peteb

I'm surprised that only 1% of the rooms you play have a bad sound, but I agree with your point, and you should be able to get a decent sound with the right gear. For me, the point is to be able send the sound I want to the desk and to make it as fool proof as possible. I try to make the sound engineer's job as easy as possible, bearing in mind that not all of them are that great. First of all get a sound that you like that works with the genres / bands you play with, which doesn't have too extreme an EQ that is likely to cause issues. It also helps if you have a half-decent technique and can get a usable sound to send to the desk. I always use a bit of light compression and you might find that a HPF is a good idea for many rooms that have issues with bass frequencies and sometimes you might have to tweak your settings to get rid of unwanted frequencies. If everybody in the band takes the same approach (and they generally do IME), then you shouldn't have any insurmountable problems.

I used to play Turn The Page several years ago, in a three piece band with a completely different arrangement . Great song. Are you sure that you're not overthinking Hollywood Nights? I've just had a listen and it is pretty much just a chug in E, playing octaves and straight 8s! You just have to be aware of your damping. It doesn't have a chord change until it gets to the bridge (one bar of D and one bar of A, before it goes back to E). It's a good song, but surprisingly simple!

First gigs of the year for the Zep tribute, up to Kinross in Scotland on Friday then Cullercoats in the Northeast on Saturday. Quite tiring, driving for a 512 mile round trip in two days, setting off at 10:30 on Friday and getting home at 2:30 on Sunday morning. Both gigs were well attended (101 tickets sold in a 120 capacity in Kinross, with a 220 sell out in Cullercoats), which was good as we had just had to cancel a gig in Yorkshire due to poor ticket sales. The first gigs we've played since November, so we were a bit rusty, but we played well enough over the two gigs. A very good crowd reaction on both nights.

Bizarrely, knowing a few people connected with Magnum, that's a completely opposite viewpoint than they all have, especially regarding Stanway!

I'm surprised that 'Les Morts Dansants' isn't on Dave's list! A pretty good bassline to transcribe, from what I remember.

I was actually in a really good Magnum tribute band for a couple of years. It featured a guitarist who had been in Bob Catley's solo band and a keys player who had played on one of his albums. It was a cool band and some of the songs are great, but it was very niche / difficult to get enough gigs! Having said that, we used to have people who would follow us around - one guy from Durham came to every gig, even if we were paying in the Midlands! Magnum may not have been the biggest band around, but they do have a genuinely devoted following.

Kinross - Backstage at the Green. It's quite a big, plush hotel, with a converted concert room (that used to be a swimming pool at one point, I believe). It is a bit of a circuit gig where a lot of heritage / ex big(ish) names play, along with some of the bigger tribute bands. Still about 30 tickets left, as of Friday! It's a really pretty village and a great place for a night away if you fancy coming along with the missus (always rooms available). We get a few hotel rooms as part of the deal, so it's one of the those gigs where we get the chance to have a few beers after the gig. We play it every year, always great fun.

Just to add that one of these gigs (both 'mid-sized' venues) has completely sold out and the other is not far off (as of Friday, with a week to go until the show). It just goes to show how chaotic the market for live music is at the moment and how different things are in different parts of the country!

It's partly certain areas and partly the time of the year. No one seems to want to commit to buying advance tickets until they've had the first payday after the Christmas break! We have a couple of gigs on the weekend after next and they have done pretty well for ticket sales. But they are in a different part of the country (Scotland and the North East) and everyone has been paid again now!

Out of those three, definitely the first one - the other two are all the place! I've never heard the Bernie Marsden version before, but that's pretty close to what I've always played whenever I've had to do SG over the years.

We've cancelled a gig tomorrow due to low ticket sales. We played there last year and got a pretty good crowd, but its a difficult time of the year. The guy promoting there wants to try again later in the year, so we will see...

I think that you will need more than just guitar polish to get the cr*p off the body in the first place. There is some product that guitar techs use to clean bodies up. Unfortunately, I can't remember what it is (big help, I know), but it's nothing particularly unusual. Perhaps someone who works on guitars can advise. After that, then just use the standard polishes. EDIT: @tauzero mentioned isopropyl alcohol, which rings a bell. Whatever you use, it needs to be pretty mild.

🙂

I would have thought that these days, £1.5k would be a really good price (especially from a London based shop)! A very nice bass.

I used to have a bright red 4 string bolt-on neck Japanese Burner that I bought back in the early 90s for £520. I ended up selling it for just under a grand about 13 or 14 years ago. It was a great bass - sweet sounding, very light and played really well. Virtually every bassist I knew used to ask if I still had it whenever I bumped into them. It was the bass that I wished I had found several years before, when I switched from Fenders to active basses. I played a lot of gigs with it throughout the 90s, but in those old rock days I used to give my basses a bit of stick onstage and I was always worried that I was going break the damn thing (that headstock angle)! I was constantly re-adjusting the truss rod and in the end I retired it and got a couple of Streamers, which felt much more robust. I finally sold it when I decided I needed a P bass for a blues band. Predictably, I now pretty much exclusively play Fenders and FSOs these days, going full circle back to when I first started gigging!

That's a hell of a track! @dmccombe7, it's on the excellent Itch album - dunno how easy it is to get hold of these days, but well worth getting if you can track it down.

Dave - I'm sure that our tastes won't be too dissimilar, although you may well run to the proggy end of things! As I mentioned before, the ones I would go for are 'Itch' & 'Rocklandwonderland', along with the first album. His last album, 'Ain't Life Amazing' has its moments as well, especially the title track and 'In the Stars Tonight' (which we played at our wedding)!. I'm not keen on his attempts to be be more commercial ('Patio Lanterns'), which doesn't really work for me, but he has done a lot of great stuff - a little more straight-ahead than Max Webster, but still have plenty of quirks and left turns. One of my favourite artists... One of his more strait forward rock tunes, but this always makes me smile when I see it on YouTube

To be a touch pedantic, that would have been Max Webster supporting Rush and it most likely would have been the Hemispheres tour (at least that's the tour I saw)! I loved the Kim Mitchell solo stuff (preferred it to MW myself). He made a few wrong turns, but there are some great albums out there (check out Itch & Rocklandwonderland).

Yep, that's the big difference between a lot of bassists who can play a bit and the real top guys.

RB was tapping comping parts when I saw the Robben Ford & the Blue Line trio about 30 years ago!

I've seen a lot of great bass players play live, and he could well be the best...!

When it comes down to it, it is difficult to convincingly recreate rhythm guitar or keys parts on a bass guitar. Of course there are exceptions - check out the great Roscoe Beck, who started tapping out organ parts on bass when he played an early tour with Robben Ford because they couldn't afford to take a keys player out! On the flip side, I have seen an interview with Philthy Taylor and Fast Eddie where they said that they developed the classic Motorhead sound to compensate for Lemmy playing more like a rhythm guitarist than a traditional bass player (creating a whole new sub-genre in the process)! Also, listen to early DLR era Van Halen, where Michael Anthony will often play busier parts during under the guitar solos.

No, @chris_b is right. I've mainly played in rock bands with just one guitar over the years and you just develop a feel over the years on how to fill things out. First of all you need the right tone and attack, but being in a three piece can give you the opportunity to play a bit busier at times (particularly under solos), to work on your note lengths, you might throw in a few octaves or sometimes you just embrace the spaces in the music (someone mentioned Robin Trower above, which is a pretty good example). However, you are never going sound the same as if you have a rhythm guitar or Hammond or whatever playing, but a three piece can still sound great! I'm playing in a pretty busy Zep tribute these days and I certainly don't use any effects or change my EQ every time there is a guitar solo! You just find a way to make it work.

That's awful mate. Not much you can say, but best wishes to the family.

I agree - it's just a lazy, patronising label to deride perfectly legitimate top quality musicians. It also has a slight whiff of racism about it! Quincy Jones produced polished RnB based pop music with strong jazz, soul, fusion and rock influences, which everyone praises to the skies. Toto produced polished rock based pop music with strong jazz, soul, fusion and RnB influences and all the would be hipsters form a queue to sneer. Quincy even used the same players, not to mention that Steely Dan used guys who played on Aretha Franklin hits (as well as QJ records).