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Just checked out Mousechat and someone has posted the following: "Took the kids to church as per normal and after a nice meal by the river we returned home to find that some absolute animal has stolen our house! We moved in three years ago and after extensive renovations had just got it the way we wanted. Really, you wouldn't expect this to happen in Hammersmith..."

Just had this little beauty pop up on my screen... I likes! Squier Jaguar H in ORANGE!! Oh yes... Christmas list has started,

The Eurovision result clearly demonstrated the sympathy that many Europeans feel for a fellow nation oppressed by a malicious, dictatorial regime. Ukraine also benefited from the same phenomenon.

Not having gigged DB since 2019, my gigbag has been in storage in my garage since then. Imagine my surprise when I pulled it yesterday to discover that it has been half-eaten and ravaged by mice. I feel a new commercial opportunity for mice-relic'd bass gear under the Road(ent)worn banner. Kerboom tish

I've done a fairly substantial gear purge recently, goodbye to the two 115s and the AudioKinesis TC112AF that served me so well for eleven years. So I now have this DIY 110 job a local friend built: It was built to fit a G-K MB500 head but I was gifted it without a head installed. The little Traynor SB-200H is a great fit for the semi-acoustic weekly jams I play. The tiltback wedge piece serves as a hinged access door to the amp's back panel and there's room for a couple of cables back there as well. And then on the other end there's a new sheriff in town: That's an AudioKinesis TC118AF, which also has a secondary back firing tweeter. Fairly big and absolutely huge sounding, but at 46Lbs it's an easy enough one hand carry over moderate distances, and balances well on the two side handles for longer schleps. I had been coveting one of these cabs for quite a few years and the owner of this one reached out to me when it didn't move locally for him. He happened to be driving within an hour of my place last week and I was able to go pick up without taking him more than a few minutes out of his way. My new tube amp should fit on top quite nicely once I finally get it all bolted together.

A shrewed investment, for sure

Shove Cats The Cure

Maybe Rat Scabies could be interested in it?

Got most of the bathroom fitted and some painting done. Had a few issues... the painter sprayed the room and either forgot to seal the plaster or did it poorly, the paint where the walls meets the ceiling has started to peel so they've had to sand it back and redo it. Also the splashwalls for the shower have been provided by B&Q in the incorrect orientation so they'll be funding removal and re-installation of new panels. All that being said, it's moving forward!

I Wanna Knee Your Dog ～ The Stooges

Of course, the question should be - “is the OP happy with the solution?” if so, jobs a goodun.

Millions of UK viewers, that’s why it’s still on. pretty much all of my UK facebook friends were either at ‘eurovision parties’ at theirs/friends houses or were watching it and live-posting their opinions.

I can think of two good reasons to have you monitor mix for IEMs under your personal control. Your left ear and your right ear. All you need is one incompetent engineer and it is over.

Unscrew the socket mount to the bass and then pull the entire socket out of the bass. Then on the side there is a retaining screw. Undo that and keep it safe. The black plastic part will now slide out of the metal housing The red plastic release button has a spring under it - lift away the red plastic and remove the spring. Then put the red plastic button back where it was, and re-assemble. Job done!

I still got good cakeage, but not until the end of the service. Fortunately there was home-made banana cake and muffins left which went very nicely with a mug of tea. The music turned up late (2 songs Friday night, 2 Saturday night), but still enough time to grab a listen to versions on YouTube. Fortunately the best guitarist/leader is a wizard with a capo and substituting odd chords so we could play off the sheet music with no issues. It’s all about the congregational singing anyway, so a few flubs in the music is irrelevant as long as we are confident and keep going! Went well, all considered and everyone was happy with the fuller sound of the music. I loved it. I also got volunteered to play at an open-air public service we are doing for the Jubilee as part of the local celebrations. That will be rehearsed though.

Baited breath??? I suppose as long as the tunes have a hook, that would be ok.

Last night's gig:

All plastered up and windows in...

Looking for a balanced XLR for my rack set up. These any good? 😂 https://www.mcru.co.uk/product/the-ultimate-balalnced-xlr-cables/

Whilst I am not a fan of bass solos I love songs that have bass being used as a melodic instrument. The below are some of my favourites for this, anyone else have any good examples of this kind of thing? [Youtube] Great intro bassline on this and gets pretty funky around 1.32 [Youtube] Bass starts around 40-ish seconds in to the song [Youtube] [Youtube]

I am in a gigging 5 piece rock (n roll) band aged 67 to 78. I suspect we all secretly think we're still amazing super-doods, and despite the odd wrinkle, creak and groan we are no less spearheading the revolution than we were 60 years ago, and with music that was and is the mutts if only young people would wake up to it. An alternative view is that we're just relics of our era, no more or less, just as music hall and early ragtime were for us when we were young (it's about the about the same time gap). If you're a younger BCer, maybe in your twenties, how do you view us ageing rockers?

Hmm...

I found a couple of photos recently which I thought I’d share, I don’t know if they might be of interest to any of you. It’s my dad, Martyn Gibson, who played bass in the early sixties, before marriage and fatherhood took over. Dad played in a band in Stafford from 1963 to 1965, initially they were called The Countdowns, later The Sneakers, and they played originals and covers, a bit of RnB (Ray Charles etc). They played all around the Midlands. They supported Johnny Kidd and The Pirates, and often played with a band from Leicester who went one to become some of Showaddywaddy. My dad’s first bass was (possibly) a Hagstrom PB-24-G; from my research they were also branded Kent and Selmer but he can’t remember and the headstock isn’t visible in order to identify it properly, but as The Beatles became popular he splashed out on a Hofner 500/1. The shop in Stafford (H.E.Parkes & Sons of St Marys Gate, Stafford) ordered it direct from Hofner in Germany with a hard case for forty pounds (or guineas, he can’t remember). How I wish he’d kept it! He had a Vox amp (didn’t everyone then?) but he can’t remember exactly which model.

I cannot see any reference to the drugs supplied to make you believe that a cable costing just south of grand will improve your sound. This is utter rowlocks.

I've only just started the flattening process on the headstock, but I have done a couple more flattening rounds on the main neck area. Basically, when I flatten the coats(wet sand to take out the ridges down to the bottom of the dips and valleys), I have to be making sure it is only previous varnish levels I'm removing and not wood - with black, even the slightest catch will show as a light mark. And so I apply 3-4 coats, left to fully dry in between each, to start with and only then start the flattening and recoating stages. I reckon the neck length itself is 2-3 flatten-and-recoat stages away from being OK. With the back of the headstock, it's probably still 5 cycles to go :

There was some discussion about this on BassRat earlier. Opinion is split as to whether Stentor or Gewa bags taste better. Of course, some of the more hardcore types are saying that hard cases taste best and only wimps eat gigbags.

Agreed, one of my pet peeves too. Having said that, my Sei has blue side leds, specified by the previous owner. My monitors at work have yellow tape over the blue leds.

Dace Of Our Lives - Queen

I own basses I love playing so those are the only criteria wherever I’m playing, in church or elsewhere. So that’s the basis of my choice. I’ll caveat that various circumstances mean I’ve not played in church or pretty much anywhere else since lockdown - it may mean that we will need to move church when we get back in the pews, but that’s another story… However, the bass I play most will be my 1985 Wal Custom bass… just because it’s great . That’s probably 60 or 70% of the time. Another big chunk would be my 1979 Wal Pro bass, but I’d be happy playing my Aria Pro 2 SB700 or Frankenjazz and have on occasion when the fancy took me. All great basses. I didn’t use any pedals for many decades except maybe a touch of chorus sometime. Since 2014, when we briefly tried going IEM and amp free (it never stuck when WL changed, fantastic sound guy moved on and guitarist/singers revolted/refused), I’ve built a modest pedalboard… Charts are all on OnSong in transposable form. I took the approach that each pedal would be there for a particular result that I wanted to achieve and it has developed to the board attached below... Here's how I use them... PolyTune Tuner - obvs but this is also my mute for unplugging between sets since I use active basses. Little Lehle Loop Switcher. Places the effects in a loop between the tuner and Sansamp so I can have a straight through sound when not using any particular effects (most of the time to be honest). Then when switched on, the signal goes out of the Lehle into the... EHX Bass Soul Food O/D - specifically a low gain structure OD to add a small amount of "hair" and mild crunchy break up to rockier tunes. I'm not a fan of distortion on bass. But it's also used in conjunction with... CaliforniWah Envelope Filter - there are a few soulful/nu-gospel songs we do which benefit from a little funk/wah on them (or at least one of the occasional W/Ls who chooses those songs likes a few of them with it - to be used sparingly). Also use it on our version of Hezekiah Walker's "Every Praise" for a similar funky sound. But this is mostly used in conjunction with the OD for some synth-bass type tones on more EDM influenced tunes such as Let It Be So, Alive, Let Praise Awaken. Personally I'd rather approximate the tone this way than get a bass synth keyboard. But this is a niche effect for this sort of song. Tremolo - fair enough, this one is an indulgence but a useful one. I got this because I'm a sucker for Chris Squire's sound on tracks like Starship Trooper. However, it gets used in worship a fair bit. Mostly on moody sounding songs like More Love More Power or My Soul Longs For You but also on more up-beat ones where it drops down to a "down bridge" as an additional texture. Chorus - never been a fan of the wibbly-wobbly, underwater 90s indie/grunge chorus sounds so this is used to add some gentle 80s pop-style shimmer on some ballad-type choruses or when I'm plucking my bass over the end of the neck to sort of emulate a more double bass tone - the chorus helps to accentuate the effect. ...and finally the signal goes back into the Little Lehle and out to... Tech 21 VTBassDI (Sansamp) - this feeds an amp/speaker sim'd signal to the PA. It's set for a lowish gain Ampeg B-15/SVT hybrid sound which just gives a little bit of crunch when I really dig in on the bass. The pedal feeds an amp/speaker simulated DI output straight to the PA via a balanced XLR cable and also goes to a stage monitor amp (if I’m using one) via the 1/4 inch jack output and a standard guitar cable. Hope that gives you an indication on why I use the various pedals I use and in what worship situations and why they’re in that order. Used to bring my MarkBass LM2 and Traveller 2x10 as a bass monitor but over the years we’ve had some church bass amp combos… GK, Hartke and now a Rumble which all serve their purpose.

We (Huginn and Muninn) had a great night at the 10th Renaissance Festival of Alternative Music at The Electrowerkz, Islington. Our set was well received, and I got to meet a couple of old friends I hadn't seen for around 25 years, who were also performing (Das Fluff).

Porcupine Tree release a new album pretty soon.

My daughter referred to Green Day as “the original punk band”. I’m still crying a bit inside.

Perfect for carrying your Roger Fenderer