WalMan

eXTC at The Factory this coming Thursday

Keep at it. Baby steps and do all your physio! My smashed right shoulder 21 years age knitted, and the replacement of the left a couple of years later is still in and working, so it can be done and all the best.

As we're mainly pub sized gigs, generally not huge, there's a bass drum mic but nothing else. I picked up an inexpensive boundary mic from Studiospares and chuck that on the floor behind the bassdrum and under the snare & hihat and have that as a simple ambient purely for my IEM's which works fine for me - and better than fannying around finding somewhere to site the Zoom H6 to do the same thing.

Having got used to running IEM's I now find that I miss them when I don't use them. Did a dep last week in a smallish room but I was right on top of the bass amp and the sound where I was was not great. Spent the whole evening wishing I'd just taken an aux from their xAir and run a quick mix. Saturday nights gig with my main band was again a smallish room and I thought "it'll be OK I won't bother it's too much faff". I was stuck in a corner with the guitars the other side of the kit and PA a way in front of me. Got to the break and set up a long cable to my side of the stage to go into the Behringer P2. didn't bother setting up the ambient mic and ran one plug in and the other out. Even like that things were so much better!! I could hear everything and BV's were less of a struggle

Saturday night was a wedding, very definitely NOT our usual gig as a rock covers band but the couple had come to see us and knew what they were getting. A cross section of ages but we’re old, so… Got in and set up. Not a huge room and I was worried that it would get loud. Thankfully it stayed under reasonable control and sound was sorted reasonably quickly with no sound check. The good thing was it wasn’t just the bride and groom getting into it and we had a good to excellent response all night. Lots if dancing and singing and ended up running over with a number of ‘encores’. singer from one of my function deps was effusive about our vocalist and how tight it all was, which was nice. Also funny to watch a couple of younger guys in their glad rags stood mouths agape at the widdly harmony guitar solo in Final Countdown 🤣

We often play Chase the Key so I have to be used to learning the shapes and moving

I am lucky that have a pretty good ear so I tend to find the song(s) on Spotify, start out noodling along and work up to a fair approximation. If it’s a well known song that I’ve heard a fair bit over the years I can normally hit a reasonable basic version reasonably quickly before digging in a bit deeper. For last minute deps I’ll usually check out @tomread of this parish https://www.tomreadbass.co.uk/transcriptions to see if he’s done the dots and chuck a beer in his direction. A scan through YouTube for possible hints on awkward bits - though very often what I find is someone else’s approximation and disagree with it 🤣 but it can be a way in. Had to workout View To A Kill recently and the bass on the version I was working was indistinct in places, then I found John Taylor’s lockdown walk through and realised part of the problem was he uses echo in the verses. Still it gave me some quick pointers. When I’m working through a deplist I promise myself that I’ll write down the structure and some hints … and then always end up with a noodle followed by “ok that’s not too taxing” 🤦‍♂️. Last week was a couple of nights on the sofa with a bass on my knee, plugged into the BassRevolt with Spotify on the aux in doing a brush up for a couple of deps on headphones while wifey watched the footie. For prog stuff I’ll go with the play along and find dots if I can - Firth of Fifth was 12 pages across the rehearsal room floor for a while, but I think I have it now.

Generally if in the break it looks like we might run long we agree on songs to be dropped in readiness. What does bug me sometimes is one guitarists inability to look up during an encore to agree with nods & mouthing across stage a follow up from the 3 or 4 available on the list. I can be looking across trying to catch his eye for an eternity, before the inevitable debate at the end of the first song to pick a second, instead of keeping the flow going. Our sets have got a lot slicker in recent months. Years ago in originals bands we would always have the first two or three songs of each set queued. In recent years doing covers that had become far less so, but we now have the first 3 or 4 ready to go for each set, but the rest also run pretty tight - to the extent that I normally have a couple of pints of water on stage and used to get through them, but in recent times have been lucky to get a quarter of the way into the first glass

You have my sympathy!! Smashed my right shoulder body-boarding in 2001, which ended up fixing itself eventually (sort of). Knew it wasn't good when the x-rays came back and I could see the doctors saying oooh that's not good. Was going to be kept in to have it replaced as the left one was a few years later, but then they had a big RTA come in and there were no beds so I was strapped up and sent back to the campsite by taxi in the middle of the night. Left shoulder was replaced around 20 years ago - the start of many repairs. As Nicko says GET PHYSIO & DO YOUR EXERCISES! My left shoulder works ok but could be better if I had really worked at the exercises (and possibly if the physio hadn't gone slightly easy on me). Getting all the muscles around it generally that hold everything together is also important. A GruvGear Duo strap helped out with heavier basses until I got lighter ones I can manage a gig with on a normal strap. Cheaper than a new bass but if you do get the leather strap that runs across the back of the bass between strap buttons for the second strap to loop round. I started with the webbing version but found it not solid enough.

If it lasts he’ll be hearing about that until the end of time … I know I am after 40 years on a regular basis, normally approaching wifey’s birthday whether we’re gigging or not 🤪🤣

Dep went ok and I remembered most of it. A couple of moments where I was looking at the set list wondering how a song went and caught up after a bar, but survived. Not a huge crowd and it was a bit of a Wild West town but still fun playing different songs. Didn’t set up the IEM’s and probably should have done as I was right on top of the amp so everything was going past my knees. Had some nice compliments in one of the breaks so I must’ve been doing something right 🙂

Last night’s dep rehearsal was mainly ok and I know what to brush up on. I got Mixing Station on my iPad connected to their Soundcraft Ui24 but for some reason couldn’t work out how to get my aux added to set my IEM mix, which is odd as I’ve had no issue doing so with a different dep that has the same interface 🤷🏼‍♂️ Tonight was run through of songs for three sets for tomorrow night’s dep with a different band. Fingers crossed I remember and don’t spend the night catching up in bar 2 when I recognise the song and find any key changes 🤪

Whole bass or just the E string? Hipshot D-tuner is your friend for the latter 🙂

Realised I have songs to relearn / brush up on for two deps before rehearsal for one on Wednesday and gig with the other on Friday … oops. Good news is the Wednesday rehearsal is with a band that runs a silent stage, so the keyboard player, who I’ve gigged with in a couple of bands over the years, was able to send me baseless tracks of them so I spent this evening watching the Grand Prix with the tracks playing from Dropbox on my iPad plugged into the TwoNotes BassRevolt aux in doing a play along on headphones so that’s one sorted 😁 Rehearsal with my main band tomorrow, brush up for Wednesday’s rehearsal for the dep and Friday’s gig Tuesday and Thursday…what could possibly go wrong 🫣🤪🤣

Friday night played a small but friendly pub for the 10th anniversary of the landlady taking over. Not a great deal of space and a nasty hum for a while, eventually traced to the drummers fan that was right next to me. Sound was good but I completely lost the bass at the start of the second set. Coming through the PA, but for some reason not my IEM's. I had had to turn the amp right down for the first set and can only assume that I knocked the master when we went back on, but why it disappeared from my IEM's when it was in the PA was beyond me. Turned the master up and the bass came back but was too loud so initially barely touching the bass (because the sound I was getting was great). Eventually rolled the level back on the bass and everything settled down. Otherwise a good night with a singing, dancing crowd so...

It's also annoying when you learn a song, get it worked up thinking "this'll go well" and it get a blank look at every gig & ends up getting dropped after 2 or 3 tries. Had that with Killer Queen. Good slightly rocked up version based loosley on the Jorn version. Got tumbleweed every time😡 Ours tends to be work up a new one to replace stuff that we've been doing for ages so as to mix ix up but the older songs go and we end up with with the newer ones all the time - that said more recently they have been better known covers guaranteed to get them dancing & singing and it's them difficult to slot older songs back in once in a while Finally, we operate to a single veto so if someone doesn't want to do a song then that's it. Had a few where that's happened, not from me as I am a musical whooer and will give pretty much anything a chance & go with the flow. Most recently I could take or leave "I Love Rock & Roll". A nothing song, but always works at the end of the night. It's 2 minutes, and a POP to play so 'whatevaaaah' 😁

Thanks all. A difficult couple of days Sunday to Tuesday, but music is a great healer 🙂

sounds like a bit of a slacker, are you sure he’s committed to the band 🤣 Got to be done 😁 I’ve planned operations around gigs and tried to get back maybe too soon but I can’t let go 🤪

After a difficult week when we lost my mother unexpectedly - saw her Saturday and Sunday morning, leaving her with a cheery “see you next week”, to 9 Sunday evening in A&E talking DNR’s with the doctors 😢 - last night it was a blessed relief to get out to a gig with a great crowd singing and dancing. Sound seemed pretty good though one of the guitarist’s boost setting for solos could probably have done with a bit more. Drummer’s stool broke halfway through a song in the set and he had to finish the night on one of the pub’s chairs as the stool was not repairable. I clearly dug in too hard even with the IEM’s as I have a big old blister on my index finger. https://fb.watch/shD9Bhs2So/?

I once came off stage at the end of a first set where I was a long term dep trying to talk a dep drummer through stuff and an utter car wreck of a set to be greeted with “you guys are BRILLIANT “ 🤦🏼‍♂️No accounting for taste. I suppose they must still have been able to discern the songs being murdered 🤷🏼‍♂️🤣

Sounds like the afternoon trouble in Bognor yesterday that led to the semi lockdown of all pubs into the evening and a tense atmosphere at our gig had actually moved out of the main town. Three pubs and a Tesco Express all trashed and assorted other mayhem and criminality. 🤬 Thankfully nothing at our gig and a great night was had by all