Happy Jack

Something that @Silvia Bluejay and I have pondered many times over the years. In our experience, it's very rarely as 'straight line' as that. For example, where the pub is owned and/or managed by a brewery or PubCo, there will routinely be an annual subsidy in place to encourage entertainment and to market the pub to the local community. 10 years ago a mid-sized Fullers pub could expect to receive a subsidy of £15,000 p.a. from head office. Broadly speaking, that's £300 per week that the landlord/manager could allocate as they wished in order to attract punters. At the Fullers pubs that I played at the time, this translated into one band per week getting £250 and the other £50 being used to run a Quiz Night or a Poker Night or a Karaoke session. Reverting to your original question, this all meant that the pub didn't actually 'need' to sell a single drink in order to cover the cost of the band. The assumption was that the band would bring in extra revenue for the pub, which would show up in their sales figures. Obviously a pub that took the subsidy but then routinely turned in lousy sales figures would soon lose the subsidy. The other aspect to this system is that it made it easy for dishonest landlords (and yes, unbelievably some such folk really do exist) to simply pocket some or all of the band fee. This is essentially what led initially to pubs demanding invoices from bands, and then to 'direct payment' sytems whereby the band gets paid by head office and not by the pub.

What on Earth makes you think I'll ever get up that high? 😂

So for those of us of the non-luthier persuasion, it looks like any other jack once it's installed?

Can someone please explain the difference between a barrel jack and a normal jack?

It's a Rockabilly thing. We interviewed Lee Rocker just before Covid and one of the things he mentioned was that The Stray Cats never soundcheck before any gig.

Seeing as this thread has veered off into Soundcheck territory, my covers band has sound-checked with the same song for the last 12 years. Every gig. Every single one. On those all-too-frequent occasions where we don't get a 'proper' soundcheck, we simply make that song our first number. All three of us in the band plus @Silvia Bluejay our sound engineer know exactly how that song is supposed to sound, and we hardly ever run into problems. Except when the lead singer suddenly decided to ramp up his personal mic-stand monitor to the max due to a loss of confidence / stage fright / whatever. It was the only piece of kit on stage that Silvie couldn't turn down!

That would be me, and there was a perfectly logical reason for that choice at the time. That reason is now gone, courtesy of £16,000 worth of eye operations last year, which is why those super-sized dots no longer serve any useful purpose.

Damned right - superb!

In truth, Mick, I'm loving this. Seriously.

Next stop ... my Seasick Steve Tribute band.

OK, I'll bite. What makes a bassist - ANY bassist - somehow "perfect to play steel guitar"?

Well string choice is going to have a major impact, obviously, but in the final analysis it's all about how it feels & plays as far as you are concerned. I'll be interested to hear what you end up with.

I once had to yell "It's not a f***ing shuffle!" at the drummer, about 24 bars into a song. He took it in good part. Eventually. The audience seemed to think it was all part of the show. 🙄

Love the badly re-stuck 'Z' ...

Please merge this topic with the one started by @Newfoundfreedom Incidentally @ped (or maybe it's @Kiwi these days), this is I'm afraid another example of just how hopeless the Basschat Search function still is. Before starting this topic, I took the trouble to search General Discussion for "Sessions" to avoid duplicating someone else's thread. Many screenfuls of stuff came up, but not a very recent topic entitled "Session" which rather negates the point of having a Search function at all.

Is this a real thing, or am I being spammed/scammed?

I'm guessing that sanding it entirely on the bass side would still reduce the size of the holes to a significant degree, but you've already mentioned that a better solution might actually be to make those holes bigger. On balance the obvious response is that, when you're working with an expert, you're usually best off leaving it to him! Please just pretend that it's your own bass, Andy, and do what you would do if that were the case. 🙂

Or use Purpleheart plugs with the Luminlays at the centre in fluorescent green. Or something. Oh alright, I'll come quietly.

I assumed you would only be able to do that if you replaced the entire trussrod. If you can replace the nut with the rest of the trussrod in situ then that's jam all the way. 🙂

Nah! My daughter's trussrod worked fine right from the start ...

Go boy, GO!!!

That is outrageously good news!

Technically brilliant, effectively unlistenable. "Let me show you how fast I can play lots and lots of notes over weird chord changes and bizarre time signatures." I'd genuinely love to hear the same kid playing a proper bass groove. I reckon he'd not only be brilliant at it, but also a great deal more musical.