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You need one of these in your rig.

After last week’s ‘quiet’ affair I didn’t have any great expectations for last night’s outing. This was a town centre pub with a fairly young crowd and the 3 bouncers on the door told volumes. Not the sort of crowd that I’d expect would appreciate 70s Glam....this was an Agent job so they aren’t renowned for good product placement so to speak. Anyhow, I was genuinely surprised, we had a great night with lots of singing and dancing from the first number to the end of the second encore. Praised by the pub management and more bookings on the horizon, happy days.

I welcome comments. The band that said, "Don't bring that bass, again." They were right and I learnt a good lesson that day. The guy who told me, on an outdoor gig, he could hear my bass loud and clear in the next road. Yesss! The guy who told me, "I can't hear the bass when you play up the neck." The guy who, a few years ago, came up and complemented me on my shirts from gigs we used to play 30 years ago. All good info. Every now and then someone can make you stop and think. We can all make iffy decisions, without realising it. Sometimes we need to be told. We just need to be able to filter the gems from the nonsense.

Played a couple of gigs this week with the ELO Experience. First was on Thursday at The Leas Cliff Hall in Folkestone, which we’ve done many times. Great venue with helpful staff and a great view from the outside balcony at the rear of the stage. France looked so close, and a great sunset over Dungeness too! We had a couple of problems with the IEM’s but an enthusiastic near capacity audience were on good form, plenty of dancing which is always good. Then after the long drive north from Kent we were at Skegness Embassy Theatre last night. One of our favourite venues, with a good stage and again nice staff. It’s always a fine sounding room, and was a really enjoyable gig. Funny moment during the first set though - it was blowing a gale outside, lashing down with rain. During the song ‘Showdown’, the lyrics include ‘and it’s raining, all over the world...’ at which point I got a massive drop of water on my head whilst I was singing. Apparently the roof vents do leak sometimes, directly above me! Moved my gear and monitor during the interval, and the staff put down what we called a stage nappy to absorb the rain and prevent splashing me. Several of the capacity audience noticed my predicament and were very amused, (as were the rest of the band of course). (No pics except this one of Dungeness in the distance from the theatre balcony).

OK I can't be certain which - and both are equally improbable - but there are two possibilities or a combination of those. A significant factor is that Jack shipped me the neck in early July. And July in the middle of the UK was the hottest month on record with temperatures up to 40 degrees and days above 38 degrees. The neck was kept in a spare room wrapped in bubble wrap and away from direct sunlight. It is likely that the trussrod was still tensioned to give back-bow as I hadn't asked Jack to relieve the tension and didn't start working on the neck itself for some months after receiving it. @Happy Jack had been using the bass and had not experienced any buzz or trussrod issues - which he certainly would have if it had already gained such a degree of Back-Bow (remembering that I was unable to make any tangible difference to that back-bow when I strung it up to full tension this month) So one possibility is what @Hellzero suggests: - that the maple neck wood shrank in length over that period. If it did that, and the ebony stayed the same length, then it would act a bit like a bimetal strip used in thermostats. The maple would try to shrink at the back, the ebony, though, would stop it shrinking at the top (the glue join) and so it would bend. But if that was the case, you would expect that there would be at least a hint of that back-bow remaining once the ebony was removed, as that maple at the top will have been held at its original length through the hot weather and now back to largely normal temperatures. Also, this is fully seasoned rock maple. And shrinkage, even when it is freshly cut, tends to be tangential and radial as the sap hardens and shrinks. There is pretty much nothing in the wood structure that would make it shrink lengthwise. It's why sharp fret ends can often be a problem over the years - the fretboard is shrinking in width - but I've never come across, say, an acoustic with fixed bridge go out of intonation because the neck's getting shorter! The other possibility is: - that the high temperatures allowed a miniscule softening of the glue. Yes, 40 degrees is far short of the 180 degrees that I've just used with my iron to get it off. But remember that it is probable (my bad) that the truss rod was still tensioned throughout that period and the neck would have had a back-bow on it...and normally with a bass or guitar, the neck is straight because the strings are also on so even if softening did happen, nothing would go anywhere. So if there was even the smallest amount of softening, over weeks of very high temperatures it is at least feasible that the fretboard and neck would slide relative to each other, in the same way that laminated sides of acoustic guitars are made. Once the temperatures cooled, the glue would revert to rock-solid and the curve would be permanently set - until the laminate (fretboard) was removed. But there lots of 'ifs and buts' with this possibility too! Both possibilities are in the zone of things I've never ever come across before. It's a bit of an enigma But the good news is that, whatever the cause, the neck IS straight, the fretboard IS undamaged and so all it needs is a clean off of the glue from the mating surfaces and a new truss rod and we will end up with a straight serviceable neck closely followed by a fully playable shell pink bass

Almost a year after paying my deposit it finally arrive this week. I was a bit nervous about having paid so much money for something I'd never played, but it's an amazing instrument. The construction is solid, the neck is a little chunkier than I'm used to, but it plays pretty easy after a few days. It balances perfectly seated and on the strap, and it sounds HUUUUGE!! The B string is massive! The body is mahogany (I think) and the neck is roasted maple, which I asked to be left unpainted. I was going for a 70s Fender look.

Well done to @upside downer on his excellent win in September, he has been forthcoming with his choice of image and has a few words of explanation to accompany it.. "This bizarre spectacle is all part of the El Colacho Baby Jumping Festival where newborn children that have been baptised need to have their original sin cleansed. The costumed man represents the devil and, as he jumps over the babies, the idea is that their sin will stick to him and be removed from them. No babies were harmed in the preparation of this photo 😁" Bizarre indeed , I suspect that 'bizarre' will be right on topic for one of our eccentrics Simple rules ✔️ Entries must be <5 minutes and recorded this month. ✖️ No illegal samples, copyright infringements or other snide goings-on ✖️ No Bagpipes. The Autumnal Equinox truce has duly expired . Panpipes only if you have too. ✖️ No voting for your own entry. We'll know. And we'll shame you. A line or two offering an insight to your inspiration/track choice will be good as well , it works nicely on the voting thread. The Deadline for entries is Midnight on Monday 24th October. Before closing off just a reminder that come December we traditionally have turkey a cover song challenge, so get your thinking caps on for a song to choose, or even get started on. Have fun

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/music/artists/remembering-ronnie-james-dio-decent-man-rock/ No idea about some of this stuff, amazing He was for the downtrodden’: remembering Ronnie James Dio, the most decent man in rock Dio had a voice that could blow mics, yet he preferred reading and cooking to heavy metal excess. Now a poignant documentary tells his story ByIan Winwood30 September 2022 • 11:37am Ronnie James Dio at home in Los Angeles, 1987 CREDIT: Getty Prior to the start of the British premiere of the documentary film Dio: Dreamers Never Die, on a Monday night in September, bowls of tissues were placed on the bar of the Curzon cinema in Soho. Bound in black vinyl, each parcel was adorned with a photographic image of the late heavy metal singer Ronnie James Dio, whose life the film celebrates. Confused, I asked one of the event’s organisers to explain. “Oh,” I was told, “it’s so people can have a good cry at the end.” Directed by Don Argott and Demian Fenton, the film is certainly a poignant creation, not least when the apparently indefatigable 68-year old was at last silenced by stomach cancer in 2010. His death came 52 years after the release of Conquest, by Ronnie and the Red Caps, the single with which the teenager born Ronald James Padavona made his recording debut. Forget about Led Zeppelin and Blue Cheer – Dio was a contemporary of Jerry Lee Lewis. As one of Dreamers Never Dies many talking heads notes, “He was singing before the Beatles. How is that possible?” He was singing before the advent of heavy metal, too. In the lobby of the Curzon, the genre’s creator, Tony Iommi, with whom Ronnie James Dio appeared as a member of Black Sabbath and, towards the end of his life, Heaven & Hell, is on hand to reminisce about times that were not always smooth. Despite critical and commercial success, Sabbath’s second incarnation broke apart as a result of Iommi and bassist Geezer Butler being cranked out of their craniums on cocaine. Not their singer, though. Asked to nominate a special memory, the guitarist’s answer speaks to the sense of wholesomeness that pervades Dreamers Never Die. “When we were doing Heaven & Hell [the Black Sabbath LP from 1980], we stayed at Barry Gibb’s house [in Miami] for about… I don’t know how many months,” he tells me. “Ronnie used to cook a lot, so I have this image of him standing at the oven with his shorts on making his pasta for everyone. Meatballs and God knows what else.” Ronnie James Dio first met Tony Iommi at the Rainbow Bar & Grill, the famous and infamous rock-biz hangout on Hollywood’s Sunset Strip. Invited to join Black Sabbath following the sacking of Ozzy Osbourne (not to mention his own departure from Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow) the singer had his doubts about whether the fit was right. “I don’t know if I love this music,” he told his wife Wendy. “We have $800 left in the bank,” she replied. “Believe me, you love this music.” Seated at a table in the cinema’s subterranean bar, 44-years later Wendy Dio is Dreamers Never Die’s executive producer. Her husband’s manager from 1982, she retains the no-nonsense air of one who was required to make her mark in an era when the transatlantic music industry was ruled by American men easily affronted by the prospect of doing business with a platinum-blonde thirtysomething from Epping. Certainly, a cheeky question about what it was she fancied about Ronnie James Dio phases her not at all. “I was invited to go to a party up in the Hollywood Hills at Ritchie’s House,” she says. (Ritchie is, of course, Ritchie Blackmore.) “Ronnie was following me around and Ritchie said to me, ‘He likes you’. Too short for me. That’s what I said, ‘Too short for me’. But we talked and we chatted and at six in the morning we went for breakfast at Denny’s… and then we went for a drive to Malibu. After that I saw him for a couple of weeks, during which time I think I fell in love with his brain.” Pleasingly, Dreamers Never Die portrays its subject as an intelligent and serious man. In a film packed with fascinating details – the now ubiquitous “devil horns” hand sign popularised by Dio was handed down from his grandmother, for example – the revelation that “life began when I saw my first book” is a welcome inclusion. Dio's commercial peak, after all, coincided with a period in time in which it was acceptable to believe, and to say out loud, that people who made and listened to heavy metal were stupid. 'He was singing before The Beatles': Ronnie James Dio in the 1950s CREDIT: Courtesy of Wendy Dio More than this, though, the film is a portrait of an unstoppable force. Never mind being a dreamer, the man was a doer, too. After launching his own band, Dio, in 1982, he and Wendy re-mortgaged their home in order to fund the recording of his debut album, Holy Diver, and its subsequent world tour. When the LP racked up more than two million sales, creative single-mindedness joined forces with autonomous financial muscle. Agitations for a more equitable share of the profits from wunderkind Vivian Campbell led to the guitarist getting the sack. “It was Ronnie’s band,” Wendy Dio explains with a steeliness that could intimidate even Sharon Osbourne. By time I first saw Dio, on the Sacred Heart Tour in 1986, this determination to plough his own furrow had (to my 15-year old eyes at least) rendered the whole thing stale. Sitting in the bleachers at the Birmingham NEC, the sight of a 43-year old man doing battle with a fiberglass dragon for what seemed like three or four months left me bored and dismissive. Driven to distraction by a set sagging with flabby solo spots for drums, guitar and keyboards, I guess I knew that I was only passing through on my journey to an untameable new variant spearheaded by Metallica and Slayer. At once, and forever, "heavy metal" became, simply, "metal". It got worse. By the time Nirvana upended the tables in 1991, it looked as if the game might be up for Ronnie James Dio. In what for me is Dreamers Never Die’s most devastating moment, the American DJ Eddie Trunk recalls one of the programmers at the east coast radio station WDHA handing him a box filled with CDs he was no longer allowed to play on the air. Alongside fraudulent rubbish from the likes of Poison and Warrant, this musical revolution had made victims of honourable artists whose only crime was to appear at once out of step with the earthquake weather. “Dio was in the box,” Trunk says. Ronnie with his wife Wendy CREDIT: Courtesy of Wendy Dio It’s even possible that I bear my share of culpability for this. Age 22, as a writer for a long-forgotten rock magazine, Ronnie James Dio became the first artist to appear in a feature I’d created in which notable music-makers were asked a series of deliberately provocative questions purposely designed to impugn their relevance. Come the day itself, however, I was so deep into second thoughts that I considered praying that he wouldn’t show up. Certainly, I was keenly aware that a man who had been in the game for more twice as long as I’d been alive was well within his rights to knock me out cold. Instead, he remains one of the kindest and most decent people I’ve ever interviewed. It seems obvious now that I was missing a point. Because while I’m not sure if I quite endorse an opinion expressed in Dreamers Never Die that Dio “was a messenger for people who lived ordinary lives”, I am willing to consider the notion that his deeply passionate but entirely sexless performances gave true outsiders a sense of genuine inclusion. Speaking to his widow, I made the point that while her late husband was mocked for his lack of height – and likely still would be were he alive today – it would (rightly) be considered bad form to make mention of, let alone poke fun at, the physical form of the noticeably heavyset man who had just left her table. A strange distinction, no? Ronnie James Dio in 1970 CREDIT: Getty “But that guy is exactly Ronnie’s fan,” she answered. “That is Ronnie’s fan. And those are people he cared about, because other people don’t care about them… He was for the downtrodden. That was his whole life, making somebody feel good themselves.” In other words, forget what you might have heard about the death of musical tribes. When all else is gone, metal will remain. What’s more, I can easily imagine that it always will. Certainly, Ronnie James Dio stuck it out. With a voice that was the equal of Joe Cocker or John Fogerty, the singer’s appearance in the Jack Black and Kyle Gass comedy film Tenacious D In The Pick Of Destiny, from 2006, revivified a career that had been in retreat for more than a decade. When it came to recording a song for the soundtrack album, after blowing out three high-end microphones, the singer produced a mic he’d brought from home that just happened to be the only piece of equipment on the market capable of preventing his vocal takes from driving the studio’s needles into the red. Best of all is the footage in Dreamers Never Die from the final tours with Heaven & Hell. Once more reunited with Iommi, Butler and drummer Vinny Appice, in his final month on the road Ronnie James Dio was at last returned to the kinds of venues – the Greek Theatre in LA, Red Rocks Amphitheatre near Denver – ideally suited to broadcasting his stunning voice to the people in the nosebleeds. After so much decline, everything seemed perfect. And maybe it would have been had the singer not been bent double in pain before and after each and every performance. “Towards the end, he used to come to me and say that he had these pains in his stomach,” says Tony Iommi, himself a cancer survivor. “He’d asked me for some Tums, so I’d give him some Tums. But I told him that he ought to get that checked out. But of course it was too late by the time he did.”

First outing for the TE-1200:

Hi all, About to buy a Boss RC-5 pedal from a 'Dave Boutflour' from Grimsby (at least one of the same pictures as posted above) who asked me to pay to his girlfriend's PayPal account ([email protected]) - very glad I Googled this email first.

I love a good cliffhanger before the next episode!

Neck-wise, the fretboard's got to come off. Another 24 hours with major clamping and trussrod adjusted to help, still a back bow of 1.5mm with the trussrod still in tension. Just to make sure I hadn't had an aberration and originally put the rod in the wrong way up, I loosened it back to the mid point. The back bow was back to 2mm either end - exactly the same as before the clamping. I'm also bothered that the trussrod has now been under a lot of strain for a long time so the best course of action is to take the fretboard off, take the rod out, and see what the underlying neck is doing, fix, replace with new rod and re-glue the fretboard. All being well, the board will be off later this morning.

I wishing had a back catalogue. I could really do with a new back.

I was once told by a member of the audience (!) to 'get rid of that cheap bass and get a Fender'. That cheap bass being a Yamaha BBNE2. It's nearly as annoying as "oo that's a big fiddle mister, can you get it under your chin?" "No I can't, is it OK if I borrow 3 or 4 of yours?"

I was once told not to use my Orange amp again and to buy an Ampeg SVT classic because "that's the industry standard". As far as I know they're still looking for a replacement bassist.

I used to have a Peerless Retromatic B2 bass in ivory finish. The guitarist in the band where I used it had the guitar version. We looked good. If it had been 30" scale I would still have it. On the left here ...

At the risk of getting the thread locked, so do I.

I got told not to use my 5 string for rehearsals and jams because the guitarist couldn't work out what I was playing because of the extra string. He maybe might have had a point if he'd been playing to stuff I was coming up with but that never happened, I was coming up with lines to his guitar parts, and you could tell whether they sounded good by whether or not they sounded good. Sadly that was the least of the problems so I did a bit of "it's not you it's me" and left.

Just got home from an afternoon gig with Franklin's Tower. It was at a beer festival in a village hall, which had a surprisingly good stage, very solid, about 9 metres by three and around 2 feet above the rest of the flooring. Surprising choice to ask a Grateful Dead band to play at a small village beer festival - but we seemed to go down well, even spotted one or two wearing GD T shirts. Even more surprisingly, we were passed a hand written note by a member of the audience requesting 'Althea', which wasn't on our set list but we played anyway. Back home now to eat and then off to my second beer festival of the day, in my home village where I am playing with the Wirebirds at the local cricket club.

...and having duly landed, perched on my PC and delivered his load , you are all invited to the party ...

Ignore this now. As happens with these things, you spend days getting nowhere and then just after I posted on the here a band gets suggested. I look them up and they're excellent and available. Job done. Thanks for looking.

Aaaaaaargh!

Thanks, you lovely people. Had a lot of fun putting this one together. New pic has just been attached to the leg of carrier pigeon Speckled Jim and he's heading off in Lurks' direction right now.

Well...maybe not. Remember who made the neck in the first place

And so, the fretboard removal. Pretty straightforward. After masking the paint on the headstock (I don't want to have to do that again ) I made a small jig so that I could apply pressure from the heel end without having to clamp, and thus possibly damage, the neck: To remove a fretboard, the good news is that almost all manufacturers and builders use Titebond or similar...and it softens with extreme heat. The really good news is that I made this neck...and so I know it's used Titebond. So first tool is an electric iron. I use a cheap travel iron: It takes a LOT of heat. Max temperature and sitting on the wood here for at least 15 minutes before I even start (and this is a thin fretboard!). After 15-20 minutes, I test the joint with a single-edged razor: Then I 'borrow' one of MrsAndyjr1515's pottery tools to start ease the thin steel end between the fretboard and neck: And that allows me to start sliding my perfect-for-the-job piece of sheet steel (it's actually a proper tool designed to help hand bend acoustic guitar sides) into the gap. Then, mm by mm, you can inch (there's a contradiction) the iron and sheet steel forwards. This is after about 45 minutes after the initial success with the razor blade: Patience is the name of the game. Any attempt to rush risks snapping the fretboard. And around 1.5hrs in total - it's off, with neck undamaged and fretboard in one piece : Note the amount of forward bow that trussrod was trying to apply to counteract the 2mm back bow of the neck. So - that maple must be SEVERELY back bowed to resist that truss rod and still bend the wrong way, right? So I put my levelling beam along it, expecting it to be sitting on a substantial hump in the middle of the neck: Flat as a pancake! And that has led me to the position of having never, ever seen something like this and not believing, if it hadn't been right in front of me, that what has happened could happen. But explaining to those interested what has happened will take me a little while. The good news is that all it needs is a new truss rod (because this one is now comprehensively f****d ) and then the fretboard gluing back on

Normally, I would say yes. But in this case no - not needed. It will take me a couple of posts to be able to explain (I'll have to draw some diagrams) but what I've just discovered, I wouldn't have thought possible. Good news is that it is easily fixable. I'll update the progress shortly...but the conclusions will take a little longer.

Last night's half sized rig. Experimenting with fully electronic drums and eventually convinced the band we should put a smidge of bass through the PA so only took the one cab. Still very loud though! ABM600 into an ABM Pro Neo 15". Lovely sound with a fretless and a touch of valve drive.

Same Old Scene - Roxy Music. (Jean-Luc Pickguard - don't you know any other groups? There are an awful lot of other options to choose from)

A great evening at Telford's warehouse tonight, made even better by catching up with some old friends who I hadn't seen for 20 years. No photo's of the band or my setup, as I wasn't in the best frame of mind prior to playing, but here's a picture of the outside.

And the winner is ... @upside downer..! Here, then, is your Winner's Certificates (download and save as pdf file, then proudly print and frame...) ... BC_Chal_Cert_2022_09.pdf ... which look like this (but bigger, of course..!)…

21.

I auditioned for a band several years ago & I had put in the effort on the run up & nailed everything they asked me to play. They seemed like really cool guys & I wanted to get the gig. However, at the end of the audition after the whole band telling me they liked my playing & my personality the singist says "what kind of guitar is that"? To which I replied "oh, this is my Musicman Stingray" He came back with, "hmmmmmmm, haven't heard of them, you'll need to play a Fender in this band"! In my broadest black country accent I said "thanks for the jam, t'raaa a bit".

If the band leader can't compensate for a slightly weaker signal from one of the instruments then why is he in charge of the sound? You set your sound on the HX stomp, he is then responsible for the level, if it needs more, he just needs to boost it. Sounds like he isn't changing any settings between different gigs which is worrying, every room is different! Bassists tend to get the blame a lot for their volume, I've had guitarists who have too much bottom end, keyboard players who aren't used to full band situations so add in all the lows... it's always the bassists fault though!

Wouldn’t that mean a lot of basses are no strings away from being ukuleles? 🤣

I’ve solved it: It was the Truss Rod Channel, in the basement, with the Levelling Board! *turns cards over* D’oh! I dunno: can we get to the design leap of neckless guitars; coz that seems to be where all the problems are!!

Or the maker! 😝

It would be $300,000,001 if you include the Ray Wilson era.

Oh that’s wonderful! I have a Midwestern 4 string and a 30” MW2 5er is my next want! Interesting pickup placement, what was your thinking on the shifted back neck pickup? Great choice on the unpainted neck too, really captures that 70’s Fender vibe! Si

This article was linked to another forum and makes interesting reading regarding why you shouldn't be using standby switches at all...