EliasMooseblaster

I'm not sure what's more awesome: the fact that you were on TV (on the Beeb, no less!), or the fact that you can play a sousaphone!

Have you considered the high-brow legend that is "Unclef**ker" from the South Park Movie?

Personally I find that they're quite useful for getting making the strings a bit slicker, and easier to glide over. Judging by the dust on my pickguards under my usual right-hand position, I'm leaving a lot of shredded fingertip on and around the strings! So whilst the audible difference is a bit on the subtle side*, I can definitely feel a difference. *I have also noticed it's more audible on acoustic instruments than electric (like so many of these things...)

I suspect you're right - I almost certainly heard that one from a drummer I worked with for many years, who devoured rock star biographies and was chock full of music biz anecdotes just like that. I have long suspected that roughly 50% of them were mis-remembered or just plain made up!

I've heard before that Sabbath (and so presumably H&H too) had a weird bee in their bonnet about keyboard players being visible onstage...didn't Rick Wakeman get stuffed behind a curtain when he toured with them?

Indeed it was Parasight! Glad to hear the others are still in music one way or another; they were a lovely bunch and all really good musicians. We were very much passing through - the band was called Cherry White, and a local group called Thunderous Jones were headlining. Were you there that evening, by any chance?

The nearby "Worst Auditionee" thread has been hilarious (thank you all!) - but it's thrown up a couple of stories of auditionees who turned out to be absolutely stellar musicians and went on to greater things. I assume, between us, we've a few more stories about somebody you played with / drank with / had an argument with who you've since seen on the telly or suchlike. My example: played a gig with two or three other bands at The Victoria in Derby back in 2015(?), and we were a bit surprised when the first band loaded in - they didn't look old enough to be there! (In fact, I think a couple of them were only 16 and there with a parent!) But they were really good. Hard rock with harmonised guitars, definite shades of Maiden and Wishbone Ash. Nice guys, too. I never did know what happened to the band - or where the others ended up - but one of the guitarists was clearly destined for greater things. He now plays lead guitar for Inglorious, and I'm pretty sure I heard about him starring as a young iteration of Slash in a biopic about Guns 'n' Roses. Over to you...

I never thought I'd find myself wishing that the Psychedelic Tuning track could be brought up a bit louder in the mix. But there are moments where it isn't quite covering up that...erm...microtonal fretless line!

I don't know if it's strictly an audition, if a guitarist has cobbled together a bunch of mates to hurriedly form his own band, but it was certainly a tedious experience. To be fair, many of us will have joined various "bands" at school which had no plan, and didn't survive beyond a couple of rehearsals, but this one stood out as interesting. Mostly because I'd never realised that the guitarist forming the band could even play the guitar. The singer, I already knew as competent. The drummer was new to me, but he seemed pretty adept, if frighteningly hyperactive. But the guitarist...could only play one song. Given he'd asked me whether I wanted to join his indie/pop-punk group, I think we were all a little surprised to find that the only song he could play was Summer Days. Yep: the song from Grease. I wish I'd been a bit less diplomatic, and suggested we knock it on the head after twenty minutes. But instead, I somehow agreed to come back the next week, by which time he'd managed to learn a Green Day song. Just the one. Made for a less tedious hour than the first session, but it was a long time before I could bring myself to listen to Longview again...

Good point - I hadn't considered the IEM angle!

So, just to clarify - are you playing the standard "open position" A chord shape? If so, @Mykesbass is spot on (and it is a nice chord!) Or have you shifted everything up one string, so you have the open D string, and are on the 2nd fret for the G, B and E? If so, you have DMaj7, which is also very pleasant.

Weirdly, I wonder whether Grime suffered from a similar issue that stopped a lot of old-school prog rock groups getting breaking through stateside - it's "too British". Granted, the artists are typically from very different demographics, but just as Gabriel-era Genesis, Soft Machine, etc might have sounded too eccentric to (most) American ears, what (admittedly little) I've heard of Stormzy or Tinie Tempah is so evocative of the run-down corners of British cities, I can imagine it sounding a bit alarming to a foreign audience.

For recording, I do a variant on Glyn Johns - one on the kick, two overheads, and then an extra one on the snare (I play traditional grip, and I'm no shed builder). For FoH...where are you playing? Pub or small club, even the kick drum sometimes feels unnecessary! Hammersmith Apollo, you might need a little more PA support. (PS apologies if you already have your mics, but I did a video on budget mics for a Glyn Johns-style setup, if it's at all useful: https://youtu.be/mJuHERnZTRE)

I'd like to report a fault with this survey. There appears to be no option for "cry."

It's a shame this is only for a single snapshot in time - you're quite right to mention different decadal trends, as I suspect they'd paint a much more interesting picture! Blues, for example, would have been huge in this country in the '60s and early '70s, but has dwindled to a niche interest in more recent decades; I think it's fair to say it's had a more stable (albeit small-ish) audience in the US. I'm sure EDM trends would be interesting, too - I'm no expert, but I think I'm right in saying that neither Garage nor Grime really translated their success across the pond.

Another one enforcing the 34" hegemony, I'm afraid - the majority of my bass guitars are all that scale length, but I've had a few exceptions over the years, and enjoyed all of them. Didn't realise my 8-string was a 30" scale until I got it home, but it's been a blessing in disguise: the "official" Hagstrom strings are nigh-on-impossible to come by, but because the design only allows through-body stringing, I can get them up to appropriate tension with a 34"-scale D'Addario set! (The biggest shock was moving to a 35" fretless and realising my intonation was all over the shop...)

Only five months late to this discussion, but I can report very good plug-n-play experience with both a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 and, more recently, a Steinberg UR44. They've been connected via USB and have talked to various editions of Ubuntu running Ardour versions 4 through 6 - no issues to date! As has been alluded above, the only difficulty comes in with some newer editions which have software controls for some features (e.g., I think the newer Focusrites use it to switch inputs between mic- and line-level gain). There have been some attempts to port this control software, and some people report varying levels of success running the original Windows versions through WINE. But if you can control everything you need to from the device itself then you're laughing.

I'm with you here: don't know if it's just companies using cheap spade connectors, but I've had amps spontaneously fail on me, only to open them up and realise, yep, it's one of the spade connectors on the power switch. Must have got a bump going down the stairs because it's just popped right off the terminal. Easy enough to fix, but it makes you worry if the next time it's going to fall off will be the middle of a song! Obviously I can see the benefits of a solderless system - easier to fix, surely! But if they were harder to break in the first place, you wouldn't be fixing them as often.

Some devices will work fine down to a lower voltage, others will complain or crap out as soon as the battery dips below 8.9V! As a cheapskate who likes to wring every last coulomb out of a battery, I've found that pedals and active basses will start to complain a lot earlier than, e.g., digital tuners or metronomes, so the higher-demand devices get treated to fresh batteries, while my tuner gets the hand-me-downs. See also bike lights vs remote controls, when it comes to AAAs...