borntohang

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.

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!

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!

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.

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. 😅

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.

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

We used to roll our own - samples over the orchestral arrangements of some of tunes and then the guitarist would start his intro to the first song from offstage on wireless. By the time he finished we'd be on and ready to go. For a couple tours we had video sync'd to it with a countdown so the lights would drop, then the screens would come up with the music. For our own amusement we used this Avalanches tune up to about 1:31 once or twice too, which I love. Absolutely majestic walking on as the horns swell in. For the Devo tribute I play with we always use the Devo Corporate Anthem which is about 2 minutes. Walk on as it plays, do our pre-flight checks, and then stand in the 'spud salute' until the intro finishes. As soon as the last synth fades out, give it two seconds of silence, then smash in.

The Squiers were let down by a pretty ugly preamp IMO. Played great and sounded good passive but the V in particularly suffered from a bass roll-off that cut the the low B. I was after a IV for ages, finally got one and loved the instrument but just couldn't get on with the preamp which was a real shame because I love the body shape. If I ever see a knackered one for cheap again I'd be tempted to just rout it for a P pickup and maybe a big passive bucker. That said I also played one of the American deluxes and didn't like the pre on that either, so maybe we just weren't meant for each other. Power to your arm if you like them!

And one more of Mark giving it the pose later on.

We did a festival with Ash in summer 2019 and I spoke to Mark briefly - seemed like a personable enough guy. I told him Burn Baby Burn was the first song I ever learned on bass, which was perhaps not the compliment I intended it to be. The real gem was Tim Wheeler, who was an absolute darling. He watched our set from sidestage and then afterwards came and chatted guitar nerd stuff with me for ages. I was actually having a bit of a Moment after I got offstage because the stage was directly in baking sun and we'd all overheated, so I was laying on the grass with my head under a wet towel when a very polite voice went "Mind if I have a look at your pedalboards while you're busy down there?" He took us up to where their rig was being set up so I could check out the infamous Vee and his new EGC acryclic/aluminium SG and then we watched the set from there later. Sometimes you can meet your heroes, although preferably not while alarmingly red and sunburned.

I really like those Fender HiMass bridges and have one in my bits box waiting - the weight isn't offensive and the saddles feel good under the palm. Unfortunately I have a CV jazz with the weird bridge mounting that only came on that short range of models and doesn't fit any standard 5-hole mount, so haven't got around to redrilling for it yet.