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Lighter fluid and a match.

There's no need to be unkind to others merely because you are an intellectual powerhouse of immeasurable capability.

Far from complete, lacks a G&L! Lovely set though!

I love crotchets and training wheels. Knowing about these has kept me in work as a professional musician who can read music, understand theory and ‘hear’ well. It’s all part of the same thing, they can’t be separated out and certainly I’d be wary of denigrating them so readily in public!

Didn't like reading the dots.

This needs to be shared because it is so far above and beyond what any other company would do i honestly cant believe it. My buddy left his keeley el rey dorado on top of his car and drove off. He went back to try and find it but no luck. It was in the box, but he didnt have a good picture of the box to put up a lost ad. He sent a mail to Robert Keeley asking if he might have a good pic of the box that he could use. Within 24 hours, he had a brand new el rey dorado in his hands sent from the US to ireland via fedex. Your man wouldnt even take money for the shipping. I've never heard of a company going so far to sort a customer out. Really exemplary conduct.

The function band I was in many years ago played a lot of weddings. Over the years we’d met a lot of famous people who were guests, although my guitarist pal in the band was most wowed when he found out that Gary Moore was attending a local wedding in the early 90’s. It was in a marquee in a posh suburb, a flash do with plenty of guests and a free bar etc. Tension was high on the day as Gary Moore was my pal’s guitar hero, and he was understandably nervous about playing in front of him. Subsequently he had quite a few drinks to take the edge off a bit. Someone suggested Gary could guest with the band, and with that he went to his car and brought out a Fender combo which was set up on the stage. My pal was so excited by this time, and had a few more drinks for a bit of dutch courage. The gig went great, Gary Moore was a top bloke, very friendly and unassuming. My pal ( who is a wonderful player himself) traded solos with Gary, although by this time he was a touch unsteady and stood on Gary’s pedals a few times by mistake! Gary didn’t seem too bothered by this, and my pal was very apologetic. Anyway, the audience loved it and my pal was in seventh heaven afterwards. It was only when he’d been driven home after the gig that he realised he had played with his hero all evening whilst wearing odd shoes.

I think I sold my MIJ P bass during COVID to finance an MIJ Jazz that I really should have hung on to. The Stingray has been with me for years now, five years maybe? Anyhow, I've never had all three types of bass at once. I fancied a precision so bought this beaut from @kevham who is a true gent and I've now bought two basses from him. Black and maple Player P bass. Classic look, classic sound. I'm starting to use more drive and distortion and need to play with a pick for more songs so it was a good excuse. Just need to fit a D tuner (already purchased from Bass Direct) then decide later what strings I want, rounds, flats or tapes.... Really high output from the stock pickups in the two minutes noodle I've had.

I have a theory about it, but perhaps I'll stick to my intuitions.

I really do wonder what you hope to achieve in this discussion. I started this thread merely to say that I respected and admired the deep technical understanding others have of music, and that I someday wished to possess even some of that level of understanding. Your contribution appears to be that it is not necessary because the theory describes the music, not the other way around, ipso facto to use theoretical knowledge to help write a piece of music is putting the cart before the horse and, therefore, wrong, and that it's much better to use intuition when writing music. This is very "what came first, the chicken or the egg" territory. In reality, it doesn't matter. I could spend hours trial and erroring my way to something that sounds good when actually somebody already did the trial and error years ago and somebody is able to explain why the result of that works well, and had I just applied that technical knowledge sooner, I could save my self several hours. That is not cheating, it's not incorrect, and it is not less musical. You may prefer to fumble around with your ears and experience in some false sense of musical purity, that's fine; don't let me spoil your fun, but have the respect to not tell people they are wrong or less musical for applying their theoretical knowledge to a real world situation; that's precisely the point of learning theory.

I had a laptop that wouldn't stop playing Someone like you. I think it was A Dell.

I was going through some old SD cards last night; all the photographic content should be on a PC and backed up elsewhere, opening one drive and there was a a folder containing a video clip from a gig I played for BBC Introducing at Reading's Purple Turtle in October 2017. My wife must have filmed it and I'd never seen it until yesterday. Even though the band all ended very badly/abruptly, I can look at this and take some joy that we were a very tight punky/alternative unit and on fire that night. I wrote the music, singer the lyrics.

Bought on looks alone 😂

What a genuinely bizarre diversion this discussion has taken.

Every time i play. And i only play originals.

All the time. I reckon aliens are changing numbers I've previously learned...

Neon Yuppie Coke Machine.

Evening players I've been around the block and played a fair bit. I have a dep gig on Saturday for a band I've stepped in a few times for. Thought id just play my fingers in and run through the set. Put the original track on and heard stuff I never picked up on when I first listened. I seriously thought I had these lines down. Sometimes think I'm so stuck on learning the structure and having the bass in hand I miss the nuances as I'm always picking out sections. when I listen without the bass in hand I hear all this new stuff. It was good to get a wake-up call.

Fair enough, but look. You posted on here about how you were unhappy about the way you played at a session. Being a decent bunch, people on here weighed in with sympathetic comments, sensible advice, etc. The next minute, you are disparaging people with no "drive", etc. Wasting time being "hard on yourself" (and/or others) is completely unproductive. You don't improve by making yourself or others suffer. You improve by working at it. You can't have it both ways. Most of us have or had (some of us are retired now) kids, houses, jobs, bills to pay, etc. It can be difficult to balance all the demands on ones time, but your situation is far from unique. How do you suppose others in your position manage? It's always possible to find half an hour to practice (use headphones so you don't disturb the family). How many hours telly do you watch a week? Knock a couple of hours off that and bingo, there's your practice time. I ditched my telly many years ago, when my daughter went to uni'. Obviously, you cannot do that if you have a family who like to watch it, but you don't have to sit in front of it because they are. I get a hell of a lot more done without that thief of my time sitting in the lounge. You don't have to go to that extreme, but you do have options.

I shall try not to let it affect my day. I'm not promising anything mind. I'm not trying to prove anything, but it shows that musical theory can be directly applied in composition. Also that making vacuous statements like: is rather silly. Not least because if I know (for example) tapping a triad over a particular chord sequence will work, I know what it will sound like, but mainly because 'don't tell me what to do!'

The sound of the accordion, which is only surpassed by the bagpipes as hand held cacophony devices. BTW, it was the Irish who invented the pipes as vermin repellent. After the Scots brought the gift of the game of golf to the Irish the Irish returned the favor by giving the bagpipe to the Scots. The Scots didn't know it was a joke. 🤪

Yes , windows are a pane

In the late 00's, the band I was in turned up to a regular monthly gig on a Saturday night in Central London. As we got there, a van pulled up and another band started getting stuff out. The bar owner came running out an apologised profusely, saying that Amy Winehouse's friends had booked the whole bar for a birthday bash for her and that he forgot to cancel us. After a bit of frustrated grumbling, we found out the other band was her godchildren/nieces or something (I later found out they are quite famous themselves, but I can't remember the name - basically two girls and a boy with their mother on double bass - Daisy, someone and someone?). We were told that they would only do about 40 mins when Amy arrived, so could we hang around and do the rest of the night as we were there? We could see Mark Ronson milling around, as well as Adele (this was after her first album but before she got stratospherically famous), so we said yes of course! At the time we were doing a similar style of sound to a lot of Mark's Dap Kings stuff, so thought it would be good to impress him! The "stage" area wasn't big enough for both bands to be set up (they didn't have a full drum kit and some sort of weird huge organ) so we packed our kit in the cellar and waited.... Hours went by, while we all dutifully stood there waiting with the paparazzi outside the front door....no sign of Amy. We kept asking the party organiser if we could play to keep the people entertained, but he kept saying no - the other band needed to be ready to play the moment she walks in. At one point I remember Mark Ronson shouting - "let the musicians play!", which made me think - wow - someone famous called me a musician! (Not that he had heard me at that point!). At one point, someone shouted they needed a bass player - so I ran in, and found Mark had started messing around on their equipment. WHen I got there he was playing on their snare drum. Our guitarist was playing, along with the two young ladies from the group. Having no idea who they were, I picked up the double bass. It was very low height for me and had plasticy gut type strings on it. I couldn't see any kind of pickup or amp, so not sure if their mother actually played anything to be heard on the gigs, or whether it just hadn't been set up yet. So, I ended up jamming with Mark (him having a go on several instruments), or at least I thumped as hard as I could without breaking the strings (that would be rude!). I think we played about 3 or 4 songs, including a rendition of Bear Necessities, before the organiser ran in and shut us down again as Amy was "5 minutes away". We all put the instruments down and dutifully stood waiting.......but no Amy. It got to about 1am, and as the venue closed at 2am, we decided there would be no time left to play after them, so called it and left. We did get paid, but were mightily huffed that we didn't get to show what we could really do in front of Mark. We had been dreaming that he might have given us some backstage after party gigs or something! Just to rub salt in the wounds, I read a report in the Metro on the way to work that Amy had let her friends down and that Mark invited everyone in the bar back to his suite at the local posh hotel afterwards. We had obviously walked out in a huff before then! In summary, I got to jam with Mark Ronson who probably didn't hear anything I played (I couldn't so I don't see how he could have). I would like to think Adele also took note of my brilliance, but she did look rather inebriated that night so I doubt it!

Do you think that Tom and Johnny were operating at this level of theoretical complexity or simply played a series of chords they liked? Similarly, it’s unlikely (but not impossible) that Charlie Parker was thinking processing all the complex substitutions at 300 bpm.

The Lonely Goatherd ～ Julie Andrews

A couple of years ago I decided to part with my beloved late 60’s Marshall 1974 18 watt combo. I bought it for £45 in Shipley West Yorkshire around 1976, and it was my first ‘proper’ guitar amp. A vintage dealer made me an offer I couldn’t refuse, and what with Covid and stuff making my finances a bit tight, I just thought it was time. It got shipped to Australia and then on to Hawaii to it’s new owner, Kirk Hammet. ( I was promised a video of him playing the ‘Greeny’ Les Paul into it, but never chased it up - maybe I should drop Kirk a reminder. )

You’re right about the chromatic alterations but nothing in this sequence suggest a change of key so best to not approach it like that when you think about it because you lose sight of the bigger picture - I.E it’s just a slightly cheeky chord sequence in the key of G major. Chord iii is pretty common actually; perhaps less common is chord three as dominant chord rather than a minor chord. Chord IV going to IV minor is a very common alteration popularised by the Beatles - it’s just a more interesting way of getting back to the I chord (G in this instance). So really its ultimate just a I - IV chord sequence (very common!) with a little variation to make it a bit more interesting to the listener.

In this video, David breaks down the theoretical concepts which make the iconic Creep chord progression work. The lesser educated among us (i.e. me) would play Creep and think "That's weird that it does that, but it sounds cool" and just forget about it, but learning about the technical and theoretical concepts behind it really is very interesting to me, and I truly wish I possessed this in-depth understanding of music theory. Same goes for Jacob Collier; as unique an individual as he is, I wish I possessed his truly frightening understanding of what makes music, music. Some day I will get around to actually learning theory. I also was not aware of how many different places the chord progression was used - I thought it was almost unique to Creep.

I always wondered why the English were so hell bent on conquering Scotland. Sure, they had bagpipes, kilts and haggis, but otherwise what was the attraction? Scotch? Not that we were all that smart for acquiring Texas and Florida. That's come back to bite us in the arse big time. 😲

Unforgivable. As I said before, strings are cheap, so it's worthwhile carrying at least a small variety of them! When it came to bass, we stocked Rotosound, D'Addario, Elixir, and Ernie Ball, with a good "mainstream" selection of each brand, and a couple of something more exotic, like flats/half rounds, steels, NYXL, etc. If a small place can do it, it should be the easiest thing in the world for a chain to do it! My personal preference is D'Addario XL steels, but it's not the job of the shop to dictate to their customers what they should string their instrument with, although I would occasionally have discussions with customers about what they liked in a string and made suggestions based on that.

What do I value about my local music shop? The Miserable ignoring of customers when they walk in. The useless stock levels of anything bass wise. The lies that they have things in stock, but turns out it's in their warehouse, but wont deal with it because you need to order online. Their sky high prices. The absolute miserable attitude to being helpful to you whilst you are trying to give them your money. The complete arrogant attitude when you walk in and the look an aristocrat gives to a street walker. As you can tell, I don't like mine. And it's a big chain store. And 5 mins walk from my house. I gave it another chance recently and having been greeted with a grunt, and then told by the assistant still eating his dinner that the only bass strings they stock are daddrio xl and they're £40, I walked out, not to return again for another 5 years.

Oh cripes, I thought this might happen. Wanting to learn music theory does not negate one’s musicality or expression. I know it isn’t necessary to write great music, I’m not suggesting it’s a precursor to writing or performing well, I’m just saying I would like to understand it. Equally, many great musicians and composers through the years have had at least a firm grasp of music theory and have used this knowledge when writing their music. Whether you enjoy the end product or not is somewhat irrelevant as, again, it’s art. It’s a completely false dichotomy to suggest you either do or don’t need it to write music - nobody is suggesting that’s the case. I do not need to understand how a car works to drive it, but I enjoy learning and understanding it, and this is something I do with my primary interests.

Carving in progress. I'm not sure how it's going. It's definitely going to take some practice... 😬

Only one way to test that. Bass solo kicks in 2:25. See what you think.

Re Fool For Your Lovin’, we do it and although I’m sure my add-ons & flourishes are probably not exactly what Neil Murray played it sounds pretty close. The only bit I dumb down is on the second half of the guitar solo as it sounds a bit empty (we only have 1 gtr) so I do more root notes on that part to give more depth.

So what have you got against Polka huh?

What's that? Never heard of it. But then I've only been playing since 1965. 😉 Only when lifted at least 70cm, and even then the change could be for the better, it can reduce boom.

Did the drummer made You feel bad?

True bass sound is an interesting concept Like so much in life it's 'whose truth' is the truth? What you hear and what the audience hear are very different Bass frequencies are omnidirectional, they are reflected by the floor and by any nearby walls and ceilings. Bouncing round the room they take multiple paths creating valleys and peaks where the bass is quieter of louder so even different bits of the room et diferent bass sounds. Meanwhile the treble and mid ranges are beamed out like a torch beam very bright/loud stright ahead but with little sound leaking out at the sides. If any of your bass is going through the PA then you'll hear all of the real lows just the same as the audience but just about nothing of the mids and tops So it depends upon what you want to hear, If you want to hear what the audience hear then you need to point the peakers at your ears. If you want to hear every nuance of your playing then again you need those mids and to point at your ears. If you want to warm yourself in lovely bassiness that you don't get any other time than on stage then that's just your preference and f you raise the speakers or tilt them you'll hear something different.

G - B - C - Cm The relative minor of G major is E minor, so going G-B is a preparation for a nice V-i "perfect cadence" into E minor. Nothing unusual. From this perspective of E minor, the B-C is V-VI — a perfectly standard "interrupted cadence". Within the first three chords there's been a nice chromatic voice going d-d#-e — with the C-Cm, this then reverses, so you have d-d#-e-eb. This gives the four bars a nice looping round on itself quality. There's a probably a specific name for the Cm-G iv-I "plagal cadence" — eg I can think of pieces by Bach that end like that — but if I ever knew it, I've forgotten it. All these elements would make sense to someone doing A-level music. But I do think the theory is just explaining why it sounds good to us, rather than suggesting to the composer what should come next. Personally, I think that the important part, given that this is rock music, not classical music, is the inner voice with the chromatic steps looping round on itself, rising hopefully, falling plangently.

Band-Jo-Aid - Do they know it’s Bluegrass?

The Old Romantics

It was a duo with Brahms. Traditional Cockney sing-alongs.

Musical theory is never a bad thing. We should learn as much as we can. Music is basically feelings and patterns. We don't necessarily need to know degree level music theory, but we should know our patterns, what the notes are called, their relationship to each other, and know how they fit together.

And we all know the quality of music can be objectively measured by how complicated it is, the more complicated the better music.

Spandex Belly Agadon't