borntohang

8 hours ago, tonybassplayer said:

Well I think it’s fair to say the doubters were wrong and that that audience absolutely loved it. 
 

Just my humble opinion but in the mid nineties they made playing guitars cool again and I’m grateful for that as I bought their first two albums, bought a nice fender strat with a work bonus and started playing again which led me to taking up bass again and playing live in several bands which had always been an ambition. 
 

They are making a lot of people happy at this moment when the rest of the world is a bit of a sh*t show 

 

PS My 23 year old daughter and boyfriend have tickets for London. She wasn’t even born during their heyday. 
 

 

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. 

1 hour ago, Rich said:

Back in 1986 or 7, two of my colleagues who had recently become a romantic item went to that year's Glasto. On the following Tuesday, I asked them which bands they'd seen... turned out that the answer was 'none'. They'd spent the entire weekend in their tent, smoking dope and shagging. So yes, they never got within earshot of the Pyramid either.

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. 

10 minutes ago, BigRedX said:

 

Thanks for taking the time to answer.

 

Due to the sheer scale of the event and numbers who attend, are you guaranteed an audience or do some bands end up playing to virtually no-one on a stage tucked away in an unpopular corner of the site? Has anyone who has attended as a punter witnessed this?

 

I have to admit I'm not a massive fan of festivals in general, but the more I hear about the festival the less impressed I am from a band's PoV. Like so much in the current musical climate the artists who appear to be able to make it work are those who already have some success and a following.

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. 

On 26/06/2025 at 12:31, chrisba said:

My daughter is working at her third consecutive Glasto, having failed to get tickets each time. My understanding is that the event is 8-10 times oversubscribed, and if just a small percentage of those unsuccessful applicants are prepared to work in exchange for a ticket, then the event is cheaper for everybody. She works for a charity ( firstly Wateraid and now Oxfam ) , who presumably get paid for providing staff ( toilet cleaner first time, now marshal/steward ).

In return for a number of hours work ( 4 x 6 hour shifts, I think ) she gets full festival ticket, exclusive camping area with showers, access to staff bars and food for each work shift. If they fail to complete the work aassigned to them, then they have to pay the full price for everything provided, and will never get invited again. Almost never happens. Apparently, there are many people who do this every year, and the charities tend to look favourably on applications from previous workers. Usually, they are expected to do another festival too, to get into Glastonbury.

This year, she's been invited to go early ( she went down on the previous Saturday ) and do all her shifts before it all kicks off on Friday. She was well chuffed about that, but it means spending 9 nights in a tent !

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)

13 hours ago, Nail Soup said:

Someone on BC (can't remember who) is in a Devo tribute band - 'We are Not Devo' I think.

That is pretty niche IMO... although Devo are well deserving of a tribute.

 

I wish the tributes were spread out over more rather than being concentrated in certain bands like AC/DC.

 

 

 

 

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. 

21 hours ago, Bassassin said:

 ABBA / Cannibal Corpse crossover incoming! 😎

 

 

Double post! 

21 hours ago, Bassassin said:

 ABBA / Cannibal Corpse crossover incoming! 😎

 

 

My friend briefly ran a club night called "Black sABBAth" at a local DIY space. They only played two bands, which you can probably guess, and luckily they have enough hits between them to fill a decent set. It was a good time, considering it was mostly a space to get out of your head while some music played. 

Back on topic, I'm actually a one-man Mountain Goats tribute called The Best Ever Mountain Goats Tribute Out Of Doncaster which I sometimes take to the local open mics to generally bemused reactions (unless there's another MG fan attending, in which case they act like a paleontologist finding a live Triceratops wandering around their local dog field). It's not a money spinner, but a man has to have a hobby and I believe that getting paid for all of your gigs isn't healthy for the soul. 

Most digital reverbs have an LPF/HPF feature somewhere in the algorithm, even if it's not accessible. The TC Hall of Fame lets you access those parameters in the toneprint software and any of the HoF family will do it, so the Mini will work if you're pushed for space.

On 24/03/2025 at 19:14, SICbass said:

Don‘t DO that. These days, any thread titled with someone‘s name, I take to be an obituary 😅

Based on the amount of smoke backstage last time I saw NWR with Wilko he might be too stoned to actually die. Still played like a bastard though. 

I've successfully improvised an emergency belt from black gaffa several times. The trick is to pull a length long enough to wrap round your waist and fold it over onto itself so the sticky sides are inside, repeat with two more lengths on both sides for sturdiness, and then create a 'buckle' connecting the two lengths BUT ONLY AFTER YOU PUT IT ON.

You do have to cut yourself out of it afterwards unfortunately and it's not a particularly load bearing band so not worth it if you have slim hips and heavy trousers - I haven't got a solution for that yet but I imagine a similar set of improvised braces could work. Careful not to get it on your chest hair. 

XR18 with an external router for us. Only one plug extra and means we can all run our own monitor mixes without fighting the venue WiFi.

We use the Mixing Station app which I don't love but is fine - if any of you aren't technically savvy spend some time setting up the view pages so nobody accidentally adjusts the mix when they mean to adjust an aux. 

14 hours ago, Bluewine said:

Sectioned , I've never heard that before, hilarious 😂. 

 

I've heard, committed and  locked up.

 

Daryl

Comes from "detained under Section X of the Mental Health Act", where X is a different section of the Act depending on the reason for detention. I think you guys use '5150' for roughly same thing.

We played a little festival somewhere down south (I can barely remember where to be honest) and ended up with a midday slot on the main stage. There were in fact two main stages which ran consecutively so there was no downtime and the audience didn't have to move. Nice site but as we pulled up a band that shared our management were heading out looking like they'd just been kicked in the collective nards and gave us a sarcastic "good luck" on the way past, which was not auspicious. It was a family festival with a real mixed line-up and we had not been pitched well, so our audience was mostly kiddies playing twenty-five-a-side in front of the pit barriers: at one point a misplaced volley came up onstage and I had to hoof it back which got the biggest cheer of the set.

We were pretty dispirited by the end and even more so to see the much larger crowd of parents gathering in front of the other stage for Dr And The bloody Medics, so we packed up and booked off sharpish. I was driving the van and remember pulling a slightly narky take-off out of the main gates with a muttered "...never coming back to THIS disaster again". Sadly, we had to sheepishly crawl back through security fifteen minutes later when our singer remembered they had left a custom mic stand behind the stage instead of packing it away.

Nothing really wrong with the festival, just a bad match, but so far it's the only show where anybody has ever asked me for their ball back mid-song.

Roswell do a P in a MM size case. EMG do P soapbars. 

If you just want a cover then I've not seen anything available as stock, but this would be a good opportunity to make friends with somebody with a 3D printer. It's a simple enough design to put together. If you don't know anybody you could try a makerspace. 

It has the same layout as the Stomp, so you can do it but it's a little trickier than just plugging in. You'll need to assign a Y split as the first block, then pan Input A to L100 and B to R100; B should then be on a parallel path with the 9 blocks able to be split between them. Mix block will need to be panned A to L100 and B R100 too and you'll have to use mono effects or they'll recombine at the output.

If you want two stereo paths you'd need to use a Loop Send block to send the output for path B to the Loops and then set the Mix block to have 0dB of Path B in the signal.

Douglas Adams had a routine about how there are infinite planets but we know that not all of them are occupied, so there must be a finite number of inhabited planets. Any finite number divided by infinity is as close to zero as makes no difference, so the average population of the universe is 0. Similarly, having worked in a venue for five years and toured for another fifteen or so, my working theory is that there are an infinite number of shit bands and consequently zero good bands - any bands you might think are good are a statistical outlier and should be excluded from the study.

Jokes aside I don't think you should be forced to lower your expectations, but it's worth acknowledging that by their late twenties most genuinely ground-breaking stellar musicians have either given up in favour of the the day job or are already in a full-time successful band (or more likely six bands). The ones looking for a new project are likely to form it with old bandmates or friends with good reputations instead of taking a risk on JMB strangers.

You don't have to give up, just be aware of the playing field and that it might take a while to find a group that really fits. Much like online dating, you're probably going to have to kiss some frogs in the hope they might eventually be transformed into something vaguely resembling a deposed royal.

The upright has the advantage of being immediately visually interesting to audiences in a way an EB isn't and also being a very physical instrument to wrestle with. I'd suggest stealing moves from keyboard players who are similarly stage-bound - you can practice playing with exaggerated arm movements without affecting your dynamics.

Musicians in charge of their own monitoring have an unfortunate tendency to mix to the loudest dynamic of their instrument instead of the quietest, or to aim for a level where the instrument "sits" neatly in the overall mix. In my experience both generally lead to you leathering it all night or gradually turning up.

Ideally you should be able to hear yourself clearly at all dynamics over everything else and break away from the idea that your IEMs should be a balanced band mix like the audience is hearing.

I realise that as someone with FoH experience you probably know this already, but your drummer probably doesn't. 

My partner politely requests that I keep the gear encroachment to one guitar in the living room and the rest stays in the studio downstairs, arguing correctly that as we have an entire room dedicated to music kit it seems a bit unfair to then start slowly moving it into the rest of the house...

We also have an arrangement where she comes to one (1) gig per new band at which point her supportive duties are considered fulfilled unless something particularly interesting comes up. She once took a train across three countries by herself to see me play in Amsterdam so it's not like she's not interested, but if she came to every gig I did she wouldn't have time for a job.

I was also away on that particular tour for two full months leaving her to look after the homestead solo - support goes both ways and unfortunately there have been times when I've not been great at it in the past. Hopefully doing better these days!

37 minutes ago, Norris said:

It was on the news this morning that they will be donating 10% of the profits from their upcoming tour to support grass-roots music venues. That's a fabulous gesture

 

Edit: It seems they are playing at two UK venues where they will be donating...

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy0gll8lp5ko

Musical wallpaper but one of the few major acts putting their money where their mouth is. Massive gesture and will be worth a lot of money to small venues.