Doctor J

Fall off bike. Get up. Get back on bike. Ride again. It happens everyone, better to find out how than after you learned 20 songs. You mention you didn't know any of the music they were into other than Green Day. To he fair, I would be reluctant to bring someone into a band who wasn't into the music I was playing, so I'd say this is probably why you're not in, more than anything else. You want the right player, not just someone who can play, and having the same tastes is about 90% of the battle, for me. They weren't the right band for you and they didn't mess you around. That's pretty good going, I would say 🙂 Find the right band for you, put that energy into it and you'll be grand.

That's my kind of band.

Thanks, I've gotten very fond of the Blade very quickly. It's the King of J mountain, in these parts.

I picked up this Stingray in a trade earlier this week and I've noticed an unintentional trend developing. Honeyburst horde?

Likewise. I'd love to spend some time with one, but they're an expensive gamble to take.

Time for Rebrenter, lads, we love you and we forgive you. Let's get back to buying and selling basses frivolously and recklessly as one people without having to give a cut to The Man!

Even though the main bass has had the West Ham colours for about 30 years, he'll always be associated with it being sparkly blue and the mirrored plate in my mind.

The nut slots should be cut out in a U shape, so you shouldn't have a problem unless the channels are flat bottomed.

Based on G&L L2000 but with: 24 fret neck, 38mm nut, banjo frets on a blank maple fretboard vol-blend-bass cut-treble cut series/parallel/single switch for each pickup passive, no active or treble boost circuit

Andy is the Chuck Norris of bass identification.

Most of my basses are Japanese, with a German and an American in there too. Amp and cabs are 1st gen English Ashdown ABM. For build quality in relation to price, I've found Japanese instruments impossible to beat.

Fantastic work as always.

Parallel is the classic J bass tone. Compulsory. Series is a nice extra to have as a bonus, but it's not vital. It's like being on 10 and having an 11 to go to, but you need to have the classic 1 to 10 first.

The curse of the internet age is too many of us overthink these things where, before, we used to just get on with it. "Key types" for genres just ends up with people trying to live up to tired and boring clichés because it's the safe option. @Delberthotis bang on the money. Find a bass you like and learn to play it. It's that simple. Be yourself, play like yourself and flip the begrudgers. Be interesting.

Yeah, they were stoppable after all. Despite everything they bring with them, I would always prefer to have a real drummer. Drum machines are ok in certain circumstances and certain genres but, really, live music is best served totally live. A lot of programmed are either too basic (i.e. programmed by someone who doesn't play drums and feels less is more and programs too little just because they don't really understand what good drumming brings to music) or too complicated (i.e. programmed by someone who doesn't play drums and feels more is more and programs too much just because they don't really understand what good drumming brings to music and because they can). Even getting the drummer in a studio to record their tracks so you can rehearse them would put you in a better position than you are now.

Or... The Seventies and Nineties Denunciation Band

And then the same again for sales based outside the UK so we know which ones are going to have VAT and import duties factored in

And then the same again for sales based outside the UK so we know which ones are going to have VAT and import duties factored in

I decided about 10 years ago that I would never pay over €50 for a gig ticket again. It took away all the anxiety over trying to justify spending huge money on 90 minutes of entertainment versus all the crap that comes along with gigs in cavernous venues. If it's overpriced, I simply don't go, that is it. I love gigs and still go to lots of gigs but, like @Leonard Smallssays, they're ones where you're up close and personal. You don't need superstar names to be a part of amazing gigs. Sometimes, I go abroad to a city for a cluster of gigs on sequential nights and get gigs and a holiday for little more (sometimes less) than some of you are paying for you and your spouse to see one gig in the Enormodome. The best so far was Hamburg a few years ago, saw Reef, Voivod, Lygo, Killing Joke and then Therapy? on successive nights and the most expensive ticket was KJ at €32, I think. Five gigs and a holiday beats one gig in my book 🙂

Personally, I'd dig up! 😁

I saw this and thought of you 🙂 https://www.adverts.ie/drum-kits/1963-premier-drums-all-original-vintage-drum-kit-with-snare/25150915

I got three clip-on tuners out of that scheme a couple of weeks ago. I use Elixir strings but you get points for Evans drum heads and ProMark sticks, anything in the D'Addario brand range, which all contribute to it. The free postage was a nice touch, too.

The only sig bass I have had, over the years, was a Japanese Geddy Lee I picked up in a trade and quickly moved on as I'm in a happy place when it comes to Jazz basses. I do have a very rare Tony Iommi signature Patrick Eggle, based on their tasty Vienna model, which I bought new 26 years ago. I managed to visit the factory in Coventry around 1997, when they were working on an SG styled model for him, and they said only 48 of them were ever made. I'm tempted to pick up one of those Lakland GZ models for the craic, I quite like the purple 😁

Tickets for some gigs are getting expensive. There seems to be a two categories of gigs now, those whose tickets are 40 quid and under and then those who are charging around 100 quid and more. There's a trend, though. The cheap gigs tend to be in decent venues where you can clearly see the band without having to look at a screen from a great distance and where the sound is good because it's a regular music venue with a good in-house PA. The expensive ones are frequently in sports venues where you can barely see dots moving very far away, where the sound is terrible as the music reverberates around an acoustically horrific bowl and you spend most of the time trying to see past infinite upheld phone screens for a glimpse of an even bigger screen to the side of the stage. I do not understand why people keep putting their hands deeper and deeper into their pockets for the expensive ones. It's a lot of money to pad out someone's retirement fund and frequently get crap in return.

Thanks. I wasn't sure what I was doing with it for a while but it'll do 😂