Happy Jack

My home studio does have aircon BUT cheap aircon like mine is usually recycing the air in the room rather than pumping in fresh. Our last rehearsal was on BH Monday in a wood above Great Missenden. Seriously.

Catering almost entirely for the local Polish community, but a very well-kept and friendly place. Food is excellent. Managed to get an unplugged gig there some years back, but didn't go down well enough to get re-booked.

Now that I never knew (or noticed) despite living around there for a big chunk of the 80s.

That is SO open to misinterpretation.

By and large, my hands don't sweat much, and my sweat doesn't seem particularly corrosive anyway, so no I don't bother.

Update - a pub where we were booked to play on 4th July believe that they will be allowed to open (with social distancing, natch) that weekend. They want to do an early-evening outdoor event in their large garden with a BBQ, and with us performing unplugged outside. As a band, we'd never actually need to enter the pub if we didn't want to. Two of us have said we're up for that, the third wants 48 hours to think it through. I'll keep you posted.

They couldn't hit an elephant at this dist ...

Yup, three great bands from (essentially) the 70s, though for some reason nobody has yet cited The Glitter Band. And you need VERY good hearing to detect that there are actually two drummers playing at the same time with any of those bands. Basically, there are drums supplying the beat. So if it was so great and sounded so awesome, why has nobody (much) done it for the last 40 years?

Why?

Good grief - feel your pain, bro!

Interesting responses here. My head is somewhere else entirely from most on BC by the look of it, and I'll be gigging again the moment venues start putting bands on again. If that's 2021 then it's 2021, if it's next week then it's next week. My choice, no preaching happening here.

The important thing is to place your finger where it produces the note that you wanted. All else is nonsense.

This is an excellent post. My only addition would be that lined fretless is an abomination, and completely pointless at that ... when you're playing a bass, you can't actually see the frets! What you need to see is the ENDS of the frets. Ibanez recognised this 50 years ago and produced this: It's a rubbish photo (sorry) but you get the idea. The bass (Ibanez 2366 FLB) was supplied with these fret end markers in place. I liked them so much that I later had a guitar tech do this: That's a Lakland Skyline Duck Dunn where I switched to a fretless neck. The job of installing those fret ends was (apparently) very simple, and was not at all expensive.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-52843846

Then enjoy the fact that you will never (as in NEVER) need to buy another set of strings.

It never died, Tut, it never died!

Ooooh, look what I found! I've seen a few Marina basses over the years, but always in (rather unattractive) solid colours. Now isn't this a lovely piece of wood?

And stuff foam under the strings. Lots of foam. The more foam, the better. You just can't have enough foam if you're playing with a pick.

In all fairness, it was a piece of artwork in a music studio rather than a musical instrument.

That remains one of the nicest (modified) examples in existence.

Nowhere near as-new condition, needs some maintenance that it's never going to get from me, but still fully-functional and working pretty well. Even got the original box, By God! Pickup only from HA1 3RG.

The real sacrilege would be to sign a modern bass.

I routinely switch (on EB) between 35" scale and 30.5", and I occasionally pick up a uke-bass. Each instrument / scale length has a slightly different technique, of course, but it's all electric bass. The only thing that could be affected by routinely practising on short scale before gigging on long scale is muscle memory. I don't own a 1/2-size DB so I can't be certain, but I suspect that the same is true.