peteb

I've been taking prescription anti-histamines (not the ones you get in a shop) in hay fever season since I've been a teenager. I do have some special beeswax type thing to wipe inside my nose, along with nasal sprays, etc. I once did a big blues festival type gig in Dundee once while having a major attack. It must have looked a bit strange to any eagle eyed punters to see a box of tissues on top of my rig, with the cover behind the cab half filled with used tissues - not exactly rock n'roll! It was actually a great gig in a pretty big packed venue, but I was relieved to get through it...

My concern for the blues gig at the bike rally tomorrow is the high pollen count and what it will be like in the marquee @ 8:30pm...! I have played a gig before while having a hay fever attack and it's interesting to say the least! It is forecast to be in the mid 80s at the rally - not bad for the north of England. My missus wants us to camp out and stay the whole weekend. That will depend on how bad my hay fever is...

That looks cool Daryl...! I'm playing a big bike rally with the 'occasional' blues band this weekend. It's a big event, but not anywhere as near as big as that!

I'm afraid that I find exercise bikes deadly boring. I really need to get out on the MTB again, even if its just on the canal towpath. The trouble is that I find even the slightest hill a bit of a problem now. Lifting weights is the best thing to do, especially as you get older and you start to lose muscle tone and your bones become weaker. I pay £16 per month in gym fees these days, which by any account is very good value!

I try to lift weights three times a week. Unfortunately, I can't do the cardio that I used to do a few years ago (play 5-a-side, run, off-road biking, etc) due to a knackered knee and I could do with losing maybe a stone or so, but that's hardly unusual at my age (early 60s). The gear I use is lighter than it used to be, but not particularly lightweight compared to a lot of stuff around these days. I can still lift a Berg 212 cab (rather than an 810) at the end of the night, so no real problems. The issue I have is that even though I gig regularly, I would happily play twice as many as I'm doing currently! I certainly felt more 'match fit' as a player when I was gigging pretty much every week!

I've got a couple of Xotic basses and I think that its pretty safe to say that isn't from the same stable. I'm guessing that it's a custom build superjazz - never seen that logo on the headstock before.

Of course it doesn't, it's Tim Lefebvre playing it. I'm sure that he wouldn't play anything that sounded 'wrong', or that the band wasn't happy with!

Just looked at a recent version of them playing it on the Howard Stern Show with the great Tim Lefebvre on bass and he plays the A, not the G#...!

Played at the Cart & Horses in the East End on Friday night with the Zep tribute. If you didn't know, this is the venue where Iron Maiden cut their teeth, which of course you would never guess from the complete lack of memorabilia around the place, Maiden themed beers and wine at the bar and everything in the familiar IM font...! 😉 A bit of an odd gig, as we had a dep drummer for the night, which as you might imagine is a tough gig for a drummer to dep. The guy we got in had been struggling at a couple of rehearsals we managed to get in, but he did fine. Not perfect, but not a disaster by any means! A smallish place so pretty packed, a great audience and Didge even managed to work the Eastenders theme into his keys solo! NB. the picture is of the soundcheck, not the keys solo in the gig itself...!

It depends what you are doing and what your band is about. Are you playing covers of tracks where the performance is more important than the song? If I'm playing something like Hot For Teacher, I want the guitarist to nail EVH's guitar part note for note. Same thing for a Rush tribute, the performance is key, so play it exactly like the record or don't bother. It's a bit different covering many other types of bands, where the bass player(s) might have developed / changed the parts over the years, or never played the same thing twice. Then you have to get the feel and spirit of the original, rather than just play the part as the record. Of course, it also depends whether you are just playing the song, or covering a particular version of the song. Remember that keeping it simple is often the best option and not settling for less at all. The thing is that you should be playing a simple part by choice, not because you can't play anything different!

I agree with that approach if you are trying to replicate a Jamerson, Billy Sheehan or Geddy Lee part. For something like the Black Crowes (who I love BTW), I would be aiming to get the feel right, rather than playing it note for note.

I completely agree (or at least to the extent that the logic for fahrenheit is somewhat convoluted). Celsius is a far superiour system. But I still think of weather in fahrenheit and all other measurements of temperature in centigrade!

I'm the same, and it makes absolutely no sense? Long distances and a person's height have to be miles / feet and inches, but otherwise smaller distances have to be metric, temperatures should be in fahrenheit for weather, but otherwise in degrees centigrade and weight must be in kilograms, except for a human being, when I can only compute stones / lbs. Dunno if it's my age, but I'm caught halfway between imperial and metric, even thought I know that metric obviously makes more sense and is a better system!

Yep, a bit of a geezer with connections to quite a lot of Manc superstars of a certain time! Me and the guitar player (who used to have a guitar shop in those days) always used to have a chat with him after rehearsals. He always had an interesting story to tell and I remember his quite fascinating insider take on quite a controversial matter of the time that he had been innocently caught up in. Very much a Les Paul Junior type of guy! 🤩

Is he the guy who used to be Johnny Mars tech (among others) / tour manager for the Buzzcocks? He used to run a rehearsal studio in Stockport that I used a few years ago. Confusingly, the other guy he ran it with was also called Richard! Both were good guys and the guy who used to work for Mars was always working on / selling some cool guitars, not to mention had some interesting stories to tell...!

You give us way too much credit - I read all that in an interview with someone who actually worked on the album! We have been asked about playing it, so we just listened to it and thought, 'what's going on there with the guitar, no chance'. However, I thought it was kind of interesting, in a Zeppelin nerd kinda way.

The thing is that the main guitar part is a slide played on an electric 12 string in open tuning, but with one of the courses tuned to a 5th rather than an octave. Then there is a capo on the first fret, which means that the slide keeps banging against the frets. This gives an unusual effect on the record, but would be horrible to try and play live. And that's before the speeding up of the tape and all the studio effects.

Speaking as someone who plays in a Zep tribute, unfortunately that song (with the original Zeppelin arrangement) is virtually impossible to play live! All sorts of jiggery, and indeed pokery, went on in the recording - one of the reasons I believe that even LZ never attempted to play it live.

Is that Black or Black Cherry? I've got one of the earlier 4 string jazzes (with Fralin pickups but the switches on the body) in Black Cherry, as well as a newer 5 string with the new logo, in natural.

That's a good find. I thought that the earlier Xotic jazzes with the Lindy Fralin pickups were great basses, even better than the later models and at least on a par with the Sadowsky Japanese basses of the period. I always like that orange colour on Xotics as well...

It's pretty much the same over here. I've just been asked to do a dep in July, for a band playing at one of the bigger blues clubs around. It's a decent payer (about the lower end of what you would expect playing the tribute circuit), an established venue with a good crowd and apparently they look after you. But it's a two hour drive away and there are less and less of these venues still going (certainly compared to ten / fifteen years ago). My own 'occasional' blues band is playing a biker rally in June, again a reasonable payer to a decent crowd, but we only play a few gigs a year. There are pubs around here that book blues bands, but they don't pay much and it tends to be Sunday afternoon slots rather than a Saturday night. There certainly tends to be more of a market for blues music in Germany / Northern Europe and even a fair bit in Central / Southern Europe. The British Invasion heyday was a very long time ago (although there have been a few resurgences since).

There is still an audience, but it is something of a niche these days. Blues bands are far more popular in various parts of mainland Europe...!

I would also suggest doing exercises to improve core strength, especially to build up the muscles supporting the spine. The best way of doing this is to go to a gym and start doing weights (get advice on what exercises to do). I used to have back problems (displaced disk), but have had no issues for many years, not since I started going to the gym!

To be fair, I don't think that Gazza was purely motivated by money when he started down the blues route (at least initially). Some of his best stuff came from working in that genre (at least to me), although he did start to sound that he was going through the motions later on. To me, his big problem was that he was overly mercurial and consequently changing to the extent that he was neither one thing or the other. I liked many things he did throughout his career, but when I bought one album of his, then the chances always were that I wouldn't like the next one enough to buy it. At least his vocals kinda worked with the blues material. I used to have the Wardance album on vinyl many years ago. I will have to listen to it again on YouTube or whatever at some point. The trouble with a song like that is, as nice as the playing is, it really exposes the weaknesses in his voice - Steve Perry he was not...!