Stylon Pilson

I'm not a fan of Metallica - will I still enjoy the film? S.P.

After reading this thread yesterday, I watched the documentary last night. I did smile quite a bit when Matt was creating incomprehensible mazes of metaphor and then getting stuck in them, but most of the rest of it was fairly meh. The arguments during rehearsals certainly had an air of familiarity about them - I was cringing in recognition. But there didn't really seem to be much in the way of narrative flow - it just eventually ended. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: if you want something that legitimately lays claim to being "the real life Spinal Tap" then watch Anvil: The Story Of Anvil. Very funny, with a great payoff at the end. S.P.

That's awful, so sorry to hear about that. Hope you have more success with the specialist. Do you have a long wait for the appointment? S.P.

I've had minor tinnitus for a few years, and have successfully arrested its progress by thorough use of ear plugs at gigs and rehearsals. The other day I came back from holiday, which was about a 3.5 hour flight, and that evening my ears were ringing quite badly. It was gone by the morning, but still I'm wondering if anyone knowledgeable can tell me whether that would have been caused by the noise in the cabin (in which case wearing ear plugs while flying in future will prevent it happening again) or the changes in pressure (in which case I'm not sure what I can do to deal with it). I'm not a very frequent flyer, but I do care a lot about my hearing, and so any ear-ringing is cause for concern. S.P.

Another great gig last night - this is now my 7th with the 80's covers band that I joined earlier in the year, and after a couple of lousy gigs in November, with very little in the way of active audience engagement, it's been nice to have a couple of good ones in a row. As I set off for the venue at about 6:45pm, Google Maps warned me that the pub had been closed since 5pm. I thought that this was probably an error on Google's part, but I was still mentally composing the "Am I at the wrong place, this place is clearly closed" email for my arrival. Thankfully I got there and the pub was bustling. A little too bustling, actually - we unloaded all our gear but then had to wait for the landlady to relocate a table full of drinkers in order that we might have enough space to set up. Very nice venue, real old-fashioned local boozer kind of vibe, lovely staff. As we were setting up, a few groups left and I started to worry that it might be the kind of pub with a "leave before the band starts making too much noise" crowd, but thankfully we had a healthy audience (in terms of size, participation and alcoholic lubrication) throughout the evening. I did have one huuuuge performance-based flub though. We'd prepared a couple of Christmas songs for our December gigs, with the Slade classic as our closer. I played it last week perfectly, but when it came to the chorus, I realised that I had totally forgotten the line. The problem is that with 6 gigs down, I've got all the rest of the set so well memorised that I got overconfident and didn't think to have a "refresher" practice for the ones that I've only gigged once. Anyway, I recorded the gig last night, and listening back to that song is hilariously Les Dawson-esque. And my drummer's put the video up on Facebook because he's lovely like that. S.P.

I have a Firefox extension called uBlock Origin. Whenever I see an animated gif on this site (or indeed any other, but this one does seem to be a particularly bad offender), 3 mouse clicks is all it takes to never see it again. uBlock Origin is also available for Chrome. S.P.

Queen have been a bit pants since their original singer and bass player left. S.P.

A jam in my experience is thinly spread on hot buttered toast. S.P.

Eric Sprocket and the Parentheses. It's my opinion that they went downhill after Eric Sprocket left. S.P.

Based on the lack of responses to this, I've assumed that no such thing exists, and have started writing my own program that will do everything I need. S.P.

I've recently joined an established band and I feel like our system for managing our calendar, while not awful, could be improved. The guitarist manages the calendar - we all send him our unavailabilities, and periodically he circulates a PDF containing a calendar for the next year with our unavailabilities and booked gigs listed. The drummer books most of the gigs and emails us with the details. I have the following issues: This is a process with a lot of manual stages involved. I have to email my unavailabilities to the guitarist, who retypes them into his document. The drummer emails us with gig dates, which I then retype into my calendar. Etc. It's possible for information to get lost along the way. For example, we have a gig this weekend which has been on our website (and in my calendar) for months with the address of a pub 12 miles away with the same name. This is because the drummer's email just said the pub name, and didn't clarify the postcode. What I'd really like is a system that minimises retyping. Ideally a shared Google Calendar into which we can all enter our unavailabilities and gigs seems like a good start. However, I'd also like the following features: To be able to automatically populate the gig list on our website with any confirmed bookings. This would be difficult to do using just Google Calendar, however it doesn't seem like too big a task for a dedicated band management app. You'd need a flag on each booking for whether it was confirmed or not, and then the app could simply expose a simple web page that could be embedded in an iframe or something. The guitarist wants to be able to print off an A4 page containing the entire calendar for the next 12 months, as similar to our current PDF as possible. This is a single page, landscape, with one row per month. Bookings are in one colour, with the name of the venue. Unavailabilities are in grey. It's a fairly high-density format, but it works well for him. He likes it because, when talking to venues, he finds it easier to scan a printed page to check dates than to be scrolling through an app. The second one feels like an especially niche requirement. Right now I'm considering using a Google Calendar and then writing tools that parse an exported ics file to do both of these tasks, using the event title to distinguish between tentative gig, confirmed gig, or unavailability, and then exporting as PDF or HTML accordingly. But I thought I'd check first to see if anyone's already using something that does all this. Thanks! S.P.

Last night's gig was at a pub in Ascot. It was a great night - after two gigs in a row with not much of a crowd, I was starting to worry that we were doing something wrong, but last night was excellent and has restored my self-confidence. We had a couple of Christmas songs in the set, which didn't get quite as enthusiastic a response as I would have expected, but I was happy that they sounded good. We had some spectacularly drunk people in our audience - on the one hand it's good because they inject a certain energy into the room, but then on the flip side they do have a tendency to try and talk to you between songs. I don't think I've ever played a gig where there have been quite as many song requests! For next weekend I think I'm going to drape some fairy lights over my bass cab for the full seasonal experience. S.P.

This was a very uncool move. Well done for keeping it together. Would you take this gig again? S.P.

Incidentally, I want to know if anyone else does this: in the past I've received minor grief from extended family about them not knowing what to get me for Christmas, so now from about September onwards, anything I need, but not urgently, I'll put on my Amazon wishlist. This means that I now have a post-Christmas tradition of "mopping up" - basically doing a big Amazon order to buy myself all the things that, while not urgent 3 months ago, I'm now crying out for, because no-one bought them for me. S.P.

In that case, what about "Every Monday Without Fail". Or is that going to be too much of a mouthful for the Bulgarians? S.P.

The main motivator, in my opinion, to having a unique band name, is searchability. When you type in your band's name into Google, you want to be certain that the top result (and ideally the whole of the first page's results) will be your band. The same should also happen if you omit a leading "A" or "The". S.P.

World Peace. S.P.

In an exclusively technical sense, yes. But perceived volume isn't always the same as actual volume - that's why we have the whole "valve watts vs solid state watts" discussion. When it comes down to choosing an amp for its suitability when gigging, it's the perceived volume that we care about, not the actual volume. S.P.

I have a document in which I write down band name ideas whenever they occur to me. I guard it like a hawk. S.P.

The clue's in the name. Basschat. I've bought and sold one or two things through this site, but I definitely view it as a forum, first and foremost. That said, I'm not a particularly GASsy sort of person, so that will influence my perspective. S.P.

Once upon a time I'd get excited when I went into a pub and saw Doom Bar on the pumps. Nowadays it actually worries me, because it seems to be the marker of a pub that doesn't care about ale but is just trying to stop the ale drinkers from going to a different pub. Seven times out of ten, it's badly looked after, and tastes watery and stale. S.P.

In terms of music-related items, I need a longer mic lead, a compressor pedal, and a compact folding stand for my bass on stage. In the "miscellaneous" category we have such items as a new battery charger, herbal teas, a pressure washer, and various CDs and books. S.P.

One of the common problems with budget keyboards is that the keys aren't pressure sensitive, which means that you can't control the dynamics by playing hard or soft. From what I can see of the Casio you've linked above, it suffers from this shortcoming. I've got a Yamaha PSR-E363 which is a bit above your budget but I can heartily endorse it as good value for money. S.P.

You've basically got guys in their 20s playing indie rock at weddings for people in their 20s, and you've got guys in their 50s playing Brown Eyed Girl at birthday parties for people in their 50s. S.P.

I use the Video DownloadHelper Firefox extension for when I want to download videos from websites. Haven't tried it with Facebook myself, but according to the page description it is compatible. S.P.