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Two gigs over the weekend with two different bands (photo from second gig), both at local beer fests with during the day slots. First gig outing for the the new (to me) Rick, love the sound but I'm still getting used to playing it (right hand placement). First gig was with a rock covers trio, took a little while to get going, you don't get the same buzz as a gig at night but it went well, there was a crowd and we got some pocket money so what more can you ask for? Second gig was with a seven piece "function" band, apart from myself and the drummer, the others don't gig much at all, so you're having to support them, depending on how nervous they are or how many beers they've had. It was enjoyable all the same, I have to say its the first time I have waited over an hour and a half for a burger because the vendor couldn't find me, being 6ft 3", 18st and wobbling/limping that was a first!

An Eagles tribute show at The Fire Station in Sunderland, a relatively new 550-cap venue. I reckon it's probably one of the best in the country. The hall is beautiful... acoustic perfection. The PA is premiere league. The staff are lovely, and absolutely on it. It even has parking! Used my MIA Standard Jazz, with the G&L L2000 on standby. Rig was, of course the Handbox R-400 (with its lovely on-board DI) and TKS S212.

First of all we have some photos from last night... Yep, a bit better than the photos I took 😂 So tonight was at The Crew in Nuneaton. Upstairs is Queens Hall, which may be more familiar to some as a venue for original bands. There was no-one up there tonight though, just us rocking out downstairs. It's been 15 months since we last played there due to various circumstances and cancellations, but it's becoming one of our favourite gigs. The Crew is a proper rock bar, so it made a nice change to be a bit louder than usual and a bit more raucous. My Rumble master volume still wasn't even at 12 o'clock though, but was lovely and punchy. The crowd there is a real mixture of ages, from youngsters still having to show ID to white-haired old hippies, and everything in between. It really is a great place. It's getting a bit regular playing the Stingish bass (nice & light, tighter string spacing) and the Rumble. Footwear were Vans for a change (Photo again barely remembered while starting to pack up) Ended the evening with a cheeky chicken shawarma from the takeaway across the road from the venue - very nice!

Saturday night was another dep gig. The Bonnevilles were the first band to play at The Beehive in Curdworth since the new manager came in about four months ago, sorted out by the new drummer. We got a spacious raised area to set up in, which was nice. And I got a couple of songs properly sorted that I'd had slight trouble with (not car crash type trouble, just stumbles). The newly acquired Zoom MS-60B+ made its first appearance. Sei Flamboyant 5 -> Lekato WS-90 -> Zoom MS-60B+ -> Tecamp Puma 900 -> GR Bass AT212. As always, Caravelle memory foam trainers.

Do your due diligence when selecting somewhere to live. When I was looking to buy my first house in the early 90s, I had found somewhere suitably interesting and convenient for work and the city centre. However it was only a couple of doors down from a pub. So before making a decision on whether to put in an offer I spent a Saturday evening in the pub to see what it would be like. Based on my experience I decided that I would become very unhappy about the noise quite quickly and therefore decided to look elsewhere. IMO that was the sensible course of action. It doesn't take much time and effort to do the research and anyone who doesn't only has themselves to blame.

Ordered 1 May, delivered 25 July - so a little over the 10 weeks stated. No updates during that time (even after phoning customer service number provided on confirmation, UK-based, useless had no info beyond it will arrive at some point). Eventually emailed the address supplied on the confirmation and got through to very helpful team (Amsterdam-based I think) who explained they ship these to Europe in batches, so the bass was made but waiting at the dock. Sent me a £100 gig bag by way of apology. Bass and gig bag ended up arriving on the same day. Was she worth it? Very... https://www.icloud.com/sharedalbum/#B2AGrhkPxGIGnBp Alder Body in Shell Pink Roasted Maple 1963 C Neck American Vintage II PJ 60/66 Pick-ups Mint Green Pickguard Fit and finish are all really decent and it weighs about 8.5 lbs. Set-up was decent, way-better than other stock Fenders I've had from new. All-in-all, I'm a very happy boy.

Never mind their head office. Whoever the OP spoke with was obviously following their policy, so they won't be bothered. Inform the local authority and the fire service and don't do so anonymously. Give dates, times, etc. I'm sure they would be very interested to learn the company asked a customer to disable a fire alarm. If they've already banned you, you have nothing to lose. Forget the hand-wringing over a bit of swearing. That's obviously their way of trying to justify themselves.

So, having sorted out the damage to the back, it was time to figure out what to do about the damage on the front. This wasn't as bad as the great big hole, but it was ugly, and in a very visible spot on the front of the instrument. Here's a picture of it after I'd finished the sanding, the black lacquer dust that got into the grain makes the detail of the damage easier to see in a photo. I decided that, as with the hole in the side, I was going to have to make a bigger but neater hole if I was going to patch this cleanly. First I drilled two 20-mm diameter holes centered on the existing screw holes for the Roland GK pickup. I used a forstner bit, so the holes are completely flat at the bottom. The drill stand meant that I was able to make each hole exatly 3 mm deep. Once that was done, I used the router base for my dremel to join the two holes up and create a uniform 3-mm deep channel where the gouge was. In theory I probably could have done all this with the dremel, but the plunge functions of that router base are really wobbly and unreliable, so I prefer to pre-drill and then have it set at a fixed depth. Here's the finished channel, and the maple inlay piece I shaped to fit inside it. This was scrap rock maple from an old guitar build, painstakingly shaped and measured out, not – as it unfortunately looks – the stick from an ice-lolly that I fished out of a bin. This was glued in with the help of an enormous brick of PTFE (non stick!), trimmed to shape and planed level. The plane I used for this has a blade that I ground into a slightly convex shape, so I can use it on surfaces like this without worrying about a sharp corner digging in. And here's the finished patch. (I fixed that little notch in the right hand side of the bridge cutout).

The gig on Saturday was a dep for a blues / americana (sort of) band at Diseworth Village Hall. A bit different setting to the last gig I did two weeks ago, a slightly dodgy rock club in a rundown part of inner-city Hull, this was a small village hall in a well to do part of rural England, just off the M1 a short distance away from East Midlands Airport. A lovely and rather picturesque little village, complete with signs on lampposts rallying locals to protest at any possible industrial development in the area (as well as discouraging strangers from parking up there for a fortnight to avoid using the nearby airport car parks)! The people promoting the gig were super friendly and helpful (as they were in the club in Hull), decent PA, free food, having to keep turning down free beers, etc. Not a bad payer either! I say it was a dep gig, but I was in an earlier version of the band and have done a couple of deps since I left. Basically, when I’m playing, it’s the Zep tribute band with a female singer-songwriter (the guitarist’s girlfriend), so we all know each and are used to playing together. The audience was not exactly the most rock'n'roll crowd, but nice people and a very good reaction, so generally a great night. The usual motorway closure on the two hour drive home, but this one wasn’t too bad – M1 closed, diverted onto the M18 to the A1(M) and then picking the M62 up just a little further out, maybe 15 minutes added to the drive. One day I will start a thread on night-time motorway closures driving back from gigs! Gear was, as ever, the 70s P bass into a Handbox R-400 amp / Berg CN212 cab. Footwear was the usual grey suede Vans hi-tops! I’m a bit worried that they are starting to wear out and I might have start wearing in a new pair for gigs (darker grey pigskin Vans)!

It was brilliant. Played the Swan in Stourport on severn. A local gig with the best energy and crowd.

If Pirate treat their AI chatbots as members of staff by paying national minimum wage, NI & tax together with sick leave, holiday leave and other employment rights, then it’s perhaps fair to apply policies against using the public using inappropriate language toward them. Until that day, it’s an overreaction on Pirate’s part.

I should mention that @Chienmortbb very kindly threw in the Roland midi pickup and its associated internal gubbins gratis, but after an afternoon of reading spec-sheets and sketching ideas, I decided that this wasn't something I wanted for this bass. It would have complicated the project – particularly the wiring – massively, and given that I don't have the accompanying floor unit (and no plans to acquire one) it didn't seem worth the hassle. I'll put it up in the recycling forum when I get a moment to properly inventory what bits are there, because I'm sure it's of use to someone. Having ruled that out, I started going through the steps I'd need to take to restore it to stock condition. I decided, after a fair while spend staring and mumbling to myself, that the hole in the side called for drastic measures. If I was to make this bass look decent and return it to its original configuration (with the strap button on either side of the bridge) I needed to plug the hole, but the current routing (if you can call it that) was so raggedy that squaring it off well enough to glue in a plug would be near impossible. Therefore, I grabbed my chisels and a sharp tenon saw and cut out the whole section. No way out but through! After tidying this new gouge, I cut a piece of wood from some scrap timber I had in my heap of scrap timber (everyone should have a good heap). This was planed and finessed into shape. I used rasps and sharp little chisels to cut the recess for the control cover. Then slathered the whole thing in titebond and left it overnight. Once the glue had set up, I carved away the excess with rasps and files. I'll fill in the remaining little gaps with epoxy once I've sorted out the other things.

Coming from an H&S/Fire Safety related role the above doesn`t look good. Someone who is not an employee of the business, therefore with no authority to do so, asked to shut off a fire alarm, that person not having any knowledge of if there even is a fire or not, no! Anywhere that runs like that would be on my not-return-list, and given my albeit limited experience of fires I`d be considering contacting the fire authorities, not out of spite for being banned, but from not wanting others to be injured or worse should there be an actual fire.

Funkin up the Pantiles in Tunbridge Wells last night with my best mates in The Audacity. Full line-up with 2 singers and 3-piece horn section in front of a very enthusiastic crowd of diners, drinkers and dancers. Wonderful stuff!

Had the OP shouted/sworn at an actual person, that might be fair comment, but all he did was type the word "f***ing" in a text to a chatbot. That can hardly be interpreted as being "aggressive or abusive" to a human being, unless you are possessed of a particularly delicate nature or an extraordinarily thin skin. Or perhaps if you know you did something wrong and wish to recover the initiative/justify yourself, of course... So you "think a ban is entirely appropriate" and suggest he should offer the company a "carefully worded and sincere apology"? I sincerely hope he doesn't and finds another rehearsal facility.

Legal liability aside, I would not feel comfortable with the moral responsibility if it did indeed turn out to be a genuine alarm and someone was injured after I disabled the alarm. With my fire warden hat on from work, I’m appalled. A key rule is never to re-enter a building in a state of alarm until all clear is given. That is the responsibility of a Fire Marshal or Incident Controller; the person should be familiar with the premises and be fully aware of all the potential hazards therein. A company cannot simply outsource the role of Incident Controller / Fire Marshal that does this to its customers and visitors to its premises. On the evidence available it’s hard to see how Pirate can demonstrate that they have an effective emergency action plan is as required by law; clearly if they have one, it is not working. E2A: where the premises are routinely unstaffed, then that just means the emergency action plan must be more robust and actionable.

Okay, yes, I likely deserve to be banned for life. I'm certainly not perfect. I might be a bad person, or even on the spectrum. My dad regularly yelled at me when I was a small boy and so deep down maybe that has something to do with it. BUT my interactions were with an AI chatbot, and to be totally honest with you I suspect the chatbot initiated the ban automatically based on keywords. I probably shouldn't be abusive to AI chatbots, but they have no feelings or emotions. A human only came on to the chat after the ban was announced, and at that point they clearly identified themselves. I did sincerely apologize to the human, and I have now also formally reported Pirate Studios for disregarding the fire alarm and for providing a customer with details for switching it off. The way that I see it, I am completely obliged to report this... they could ultimately kill people.

This was a little new black left handed short scale £85 Harley Benton which is going to be my 6yr old nephew’s birthday present. The only problem is his mum wants it in green and you cannot get a left handed short scale in green for less than £500 new and none second hand. Good old uncle Silky is in the process of a nitro refinish in Emerald Green. I have also levelled the frets, rolled the fretboard edges, dressed and polished (it is an £85 bass after all so what can you expect from new). It is turning out rather well!. Handy hint for a cheap painting jig……I have used an old disco lighting T bar stand with wood batten bolted to it to screw the body onto. It’s fully height adjustable and you can spin the body on its long axis by loosening the Allen bolts on the bracket. Puts the body at just the right height however tall you are.

Lakland and Fender

After getting outbid on the BG-208 on eBay last night, I just got one for £160, pickup in Sheffield which means I can go visit one of my mates over there!

I'd definitely dob them in to the fire service and the environmental health department of the relevant local authority.

I'm wondering how many more strawmen / whataboutery / false equivalence comments that could be made. The proposed law is nothing to do with any of your post. It is to stop people moving / building / developing within earshot of a venue knowing or should have known that it is a noisy venue and then being able to complain and have it shut down. That's it. Nothing else. Land within ear shot of noisy venues often gets bought by developers very cheaply. They then build homes on the land and don't mention the venue nearby. The buyer of the new home doesn't do adequate searches about the location when they should have done as part of a survey, or does them and decides to buy the home in the anticipation of complaining enough to shut the venue. The developers know this will happen - in fact they are probably banking on it and it will likely make the venue fail and be up for sale too. Venues are often on the brink financially so they don't have the ability of say, an airport, to tell the new resident to sod off. And generally nobody can claim they didn't know an airport was there. All this law will do will make developers tell the truth about the properties they are selling, and it will stop new residents moving into a noisy area and then complaining about the noise they were already aware of. It will stop new residents lying that they didn't know about the venue / noise / etc. That's it. Nothing like any of your post at all - all of which can be avoided by not buying a home in earshot: "Your neighbours" made their own decision to move next to a live music venue. That is their choice and for them to move there, and for them to then try to change the behaviour of the people who were there first is the selfish act.

Isn't it funny that every time i see a Ric bass in the pics my first thought is "Ooohhh a Ric bass". Maybe i need to get one. 😂 Dave

My Chinese Ebay roasted maple neck on my parts bass. Gave it several light coats of Rustins Danish Oil & she's sweet as!

I dislike noise as much as the next guy, my neighbour is a particular nuisance when he starts drilling into the party wall at 7.30 in the morning, but you don't move next to the M1 and complain about the traffic noise. You don't move next to a pub and complain about drunks. . . . etc etc

I bought this last Friday week, so have had it now for around a week and half. It was local to me, and stopped on the way to a Ska gig. I still used my Jazz type 5er that night, but used the Roscoe the next night for the party band gig. I’m not a fan of these sticky black strings on it - also they’ve appeared to leave sort of tram line residues all over the fingerboard, so I’ll clean them off when I change strings. Will have to have a search on what most folks use with these basses. It’s completely different to my Japanese Sadowsky Will Lee 5 - which was the idea really. I’ve no way to measure, but I’d say it’s 18mm at the bridge, as opposed to the 19 on the Sadowsky. Also the fingerboard radius is pretty flat, and the action is crazily low, making it a breeze to play. As mentioned by others, the B string is epic. Sorry that the pictures aren’t that good…

While your experience was frustrating, maybe your language was unnecessary? Most places have signs stating that abuse of staff won't be tolerated.

So just to be clear -- you think it's ok to move in to a house close to an establishment that you know full well to be a source of noise, and then complain about it despite the fact that a} it was there first, b} you knew it was there, and c} you chose to live near it?

Franz Ferdinand do what I suspect is put fabric covers over road cases. Sorry that they don't work for you, but please don't try and tell those of us who are doing it that it can't be done. It's possible to create excellent stage sound using a variety of approaches. Those 'farty' frfr cabs are the same ones that do mains pa duties on thousands of stages across the world.

So this is going to be my first post in the build diaries forum that's actually describing an ongoing project. A few weeks ago, I gave in to impulse and decided to buy @Chienmortbb's headless Hohner "The Jack". I'd been circling this project bass for a while because I was on the hunt for some decent (but not astronomically expensive) headless bass hardware. I didn't like the idea of cannibalizing a bass that looked more-or-less salvagable, but I figured I'd keep an eye on it just in case he decided to split it up for parts. The longer I stared at it, and at the complex thru-neck multi-laminate-body design that I'd been working on, the more I realized that a cheap, lightweight and compact bass was something I needed/wanted far more than the custom bass I'd designed. That was a bass that would probably take me several months and end up costing the best part of grand to make. So I contacted Chienmort and said I'd take the Hohner off his hands. It arrived the week before last, packed with great care and attention, and I was able to take stock of what needed to be done. For anyone who hasn't had a quick look at the original listing, the story of this bass is that it was retrofitted with a Roland midi pickup system by a previous owner. This meant it had three extra holes drilled into the control cavity for switches, a recess cut into the front to fit the pickup under the strings (which the previous owner appears to have done with his teeth) and a massive square-ish hole Boo-Radleyed into the side to accomodate the 13-pin output connector. Whatever I did, I knew that I was going to need to refinish the bass. So the first order of business was to strip off the finish – or as much of the finish as needed stripping away. I tried to use chemical stripper again, and met with exactly the same results as last time I tried to use it on a guitar, which is a whole lot of bugger all. Each application only penetrated into the top few microns of paint, and I probably would have made just as much progress with just a metal scraper on its own. I gave up and switched to an orbital sander, which went much better. My aim was not to go down to the bare wood (solid-colour instruments are always solid colour for a reason) but just to sand until the scratched top layer was gone. With that done, I was ready to start patching up the damage.

I found it interesting and I'll give more detailed opinions later.

Thanks. In other news, I'm currently trying to order some of the electric gubbins I'll need to finish this job, and generally raging at the electronics gods. Why is it that if you need, say, a 500k blend pot and two 500k audio taper pots, every shop will only have one or the other in stock, or they'll have both in stock but with different bushing lengths, or shaft types, or bushing diameters! Then when you finally find a shop that has an acceptably close-enough set of components, they don't have any barrel jacks, or knobs! Every time I place an order for guitar parts I end up having to buy like six small and inexpensive items from three or four different shops, paying as much for shipping as I do for parts. This is despite each shop, in theory, selling everything I need. As it is, I think I'm going to have to get the knobs, strap buttons and one of the two types of pot from Northwest, the output jack, other kind of pot and pickup rings from Armstrong and the fretwire from Tonetech.

Cheers! It really is. Here's a clip. Bass sounds exactly as I want. Flatwounds FTW!

Okay, I apologized to the AI chatbot too...

You’ve taken two of your favourite basses in but the inferno starts up! Which one do you save?!?

No

I wish I had either of them

Nerdy pic of my three Goodfellow’s. Quaint basses indeed.

Gratuitous green and red 🙂

Are bands getting louder? I'm not sure that assertion is supported by real world experiences. More and more bands and musicians are going for quiet stages, modelling rigs or smaller amps, electronic drums etc. Big gear that used to be a gigging staple like 8x10" or 2x15" bass cabs and guitar 4x12"s go for pocket money prices because very few still have a use for them, and there's a whole market for gear that imitates the cranked amps that used to be normal.

Look behind many tragedies and even major disasters and there’s an alarm that has been routinely ignored or switched off. Building fires are funny things, you often don’t see them until it’s too late, as a close neighbour found out two years ago. CCTV is not a fire alarm, that’s why we have fire alarms

It might become a small factory making drums, trumpets and sirens.

I think if we listened to all the complaints and moans from disgruntled folk and acted on them we would live in a very boring sterile non human kind of existence! The fact is so many things happen now in society that are far more horrific and offensive compared to occasional noise issues Some folk have forgotten what it’s like to have fun !!

That falls into unreasonable expectations in my book. I back onto a pub car-park. We get doors slammed, occasionally people fighting, lots of noise as people arrive and leave during the Sunday lunch rush, a bit of noise carry from the garden on the other side of the carpark. Most of it can be easily ignored. One day some of the locals decided to move one of the benches down the carpark outside my fence (because it was jn the sun), started swearing and throwing cigarettes over the fence. That is not reasonable. That resulted in a robust face to face confrontation where I was told "You moved next to a pub, what do you expect?", and I told them (the above), explaining that I moved next to a pub carpark, not a pub, and that my small children were listening to the swearing, and having cigarettes thrown at them and their trampoline. Some red-faces, sweary people apologised and moved the bench back into the pub garden. But some people are really over-sensitive and a precident has been set where pubs have been refused licences. Bad reporting in the press has resulted in people thinking they have the right to complain about reasonable noise.

Sadly yes, never give a jobsworth the opportunity or excuse to be a jobsworth, they relish it. Sign of the times 😕