borntohang

On 07/04/2024 at 12:18, uncle psychosis said:

I've got one of these, but I don't really use the presets and I am not a big fan of the sound that you hear having no relation to where the knobs are physically set (which is partly why I don't use the presets).

 

Does the VT Bass DI sound the same? (or does a different Sansamp pedal sound the same? I can't keep up...). 

The VTDI is the same circuit just with a Blend, and also you can turn the Bite setting off (sub filter as I understand it). There's not much extra that you won't get out of the Deluxe but I do understand your dislike of the presets thing - I tend to use the DI as a single set and forget amp sound, but having the loop would be cool.

31 minutes ago, lidl e said:

That video is rad!

 

Which bassist are you? The one with the tatooed fingers, the bald fella or the young hipster kid at the very end?

I'm the one entering the Richard O'Brien contest. Tattoos is Ray Loverock (hence the knuckles) who we also worked with when I was sessioning on guitar - nice guy and great player.

44 minutes ago, stewblack said:

My god I almost admire him. Played you like an old fiddle 🤣 

I felt he was putting himself in a precarious position regarding me not dobbing him in to his wife to be honest, but he knew how to play the game. One of the last old-school road monsters: two shirts is a costume change, that'll be an extra £50 thanks! Three disco cans on a stick is a light show, that'll be another £100 please.

Sometimes when I'm chained to my desk answering pointless emails I look back on those quiet 3AM moments travelling back from some show at Dogcock Conservative Club, Nowhereshire. Three of us sitting in the back on a pile of beer bottles covered in carpet, watching the M1 fly by through the holes in the van floorboards while a pissed BL gently weaves between lanes, and I think "what a bloody stupid way that was to barely earn some change"... 

Maestro are Gibson, yes. They have Steinberger, Wurlitzer, and Dobro under the brand too.

Kramer just have the one bass , the D-1. We played the Kramer UK launch in what was the Gibson venue before it became the Garage, so you can see me playing it while pulling a stupid face at 00:47 of the below video. It was fine but nothing I'd ever use - weird setup where each coil of the humbucker had a volume control and I didn't get a lot out of it to be honest. We were supposed to be getting some gear as part of the deal but the little sod from the support band legged it with the one bass they had on hand after the show, so I didn't even get a freebie! We did get two of the guitars which were nice though.

I must admit that my final straw with those guys wasn't musical but entirely selfish. The few high points of the dep calendar were the shows during summer or Christmas when the students would come back from uni and be persuaded to come down the WMC with their parents. For a start this meant our audience would be 300% more engaged and likely to dance, but as an added bonus being the only man under 30 in the building almost but not quite made up for my many and various shortcomings. 

This show was one of those and I had been chatting to a lovely young student throughout the breaks. After the set the beer goggles had kicked in properly and she invited me back to hers for a game of dominos and a cup of tea. Of course I jumped at the chance:

"Lads, if I stow my gear away can you do me a solid and just chuck it into the room for me to pick up tomorrow? I've only got my bass and board so won't take you thirty seconds"

BL: "Not a chance, we'll be down hands on lugging the PA in. You've got five minutes to get in the van."

As he was my lift home and also had the taking for the evening I didn't have much recourse so regretfully declined her invitation and got back into the van for a sullen drive home. As we're about to set off the driver's door opens and the guitarist jumps in instead of the BL.

"Oh right, yeah. BL has pulled some owd lass so is stopping the night up here and we're on PA duties. He says chuck it all in the room and he'll see us next weekend, also that we need to park the van round the corner because his wife thinks we broke down."

Arse 🙃

My first paying gig was a once-monthly dep for a guy I knew from a local venue and it was like a checklist of club band horror stories. It was all old-school WMC venues so you were going out to play set one to a room full of stony-faced pensioners waiting for the meat raffle during the intermission, and then them all immediately clearing out so you played set two to nobody. 

My main gripe was that I would often turn up to find out the keyboard-playing band leader was the only regular member and the entire lineup was deps. Everyone got a song list (usually the same one too) but if somebody didn't know enough to fill time he'd pull the old "let's do X/Y, everybody knows that!". Turns out that while many people know how to start Sweet Home Alabama, significantly fewer know how to stop playing it. 

The band had a house uniform with a costume change (black shirts with white tie set one, white shirts with black tie set two) because that meant you could charge more on the agency. I was warned about this and bought the correct shirts, but told I could borrow the bassist's waistcoat to match the others. Unfortunately he had two feet and six stone on me so I had to belt all the excess fabric in behind my strap. Between all the deps we often looked like a band of kids dressed in their dad's clothes. 

I didn't have a completely awful time and getting paid to play as a teenager was a game-changer, but it was a rough education. I saw the BL around town a couple years back and we got to reminiscing about the old days - he was keeping very quiet but about halfway through the conversation suddenly went "wait, you didn't play with us did you??". Turns out he was totally pissed for most of the two years we worked together and had very little memory of any of it. 

On 07/04/2024 at 08:33, 12stringbassist said:

I've had that happen years ago. It was in a pub with really old and beautiful etched glass windows. I mentioned quite pointedly that if they kept doing that to bands they were very likely to lose them. He promptly went upstairs and found the cash. 

Unfortunately that can be prone to backfiring depending on the establishment.

Some years ago when my friend's band were younger and much less wise they got stiffed on a fee like OP, so their driver/manager produces a cricket bat from the van and they go back in to renegotiate. Piling into the landlord's office all full of vinegar they insist, nay demand their £100! Landlord took one look at them and their well-curated skinny jeans, pulled a shotgun out of his top drawer, and planted it on his desktop in a manner that wasn't directly threatening but very firmly suggestive: "You can have £30 just for trying lads, but leave it to the professionals next time yeah?"

They took the £30 and their kneecaps home in the end and called it square. Them were the days, you could leave your door unlocked, etc etc.

edit: accidental double post!

On 20/03/2024 at 09:02, Huge Hands said:

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?

 

Kitty, Daisy, and Lewis. We played with those guys too - their mum wasn't still out with them on that point but they were nice and veteran tourers at the ripe age of 25 or so. Played about 15 instruments between them.

Met plenty of already well-known musicians, but in terms of unexpected trajectory we played with Idles in a tiny little Sheffield basement in 2016. Well Done had just been playlisted but there were as many people onstage as paying customers so we played to them, and then they played to us. They were pretty much fully-formed already and the atmosphere felt genuinely dangerous, like there was about to be a fight onstage and they weren't too fussed if it was between the band or the audience. We did an EP swap after the show and theirs is now heading for triple figures on the second hand market - ours of course is still worthless.

They kindly invited us to support at the significantly bigger (and sold out) Plug down the road when Brutalism hit and made enough of an impression that we pretty much broke up after that second show: we were getting tired of trying to push forward in aggro music and Idles were doing it so much more effectively that it solidified our need to do other things. I went into pop music and the singer went the other way into extremely hardcore electronic noise.

Didn't play with them again after that, but I still deal with them occasionally through Hiwatt work and took a bass amp down to the Ally Pally shows in 2019 - went from 10 people to 10K in three years and have only really got bigger since then. You could see they were going to do well, but I absolutely didn't have them pegged as arena headliners. In fairness I also didn't peg Snow Patrol, Kasabian, or Bring Me The Horizon when they played the 100 cap venue I worked at over the years, so perhaps I'm just not that well tuned!

Forgot about this post! Bass currently on hold for a buyer.

We got "not pish at all" last weekend, which was quietly gratifying. My friend is fond of "you looked like you were really enjoying yourselves up there" when she can't find anything nice to say.

I gigged the wheels off my Jag SS and it took a really battering. Had to replace a tuner, the bridge, pickups, and all sorts. Great little basses. 

I actually took mine on a session and the other bassist there liked it so much he ended up buying one to replace a vintage Musicmaster which he didn't want to risk gigging any more. I've gone back to 34 scale now but would definitely look at another one if I needed a shorty for a project. 

Delano are well respected builders and there's nothing too mysterious about winding P pickups - the Fender ones will be fairly basic winds compared. If you can't get there by adjusting the pickup height plus whatever control you can get from your active EQ then I'd be surprised.

For a while I used a Squier Jaguar SS tuned ADGC using the lowest three strings off a standard set and then either a G or B from a Bass VI set which I think was a 030 or something. We did a lot of tunes in G so I tended to drop the A a tone to get the low G. Worked nicely for clangy post-punk stuff but not something I'd choose for a band that I wasn't specifically writing in that tuning.

I tried it in piccolo for a bit using a mix of the rest of the VI strings, but that didn't last long.

If I'm just playing music generally, say at an open jam where there are lots of keys, then I'd stay in standard for convenience. If I'm playing something particularly 'guitaristic' like metal or rock where there is a lot of riding open strings involved or the downtuning is part of the tone, then I'll drop. 

1 hour ago, dmccombe7 said:

Sometimes life and family have to come first. Good choice as you don't get those fun yrs back with your kids. Make the best of it now. Once they become teenagers they'll only need you to drive them to gigs with their own bands 

Dave

My old man joined his first band in his sixties, at which point I had been gigging for 15+ years, so I took great pleasure in volunteering my advice for youngsters starting garage bands. They called themselves The Gastrick Band and set membership qualifications at "owns an instrument and eligible for a bus pass". 

When he started gigging I turned up pissed and heckled a couple times just to even the score. 😅

On 28/01/2024 at 15:57, TRBboy said:

There's no drama involved, but the rhythm guitarist has decided to pack it in with immediate effect because he's just too stretched, he has 5 kids and a busy job, and just can't commit right now. The drummer is in a similar situation, although not quite as bad. He's going to honour the handful of gigs we have booked in so far this year.

Five kids? Good grief, the last thing that guy needs is more spare time at home! Has he worked out what's causing them yet? 😄

I went very heavy with touring between 2018-2020 and while I do love it it's been pretty rough on both the finances and home life. Looking at my notes I did about 20K miles and 120+ dates between May '18 and August '19, not including travel days. I was working as a session player but then came in as a full band member just before 2020 really kicked off (and chucked in the day job for bonus points) at which point I realised I hate nearly everything about being in a band except playing live - without touring it's just a crap admin job that doesn't pay.

Luckily I wasn't expecting to make any money for at least 12 months after going pro anyway, so while did I burn through my savings pretty quickly the mortgage still got paid. My partner works in healthcare and they were piling up overtime hours during the lockdowns which really saved us long-term. After things opened up again I went out as tour crew a couple times and loved it just as much, except didn't have to worry about how I looked or being in photos and also I was being significantly better paid. 

I'm really definitely totally done with the original music career thing and wouldn't get back into the mainstream industry under any circumstances even if I wasn't too old and ugly now, but I've managed to self-finance a bunch of little EP's over the last two years and had more fun (and studio time) than I ever did during the push years. Took a while to get back to the idea of playing music being something you can do for fun, but we're getting there.

I like Pirate as a company and we have done sessions and festival gigs for them, but the individual spaces can be hit and miss. The one near me turned into a bit of a hangout as it was one of the few spaces open through lockdown for "streaming" purposes and there was no real oversight of whether you were streaming or just having a party. I'm sure Pirate try to minimise it but not having anybody on site to crack down is a big issue and ultimately a room hire is a room hire for them.

Does anybody have a UK recommendation for custom moulds for Shure? I've got a client wants to keep their existing Shure rig but needs better isolation. I have been recommended Custom IEM Company before but seems they're not taking orders now.

Apart from Trujillo, the other auditionees in Monster are mostly bassists/guitarists from well-known bands rather than pure session guys. Trujillo was ten years into a arena-level session career so he'd have the toolkit to come in and just kill the whole audition. As an aside I love Eric Avery but don't think his style would have meshed well.

Old Chapel in Leeds has Ashdown 810s in every room - I've been very happy just taking my own head down to run with them. In fact I've been going well out of my way to organise practices there!

On the subject of rental, I did a guitar fly-date in Switzerland and only took pedals - in our rider we asked for two 'clean combos', one guitar with "a trem and 22 frets", and another "telecaster or similar". Turned up to find out the supplied backline was two 60s AC30s, a PRS, and a Custom Shop Telecaster which made me a very happy bunny indeed. Our bassist asked for a short scale and got a Mustang PJ and a MarkBass 410 which didn't have quite the same wow factor but did sound great.

I liked the EB they did before that which had some Dimension vibes to it. Non-reverse Firebird headstock is always cool.

23 hours ago, Wolverinebass said:

Personally, I'd say £450. That would put it up with the studio strip eq pedal they did a few years ago. 

 

What this looks like to me is that you can run both in parallel or combined depending on whether the crossover is selected or not.

 

That suggests to me that (without seeing a manual yet) that it can do parallel dual channel (Orange Bass Butler), bi-amp (Dug Pinnick) as well as lpf and hpf a la (Darkglass X7). It seems like a winner to me espeically with parametric mids. Pity there wasn't an option to run it with stereo bass. Can't have everything though.

 

As for Tech 21 "just cranking out new pedals because they can," obviously all pedal development should have ceased after the fuzz face in the 1960s. 

Not seen the manual either but from their blurb yes the Mix mode is parallel without crossovers. Just marked another notch on my list...

57 minutes ago, NancyJohnson said:

I just watched this presentation through some decent speakers.  The 'effing brutal' setting is about what the Darkglass A/O spiel might describe as 'picking daisies with your loved one, tra-la-la'.  Not really that brutal at all, it's more like the entry point for them.

Tim mentioned on talkbass that he had to rush the video a bit to be ready for NAMM (the demo pedal is a rough production proto with the HPF and LPF labelled wrong) so he didn't really get into too much of the range.  Wouldn't expect the gain to be any lower than the DP-3X or other sansamps.

Always thought this would be a banger intro too: 

Up to either the vocals, or the second "intergalactic..." chorus.