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Happy update. Got a can of Kobra "Venom Red" from the local DIY store and this is the colour I was hoping for (going for an Audi Quattro sort of a colour scheme).

Sigh. So this is what Montana Color call "Fire Engine Red". Oh well, off to buy more paint I guess.

Last night was probably the biggest and best gig of the year so far. We played "Twisted Firestarter" which is the InFest Festival warm-up party at Rebellion in Manchester. Six bands all in a post-punk/Goth/Electronica style from various parts of Europe. I did this last year with the other band I was at the time and with drums and noisy guitars we were very much at odds with the rest of the line-up. This time we were the only band that wasn't all synthesisers, although my Bass VI is pretty heavily processed, and musically we were definitely in the right genre. We played second and I was a little worried that the event wasn't going to be as popular as last year when it was noticeably busy from when the doors opened; but this time the venue looked a bit sparse during the first act. However by the time we were ready to come on the bar area was heaving, and there was a noticeable rush of people to the front of the stage as we launched into our opening song. Excellent sound from the foldback and the large stage allowed our singer to really get into the performance. Even though our set was heavily biased towards new songs that have yet to be released, the reception was excellent with plenty of people down the front dancing and singing along, and even managed most of them to light up the room with phones and glow-sticks during "Calling Out". Surprisingly we didn't sell a lot a merch afterwards, which suspect was partly down to the fact that most of the people who liked us already have CDs and T-shirts and the strange decision for the merch table to be cash-only; this year the vast majority of our merch sales have been paid for by card. The promotor seemed to be impressed so hopefully we'll get some more gigs from him. There were a couple of professional-looking photographers in the audience so hopefully some shots will surface soon on Facebook. Next is a bit more down-to-earth as we'll be playing a small-scale multi-venue "festival" in Newark in just over a week's time.

None of us will get bigger than this. A few years ago I played with an ex-ELO guitarist. ELO were playing a packed Wembley Stadium. The keys player was first on stage and had to press a button on the keys which kicked off a preprogrammed introduction and the first song. The whole band would join in at various points. It was pitch dark on stage, about 70,000 people started cheering and the keys player hit the delete button! That was it. No backup, no introduction and no first song.

One song we play a semitone louder lower than the original recording, but I hadn't yet figured out how to play back the track at a slower speed maintaining the same pitch when practising, so I'd practise with the original and make a mental note to drop the key when we played live. I'm sure you can all guess what happened next.

I suspect you are not the only one troubled by that particular memory. 😄

I still have nightmares about the time I gigged in lycra cycle shorts. WTF was I thinking 😂

Anyone else tempted to buy something because they read about it on this thread? 😂

Excuse the non bass anecdote, but it was an embarrassing rookie error. (and excuse the name drop...) While still a studio assistant early '80s, I had to run a session for Heaven 17 who were recording some demos. The engineer who I mainly worked with had a line in cheeky phrases that he could get away with and would always get a laugh. So we ran through a lead vocal with Glen Gregory. No issues, all fine. However, I thought I'd try one of his cheeky remarks, you know, as you do when you think you're above your station. "that was great Glen, thanks. If you'd lke to leave your name and number in the bin on the way out" It didn't really go down as well as expected! I was rather embarrassed, but had to balls it out.

Gigging in shorts. A great idea until you see how silly you look in the photos. Especially as a short ar$e

I made the rookie error of trusting one of my students. A long time ago I took my class of hairy rockers into a theatre pit to play West Side Story with the Performing Arts dept on stage. I downloaded the whole thing on Midi Files and then loaded them into Logic. I printed them out as TAB and handed them to my hairys. To make sure we had a safety net I had piano tracks on a CD. This was back in the day. We radically were running a silent pit with everyone on cans. There were some tidy players in the pit with 3 drummers sharing duties and everyone getting a good crack at it given numerous shows. The fight scene (if you know the show) was absolutely rocking. We ripped off a Steve Vai/Chick Corea version of it. Lots and lots of fun while they were really being stretched. Of course, not everyone was a player and there were students who needed to be accommodated with various roles. I shall call him Dave. He was clueless in virtually all aspects of the course. He was put on monitors (which were set and forget) and playback. How much of a mess could he make? We got to the quiet number before the finale of the first act. This was programmed on the CD to wind down with some gentle piano arpeggios and segue on the same track into the finale. Dave, who was chemically enhanced by then, hit stop at the end of the arpeggios. The intro the "The Jets are going to have their way tonight" etc just did not happen. That song was meant to start at 2:36 in the track. There is no way he could queue it up again even if he was operating at 100%. And he was not. So I turned to, let's call her Sue, on the keys and hissed, "Give me a G". "Huh?" she responded. "Give me a G", I hissed louder. This, while all the cast were frozen on stage. I started singing "The Jets are going to have their way tonight" acapella. The cast joined in and hammered through it. Acapella. With all the moves to the music which only existed in their minds. How we all laughed. A few weeks later. The energy levels on stage were insane, though!

Played my first big stage and ran across it - I was not wireless. Fortunately, I plugged back in in time to hit the signature riff. It was recorded and you can just hear the crackle as I reconnect.

I posed about this in another thread, but I once turned up to a gig with the wrong bass. It was one I had swapped pups out with and had just put the pups from the other bass in to this bass as a place to store them. The whole bass needed wring with gaffer tape at the gig.

I was 17 and took the frets out of my first bass, a Framus Star Bass, because I wanted more of a double bass sound. I took the bass to a gig that night and, for some reason, decided to wear sunglasses. It was so dark I couldn't see a thing and was far too cool to take the glasses off! I made so many mistakes that ,at the end of the gig, the rest of the band gave me a huge thumbs down. I've never gigged wearing sunglasses since!

Totally understand this, can't stand him or his godawful band. If I want to watch a bunch of toothless, semi-naked gibbering smackheads making c**ts of themselves I'll just go into Cardiff city centre.

In my teenage days playing at a Student Union where I'd just got a fancy wireless kit. Got carried away and decided to jump off the stage. Wireless receiver drops out of bass, hits the floor and battery goes flying....

I’ve never been that excited about a violin bass - I hope you cleaned up

Came across a Hofner violin bass the other day in a shop. Have never played one before so gave it a go. I always thought they were crap (they still are!) but turns out they're a great slap machine (the salesman was horrified). Maybe could be Mark Kings next unexpected endorsement.

In the early days with the tribute band, when playing smaller theatres we had our mixer onstage. It was stage left nearest to me, so I got the job of starting our play on music which was on a mini disc player in the wings. The music was composed by our then keyboard player to neatly segue into our first song with a big opening chord in the same key as the play on - very dramatic. Last thing I did at each soundcheck was to check it was running okay. One memorable night we were all ( an 8 piece band with string section) waiting to go onstage, and I saw the house lights going down which was my cue to hit the start button for the play on. Only then did I realise I hadn’t returned the music back to the start and it kicked into life around half way through. Cue 8 musicians frantically running to their places and instruments - we all just made it in time to avoid a massive gap in the proceedings. Needless to say that was the last time I was entrusted with the task, and soon after we got a pro FOH engineer on every gig who did the job perfectly every time. Even then, hearing the music still gave me flashbacks. 😅

Get a 5-string Corvette.

Will the bassist be required to stand too close to the back of the singer whilst blinking aggressively? 🤭

#1 - Paul @NancyJohnson #2 - Paul #2 @prowla #3 - Martin @Merton #4 - Matt @Wombat #5 - Andy @Wolverinebass #6 - Stevie @stevie #7 - Lozz @Lozz196 #8 - Matt @neepheid #9 - @bassace97 #10 - Robert @bass_dinger #11 - Christopher @chyc #12 - jaco @Geek99 ** #13 - Alan @WalMan #14 - Trevor @TrevorR #15 - John @jonno1981 #16 - Gary @cetera #17 - @MacDaddy #18 - Steve @Stingray5 #19 - Russ @Russ #20 - Rich - errm, @Rich tbc #21 - Happy Jack @Happy Jack #22 - Silvia Bluejay @Silvia Bluejay #23 - Mike @mikelawrencecalleja #24 - @admiralchew #25 - Martin @police squad #26 - @Sean #27 - @silverfoxnik #28 - @SimonK #29 - @hen barn #30 - Andy W @basexperience #31 - @stevie #32 - @Mudpup #33 - @BillyBass +potentially @Shockwave, @Wombat & @Mike Brooks We're getting up towards 40! I think you're gonna need a bigger venue!

Updated pic with fretless neck attached

Maybe I need an angry parent to make me learn properly! RE the pickup surround - I talked to Tim at Gig.Ink https://gig.ink - despite offering a super cool range of designs, he was more than happy to do me a simple boring white rectangle. He sent 1:1 templates to test and we're all set. The bass looks quite cool with a surround around the bridge, too - so at a later date I might do that, or get surround(s) in other colours, maybe.

At the end of the day, all tax and NI ends up in the consolidated fund at the Treasury, where it's disbursed. A small percentage of NHS funding will come from NI contributions since it's all coming from the same bucket at the end of the day, but it's budget and allocations is based on a percentage of income tax, VAT and other tax receipts rather than NI. That's why when you get your tax document from HMRC every year, the NHS is a big slice of the pie on the pie chart. I work for a well-known US manufacturer of acoustic guitars and we're seeing a significant dropoff in overseas sales, to the point where we're considering moving some manufacturing out of North America (we currently have factories in the US and northern Mexico). Not only have our instruments become more expensive, people around the world just don't want to buy American stuff. Or, at least, American versions of American stuff - supposedly Fender Japan have seen a big surge of interest in their stuff this year...

Thanks for that, I now know what I'm calling my autobiography: A Semitone Louder Use dummy plugs in seldom-used sockets. Saved me more times than I'll ever know.

Compressors. I've had rack mount and pedal. The rack mount looked pretty because the lights went up and down, which is also 😎 cool. Pre-amp pedal. Although they were bought more as DI boxes as well. Otherwise I just feel I should have bought a different amp.

Things do seem to hv changed somewhat . I played in a pretty good 6 piece prog rock outfit years ago with an old school JBL, ATC, EV pa and you cld talk to each other on stage with raised voices . Sound guy was strict as hell and would just press ur mute button if you started messing with the onstage.

Wood-effect control knobs.

This thing is a beast.

In my last blues band the guitarist starting wearing a hat that gave him that SRV look, so I can forgive him that as he did look cool (and had the 'LICKS' to back it up). Baseball caps I can't abide! Worked with a guy once who I never saw take off his baseball cap, day, night, restaurant, on a plane. On one occasion we were waiting for transport in an army canteen, he still wearing said cap as we eat, an army guy walks in, I can see the immediate rage in eyes, walks over, takes the cap and puts it straight in a bin. Brilliant. Should be made a standard policy.

Many years ago at the start f my bass career we were playing a biggish gig at a local holiday park. Big stage, big PA, fairly large FOH engineer. He plugged the DI from my Laney amp into the desk and left us to set up and start the on stage sound check. Once I'd plugged in I realised there was no sound coming from my amp. As one inexperienced with DI at the time, I assumed it was something to do with the FOH guy DI-ing me, cutting the amp volume, so I went to find him. He pretty much dismissed out of hand my suggestion that it was his fault (fortunately, I don't have a temper and I was quite calm when asking him what he'd done to my amp). A few minutes of staring at the amp later, I realised that I'd turned the master volume down. I apologised to the FOH guy (his dismissive acknowledgement was enough to ensure I never made that mistake again) and the gig went ahead to moderate success.

Went on for the second half of a gig and silence from my bass. Backup bass - also silence. Swapped wireless to the spare and got sound. When I got home, I tested the suspect wireless and it was perfect. My conclusion was that after unplugging the two dongles to save batteries on the bass and the effects pedal, I had plugged them back in without looking to check that the one marked "Tx" in big friendly letters was on the bass and the one marked "Rx" was on the pedal. As bassist, I am of course the default sound engineer. With another band at another gig, we started the second set and all was well (we thought) until somebody told me that they couldn't hear the vocals out front. The channel mute switches only worked on the FOH, not the monitors. Turned up at one gig with what I thought was my bass amp, then found that I'd picked up the wrong silver case and had a case of microphones. I did have a spare amp with me, but sadly no means of connecting said amp to the cab, so that was a dash back home to get the amp. And I've done the wrong venue thing as well, fortunately only about five miles from where I should have been.

It started a bit like @Skinnyman with my first ever fiver, a brand new Hohner The Jack V. I proudly came to the rehearsal with that one and only bass and started to tune it EADGD instead of BEADG with the factory fitted strings, even if I found the strings very hard on the fingers, I kept going on until the G string broke in a loud snap very slightly injuring my left hand that was on the neck. No more rehearsal that evening, but beer drinking instead... I had to wait for a month to receive a brand new set from the local store, hey it was 1989 so the store was not stocking fiver bass string sets at all, and certainly not double ball type.

At one point I had two matching 4u Gator racks. One had my bass rig in (a wireless and Helix). I needed this rack for every gig we played. The other housed my mixer and bluetooth music player. I only needed this rack when we were providing our own sound. Guess who showed up to a festival an hour away from my house with the one, wrong rack? I've long since moved on from the Helix but the mixer rack is still in use and still has several large '2' stickers on it just so I can tell it apart from the long gone '1' rack with the Helix in. Hey, at least I learned my lesson to label things clearly.

Last gig while soundchecking, no sound from the bass. Soundguy "Is the amp switched on?". Me "yes". Now in my defence it looked like the amp light was on. But it was an outside gig and it was just the sun shining on it, making it look bright. When the sound walked over and turned the amp on I looked like a right 🤬 I've only been gigging for 40 years 😖

Good News - Guest Update I have confirmation today that Matt Gleeson of Monty's Guitars has agreed to come along and do a chat, demo and Q&A session on Monty's bass pickups. He'll also be telling us about Monty's future bass products (really exciting stuff) and will be listening to all your feedback on needs and wants regarding bass pickups, preamps and anything else. There'll be some Monty's booty in the raffle too. There'll be a couple of Monty's-loaded basses for you to try out and we'll be offering a pickup fitting service on the day if anyone wants to buy some and get them fitted there and then. Donation to charity £TBC for pickup fitting. We've agreed to do the demos through a couple of different amps (full valve, hybrid analogue, Class D) using an LFSys Monaco @stevie so that we get as transparent and as full a sound as we can from the pickups.

Panicked at Rebellion when setting up, no volume from the bass at all, due to start in less than a minute. Hadn’t pushed the jack plug from my lead fully into the tuner.

I have two examples. My very first gig. I set everything up and go to tune my bass, only to realise I had left it at home. Touring in Germany. Nice big stage and superb foh sound man. Soundcheck goes well, but the bass is non existent as we start playing. I can hear the bass from the foh but nothing on stage. Finally, after 3 songs, I found I hadn't thrown the standby switch. Did that and all was well!!

-When someone says something like "let's have a jam" -Calling a guitar an axe -The word mojo -"the pocket" -When you see band members looking at each other like some little lick they've just played is the best thing to ever hit human ears, with a stupid smug look on their faces. I understand that they're getting into the music and enjoying themselves but I still hate it, smug fart sniffing b*****ds. -The word "lick"

I was waiting ......... until I have enough experience. But as a teaser .... I too have had a Monaco for almost a month. 2 Pub Gigs 2 Outdoor Festivals 4 Rehearsals On it's own in my "music room", it's REALLY GOOD. I've had 2 * Vanderkey 12 EXT's, Mesa Subway 15 plus 12, and a Barefaced SuperTwin. The Monaco in terms of a really even and pleasant sound across the frequency spectrum, is the best yet. Gone is the endless tweaking EQ to tailor the sound. In Pub Gigs, I can hear what I'm doing, the band can hear what I'm doing (😳), to the extent that the drummer keeps telling me my bass is too loud in his monitor ( even though it's not going through his Monitor!), and, unprovoked, the Guitarist likes it, and say's its so much more "even" across the frequencies than previous cabs. In rehearsals (which are in a small space and VERY loud, it's great ..... no problem with volume. At festivals with full (BIG) PA, it's good, but, I'm driving it with my ABM 600 cranked to stupid volumes which I'm uncomfortable with (as much gain as the VU indicates is "OK" and master volume at 3 O'clock!!!) This is because the band are not used to utilising Monitors which have more than vocals in, and in both festivals there has been no floor wedge for me .... so stage volume is necessary for the band. Still great, and the sound is fine both on stage and off. But at 8 Ohms, I'm worried about the ABM 600, which might be running out of puff. So, not a speaker issue!!! So, could buy another one, or get a bigger Amp. Trace Elliot TE1200 now with me and in my music room it's great ......... rehearsals and gigs next week .... I'll keep you informed. One other point It's really easy to carry around and transport ..... much more so than 2 cabs or the bigger Supertwin. It a big hit with me!!

Forgetting that I’d strung a bass with BEAD strings (as an experiment prior to buying a fiver) and trying to tune it as EADG. Wondering why the PA was dead and, in the process of trying to track down the issue, turning up every gain and volume knob to max before spotting that the master Mute button had been pressed and….

Cats...

Irrational? Don't think so!