NancyJohnson

We did the He is a lovely bloke, don't get me wrong, but it just wasn't happening musically with him at the time. Let's get one thing very straight here, like a lot of drummers, they only drum when they're rehearsing with a band, so the guy was probably only playing for two or three hours a fortnight and it really did show. Band politic took over for the same reasons why I walked before hitting anyone. On a personal level, we did the final gigs with him (these were good cause, Musicians Against Homelessness events) and there was zero animosity, but his wife was a little standoffish with all of us. He knew (irrespective of how grudgingly) why we gave him the Spanish archer and accepted that. Insofar as to the personal relationship thing, we didn't know each other before the band and the members never socialised together outside of the band environment. (My wife used to joke that once a bandmember gets the sack, then that's it, you'll never see them again.) We remained friends on Facebook (if that means anything at all), and he did make a good grief I don't believe it type of comment when I walked from the same band about 15 months ago, but that was pretty much it. About two years ago. I ran into him briefly when I was contracting elsewhere and it was all pretty civil, since running into him at the new job it's been much of the same. We're never going to be BFFs, we never were.

Oh, I'll tell you something else too. About a month ago, I started a new position as commercial analyst in Reading; day one I'm sitting in this little open pod thing having a meeting, I hear this laugh and guess who walks past me?

You're taking the thread a little out of context! He went, then I went about a year later. That said, to echo a comment from earlier, you are only as good as your drummer; they're the engine room of the band.

That's the way I'm leaning too.

Racked power plus a choice of GED, dUg, BDDI. Rack tuner. I'm pretty much of the mindset that I'm ready for a change to be honest; I don't need all this stuff and money isn't an issue! As soon as Andertons have stock, I'll A/B the two heads and see what's best.

I suppose the thing with MIDI is that I never saw a place for it in what I was doing, so that whole area of technology never really had any impact on the sixteen notes a bar noise I've been churning out for years. Anyhow, decision pretty much made here; I want to do a side by side with the A/O and the v2...providing I can nail the tone I want (which doesn't appear to be an issue; you know where I'm at now tonally), I'll just pull the trigger and then have a fire sale.

Yep, it works fine from the blend perspective, yes. Still a little flummoxed as to why there wasn't simply a button on the facia to achieve this; yes, I know it's Geddy's design etc. but not all of us are running stereo set ups.

I'm such an old fart that I just tend to set up so I sound lively and leave it at that.

As I'm not really doing that much live work these days, I had been thinking about dumping my rack set up at some point and moving to something a little more bijou...a mate of mine owns the V1 and is pretty pleased with it. Hmmm.

I'm enjoying the Andertons You Tube output, but really not seen anything (yet) that's made me sit up and go, 'Oooh.' On the regular guitar front, I'm still waiting for Gibson to pull the trigger on a proper doublecut Les Paul Junior (not the plastic monstrosities they're currently hawking), but they have git a singlecut now that looks ok.

Harking back to a similar period, and covered in the Anthony Reynolds book Japan - A Foreign Place, somehow or another 80% of Japan were coersed into signing away writing credits to have David Sylvian as sole composer on everything. In a roundabout way, this is telling us why Rob Dean relocated to Costa Rica and does birdwatching tours and Mick Karn, who died riddled with cancer while trying to crowdfund money for treatment, was pretty much penniless at the time of his death. Meanwhile, Mr Batt continues to reap the 100% rewards from his pre-solo career.

I've got a pair of Lull basses (combined purchase price c.£9k), a Hamer (lowish purchase price, but a high book value) and an old Aria Primary Bass that owes me about £100.00. I love the expensive stuff; nothing wrong in having some pride in owning gear you've shelled out a fortune for. I've been buying and selling since the early 80s and while the Lulls are amazingly good instruments, at the same time the Aria is a wonderful thing too. I can't quantify why I'm so attached to the Aria; its not a type I particularly like (a Precision style thing), but it plays wonderfully and I don't really have to worry about dinging it. Perhaps it was just that the stars aligned somehow when I got it.

I think this is it in a nutshell. It's just BBC populism tripe; the omissions speak louder than the people who were in it. The upcoming guitar one, it would have been great if Dave Grohl had done it; much as I dislike Nirvana/Foo Fighters as an individual I find the guy endearing, engaging and passionate about his subject matter in equal measure. I suspect the guitar one will follow the same right-on format favoured by Auntie; heavily weighted delta blues for the first 15 minutes, featuring loads of (black) blues players that no one has heard of, a bit about Elvis stealing his entire act from aforementioned blues players, Sun Records, Buddy Holly, The Beatles, Hendrix, Woodstock, a short piece on Page/Clapton/The Who/Fleetwood Mac, perhaps a few seconds on Eddie Van Halen, a bit of Steve Jones.

I need to relax a bit, so tonight's listening is Handel's Soloman. It's pretty epic.

Years ago, I was doing this regular Sunday lunchtime residency thing at a pub in Hackney. Let me cover the specifics; we're set up in the corner of the pub (The Cat and Mutton), three piece band, I'm sitting on a barstool, playing root notes doing covers (shudder), a 90 minute set in exchange for money, beer and a free lunch. One Sunday, there was some jostling at the bar over chicken wings and a fight breaks out. Now when I say fight, I mean a fight. It seemed the pub was full of two factions, both of whom were just itching to get it on and I'd say the place literally erupted and 90% of the clientele were punching the crap out of each other. Furniture is flying, people are on the floor hitting each other, glasses flying. It was like a brawl out of a cowboy film. Anyhow, let's get back on point. We're still playing. I'm laughing at the incredulity of what is going on, when I stand up and push my stool back closer to my amp to give the fight more room to breathe and from a selfish perspective, to offer protection for my gear. At this point, a bloke comes over to me and shouts, 'Excuse me mate, are you using that stool?' I just do this shrug and nod thing, he picks the stool up, runs into the melee and breaks it over someone. So there you are. The most ridiculous thing I've been asked is whether I was still using a stool.

Then Auntie should put it in a synth show.

The Tina Weymouth show was frankly a bit stinky poo. I'm just tired of these type of shows, trawling out the same old names. Dull, dull, dull. Where's Sheehan? Myung? Geddy? Flea? Entwistle? Why is it always the same old content? Crap.

I met him at Manny's store. I'd just gone in for a nosey and saw this bloke who I recognised from somewhere, he was pretty prominent in the adverts in Bass Player at the time. One of the staff asked whether I'd 'like to meet Larry' and it just clicked. I'd concur that he was genuinely interested in what gear I was using, the band I was playing in, whether I was gigging regularly and whether I'd heard about.the Hydrive gear. He watched some You Tube footage, listened to some studio stuff. Honestly didn't think I was going to leave the store with anything other than strings. Credit to him though. He sorted out everything with Korg and about a week after we got back from New York, everything was delivered. I just get the feeling he must bang out artist deals left, right and centre, much to the scourge of global distributors.

Following a chance meeting with Larry Hartke in New York, I had one with Hartke (I think it's probably still active). It was a somewhat lovely thing to behold; you just have visions of vans full of gear arriving, but in truth I only had three HyDrive cabinets off them, along with a replacement 10" speaker, as there was little necessity to keep swapping my backline out with fresh cabinets.

The voice of reason says: God, they look horrific. Message ends.

Ooh, I'd just like to direct you to this link. Same bass through the GED, pretty much the same settings, same interface: Let me know if you can hear the difference.

I'm having an issue with my GED 2112 unit and to support an ongoing query I have T21 and the UK distributor, if it's possible could I ask owners to dial up (for the sake of clarity) the Roundabout settings and record a short isolated bass clip and upload here please. If you listen to my mixdown it's producing a very uncharacteristic non-Ged tone, just a nasty phatty fuzz (there's two short pieces, the first is with the unit set to the manual's 'Roundabout' settings - which should be super bright - and for the second I've rolled the mid and mid shift forward to the two o'clock position which should enhance the drive...I've panned the drive to the left channel and the deep to the right. The deep side sounds fine, no issues with that). Getting a decent clanky tone from Tech21 stuff is as easy as shooting fish in a barrel, but apparently I've somehow lost the ability to do that with this unit. My BDDI and dUg stompboxes are fine, proving I have no issues with amps/cabinets. Thanks. Mixdown.mp3

Blimey, listen to you lot. When this was all fields, I used to drop the needle and play along with the track a few times. No tabs or software required.

A while back my old band were supporting a three piece punk band and their bass player was using an Affirma (or whatever it was called back then). No qualms about how it sounded, but it was the most ridiculous looking bass I'd seen in a while, especially in a punk band.