Stylon Pilson

I think that we make it hard for ourselves - we study great bass players on TV, YouTube, Spotify etc, we chat with other great bass players on this here site, and so as a result we can have a tendency to take a harsh view of our own abilities, because we set ourselves such difficult standards to meet up to. But then once you're up on stage, you have to remember that you're probably the best bass player in the room, and you're doing things that, to the majority of the crowd, is like witchcraft. I don't think that we should get too complacent though. I like being well prepared, I like knowing that I've done the best that I can do. But I also agree that some of my most memorable gigs were the ones where things went wrong, but the band held it together by sheer musical intuition. S.P.

Oooh, has this turned into a "best rock movie" thread? Okay, I'll bite. The following are all, in my opinion, essential viewing: Spinal Tap The Last Waltz Stop Making Sense Anvil! The Story Of Anvil Searching For Sugar Man S.P.

They changed a lot of stuff around in the film. In reality, Freddie was diagnosed in 1987 and didn't officially tell his band mates until 1989. Another thing they really took huge liberties with in the film was the story of how Freddie met Brian and Roger. In real life he'd known them for a long time before he joined the band - indeed I believed they even lived together for a while! S.P.

A third week has passed. Don't know whether to be more angry at Invapay or the venue. S.P.

I've been in bands with people who are in other bands, and it hasn't significantly impacted their availability for gigs or practice. I've been in bands with people who aren't in other bands, but are mysteriously almost always unavailable for gigs or practice for other reasons. S.P.

Saturday night was at a pub that has live music on every week, but it seems like the crowd there aren't really into it. It's an L-shaped pub and for most of the night our side of the "L" was empty. It's the first time I've been there so I don't know whether this is par for the course, or if we were excessively loud and forcing everyone round the corner to where they could hear each other speak. I'm not sure it's the latter, because if it was then we'd regularly find people clamouring to get as far away from us as possible, and that's not the case. Bit of a disappointment, all in all. But hey, at least we got paid. We still haven't seen any money for our previous gig, which was over two weeks ago. Fucķing Invapay... S.P.

I feel like there's a small part of me that actually wants my main amp to fail, to justify the expense and additional load weight of having a backup. S.P.

When I'm looking through the items for sale, if I see an item listed at 83% of the price that I could get a brand new one for, then I'll probably move right on. S.P.

I think that my approach is probably an amalgamation of various advices above, but I will include it here for completion anyway. Get hold of the original versions - make sure that they're definitely the same structure and key that the rest of the band will be listening to. Go through these originals slowly, transcribing them onto a cheat sheet. Don't use tabs from the net, unless they are really complicated basslines and would take hours to transcribe. Prioritise the root notes and the "famous" riffs. Don't worry too much about getting every single passing not eperfect. Spend a day or two just playing along to the originals, with the aid of these cheat sheets. Meanwhile, spend some time listening to the originals when you don't have a bass in your hand - I tend to do this in the car. This will serve the dual purpose of (a) establishing the song structures in your mind, and (b) giving you an opportunity to hear places where you may have got the transcription slightly wrong (because when you're playing along, you might be drowning out the original bass line, right?) Then try to play the songs without the cheat sheets. By the time you get to the audition, you'll have a good idea of which songs you are able to play without the aid of the cheat sheets (hopefully all of them) and which ones you can't. If you do need to use the cheat sheets on one or two, then this is not the end of the world, as long as you own up to it. If you don't get the gig, then you'll have done the best that you could have, and there's no point beating yourself up. S.P.

I'm of the opinion that the bass is a part of the music, and can't be separated from it. Geddy Lee is a fine example - while I can logically and dispassionately acknowledge that what he's doing is technically very good, there's no way I would ever describe myself as "enjoying" it. I am not ashamed of this. S.P.

I've never needed to use a backup amp. I know, it's not a very interesting story, but I figured that if I didn't post it then people reading this thread might think that everyone's had an amp fail on them at some time or another. S.P.

Took me a minute, but I got there in the end. S.P.

You say this like it's a bad thing. S.P.

That's a nonsensical argument. If it turned out that my RH450 was emitting clouds of poisonous fumes then of course I'd bloody well stop using it. S.P.

I disagree, Cuzzie. Even if manufacturers standardise on peak/RMS, there's still so many ways to fudge the numbers that it'll continue to be meaningless. If you're looking for the certainty that amp A having more watts than amp B means that it will be louder, then you'll forever be disappointed. The only way to know how loud an amp goes, is to try it at a gig. S.P.

I don't know. I don't know what that is. S.P.

Some of the basslines that I most enjoy playing in my current band: Let's Dance (David Bowie) Start (The Jam) Maneater (Hall & Oates) S.P.

Reading this thread is such a rollercoaster. I fully expect your next post to be "whoops, I've made a mistake, this isn't going to be a bass any more, it's going to be a little box for keeping snacks in." S.P.

First one gets his audition cut short. Second one has to wait his turn. Simple. S.P.

Saturday night was at The Bridge in Bracknell - it's a Greene King pub, with residential areas in one direction and industrial estates in the other. Our guitarist/singer was a bit late arriving, and he's got all the PA and lighting gear, so we were already against the clock when we started setting up. As we plugged in, we discovered that the the power points in the band area were all dead. The venue staff spent a few minutes trying to diagnose it, and then eventually just ran an extension cable from a different corner of the room, so everything went through that instead. In many ways, the gig itself went well. We sounded good, we had fun, the staff loved us (the head guy behind the bar, don't know if he's landlord or just head barman, said "you're the best band we've ever had in here", though maybe he says that to all the bands) and the crowd loved us ("this is the best night I've ever had in here", though again maybe she says that every night). The main problem was just the size of the crowd - throughout the evening there were rarely more than a dozen people in the pub, and it was not a small pub. Whether that's a typical Saturday night for this place, or because everyone was in the pub round the corner watching the boxing, I don't know. Of course, you can have a bit of fun when the crowd is that small and intimate. At one point, one of the audience members wanted to go to the toilet, so she asked if we'd wait for her to come back before starting the next song ("Girls On Film" by Duran Duran). We sort of accommodated, by extending the intro and waiting until we saw her walking back before starting the first verse. We're getting quicker at breaking down too - I think we finished playing at about 11:40, and we were stood in the car park with the cars loaded up by 12:15. As I say, not the worst night, but playing gigs to a handful of people is not where I want to be at at this stage in my life. S.P.

Resuscitating this thread, rather than starting a new one: what Christmas covers do people have lined up in their bands for this year? S.P.

Or they are awful at holding their tuning, so he needs his tech to hand him a freshly-tuned one for each song. S.P.

I find that https://www.joinmyband.co.uk/ seems to be the most active site for musician ads, by quite a hefty margin. S.P.

Easy, they just add waveforms together. The real question is, how does our brain manage to pull them back apart into their components? So far, the best answer that we've got is "magic". S.P.

Well, the octave sounding pleasant is universal - it's a basic consequence of physics. If you have two waves, one of which is exactly twice the frequency of the other, then they sit on top of each other nicely. See this image, for example: You'll notice that wherever the waveform crosses the y-axis, those points stay in the same place moving down the image. However, our subdivision of the octave into 12 semitones is definitely a western cultural thing. Other cultures divide into different amounts (see here) and that's even before we start moving away from equal temperament and into other tunings. S.P.