borntohang

Oh, and there's few things worse than a trumpet player who comes from the 'HIGH and LOUD' school. The ones with the cheeks like leather bowling balls who haven't worked out that monophonic instruments can sometimes lay out during other player's solos, or that sounding like a pinched balloon neck being rapidly deflated is not a desirable trait in a soloist.

A couple of years back I worked an acoustic duo with two guitars. Very laid back, restaurant music. Occasionally had a percussionist sit in and he was generally excellent and tasteful. One particular show he was suffering from an ear infection and consequently the volume kept going up with a particularly piercing cowbell right in my ear line. I could have handled that, but a chap at the pub garden we were playing announced he was also a percussionist and ran home to fetch some kind of wooden primitive xylophone thing so he could sit in. It was about knee height and he placed it on the floor while sitting on a slightly-too-tall stool, so he had to lean forward and awkwardly hammer away at it with a mallet like a particularly demented shed builder. It was already a horribly warm day and now one ear was getting the cowbell and the other a discordant clattering of poorly tuned wooden tonebars with little relation to the tune, with the two of us guitars trying grimly to hold onto a tempo. I started to get a bit woozy and felt like I was dodging massive gears inside a giant horror movie clock or something equally baroque. SAW: REAPERCUSSION perhaps. Puckered my anus enough to get through about three tunes worth of it and then had to stop the set "to do a couple of solo tunes" while the other guitarist diplomatically told them to shut the f*** up before both their instruments went into the harbour.

If I was installing a J pickup into a Stingray with the aim of getting both MM and J tones I might consider a blend control that blended between the neck coil of the MM and the J pickup, wired in parallel with the always active bridge coil. That would give you: 1. Traditional MM with both coils in parallel. 2. J pickup and a single coil close to the bridge J position in parallel for the Jazz sound. 3. All three at once for something else. And of course any combo in between the two extremes. Not sure how accurate it would be but pretty sure I could get something useful out of it (I would actually put it on a switch because I don't like blends). When the tech reinstalled the new pickup they might have just wired each coil of the MM to either side of the blend pot assuming that was what it was for. Looks like a cool piece anyway!

Not to flex on somebody else's achievements, but my drummer finished a tour with a broken foot a couple of years ago. Came offstage badly during an encore moment and broke it but still finished the gig before he realised he couldn't stand on it. Luckily we had a couple days off so he got booted at the hospital, me and him went into the studio and he relearned the set playing left foot kick, and then we did the last three gigs. He was taking the boot off so he didn't have to hobble onstage with it which earned him a shouting from the doctor after we wrapped. He's healed up fine thankfully. Wouldn't do it now but you know how it is when you're young and the band is the most important thing to ever thing.

There probably are because unforeseen cancellation clauses go on every tour contract, but Live Nation aren't just going to front up nine figure sums if they didn't think it wasn't going to happen. People were talking like both sides haven't been reliably fronting arenas for a decade since the bust-up days.

Did anybody really suggest for a second it was going to be a bomb? They could have come out and farted three blind mice to rapturous applause but both the Noel and Liam bands are, at bare minimum, stadium-level outfits and these are songs they've been playing for decades so I'm not surprised they sound great. I'd probably manage to do some vocal warm-ups with 50m on the table too.

Festival talk has reminded me we once got a dodgy golf cart with a blown fuse. We bodged it with the foil bit out of a fag packet and it ran like a champ for a week. The following year, same festival, I got a suspiciously familiar golf cart. Opened up the fuse box out of curiosity and found that ciggy foil is much more durable than expected, or possibly that a series of unlucky crews were inspired by our initial bodge. At least it wasn't a nail this time.

I have the opposite story: the last time I went two of my social circle who were dating had bought tickets together and then split up just before the festival. They couldn't afford/didn't want to lose the tickets so went together in a tiny tent and somehow every act I actually saw they were stood somewhere at the back looking incredibly miserable. Why didn't they just split up and go find some interesting things/hot people, in this huge festival the size of a city, full of interesting things/hot people? It is a mystery for the ages.

Oh yeah, I've been to shows at Glastonbury with five people at them. There are just so many artists, so many small stages, and not enough time in the day. On my second visit I was still discovering entire areas of the festival site with multiple stages I'd never even seen listed on a timetable. Lots of them were just vendors or art groups throwing up a riser in the corner of their location or similar. It's not your standard "main stage and two big tops" festival setup. That works both ways though: there are punters who go to hang about Strummerville/Arcadia/Shangri-La for the entire weekend and will never even be within earshot of Pyramid, so there are built in crowds for some of the more niche stages.

My old man has been volunteering with Oxfam for 20+ years now. He was in the field again this summer shift-leading stewards on Vehicle Gate 3a which is where the interesting people come through. He claims it'll be his last year as he'll be 75 after the fallow '26, but we're not convinced. If it wasn't such a dog of a five-hour drive I reckon they'd eventually be carrying him out in a box because he loves the festival. Doesn't even go to watch bands but just wanders and occasionally texts me updates like "some old git looks like a muppet playing on Pyramid now". I did a few years with him when I was younger, although only twice at Glastonbury. Eventually my future wife started tagging along and we did many years at Leeds and Latitude plus assorted others we wouldn't have got chance to visit on our minimal budget. Hope your daughter enjoyed it as much as we did.

Sat in with a friend's band over the weekend and between wireless guitar systems and cheap IEMs there was so much crappy signal firing around onstage that my wired IEMs started to pick up interference even when not plugged into the XLR. Hard work and not a problem I've ever had before, but luckily only a one shot gig.

Zak out, Scott in to finish the final tour apparently. Pete says Zak has left to pursue other projects and Zak said he was fired. It's all refreshingly untrained and up close PR compared to the Foos and their faceless radio silence, I must admit.

TB can be a bit fussy but the Effects forum does specifically have a longstanding sticky thread warning zero-tolerance on 'real bassists don't use effects' posting in the Effects forum, whether humerus or otherwise. I doubt the mods get offended as much as they got sick of clearing up the mess every time that joke got posted and inevitably turned into a flame war. BC has the advantage of being a smaller userbase so you're more likely to know which particular berk is winding you up and how sincere they're being.

74% (exactly) of starting a tribute is finding a good pun. The band stuff comes later. Some of my favourites we've seen or worked with, in no order: The She Street Band (all-female Springsteen) Slady The G52s (Glasgow based B52s who formed to play two shows with us) The B-Hives (actually got franchised as official tribute by The Hives) Stones N'Roses (US based Stone Roses, Rolling Stones, and GnR tribute. Also play as Geezer and a bunch of other pun tributes)

Also me, although I don't play bass for them. It's been going seven years now so doesn't feel that niche any more. We have the advantage of there being basically no casual fans of Devo - either you've never heard of them, or don't like them, or you're a fanatic. Keeps the crowd numbers ticking over nicely.