Happy Jack

What he said. ^

At rehearsal for a Dep gig that I really regret accepting: Me to Guitard - Are you playing a quick change there at the start of the verse? Guitard to Me - No no no, it's not a quick change. Me to Guitard - I know that, but it sounded to me like you went to the F and then back to the C. Guitard to Me - Yes I did, but I was trying not to ...

Clearly you haven't heard me play then. 😂😂😂

Understood. I can really only play one song at a time with a pick, or I also run the risk of the ball of my thumb cramping up. I haven't got a solution, you understand, but being the person who does the set lists has its advantages. 😎

Bad habit holding the pick wrong, or bad habit playing with a pick at all?

Sadly, I have. In my repertoire it's only a handful, but without a pick they just don't work. The most obvious ones are Summertime Blues and C'mon Everybody, but I can't get Let's Dance or Down Down to sound right with fingers either. For pick playing I don't use the traditional thumb + forefinger grip, instead I use thumb + first two fingers. It's clumsy and restrictive, but you know exactly where you are and you're much less likely to drop the pick. @BassAdder60 is spot on with the whole 'anchoring your hand' thing. With my r'n'r band I play a Precision with '57 pickup cover in place, so I rest the side of my hand on that and pluck between pickup and neck. With my covers band I play (mostly) a Rick 4003s5 with a sensible bridge so I rest the side of my hand on that and pluck over the bridge pickup.

But if you want the Daddy of them all ...

Yup, if I was selling an incredibly rare and expensive bass with a totally off-the-wall design, I'd definitely list it with four rather poor photographs and no description worth mentioning. Must be a French thing.

No dates in London?

I tried the GruvGear Duo ... absolutely hated it. 😂 In the final analysis, there's no substitute for actually trying these things for yourself.

Troo dat, but I've posted about them several times and I wouldn't want my fellow Basschatters to think that I was on commission ...

Not sure why anything needs to be flipped? I won't bang on about readily-available lefty basses as I'm sure you already know all about them, but a whole generation (and then some) of lefty bassists simply played a righty bass upside down. You can either learn to play with the E at the bottom or - more sensibly IMHO - reverse the nut so the E can go at the top.

Ha! I've always loved this analogy. Back in the 70s, the guys who first got me into biking were obsessed with 'fettling' their bikes. I remember that John's idea of a perfect Saturday afternoon was to take the carbs off his CB250, strip them down and clean them (on the kitchen table 😨), adjust the needle, refit and re-balance. If all went well, he ended up with a bike that ... erm... ran exactly the way it had before. He could never understand why I avoided fiddling about with tools and mucky things like oil and grease and chainlube, and instead I got my fun from actually riding the bloody things.

Don't forget to take the other factors that matter to you into account. 🙂 In my case, that would include low weight, wide string spacing, and simple controls. YMMV

Fascinating. I routinely double with DB and electric at every Damo & The Dynamites gig, and I own quite literally every suggestion that has been made above! 😂 Oh yes, and an EA Doubler head, of course. Of all the solutions I've tried, I like the MicroBass II by far the best. I use the DI to the board for my bass signal and also to get 48V phantom power (no need for a power supply or a battery, though of course I keep a battery in there just in case), and the Line Out to the Trace Elf which drives my Crazy 8 for stage monitoring. I put the DB through Channel A and the electric through Channel B, set my levels at sound check, and thereafter I have no need to touch the unit except to use the foot selector & mute buttons. Similarly, since the Elf is essentially 'fire & forget', it lives on the floor under the old PA tripod I use to raise the Crazy 8 to ear level. This arrangement allows me to have instant access to each bass, preset to the correct level, without groping around for the right button on the front of the head. Once I'm up and running with the first number of the evening I can just forget about it and focus on reducing my error-score for the evening. It also means that no valuable real estate on top of the PA case is being used by my bass rig. "This seems ideal - but there are lots of dials & buttons on it, and it'll take a wee while to get used to." True, but almost all of them, on close inspection, are either easily-ignored or (again) fire & forget. Apart from maybe the Boost control for Ch.A or the Drive control for Ch.B I can't imagine what else you would want to be tweaking after soundcheck.

The argument that a limited company offers protection or, worse, guaranteed protection is something to treat with caution. Depending on how and why you end up owing megabucks, you can easily find that your creditors can come after you personally. From the POV of succession planning, losing and replacing band members etc, I'd recommend forming an LLP as a far better, more flexible option. GET PROFESSIONAL ADVICE!

Ah well, if it comes out of the marketing budget ...

I imagine you'd get a few people prepared to hand over a fiver for a pretty piece of cardboard, but only if they were drunk enough. You'd need to be offering these for 99p each and there comes a point where the game's not worth the candle. Thing is, if you have a band with a decent following and a good social media presence, then downloads (for 99p each) are by far the simplest, most cost-effective way of dealing with this. With my rock'n'roll band, the talent (Damo) has written four songs in four years, all of them excellent of their type, but he ain't exactly the new Lennon & McCartney. He's also a technphobe so dealing with every aspect of the download biz would be left to me and @Silvia Bluejay as was the recording and production of the 4-song CD during Lockdown. Given that all royalties would be going - rightly - to Damo, and that we'd be dealing in pennies, life's too short. In a successful 4-piece originals band with a shedload of great songs and a real desire to 'get our music out there', I imagine things look different.

Interesting - you wouldn't know that from the ticketing.

Stumbled across this, and was genuinely tempted. https://www.seetickets.com/event/the-steve-hillage-band/o2-forum-kentish-town/2395747?fbclid=IwAR248tnd4X-AiTgQA_O8mccF6PHF6RkLrX0omcpDVh2iU_stA0UC94yAwAA I have vivid (if somewhat stoned) memories of the 1977 Rainbow gig, including the journey there on the tube for some reason. Motivation Radio was riding high and almost permanently on the turntable, I had just discovered that there was more to life than four cans of Fosters and 20 Rothmans, punk was a happening thing that most people knew very little about though I'd pogo'd for the first time a few months earlier (Pretty Vacant). Ah well, the Kentish Town gig offers no seats and anyway - I'm gigging that evening. Shame.

After a lot of research, I ended up using http://www.torchmusic.co.uk/ We were pretty happy with the outcome. For context, we went for the cheapest options available throughout, because we were well aware that very few people have any interest in buying CDs these days. We sold JUST enough to cover production costs. You really REALLY want to enclose a download code with each CD.

Hopeless technique ... look at the way her hair strays across the fretboard. 😂

I have relatively recent experience of trying to run a US bank account and a US cellphone with a US SIM. My advice? Don't even try. American banking is decades behind Europe, even the supposedly big international outfits like Chase and Wells Fargo. All of their systems work on the assumption that you are a Yank, you live in the Land of the Free, and the only currency on the planet is US$. You WILL need to supply a valid US residential address, and quite possibly the Yank equivalent of a Social Security number, though certain banks are so obsessed with new business that the individual you are dealing with may well fudge that issue so that he/she can collect their next bonus. This WILL backfire on you if and when it all goes horribly wrong. All assume that you can 'pop in' to your local branch to deal with certain issues. Very few have any system for dealing with, for example, an email from an English customer living in England, still less a phone call (transatlantic!) to their "Free Helpline - Just Call This Number". None are prepared to bend or amend any rules, no matter how obvious it is that something doesn't apply to you because you're a foreigner. Running a US cellphone sort-of works so long as you are NEVER out of the country for more than a 6-month period (they have so many burners that any number unused for six months is recycled). And of course you need a US bank account. Oh no ... wait ... I stress, this isn't "a guy in the pub told me", this is "I personally lived through this nightmare a few years ago". Sometimes you just need to know when to walk away.