Happy Jack

Most of the stuff I play is dance music; most of what isn't dance music is singalong stuff. For me a really good gig is one where everything goes well technically and musically, AND where there's an enthusiastic audience who 'get' what we're doing and join in. Doesn't have to be a crowd of thousands - I've played gigs that made me very happy in pubs that were no larger than the 1930s semi I live in. Conversely, dull or ropey involves small audiences of ageing punters who have forgotten why they even bother to go out any more, or Club Members sitting lined up on the banquette seating with their arms folded and a grim "Entertain Me" expression on their faces, or a mass brawl breaking out on the dancefloor, or a bunch of pikeys invading the stage so that they can sing inappropriate songs about how everybody wishes they were back in wherever (including the band). The really memorable gigs tend to be either exotic and interesting venues (e.g. playing a national car show with the stage alongside an active airport runway) or utter disasters (e.g. playing to a large, completely empty field during a rainstorm of Biblical proportions).

Can't you use the existing white p/g as the template?

Since Covid I've averaged 80/90 gigs a year, playing in two/three main bands plus various side projects and dep gigs. As others have mentioned, there's been a lot of venue closure and gig cancellation this year and I'm currently standing at 78 for 2024. Gigging is what I do. It's my main hobby, activity and interest. It's also a shared passion with my wonderful wife, @Silvia Bluejay I entirely agree about preferring quality gigs to mere quantity, but that reminds me of something I first heard when I joined an advertising agency in the mid-70s: "We know that half the money we spend on advertising is wasted. We just don't know which half." If I knew in advance which gigs were going to be a triumph and which a waste of time & energy then I'd be a very happy bunny. Sadly, my crystal ball is no better than anyone else's. In order to play a dozen truly wonderful, memorable gigs each year, I accept that I'll also have to play 70 dull or ropey gigs. I'd like to improve those odds, but for the moment I'll take what I can get.

Some very expensive hi-end brands being recommended here (above) and - while I'm sure they're all absolute killer devices - I'm competely unconvinced that they're the best route forward. All rechargeable batteries will fade away and (eventually) die, so spending £458 on that Shure outfit seems like an awful lot of money for something that you'll be chucking in a skip sometime around 2027. If you've not used wireless before then I'd strongly suggest you experiment first with the really cheap stuff (Joyo, Lekato, etc.) which my reasonably extensive experience suggests is at least 90% as good as the top-end stuff whilst costing 90% less. I started out with https://www.gak.co.uk/en/xvive-xu2-wireless-instrument-system-black When the batteries started to fade, I experimented with https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/305814068759 and with https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/186311571177 Following a recommendation from @stewblack I also bought https://www.amazon.co.uk/JOYO-Wireless-Transmitter-Receiver-Instruments/dp/B0CRKS96NS And my experience? They all work. They work just fine, and if there's any difference between the performance of the Joyo and the XVive systems then I've never been able to spot it. I play pubs and clubs, beer gardens and festival stages. I use passive and active basses, 4-string and 5-string. The only basses I own that have any trouble with wireless systems are double basses - all of them - and I don't understand why. It seems to make no difference whether I'm using piezo or magnetic pickups, full-sized DBs or my Kolstein Busetto, even whether the bass is plywood or aluminium. The strength of the string vibration seems occasionally to overpower the wireless signal producing a juddering sound that reminds me of the ABS cutting in when doing an emergency stop. Incidentally, the combined cost of ALL FOUR units referenced above was roughly HALF the cost of a single Shure GLXD16. I love Shure kit and I own a fair amount of it, but £458 for a wireless system? Your 'avin' a giraffe.

I'm guessing it comes with a free pool table.

Can't comment on the workmanship, but alarmed by the price! You can buy a helluva lot of gear for >£3k and you can get a very decent DB for rockabilly for less than a third of that price. 7.5-8.5Kg is deffo lightweight and I like that (a typical 3/4 plywood DB will likely be around 10Kg) but whether a 2Kg reduction warrants such a premium on the price is pretty debatable. The Thomann listing stating "Rockabilly string action - not suitable for jazz and classical music" is an immediate red flag, too. The fact that they felt it necessary to put that implies that people have bought these basses for rockabilly and other uses and been disappointed. Personally, I'm not convinced that there is such a thing as a pre-determined rockabilly action. I play in a similar band to yours using one of four DBs (or similar - one is a KK BabyBass), each with a different action, different strings, different pickups. I'd be hard put to tell you which of mine has a "rockabilly action". IME playing in a rock'n'roll outfit makes it unlikely that your bass will be cosseted and kept wrapped up in tissue paper. Buying a brand new DB and taking that instant depreciation hit seems quite unnecessary, which is why I've never yet bought a brand new DB. I'd second both @Burns-bass and @Beedster ... stick with plywood and buy pre-loved. If you really need to blow the rest of the dosh in a DB-related sort of way, then there are appropriate rabbit holes for you to fall into ... specialist DB amplification and selecting gut strings both spring to mind.

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/296728986785?_skw=hagstrom+h8&itmmeta=01J9RQ4BT2SYAP9P9MTEAMY0TC&hash=item45166d04a1:g:DJAAAOSw4vhm~qB~&itmprp=enc%3AAQAJAAAA0HoV3kP08IDx%2BKZ9MfhVJKkSsm2d1shKfuwuOrIOriLfkDc9QWLgmJUve7y6DC32CZz5Tf0NMcTYai96Z4W8tNiFn2g1%2F9mHBoghAcI7tem5yUntGc8AvGgd8TXu4%2BUbLQAgeyXEUW86p1dvPTA3F2nD%2B25mYIOsyxSlFMKcD0xXw6Zl78y9NiPeL96EkhizpDQWBcCZ19kdM3onRcLNvt2oowEpAawvdSEOgzWN30Wcu048Wk%2BGXpL2EZPim7PYXPveI5ezsZpyI9kD1PbBmSw%3D|tkp%3ABk9SR5C9kZfOZA

Sadly, you have made a tyro's mistake and completely forgotten to mention your budget. You just know that this will come back to bite you in the bum. 🙄 @Silvia Bluejay and I bought a pristine pair of pre-loved HK-Audio PR:O 12 passive tops a year ago, and they've been a revelation. https://www.thomann.co.uk/hk_audio_premium_pro_12.htm You'd probably do just fine with a single cab. If 18Kg is more than you fancy putting on a pole (I'm 67 and I do two at every gig; no I don't lift weights) then at just 13Kg there's https://www.thomann.co.uk/hk_audio_premium_pro_10_x.htm If you like your powered mixer and it still works, why change it?

We routinely play 2x45 plus 1x60, which seems to be rather more than the bunch of skivers majority of posters (above) do, but before anyone feels sorry for me you'd best wait to hear from @Bluewine about the hours played by American bar bands ...

'Ere, back when I were lad, all this round 'ere was a Ricky-free zone. That booger John Hall, 'e 'ad faster briefs than a whippet, if y'gets my meaning. Weren't none of this Chickenbacker nonsense back then, neither. Nay lad, Basschat knew its place back then, hiding behind t'sofa in case a writ come through t'letter box.

Hi Jack To improve the selling experience on eBay, from today (1 October 2024) it is now free to sell for our private sellers in the UK. We are also introducing a number of updates to make selling on eBay easier and safer than ever. Free selling Earlier in the year, we removed transaction fees for pre-loved clothing. As of 1 October 2024, we are extending this across categories, with the exception of motors. Here’s what this means for you: • Transaction fees were paid when your item sells. We are removing these fees, meaning selling is now free. This applies for both new and existing listings. • Listing fees are paid when you list an item. You will receive 300 free listings a month. • Optional add-on features, such as international selling and promoting your listing, will be available for an additional cost. If you'd told me that was coming, you bar stewards, I might have postponed my recent big kit sell-off by a couple of months. 😂😂😂

Hey @Lozz196, see if you can guess which pub he's talking about. 😂

But there's no getting away from the fact that it's £600 for a cardboard bass. 😱

Yeh, but you won't catch me standing too close to them. I've bought three sets of new strings in the last five years. On each occasion, it was because of a new bass. Old guys with flatwounds rule ...

None of that even begins to surprise me. My point was, of course, that by the time you've amplified your single DB at a gig, the sound of the gut strings is nowhere near as significant in the overall sound as when a DB - or many DBs - are played acoustically. Your post also leads on naturally to the disparity in instrument prices between orchestral DBs and the sort played by most of us here on Basschat in blues bands, country bands, jazz bands. Putting a £700 set of guts onto an £8000 orchestral DB makes more sense (to me, anyway) than putting those same strings onto an £800 3/4 plywood bass.

That was your best attempt at raisin a laugh.

https://www.cases-and-enclosures.co.uk/roc-cases-grey-flight-case-l550-x-w220-x-h175mm-with-foam-insert

I've spent the last few days looking at exactly this solution ... or, more accurately, at the truly enormous range of solutions out there. You can start with BandHelper, OnSong, GigHelper and Camelot Pro. There's loads more. And that's just the Apps. All of these assume that: You are an Apple afficianado and already own loads of Apple kit; You have a background in software development and programming; You have spent the last 20 years using Midi for everything except wiping your arse; Everyone in your band is keen to fall in line with your solutions and let you control the set lists etc. I have spent literally hours just this past weekend scanning websites, watching YouTubes, downloading manuals (srsly), asking my friends over at https://www.facebook.com/groups/1096679527422725 and I haven't found anything designed for the ... ahem ... elder musician with no interest in falling down this particular rabbit hole. Essentially, "entry level" = a degree in computer programming.

For singers / guitarists / bassists I'm firmly in the NO MUSIC STAND camp. Echoing many others, if you can't be arsed to learn a couple of hours' worth of covers then IMHO you shouldn't be on stage trying to perform them. This applies particularly to dedicated singers who need only learn the lyrics to - usually - a bunch of famous pop songs that they grew up listening to and singing along to. If you can't remember famous lyrics, you're probably not actually a singer at all. Orchestral players - and that definitely includes the horn section for, say, a soul band - is a whole nother thang. Those people have to play perfectly in sync with each other and with the rest of the band (even when they're being 'loose') plus all their training points them at reading the songs from the sheet music. The crossover point seems to be keyboards. I play a 3-tier rig using each tier in any given song for one of brass, strings, piano, organ or synth. But it's not as simple as that ... I have a dozen different organ sounds for different songs, half a dozen different pianos, half a dozen brass sounds, etc. Every song starts with 30 seconds of frantic button-pushing to get the right sounds cued up for the next song. Inevitably, I have a tablet mounted on my rig which tells me what settings I'm going to need. Equally inevitably, since I have a tablet with all the songs in the set in the correct sequence, I also have the chords for some tricky passages. Does that make me a bad person?

Free-ish to a good home - best assume £10/£15 for P&P depending. I've had this for at least 10 years and it still works perfectly. At the time, it was the latest in Smart TVs. There is a possibility that things have moved on since then. Condition is pretty much as new. That looks like the original cellophane protective nonsense still on there ... at the time this was a very new thing. Now surplus to requirements. Easiest (for me) would be collection from Harrow HA1 but, as luck would have it, I am temporarily in possession of exactly the right packaging materials.

Clearly I should have charged you more ... 😂

... this isn't quite what you had in mind. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cg5677nq4ngo