Happy Jack

In fairness that's the "shipping weight" so may include a load of packaging.

... is just like Freaky Friday. You have to swop bodies for a whole day with your band's guitarist. 😨

Bass never sounds "sh1te". The worst that can happen is that you don't like the sound you're producing. Doesn't mean it's the wrong sound, or a bad sound, or that everyone else hates it too. The important thing is that, if you can hear that you don't like your sound, then you must be able to hear your bass. Job done. @Silvia Bluejay routinely mids the bejasus out of my bass, making my beautiful Mike Lulls sound like bloody Warwicks. 🤬 But hey ... if that's what the band needs, if that's what it takes to enable the audience to hear that there is an actual bass being played, best go with it. My solution has been to follow @Beedster's advice and buy a Rick. 🙄

Does not compute ... 😂

Tell you what, I'll take it all off your hands for a fiver ... 😉

Oh, you Brut!

To hell with what bass he's playing, I just can't wait to tell my band that we'll be doing synchronised dance steps while we play our next pub ...

Gutted ... at no point did the listing mention "oxygen-free" or "gold-plated" or "hand-soldered". How can they possibly justify such a high price for a product so bereft of buzzwords?

Tosh. When BS came out the music they played was what we later called Heavy Metal. I don't know of anybody who called it that at the time - it was heavy rock. Labels are things that go through a long journey over time. I'm old enough to remember the classrooom debates in the early 70s as to what was Heavy Rock and what was Hard Rock, like these were two completely different genres. Some of the albums I owned at 16 were later re-labelled as Heavy Metal (e.g. Budgie's Never Turn Your Back On A Friend), some were later re-labelled as Classic Rock (e.g. Deep Purple's Machine Head), but those terms are subsequent inventions. The situation hasn't been helped by deliberate revisionism, in many cases by people who should know better, not to mention the memories addled by Red Leb and Thai Sticks as to what we were calling things back then. 🙄

Well I'll not invite you round to try a Mike Lull P5 then ...

Mike Lull P5 - a perfect P-bass combined with the light weights that only Mike seemed to know how to achieve. Where are you based, @JPJ?

Lovely ... and I have the matching bass cabs too!

Some Basslab gear is bloody wonderful: https://basslab.de/

Quo. And the Stones.

With the right communications, the best pedal rental outfit would probably be ... erm ... Basschat.

Do you take a laptop to gigs? https://www.presonus.com/products/audiobox-usb-96

Good Grief ... 😉

Wow man, like, no breadheads, man. 🙄

With impeccable timing, the real world intrudes. A guy I know just called me and asked me to play bass on Friday for his new band at their next rehearsal, to be held in a well-known music pub. They're playing a very eclectic mix of 60s and 70s crowd-pleasers, and I suspect that they'll play them in drunken singalong style (though that may be doing them an injustice). The pub in question is one where @Silvia Bluejay and I have tried several times to get paid gigs, so this sounds like not only a right laff but also a good chance to get to chat to the landlady one-on-one. OK, I say, happy to do that, but where are we actually rehearsing? He says the name of the pub again. No, sez oi, where in the pub? I mean, it will be open on a Friday night, won't it? Yup, sez he, on the stage. Huh? In front of punters? Yup, sez he. At this point, I fall about laughing. Granted this guy was actually at school with the landlady (many years ago) but even so ... So now my conversation with the landlady will quite possibly be along the lines of, well you can have this ... erm ... music free, gratis, and for nothing, but if you'd like something rather better then I invite you to have a look at my two (paid) bands. 😂

Apart from being 21 at the time (and sharing a floor in the East End with Bruce Dickinson - yes, that Bruce Dickinson) I went the same route. I had a 40+ year career doing something dull, unglamorous, unpopular, but necessary and turned 'pro' as a musician (for a given value of 'pro') when I retired. Musicians are artists and entertainers. We are every bit as desirable as actors, sculptors, impressionist painters, and Premiership footballers. Also, about as necessary, as in not really necessary at all. If I look at the people I have 'needed' over the last few years, I find it easy to spot shopkeepers and delivery drivers, plumbers and roofers, lawyers and surveyors, but I struggle to remember a single occasion on which I genuinely needed a professional musician. Right now, I am imagining this topic transported to PlumbChat where dozens of plumbers are earnestly bemoaning the fact that they are losing business to enthusiastic Weekend Plumbers who will fix your dripping tap for little or nothing, just a mug of tea (with four sugars, please), before returning to their mundane jobs on Monday morning.

Agreed, and there's a reason for that. Meanwhile, here's the view from one of the vanishingly small percentage who managed to make it.

And there, in a nutshell, is your problem. They play for no fee because they WANT to do it. When push comes to shove those musicians (like so many others) face a simple choice ... do I want to play for nothing at a gig that I really really want to play, or would I prefer to sit at home watching TV and being proud of the fact that I "stuck to my principles"? Either way, you get nowt. I have every sympathy for unemployed or under-employed musicians, but you can't just ignore the fact that they have chosen to try to make a career out of an enjoyable hobby. Some people succeed at this, but they're a vanishingly small percentage of all the musicians, footballers and PC gamers who would just love to be paid lots of money for doing something they would anyway be doing in their spare time. Putting it really bluntly, if you want to be paid then get a real job.

After six years? I suspect not ...