Silvia Bluejay

It happened again, tonight - twice. Junkyard Dogs gig. Middle of the second set, a young guy comes to me and asks me to play some Rod Stewart. Usual reply, along the lines of 'Fraid not, he's not in the setlist'. 'You have a setlist?' comes his reaction. 'I thought you were choosing the music...' I'm beginning to get the impression these people believe I should have even more power over the band than I already have. Hmm... 😄🙄 Beginning of the third set, girl comes to me, and goes straight to the point: 'Are you the DJ?' 'No, I'm the sound engineer.' 'Oh.' *walks away* She clearly didn't think I was even worth talking to any further, not being the DJ.

Thanks for that very interesting site comparison, with technical bits, @lemonstar. I'm on several other music sites too, but Basschat is the only one I visit regularly and I'm happy to have been moderating since 2012. To answer your query about the calendar, after the interface redesign in Nov 2017 we have been trying to figure out how to get the best out of it, but IMO it's still not user-friendly enough: every event has to be added to it manually (which is fine), but then, well, they stay there. No reminder feature, no particular main page prominence to the calendar, etc. I think that's another feature the admin team will be looking at in due course. @charic is our developer, and he's working on this site alongside his day job, so his availability is limited, and there is always a need to prioritise tasks.

See, if you had a sound engineer, that girl would ask him/her instead, and be extremely surprised when told they can't 'play' that song. As per my OP.

At one Dogs gig at the White Hart we were forced to wait on stage, in the alcove, for about half an hour after the gig, just so some space would free up on the floor, so we could start breaking down and loading out. At another gig there, there was a massive fight, complete with spilt pints and broken glass, right in front of our extremely expensive subwoofer placed on the floor, stage left. At Ye Olde Swan, the guy who tried to sleep in Jack's DB case also walked off with it a few minutes later, once it contained his shiny Ali DB. We ran after him, of course. He was too out of it even to realise what he was doing, so we had no problem taking it back from him. He then proceeded to try and wrestle an extension lead from my hands, at which point I angrily yelled at him. That seemed to work - he went away... The Wheatsheaf in Dunstable is a friendly place. I'm not keen on the layout and the area where the band has to set up, as there seems to be no decent place where I can be more or less in front of the band with my tablet and the camera. No complaints about the manager or the crowd.

Oh, as we were also talking about birds, I thought you meant to show a tit on that photo.

Christ I remember that too. In fact I think we took video! 😮 (No, I won't publish it.)

I'm also loving the concept of 'inequality amongst piers'! Keep 'em coming, guys! (npi)

LOL that's fine, no prob. There are a number of women here who feel comfortable enough to post regularly. There are a few women hiding behind monikers that don't reveal their gender. Even counting them in, we're a small minority. I attribute that to the fact that this website's regulars tend to be mostly over 40, and there are far fewer women over 40 who play bass, compared to younger women. I am thoroughly enjoying this thread, and I don't find it male-centric, to be honest.

Cough cough. Aherm. 😉

No defensiveness there, just stating the fact. That sort of nonsense gets spouted far too often at left-handed players without taking into account that it could equally be applied the other way round.

I guess, seeing his struggle, guitar makers realised there was a market, and produced some lefties, and now we've got quite a decent choice, especially on guitar.

Maybe she'll learn to play both ways? That would be one hell of an achievement, and very possibly fully within her reach.

Oh we've had threads about that. Originally, the stronger/most important hand was the picking one. Virtuoso stuff on the fretboard came later, when the concept of right-handed and left-handed instrument playing was already defined. I would not know where to start on a right-handed bass, and I felt exactly the same when I was a total beginner. Lefty made immediate sense. PS Thank you, Sir Paul McCartney, and Mr Jimi Hendrix - we would probably not have lefty instruments without you.* * Or at least, widely-available lefty instruments.

Um, try applying the same logic to playing right-handed then. Your right hand is the stronger hand, isn't it? So it should be on the fretboard, shouldn't it? So most guitar or bass players should play what we call left-handed instruments, shouldn't they?

Add to that the dreaded 3/ Oh you are left-handed? Nah, just learn right-handed, it's always difficult at the start anyway, and there are more right-handed models available on the market. [More or less the equivalent of: 'Oh, you are gay? Nah, only sleep with the opposite sex from now on, it'll make your life easier']

If one of the bandmates happens to be married to a professional social media manager, who will in any case always follow a code of conduct in the managing of any account, whether belonging to family or friends or simply to strangers, I believe that to be an even better idea.

In reply to the admin discussion: you can have multiple admins, all of whom have the same authority, on a normal FB page. If the page is part of a 'business' entity created by one of the admins - the 'owner' - before the page in question was tagged on to the business and other admins added, the business owner will always have the power to kick any of the admins off the page and block them, but not vice versa.

Many thanks guys! 🙏

The name is Damo And The Dynamites, as per the other page, it's the Facebook URL that's added the 'band' bit. It's this one. Many thanks!

And what's best for one person isn't what's best for another. Edit: cross-posted with Maude!

Many thanks to all of you who've liked the page. It now works better - FB makes everything harder when the page is new and has less than 10 likes, and always assumes you're a spammer and up to no good, no matter what you're trying to do. Hopefully it'll get easier in the next few days. Much obliged to you all.

You should get very little stuff appearing on your timeline if you like the page now, as I've re-uploaded most of the it before trying to re-build our following. But you can like the page and then set it so it gives you no notifications, so you don't get annoying little numbers at the top of your FB account every time we post something.

HAHA! Exactly. FWIW, I'm currently in control of all the Dynamites' social media, if we include the new FB page. But I'm technically not in the band, which I think is slightly safer for everybody.

Nah, doesn't work like that. The gentleman in question was the owner of the page, in that he created it before HJ and I met the band. Then he handed over its day to day running to me. I'm possibly the only person who hasn't explicitly fallen out with him, but he obviously can't have me around any more on whatever's left of the page (if anything). I'm working on the new page, but it's almost bedtime, so I'll continue tomorrow.