tauzero

Mrs Zero and I do the Eva Cassidy version of Time After Time.

Got there after a 90 minute drive. Walked in with bass and speaker stands, and the landlord said "who are you?". "Dirty Roses". "Oh, really sorry, I've double booked you. I'll pay you all the same". So home we all went (not so far for the guitarist and singer, a bit further for the drummer). At least I didn't have to carry all the gear in and out with a gouty foot. But Mrs Zero and Sub Zero had gone out for the evening to celebrate their birthdays (one day apart, 65 and 30 respectively) and I could have joined them, or we could have taken up a panicky last-minute request for a band from a place two miles from my house. Oh well.

Jamerson yes, Carol Kaye no.

Last night was a curate's egg of a gig for Dirty Roses. The venue was the Old Court, King's Heath, Birmingham. It's on a busy road, with a residential street of tightly packed terraced houses by the side of it, so parking was a nightmare. I managed to squeeze in by the pub, making use of Mrs Zero's blue badge (Mrs Zero was with me, I wouldn't use it illegally). Went in and was "greeted" by the most miserable looking and unwelcoming barmaid I've seen in my life, who led me to the doors through which I was to load in. I've just had a flare up of gout in my right foot, so it was rather painful bringing everything in - this is the band I do the PA for so there were numerous trips to the car. While I was doing that, Mrs Zero asked about moving the furniture out of the way, to which the miserable harridan replied that it was busy (there were five people in the pub plus us) and there were only two of them on, so we'd have to move the furniture. The singer arrived and he and Mrs Zero moved the furniture while I was loading in, then the guitarist arrived. We'd got pretty much set up by the time the drummer arrived - I was still rigging the PA so the others helped bringing in the kit. Anyroadup, we had a fair bit of space, and a whole one mains socket each side of the appointed area. There was a bit of response from one somewhat enthusiastic woman and what I presume was her equally enthusiastic daughter, but as the evening went on we got more and more of them moving and singing along. At one point in the second set we have a choice of two songs depending on reading the room, and we went for Time Warp - a good choice. The WAGs did their duty and led the calls for more. Oh, and the big TV behind us? They left the bastard thing on all night. There was another (younger and friendlier) barmaid who told us afterwards that we'd gone down really well, and then asked us to put the furniture back. We loaded up and then buggered off - we shouldn't have had to move the furniture in the first place, and we CBA to move it back too. So it's somewhere we never want to go back to, though the gig itself was good.

We have been a purportedly metric country since 1963. There really isn't any excuse for hanging on to imperial measurements (the very last vestige of British empire), only officially used by three pretty much third world countries - Liberia, Myanmar, and the United States.

I used perforated aluminium sheet with 3mm holes on the Plenty cab. While it pumps out a respectable volume of sound, I suspect that the resistance to fluid movement caused the fixing screws to ease off slightly so it sounded as if the speaker was on the way out on a recent open mic night. I took the grill off to check and it was fine, so I put it back on and tightened the screws firmly and it's still fine. However, for the 8" cab, I'm using 10mm diameter hole perforated sheet, and I may well retrofit the Plenty cab with it too.

Aionfx's description of the PCB says "Unlike Lovetone’s later offerings, the Meatball was not a fully original circuit, but rather a heavily tweaked version of the very first commercial envelope filter pedal, the Mu-tron III. While the core circuit is the very similar, the Meatball adds several new features including a clean blend, attack/decay controls, two extra range modes in between Hi and Lo, two expression controls, and an effects loop."

When you say the original maker, do you mean of the Mu-Tron III that Lovetone based the Meatball on?

Bartolini BH2s. Low End Lobster recommended Aguilar DCBs to replace them - I have an EHB1265MS with the Aguilars in, but the pickup swap was before I bought it so I never got to do a comparison.

This is HMRC's sudden obsession with "side hustles", as they want to scrape a bit more income from the average person on the street/Clapham omnibus rather than Reeves introduce a wealth tax or bring CGT in line with income tax or do anything significant to get more money from the very rich.

I had an Ohm cab which I used with a Laney PB150 head. At some point I decided to go small and lightweight, and pxed them for a GK 200MB combo.

Anton Yelchin managed it too. Both of them were following the example of Monty Python in the Upper-Class Twit of the Year contest.

Sharpie.

Mrs Zero and I do a lot of songs at open mics. Last night - Hallelujah, Hero, Many rivers to cross. If you have one other who can do enough vocals to do duets, there's a few others to consider. We do Perfect Day as a duet by one of us singing the first two lines of each verse, then the other the last two. There's the somewhat dark Where the wild roses grow (Kylie and Nick Cave).

Put mouse cursor at start of address bar, hold down left mouse button, move along to the .html (stop just before the question mark), Ctrl-C and you have it all ready to be pasted. That's in Chrome, other browsers are the same.