bassbiscuits

The Darkness tonight in Leicester DMH.

Nice one. I’ll get my top operatives onto it…

That racing stripe looks ace. How does one go about getting hold of such a thing?

I love my Yamaha BB604 but I’d love the option of more colours beyond the fairly dull choice of factory black, natural or red wine sunburst Yamaha colours. Lake Placid Blue, Inca Silver or antique white maybe?

I use IEMs in two of my bands but also always use my bass rig onstage. The IEMs are great for getting a decent mix of everything else on stage (including any clicks, tracks etc) but for me there’s no substitute for the feel of real live bass onstage either.

Good gig with the Andy Wales Band at Leicester’s Dos Hermanos Bar. Second time we’ve played there and word seems to have got around as it was pretty busy. First band gig I’ve done since Christmas so I felt a bit off match fitness (hands tiring by halfway through the second half but powering on thru on adrenaline etc - we’ve all been there surely.) Ready for bed now. Edit for gear: Yamaha BB604, Little Mark II head, Markbass STD102F cab, various pedals.

Simon Jones- SGL Guitars. He used to be my go-to repairman when we both lived near each other in Wales some years ago. He’s very good. Drop him a line. http://sglguitars.mysite.com

I’ve had a couple of those double straps and never really got on with them. Instead they just seemed to pull my head forward, which wasn’t ideal.

Haven’t Franz Ferdinand just released a new album too? I think they’re still pretty active rather than being a nostalgia act.

The princely sum of £30 all in.

Courtesy of FB marketplace this weekend I picked up a Yamaha FG Junior JR2 3/4 size acoustic guitar, with its fairly decent padded gigbag and a fender wall hanger thrown in. It’s in pretty much unused condition - I lemon oiled the fretboard, gave it all a good wipe down and restrung it. The action could go down a little and the frets feel like they need a polish but with a good set up I’ll have a very decent little guitar for not much money. Also fits in the car boot nicely which means I won’t have to choose between taking my kids or my guitar whenever I go camping. Happy days.

Aha. The manual points out that: “Guitarists will be pleased to know that two of ZEDi-10FX's mono channels feature Guitar DI high impedance inputs, allowing guitars to be plugged straight into the mixer without the hassle and expense of carrying separate DI boxes.” Theres a push button with a pic of a guitar on it on the channels Im using. If I don’t press it you cant hear enough signal to use. If I do press it you get this massive hum. I’ll try using my DI pedal in the chain and not using the “guitar button.” Also wondered if 3/4 from tuner into XLR of mixer channel would get around it. hmm.

Not as far as I know. I’ve not got the mixer to hand at the moment but it’s always just worked with normal guitar leads. It’s only when effects which are connected to power supplies are involved that the noise starts.

Just guitar lead from acoustic to tuner and then tuner to 3/4 inch jack channel input on mixer.

One of them has a plastic earth pin (a One Spot) the other doesn’t (a Mooer). I tried both and gave up. I ended up using just a tuner running off battery and the hum disappeared.

So I play acoustic guitar, which usually goes straight into my little PA (a little Allen and Heath desk and two Mackie SRM350 powered speakers). The only pedals I use are a Korg Pitchblack tuner, and occasionally a Boss GE7 Eq pedal and a EBS compressor. However I’ve noticed at a couple of gigs (mainly the ones where you’re running a lot off one socket/extension) that whenever I add my pedals into the chain there’s a massive buzz thru the PA. I’ve swapped out each pedal, each guitar, two different power supplies and plugged them into to different extensions etc but still it happens. Even one single pedal and one single adaptor is enough to do it, so it’s not any individual pedal or the adaptor trying to draw too much power. The only way around it has been to stick with just a tuner running off batteries, which is perfectly silent. What am I missing here? Is this problem with venue wiring, nearby lighting, my leads (swapped them out too), my PA, or something else? It’s doing my head in.

Yup - the pub gigs I do are with my blues trio (all three of us sing and play) or as a solo performer (guitar, vocals, harmonica) for the even smaller places which don’t have the space or the budget for bands. I love playing in a trio. Plenty of room musically and onstage, we can travel light, plus fewer people to organise dates around too.

I’ve had a couple of sub-£300 basses I’ve bought blindly, with mixed results - one fine, the rest wrong for various reasons. But a punt I was willing to take. Wouldn’t do it for anything more expensive though.

Just back from doing a rare solo acoustic guitar/vocals gig. It turned into a brilliant evening. Was beset by technical gremlins at the start (buzzing power supplies, dodgy wiring and breaking a string on my main guitar in the first intro to the first song…). But just used my backup £40 Yamaha FG512SJ with a Seymour Duncan woody in the sound hole all gig and it sounded great. The venue usually has music on Saturdays, so Sunday afternoons currently seem quiet for passing trade (though a load of my friends and their mates came along and made a racket). Maybe Saturday nights would suit my rowdy loud playing more anyway. I needed a decent gig after a rubbish few weeks in several aspects of life so this one did the job perfectly. Very happy indeed. Edit - added the only photo I can find from the gig

Back around 1999 a sort of Brit pop / indie band I was in (weren’t we all?) did a gig in London at a place in Soho. We arrived to find we were billed as a jazz band, and our set was in between two drag act singers, so we didn’t exactly fit in musically or sartorially. When it came to be paid, the “promoter” told us there’d been a mistake and the fee was only half what we’d agreed (not even enough to cover the petrol money). To add insult, the van we’d hired had got a parking ticket while we are at the gig. On the plus side, no hang on. There wasn’t one.

There’s a hotel just off the M1/A50 roundabout which I was gigging at a couple of years ago. In the dark and the rain I missed the lane to access the hotel and then had to drive most of the way to Derby before I could turn around. Cursing, I eventually got back to the roundabout - and did exactly the same mistake of missing my turning again! By the time I got to the gig I was well cheesed off, late, properly stressed out and having pointlessly driven to Derby and back twice.

To be fair my sense of direction is awful so I can’t say too much. I was driving home from Wales last month when I noticed the surroundings were no longer familiar and realised I’d missed the entire M42 and driven through Birmingham.

An original glam metal band I was in played a gig up near Stoke in about 1992. It involved us a driving up in our various cars from Swansea - quite an outing. My dad drove me and my girlfriend, while the singer drove the guitarist and their girlfriends in another car. We got home about 3am. The singer’s car didn’t get home till 7am having somehow taken a wrong turn; alarm bells began ringing when they reached the outskirts of London, a mere 190 miles east of their destination. Looking at the map now I still can’t figure that one out.