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Stylon Pilson

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Posts posted by Stylon Pilson

    Imposter Sydrome

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    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.

    • Like 9

    Not A Word About The Queen Movie Bohemian Rhapsody?

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    On 03/11/2018 at 16:03, mcnach said:

    I didn't realise Freddie knew about his illness so early on (1985). I always had thought that he found out much later, closer to his death.

    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.

    • Thanks 1

    No More Pubs - What Next?

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    10 minutes ago, PaulWarning said:

    I've found being in more than one band can cause problems if not all the members are in other bands when you have to start turning gigs down because people aren't available or "sorry lads can't practice this week I'm with the other band"

    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.

    • Like 1
    • Haha 1

    How was your gig last night?

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    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.

    Band tryout advice needed

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    I think that my approach is probably an amalgamation of various advices above, but I will include it here for completion anyway.

    1. 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.
    2. 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.
    3. Spend a day or two just playing along to the originals, with the aid of these cheat sheets.
    4. 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?)
    5. 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.

    • Like 1

    Band versus Bassist

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    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.

    • Like 6

    Eude throws down the gauntlet

    in Build Diaries

    Posted

    1 hour ago, Andyjr1515 said:

    Note also - seems obvious but trust me, it's a tip learned from bitter experience - that the layout is always with the tuner knobs flat on.  For those who are not sure why, I won't spoil the satisfaction of realising EXACTLY why that is

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

    S.P.

    • Haha 1

    First attempt of a thru-neck bass

    in Build Diaries

    Posted

    31 minutes ago, Jimothey said:

    I dont know how I got it so wrong but this is now going to be a 4 string as the neck is 7mm thinner than the 5 string width fretboard 😩

    Not the end of the world at least I can still use it for something and it's an excuse to do another one that will be a 5 string (every cloud and all that!!) 😀 

    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.

    • Haha 2

    How was your gig last night?

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    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.

    • Like 1

    How was your gig last night?

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    1 hour ago, Woodinblack said:

    I saw Placebo a few years ago, the bass player changed bass at pretty well every song. It was an odd thing, seeing as almost all the basses were different thunderbirds that obviously sounded completely identical. And it was very noticable because it was almost every song. 

    I assumed he just wanted to show off his thunderbird collection.

    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.

    How does that work?

    in General Discussion

    Posted · Edited by Stylon Pilson

    11 minutes ago, missis sumner said:

    How do speakers manage to produce all those different sounds all at once?

    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.

    • Like 3

    How does that work?

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    13 hours ago, DJpullchord said:

    If sounds were divided up into a different amount and used culturally for centuries,  would it be accepted as the norm? 

    Are we just conditioned to hear and use this division of the octave because it’s the only thing we’ve heard in western music?

    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:

    octave-sound-waves_orig.gif

    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.

    • Like 1
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