BigRedX

Agreed. Any EQ fix for a poor sounding room might make it better where you are stood, but it is guaranteed to make it sound worse elsewhere. There was place I used to play regularly where the biggest improvement to the FoH sound (and that's the important one) was achieved not by any EQ fiddling but by simply drawing the curtains to cover the large windows that ran all the way down one side of the room.

If you take a spare amp do you take spare cabs too? In 45 years of gigging I've seen more speakers fail then I have amps. I've solved the problem by ditching the backline entirely.

Fender could have done all those things with a little R&D if they had really wanted. The thing is Fender know that their core market aren't interested in these things. Also G&L's market for Fender-ish designs with a bit more innovation is already pretty saturated, and I bet there's a fair few G&L owners who don't even know of Leo Fender's involvement with their guitar or bass.

About 20 years ago I was a deposit payment away from ordering one. I'd looked longingly at the photos on the Shuker website and exchanged numerous emails with Jon regarding specifications. Then I actually got to play one at (IIRC) one of the Manchester Bass Days. I can't put my finger exactly on what it was, but the bass just didn't feel comfortable for me to play and the whole experience left me feeling very underwhelmed. Especially as a few weeks earlier I'd been at The Bass Gallery in Camden and had tried a Rob Allen and liked it a lot. In fact had the two experiences happened the other way round I might well have bought the Rob Allen. As it was I changed my mind completely about the look I wanted and put down a deposit on a Sei instead.

And I was implying that IMO the Shuker is a poor substitute.

But none of those are directly in competition with Fender, whereas G&L by the very definition are supposed to be the guitars and basses that Leo would want you to buy over those from his previous companies. My feeling is that fender will have bought them to reclaim the Leo Fender heritage. They'll pay lip-service to the brand for a few years and then everything will be quietly dropped. As we've seen over the years, Fender's core user base don't want any developments to their instruments since the pickup positioning on the Jazz bass was changed.

IMO it doesn't matter if you are playing to just the bar staff and half of the other band on the bill or an adoring audience of several thousand. You have to give it everything. If you can't do that then maybe live performance isn't for you. I've played my share of poorly attended gigs, and you never know if one of the two people who aren't venue staff or in one of the other bands is going to be someone important who will open the doors to better gigs, as has also happened to me.

I'd only played the demo model of the Shuker Artist, but IMO it wasn't anywhere like as good as a proper Rob Allen.

Next Hurtsfall gig is OxJam Beeston. We're playing at The Berliner at 3.30pm. Wristbands for the whole event are just £10, but all the venues are free entry before 6.00, so if you don't want to stay late it won't cost you anything although the organisers would like it if you made a donation. If the previous years are anything to go by the whole event is excellent and well-worth supporting. Also in the past serval other Basschatter's bands have played so it could be an opportunity to catch up with some of us in real life!

I don't really know what it's like trying to get into a covers band but for an originals band this would be a bit of a red flag, as bands tend to like their musicians to be fairly focused on the style of music they want to play. Certainly when I have auditioned musicians who say they like a very range of music it turns out they might say they like everything, but they have little understanding of the specifics of many genres outside of blues-based rock music and ultimately are unsuitable for the band. If you really do like (and have a good understanding of) a wide variety of genres I would suggest that you do a separate advert for each one rather than trying to lump everything together in a single one, as it has the tendency to make you look unfocused rather than versatile.

How was your gig last night? - Mixed. There were good bits and terrible bits as I'll describe. We were playing the St Lucifer 10th anniversary gig and the only band in the lineup that didn't include previous members of St Lucifer. There was a last-minute change of venue due to the place we were originally supposed to be playing being flooded. Luckily an alternative venue could be found so we were upstairs at Gulliver's on Oldham Street in Manchester instead of underwater at Fuel The Music. Apart from having one of the most inconvenient load ins ever - from a narrow street with double-yellows both "sides" so we do get everything out of the car in double quick time, set up and sound check went smoothly. For a change the sound on stage when we started playing was the same as when we sound checked. Everything was going brilliantly with plenty of people in the audience dancing and singing along to our better-known songs. Then during the penultimate song the drums on the backing track cut out. No error messages on the computer which is what normally happens and the track was still playing and outputting MIDI data, just no audio to the PA. We played through to the end of the song without drums which got us an extra loud round of applause, but after that it proved impossible to get the audio to work again. Time was tight and after two unsuccessful attempts to make it work we had admit defeat and not place our last song. Really gutted, especially as up to the point where the backing failed it had been going so well. There were at least two people who'd come from Nottingham especially to see us play and we felt that we'd let the audience down. Of course now I'm back home the backing plays fine with no audio cut outs. Still extensive testing to do before our next gig on Saturday at The Berliner in Beeston as part of the OxJam festival (BTW I've started a thread about it in the gigs section and if any other Basschatters are playing it would be great for you to add your venues and playing times to it). In the meantime here is a collage of photos from the night including one of us while everything was still going well:

I can only remember two places I have played where the location itself made any noticeable difference to how I sounded. One was a place I used to rehearse in with my dad rock covers band. It was full of reflective surfaces. Absolutely nothing I did to the EQ or positioning of the bass rig made it sound even half way decent. In the end I told them that it didn't matter that the place was free to use, if I couldn't tell what I was playing, practice there was pointless and could we please move back to the previous room which at least had a carpet and some furniture which controlled the sound. The other was an octagonal church hall with the stage along three of the walls. This had the effect of project all the sound out into the middle of hall. On stage everything (especially the bass) was quiet. Out in audience it was deafening. These days I go direct into the PA and use the foldback to make sure I'm in time and tune with the rest of the band and the backing track. The PA does the important FoH sound for the audience.

Practice for the sake of practicing? I think I stopped once I was able to string a series of chords together on the guitar without having to stop strumming - about 50 years ago. Since then I only practice if I come up with a part that that my fingers can't do reliably and repeatably, or so I can play our songs whilst also moving about on stage.

IME it very much depends on the band and how good the person doing the stage patter is. In many ways I'm with @Lozz196 in that most of time I want the talking between the songs to be kept to minimum. Announce who you are before or after the first song, if you have a new single out mention that before you play it (or album before you play the title/lead track from it). Announce who you are again at the end and thank the audience for coming. And that's all most bands need. However the singer from my current band is very good at communicating with the audience between songs we let him even though the default setting for most Goth bands is to say nothing and "let the music do the talking". I think because of this having a talkative front person sets us apart from lots of the bands that we play with and has definitely worked to our advantage. Having said that, IMO if you are going to say something on stage make sure that the audience can understand you. In The Terrortones, Mr Venom who was very good with words used to do quite a lot of talking between songs. Unfortunately most of this sounded like Elvis through a 70s British Rail Tannoy system so almost everything he said was completely incomprehensible to the vast majority of the audience. Also remember that if you are engaging in banter with audience members most of the other people in attendance will only be able to hear half the conversation which doesn't make it very interesting for them. The worst band for this I have seen were Fleet Foxes who engaged in endless banter between themselves and with members of the audience at the front much of which was off mic. I'm sure it would have worked fine for an acoustic set in an intimate venue with an audience of 50-75, but in a big 500+ capacity hall most of us had no idea what was going on. And when some of these inter-song interludes were almost as long as the songs themselves it didn't make for a very entertaining gig.

The way I look at it is, For live use, I'll take the convenience of having all my effects in a single device where the setting for each song (and the changes required within each song) can be accessed by hitting a foot switch or any supposed sonic superiority of individual pedals. That the sounds are the same every time I plug in and I don't have to worry about earth loops or noisy PSUs or individual pedals not playing nicely with each other. Also I can have exactly the EQ/distortion/chorus/delay setting I want on every single song (and change them instantly within a song) without needing multiple instances of each pedal or scrabbling around on the floor to make changes between songs. I have just four connections to make - mains via a proper IEC connector, MIDI and signal in and out. I'm set up and ready to go in under 5 minutes. Before I get my first programmable multi-effects unit in the late 80s I had a huge rack case full of non-programmable devices all controlled by an unwieldily set of foot switches and often serval minutes of fiddling between songs to set up each device with the right settings. I don't miss it in the slightest. In the studio I'll use whatever is required to get the perfect sound for the recording, but most of the time the plug-in version effects unit I use live (Helix Native) is more than adequate.