Huge Hands

I play in a concert band (brass/woodwind). Lovely people, but regularly wind me up. If a gig has restricted parking, the flute or sax players will park right up against the venue doors with no access near or through cars for me, drums or percussion with the heavy gear. One local event every year we get allocated 3 spaces near to where we play for bass, drums and percussion, but every year I get there and someone else in the band has blagged the three spaces. If I'm one of the last ones there, they will have set up in their semicircles on stage with no access through the chairs/music stands/mutes/spit rags etc for me to get my gear through to the back. They just look at you blankly when it is obvious you need to get through and your arms are about to burst having carried it all half a mile from the nearest available parking space. They also regularly forget to tell the event organisers that I need electricity, or when there is some the band won't move in a bandstand so I'm exposed when the rain starts. I find bluntness, shouting, and ramming fingers and toes with my gear tends to work well.......

For those from the North East - as a rotund ginger kid with glasses, I often used to get likened to local newsreader Mike Neville. Not really a musician, but I did have his "Larn Yersel Geordie" LP he made with George House. "Geordie hurt his leg. He went to the doctor. The doctor said it was healing well, and he should be walking soon. Walk? Geordie says, Aah cannat even waaaaalk!!"

These would show if the earth in a socket is missing, which would be a valid test to try. so not knocking them, but not if the earth was there but of poorer conductivity than the one connected to your mic - so may not be a conclusive test.

Dood got it right in reply #2. The likelihood is your PA being connected to a powerpoint somewhere in the room, and your bass cab to another, and there is potential difference between the two earths to the various equipment. This could be due to shoddy earthing in the building, or your equipment. One quick way to stop it would be to remove the shield connection at one end of your (presumably balanced XLR) mic cable. Disconnecting this may make the mic noisier, but it will stop the mouth shocks. I got a stage manager to do this once at a gig I was FOH engineer at just before the door opened and they let the audience in. As people were rushing in. The main guitarist (who had been getting the shock) was hidden from view, but through his extremely loud stage wedge I heard him say "Hey man, either that was a lucky guess or you're a f***ing genius..!"

Doing a quick Google - at £800 per speaker, that's £200 off. A lot better than full price 😉

As others have said, if he's getting a mega discount, I'd probably go with the JBL. When I was in the live sound game around 20 years ago, I was never a fan of the JBL sound and loved RCF drivers in various speakers, but they were both quality brands, it was just a personal preference thing (JBLs were too high mid bitey for me back then). I would imagine if he's getting a mega deal, you'll soon learn to love the JBLs.....

Interesting, as a ginger who retreats at even a slight beam of sunlight, I've been struggling with the heat for weeks. Feels like we're talking about different countries...... Admittedly it is not like this every year.... Hope your relocation goes well. My dad's mate was married to an Italian lady and when we were kids I just remember regular visits to their house for days of coffee and amazing food.

Welcome Chris, I came at it from a different direction so play bass guitar and sometimes upright bass (plucked only - mainly for the look and sound) with a concert band alongside tuba players. I have never managed to get my paws around bowing and recently found out I am allergic to rosin! I'm sure if you've played in the Welsh Guards you're at much more disciplined and competent level than me! As a former trombone player I have been tempted to look into a sousaphone or tuba but I know the band would want me to stay on that if I picked it up enough!

I always refuse to wear one, even as my hair starts to thin (I've been lucky to get to my 40s before this has been mega noticeable). Some may pull off the "cool bassist in a hat" thing, but I've always thought I would always end up looking like a "fat cnut in a hat". I would love to play in a cool hip hop type band where I could wear a cap backwards or something, but always seem to end up in suited and booted blues and soul bands. I have had so many bands try to convince me to wear some sort of pork pie or wide brimmed trilby thing, but I always refuse. I felt it was right to make this stance after I left my last blues band and the next bloke, who didn't look too different to me - always had a trilby on - ugggh. I think my fear of looking a cliche comes from around 1993 when I was into acid jazz and funk, tie dye etc but my mate convinced me to go and see the US blues man Walter Trout at the Mayfair in Newcastle. He was great but I remember his stocky bass player wearing a long leather jacket and wide brimmed hat. Even worse, his keyboard player had Brian May hair and spandex leggings printed with a keyboard all up the side of his legs...... That was out of date even then.....

I've had a NXT5 for about 4 years. I wasn't aware there was an active version, must be a new thing. Mine came out the box with a lovely low bass guitar type action which I've kept. I'm not a bower, but when I have feebly tried I think the action would need to be raised for that as you just constantly catch 2 strings at once. I find that when I stand next to it while playing it doesn't sound very DB, but if you listen to a recording of it from across the room, it really does. Weird, but that's how it is for me. I love mine, not sure of this is helping you make up your mind though 😄

Not really into this but has reminded me to check out other Tiny Desk offerings. It's the new Jools Holland for me. Loving the Erykah Badu one I just found....

I remember in the 90s my mates were into obscure comics. One was an oddball superhero called Too Much Coffee Man. Compared to their usual XMen type stuff I quite liked this one. I remember one strip where he is talking to a girl who informs him that Brown Eyed Girl by Van Morrison is actually about butt sex. "You know, down in the hollow, playing a new game?". The strip cut to him wide eyed saying "Thanks, I'll never listen to that song the same way again". It has been the same for me ever since too.....

I can remember getting a similar band when I was a in-house sound engineer and trying to throw everything at it. I borrowed every mic/stand I could and tried to close mic everything, even though we had 20 mins turn around between gigs.. Problem was, I was used to pro-brass players setting their own mics up. We flung a load of mics on stands out and ran off to FOH to do a line check...when the curtain went up - they hadn't touched them! We ended up with mics pointing down, up, left, right, but not at the instruments! I ended up having to do an ambient mix from the best mics I had. In a way, it probably worked better than close mic'ing. They also obviously weren't used to working with monitors and hearing themselves. When the first song ended, the vocalist/compare started to talk and ended up putting his hands over his ears so we killed that monitor straight away.... This was a 1200+ seat venue, and a gentle reinforcement certainly worked fine in a room that size. I don't think you would need too much equipment - perhaps just a bit more practice with what you have? Perhaps mic the vocalists and put the guide they use (most likely piano) only with their voices in the monitor? If the guitarist is having issues (wow you found a quiet guitarist?) stick a mic on his amp to give you a "boost" option FOH and only permit one trusted soul to have control of that.... Finally - where are you based? The concert band I play in would kill to have 4 trombones and four trumpets right now....

I used to play in a band where the guitarist insisted on counting in all songs with his foot, a'la Herman Munster stomping on a broken floorboard. It was because he liked to kick them all off with a little widdle, or rhythmn, and then have us all join in. Problem was his thumping, as well as being really embarrassingly loud, never matched the pace of his playing, so you just had to hope you could get the beat from his avant guarde widdly slide before it took off.

Shows how times have moved on that the owner of a music shop doesn't know what a euphonium is.....

I feel a mini bass bash coming on....😉

As a former FOH engineer, I would say this: I used to always initially push to go pre-EQ as you never knew what silly things bass players would do mid gig to hear themselves on stage which might cause problems with resonance or mush out front.. However, if a bass player made a fuss about a "unique sound" or wanted post EQ, I would usually understand and go that way. A lot of bass players didn't have a clue what I was talking about or would say "it's up to you". In my experience (and only my experience) 90% of bass players are in a certain tonal range that you can hear and easily recreate FOH. I used to mainly use EQ to suit the room and never really used it to override a players tone and boost or cut a sound to try and change it. The perceived sound is often made more by the mix of the overall band along with room resonances etc, not because some devillish sound control freak is purposely changing your tone. Of course there are some hopeless sound engineers that will leave a compressor across your channel and not hear it has totally taken all the bite out of it, or not hear the signal is clipping, or the line has gone one-legged. Those guys just can't be helped. A bit like the bass players that turn up with home made pedals that output DC V to your hired backline, or don't understand the laws of headroom on a signal.....

I think a lot of it is governed by PRS. I used to work in a shop about 25 years ago where all of the musak was supplied by Rediffusion and was really poor cover versions of middle of the road pop. I'm assuming they had a set list of songs that they paid PRS for and imagine they got discounted because it was poor copies and not the originals. With only a 60min max cassette, it used to wear thin after several 8hr shifts. That's how I'm surprised @Leonard Smalls could just pick and choose (albeit Mozart stuff is so old it is probably licence exempt) unless the Garden Centre has a blanket PRS licence? I seem to remember @cetera had something to do with PRS - I'm sure he could advise how it all works - he'd certainly be a lot more up to date than me!

Liked this. Thought his Moog sound and solo was very reminiscent of Sean Martin who he used to play with in Snarky Puppy. Also good to see Captain Birdseye grooving along in the audience.....

I recently bought 5x Gotoh GB707's from these guys: Swift delivery with no issues. They are based in the UK, so might be able to help if the model you want is not listed? https://www.gluedtomusic.com/ NB: I am not affiliated in any way.

I used to play in a covers band (not tribute) where someone would pick a song to do. We liked to do obscure stuff, not the obvious hits. I would usually roughly have heard the track before but not recently and we would turn up to rehearsal and jam our way through it a few times. I would only then go away and really listen to the original to see how the lines I came up with compared to the original. It wasn't just me, most of the band worked like this. It meant that often we would come up with our own arrangements that we felt were better. Other times, I would realise I had been overplaying, and the original bassists lines fit the song much better. Sometimes the band member who suggested the song would moan I wasn't playing the iconic riff, so I would learn the original and play that. I know this approach would wind a lot of bands up, but we were all fairly democratic and happy to spend the time and it really worked for us. We used to do a killer version (IMHO) of St James Infirmary in the style of House of the Rising Sun. My argument was that in the old days a studio bassist would usually have played on record, but a different touring bassist would do his version and then evolve it out on the road. In some cases, the later live versions were much better so why stick note for note to the recording? (I do admit some were much worse!)

I don't know if this helps at all, but the large concert band I'm in use something called Muzodo. They use it to log gigs and send out availability requests, not sure about the set list bit. The language of it suggests to me it was designed for brass/concert bands rather than small rock gigging bands, but you never know. I'm not an admin, I just respond "yes, no or maybe" if I'm available so that's as much as I know about it, so can't comment on interoperability or anything, but it might be worth a look if you don't get any better responses? EDIT for corrected spelling of app.

I bought a cheap Harley Benton 5 string ex-deco that sits in my lounge. It is great for quickly picking up and working something out if an idea comes into your head, or a song on the TV, or the missus starts warbling and you want to play along. If I want to practice properly, I plug in my gigging bass - as the body size and strings/string spacing make the feel a lot different - as others have said.. It came with cheap zingy brass strings on it which would make horrible finger noises when trying to move around the neck. I put black nylon wrapped Roto 88s on mine, which are great but feel like the brake cables @jbu09 was on about. I tried to pedal some bass notes under a violin duo/flute trio thing as my DB was out for repair, and it couldn't even be loud enough with those in a small church setting, so wouldn't advise gigging acoustically, but it is great when noodling by yourself on the settee. I recently has a tuning post snap on it, but that's another thread - all sorted now.

I've lost gigs because I'm 6'3" overweight and ginger, and stuck out like a sore thumb against their backdrop of cool rock tight jeans and shades. Shorta***es! (I also refuse to wear stereotypical bass player hats). I recently got asked to turn up to help audition a drummer for a new band because the bass player wasn't available for that night. I was told it would be jamming 12 bars, but he started shouting out classic rock numbers at me that I'd heard plenty of times but never/rarely played. It was seat of the pants stuff! Shame I can't commit due to upcoming surgery - as they offered me the gig too!