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phil.c60

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Everything posted by phil.c60

  1. And expensive (relatively) and complicated and time consuming to set up, and as for the ability to change monitor mixes "on the fly" - while your playing? How on earth? Or between songs? Constantly fiddling with your mix while the rest of your band hangs around? Fine if you have a dedicated sound person like Bluejay who knows what they're doing, that would be great but most of us don't have that luxury. We run with just backline and vocal PA, total PA cost (second hand, Yamaha and EV, not rubbish) about £500 get told we sound great and play 30 -40 gigs a year. We must be doing something right. If the drummer needs to hit harder to hear himself, the answer is that the rest of you are too loud. The volume of an un-mic'd kit in a small venue is perfectly sufficient even when played "gently", the rest of you adjust your levels to suit. Simple, effective and quick - we expect to be set up, checked and ready in 30 mins. The last time I played with a band who had all the fluffy stuff they told me "we need to be there about 7.15 to be ready by 8.45". and we didn't finish packing down until 11.45 after an 11.00 finish That didn't last long. YMMV.
  2. Castle was at the end of Putney Bridge Road. Now demolished and rebuilt as "The Boat House". They still used to deliver by horse and dray when I was there which was very charming (early eighties, before the funny comments start!).Trying to get served in the Dukes Head on boat race day - mission impossible!
  3. Yep, travel light. Markbass head, Barefaced (or similar, other brands are available, before the "fanboi" line comes out again....) lightweight cab and your good to go for most pub/small venue gigs. DI out of these heads is great, with adjustable level and pre/post eq so if they do want to shove everything through the PA you can use your cab just for monitoring for the first few gigs, even f they are all on in ears while you decide what else you might need. Set up in two minutes flat. Take down in two minutes flat. Plenty of time to help with everything else that needs doing which is your main job anyway lol. Easy, flexible and professional enough for a start, you won't look foolish if you turn up with that. If they have some super duper ipad driven full spec pa with a dedicated engineer to run it they should have talked to you about that by now. If they don't want you to use the cab for monitoring because they either use foldbacks or give you a set of in ears to use then you can still use the head as a di: it doesn't need speaker loading to run properly, just turn the master to zero and your good to go. It's what I use for recording too.
  4. You're welcome. It's great how these threads expand....... Also, when I was a young long haired Herbert I worked in The Castle pub at the end of Putney Bridge. They filmed most of Minder around there, and the some of the cast and crew including Dennis Waterman used to pop in sometimes after filming. Lovely bloke, always bought me a drink if I served them. All along time ago now but a lot of fun in the day.
  5. Miss this under no circumstances, watch it. or: Miss this under no circumstances watch it.
  6. Thanks for that WOT! Might have known it would be him. He really was everywhere all at once at the time like some omnipresent bass god wasn't he. Following links from that led me to this: Scroll through to track 51 at 1:51:06 and it's all there! Great tone, lot's of space and feel with minimalist percussion. Time to get playing along!
  7. As I have a lot of time on my hands, and I am of a certain age, I have been watching re-runs of this seminal police drama on ITV4. Come on George and all that. I have noticed that almost all the incidental music is bass guitar with a great tone and it really does add a great deal to the visual. Does anyone know who played it?
  8. Yeah, but it's only £4.63 and for that you get the very right thing. Not a huge price to pay IMHO to save yourself a lot of time.
  9. And if you expand the photo the VLE is in the off position, and the VPF is at 12 o'clock.......assuming the photo is taken how the OP usually has it set.
  10. So I thought I'd save anyone else from a similar disappointment.....
  11. And there was I hoping for a juicy picture of Mary Hopkin. Never mind.
  12. Got asked to do this because "You look the part". Lol. And yes Glo is one of the Macari's Music Shop Macari's. It was a lot of fun.
  13. A spare piece of sponge from an aluminium case lying around in the studio (you know the sort of thing) when the recording engineer wanted to cut out some of the overtones from my F hole hollow body bass. Either that or my muting technique is pants (it probably is.....) and he was too polite to say so.
  14. No! Precision (PJ) with a Precision neck. And flats. So there (sticks out tongue......).
  15. Being a "calculated risk person" is fine if the risk is yours. If you get it wrong, it only affects you. If the risk is to others and you get it wrong that's a whole different ball game. We won't be rehearsing any time soon. We'll work on some new songs at home, then put the parts together when we can.
  16. Would I gig for free at a venue who have booked me regularly and treated me well, sometimes for years, in order to help them get back on their feet? Absolutely and without hesitation. Would I take a booking from a venue that I've canvassed on many occasions, given them CDs, sat their with my wife and bought a few drinks, been to watch other bands, you know the score, never managed to get a booking, and now they'd like me to play for free because "we're all in it together": not a chance.
  17. The advice is fairly clear. As a band, continuing to gig which by it's very nature involves drawing together a large group of people who have all had multiple contacts with other people is just highly irresponsible. The people who are likely to still want to turn up to these events are probably not distancing themselves socially and probably of the "it's all scaremongering, I'm relatively young and healthy, I don't know what all the fuss is about" sort of people, and that makes these events even more dangerous. Just stop. Now. Anyone who has booked you and is unhappy that you won't play is an idiot. And that's without the "Go on, we're paying you a lot of money, it's us helping you keep earning a living, let my son/daughter have a go on your microphone, they're really good and it's their birthday". Good luck with that. I'll say it again: just stop. Now.
  18. Not much us to me, I rarely venture above the 7th fret anyway.........😎
  19. I do actually know someone who does this for a living. Yes, really. Not to dogs or children though.
  20. We've cancelled all gigs for a month and we'll roll it on very couple of weeks if or as we need to. If the advice is "don't go to pubs etc." then clearly that includes gigging. A hard thing to do, but slowing the transmission is the only way the NHS can cope. Both my wife and my daughter are in the thick of it, my daughter is at a major hospital, and my wife as a community nurse who deals with patients currently having Chemotherapy. If I passed something on to her from going out gigging which meant she had to stop work, or worse passed it on to a patient with no or little immune response I'd be beside myself. A few gigs are just not worth it to me. YMMV. BTW: The Duke of Wellington, which Mykesbass posted about recently is one of our venues: They've cancelled all gigs for the present with immediate effect.
  21. EBS Octabass. Thought I wanted one, bought it from the ads on here, fiddled around with it for about an hour and it's been in a drawer ever since.
  22. Just had an email to say that tonight's Elvis Costello gig in Oxford is cancelled.(well, "postponed", but I doubt it will happen any time soon) which we had tickets for and were going if it was on. The last two shows at Cardiff and Birmingham are off as well, obviously. Local pub gig for me this afternoon instead then , to see some mates play. I've a feeling that my bands upcoming gig schedule is going to get thinned out really soon......the drummer has already started making noises "I'm 63, I'm in a higher risk group..."........
  23. Any one who knows me would have no interest whatsoever in stealing my identity. Anyone who doesn't know me and decides to try deserves everything they get.....😂
  24. I mend cars. Have done for the last 40 years! I've worked in every aspect of it, from engine reconditioning way back when, including crank grinding, cylinder boring, cam profiling and all the other associated engineering through to repairing modern electrical/electronic systems. Had my own business for meany years as specialising in electrical/petrol injection/rotating electrics (that's starter motors and alternators to you) before running a pub for 3 years and then going back into the motor industry. Now after a serious illness brought a reality check am semi-retired and only work on old classic and specialist cars (1973 MG Midget with 16 valve K series Rover engine, Ford 5 speed gearbox, LSD rear axle etc. etc for example). Off to work this morning to start building a small block Chevrolet engine for a 1965 Gordon Keeble, then later this month a K series race engine for Lotus Elise, whilst trying to find the time to put a Lotus Elan +2 back together after a body-off chassis restoration. Along with sundry other "Can You Just...." type jobs which always grow like Topsy on old cars! Only work Gentleman's Hours these days - start around 10.30 and always home by 5 and if I don't want to work on a particular day I don't (so I've been able to do some recording on Friday daytimes with a great female singer without it having an impact on my main band). Lunch can be half an hour, or two hours if someone interesting turns up and the conversation get's going. I work with a couple of guys in the same position: we're all old farts but with a huge range of knowledge and experience. What we lack in physical strength these days we make up for with brainpower. I'm very lucky, I do something I enjoy and have enough time off to do anything I like. Not earning a fortune by any means but my wife earns enough to pay the bills and is happy to do so: I do the lions share of the domestic duties during the week so she can have a proper rest at the weekends without having to do he supermarket drudgery etc.
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