Stylon Pilson

I don't consider myself to be a grammar/punctuation pedant, but that was hard to read. S.P.

I suspect that the reason why the general public don't go out to see local originals bands any more is that the overall quality is lower than it used to be. With the democratisation of music over the last few decades, you have a lot more weekend warriors going out and churning out the same cliched stuff over and over again. Whereas with a covers band you at least know that the songs they'll be playing will tend to be fairly good ones which have stood the test of time. S.P.

I am increasingly of the opinion that you can support music, or you can support the music industry, but to claim to support both is a contradiction. S.P.

Nah, I disagree. Loading the car is a 10 minute job, I have a system that I always stick to, so I know it's going to fit. We generally gig locally, so the drive to the gig is never more than 45 minutes each way. Setup and teardown at the gig takes a bit longer, but I take the mentality that 80% of my fee for the night is doing that, and only 20% is the actual performance. There's very rarely any standing around as my guitarist is generally late to arrive, and this then results in us being late on. I kinda agree with you about the audience often being cold for the first 3/4 of the night and then suddenly demanding an encore at the end, when I'm knackered and already thinking about my bed, but I'd still take that over them not asking for an encore at all. I'm usually home and in bed within 90 minutes of finishing the last song. S.P.

Hate to be the bear of bad news (roar), but your situation is not a promising one. If the existing protocol within the band is to be very laid back and disorganised, then they won't take kindly to you trying to whip them into shape. The best that you can do is to offer to take on the responsibility of managing set lists yourself. This will go one of two ways - either the singer will refuse, because they want to stay in control, or they'll gladly accept, because they're willing to be told what to do if it means someone else is doing the hard thinking for them. S.P.

Great gig last night. A slight fly in the ointment a few minutes before we were due to go on, as I couldn't find my car keys. The rational part of my brain is saying "you do know that there's a 95% chance you've just done something stupid and they'll show up when you're packing away" but there's always a little part of you that starts to panic and worry about the worst case scenario. Managed to find them before we went on, which was nice because it would have distracted me otherwise. Fantastic gig, energetic audience. It was fairly warm so a lot of them were listening to us from outdoors, which is always a bit suboptimal, but I could see through the door from where I was and could definitely see them there, dancing and singing along. I think their demand for an encore was possibly the loudest and most prolonged that I've ever experienced - there's no way we could refuse to indulge them. S.P.

Assigning unique identifiers to your batteries is such an Arnold Rimmer move, in the positive way. S.P.

Yep, I use Eneloops, I have a little pack of 4 in a plastic case, and ostensibly I'd use a different one for each gig and then after every 4th gig charge up the lot of them. What happened on this occasion was I just mixed them up and accidentally put in one that had already been used for at least one gig. Once bitten, twice shy, won't make that mistake again. S.P.

I bought a Samson AP1B through this site 4 years ago, and I've generally gotten on well with it. The only issue I had was entirely my own fault - I hadn't been keeping track of which of my AAA batteries were freshly charged and which weren't, so I got within about 3 songs of the end of the gig and it conked out. Grabbed my spare lead and finished the gig with that. S.P.

That joke's so old, it writes newspaper articles complaining about 18-24 year olds and then refers to them as "milennials". S.P.

Post a photo and let us be the judges of that. S.P.

I was at a festival this weekend and discovered my new favourite band - Man and the Echo. Catchy tunes, clever lyrics, and some tasty little basslines in there too. S.P.

Yep, and I love learning new songs too. My current band has a near-perfect two hour set list, but I want to keep trying new songs, even if they're "not as good" as the ones we've already got. Why? Because (a) learning new songs motivates me to practice regularly, and (b) having the ability to swap songs in and out of our set gives us the option to temporarily "bench" something that we're growing tired of. S.P.

Ah, I've worked with musicians like that before. Only way to deal with them is to make plain statements, not ask questions. So the evening beforehand you need to send out an email or message saying "I'm going to assume we're not going acoustic tomorrow, and I need to bring X, Y and Z. If there's a problem then let me know before 7am tomorrow so I can bring something different." S.P.

Last year I bought myself a Yamaha BB235 on a whim. I'd always played 4 strings before that, but I'd had a beer and it was at a very attractive price. Got on really well with it, and now I consider myself 100% a 5 string convert. S.P.