audio and bosh; post it up here and see what folk reckon, get some feedback on if we should/how to proceed with it? If it get's "green lit" then figure out who's going to run the Libsyn and the admin side of things. What do folk think? I by no means wish to dictate what should happen to everyone, I want it to be BC's podcast not mine. You just posted this after I'd typed up my previous gambit so for the record I'm up for traveling too if in-person would be a preference but it's definitely less doable if we'd like to make it regular. I'm in Manchester not sure where everyone else is?

You should update your above-avatar job description to full time!!

Took the TKP to band practice last night, it plays like a dream and the pickup sounds terrific. A P bass with tone that looks stunning - what more could you ask for.

A lot of gigs I play these days (and for the last dozen or so years) are under the cosh with neighbours complaining about excessive noise. My solution would be that if the neighbours complain about the noise, the band causing the nuisance would have their gear impounded. Sold for charity, crushed or just set on fire, I don't care but IMO inconsiderate bands should be the ones suffering rather than another gig losing its licence and everyone else suffering as a result.

I once discussed joining a band with someone - their precise requirements were that I play exactly the lines they told me to and also drive him and the singer to and from gigs as neither of them drove. That was a tough gig to turn down!

It would really be quite amusing if any profanties were overdubbed with the same swear filter as here

Have you come over from GuitarChat to insult us, or what..?

Negativity on a gig night. beaching about various gripes with the band is fine, do it at rehearsal or a meeting, don't do it while I'm out trying to have a good time and DEFINITELY not while we're on stage you massive grumpy "£$£&%^*%&^

Just swapped 6 string guitar for the bass as just landed a gig with a busy local covers band .Kit so far = 2 Fender PBass ,2xGK 2 by 10 cabs and a Peavey Tour 450 head .

I liked Foley’s piccolo bass playing with Miles. Benny Reitveld was playing regular bass.

Tell Mark that ped sent you 😂

My current fave is Broughton's Terraformer. Breaks up nicely, from light OD to pretty gainy stuff, no low-end loss, and so many tones hence its 3EQ, blend and gain combinations. The tricky part is setting the blend on the fly as it has a major effect on output level. But it doesn't sound 'layered' at all. Nice form-factor too. Second one would be Grizzly bass, Swell B-Peg too, which is less flexible, bigger and has specific power needs, but sounds damn right !

If the venue is SO dodgy*, that I feel I may need use my bass as a weapon, I take the Squier. * i.e. it's in Dundee

Another suggestion re: audio quality - while it is true that you'll get the best quality if everyone records their own voice separately, there may be times when this isn't feasible. On these occasions, I'd suggest using Discord instead of Skype. I know that it's not quite as ubiquitous, but the transmission quality is far, far better. S.P.

Here’s ours: https://www.tildawn.co.uk/ Our guitarist put it together on Wix; it’s not bad but it does the job. I think it was designed more to be viewed on devices, rather than on a desktop. To be honest the vast majority of our enquiries and interaction come via our Facebook page.

Really simple! So the drive pedal is the absolutely superb Billy Sheehan Signature Drive Deluxe. On the face of it seems like a fairly simple pedal, but it allows blending of driven and dry tones, but also by careful use of the tone control (which is more like a swept EQ than a treble attenuator) and the phase switch, you can get a wide variety of tones from 'peaky mids' to a scoop at around 500hz. The drive channel has an HPF built in to it already too. The compressor on board is also infinitely adjustable internally too so very easy to emulate that valve amp compression. There's also a boost button for extra bite when you need it. The IR I was using was sat on my Helix, but you could absolutely use the Mooer Radar to load your IR of choice. Or, if the budget doesn't stretch, I recommend the Mooer Micro DI (I actually have a Fender rebadged version) that features an EQ curve that sort of sounds like a 4x12, yet there's no bass drop off, so works perfectly for us bassists too. I do also have a micro EQ pedal that I have used a hot glue gun on to set the knobs in a specific position, but I've found that I am not really using that. The whole lot goes direct to PA as I am on IEMs virtually all the time now.

If you get the chance, Limehouse Lizzy is the Thin Lizzy tribute band to see.

Quality, mate; sheer quality. S'not my fault; it's genetic. I'd claim perfection but for this infernal excess of modesty I'm cursed with.

Think it would be easy enough to record. You can just record Skype into a DAW given the right interface, although not sure if that’s still the case if you have more than two people on the call. Will investigate when I get the chance (currently on holiday). Si

And as always JMB is absolutely stuffed with flakes & fantasists, plus it has arguably the worst search engine in the entire history of IT. I still use it occasionally because, as you say, it has a large user base, but it ain't fun and it sure ain't pretty. No idea where you are Bassix but you may have a decent jamming / open mic scene near you.

Great thread and I rarely if ever read every post of any thread. This last audition whilst not hellish was I have to admit bloody nerve wracking . The practise room is a little annex off the BL open plan kitchen. Everything's setup, tiny muffled kit, keys, couple of amps all crammed into this very small space and I'm starting to think...blimey this is cosy. We sit down and are literally rubbing shoulders with each other, not an inch of room between us. BL asks me what I want to do and I say well lets go from the top of No 1 set list. ( their a 60's tribute outfit, and they do three sets of twenty each!) First tune is the Beatles "I'm A Looser" with that fab two part opening harmony. I haven't played for quite a while and was almost knocked off my stool by the power and tightness of that opening vocal.....christ these guys are good I think. Then the BL wife who's on keys starts warbling and the whole thing goes stratospheric. Not bad for a bunch of 70 yr olds. I'm 58.... To be sat in the middle of a four part harmony reaching for the sky in a room you couldn't swing a mouse in left me feeling emotionally drained....quite an experience. I've subsequently learned they've been doing this for 40 yrs and the front guy had a No1 record in South Africa.....no reason to doubt it really. Our first gig is this weekend ( a mini festival apparently)...can't wait if a little apprehensive. They give the bass loads of frequency space, its all very jangly and trebly as would be expected, so no room at all for any mistakes.....yikes!

You'll soon get used to the way that you can't walk past it without pausing to pluck the E string ...

Great thread! I tour with 'ELO Again'. It's a lot of fun. I transcribed the originals from the records, but we do a couple of tracks with live arrangements, so for those the basslines sometimes differ. For a few of the more uptempo rock and roll ones, I don't play them note for note - keeps it a bit more fresh and exciting. Here's a video I recently made showing my bass rig set up for that gig!