Lo-E

A few days late and no pictures (so no incriminating evidence), but I had fun gigs on Friday and Saturday. Friday was with The Underbites, loosely a punk band playing originals. The venue was Arlene’s Grocery in lower Manhattan. Arlene’s is a fixture in the rock scene in NYC. Good backline, good PA, good house engineer and, overall, just a great place to play. We had a modest crowd but they were enthusiastic. We played a fast, tight set that was well received. The high point for me was that the young crowd that had come to see the earlier (and much younger) band stayed to hear us as well (not always a given in NYC) and they were VERY complimentary. I don’t think they were expecting the old guys to be a much better band - but we were! Saturday was another punk band; Bedpan Fight. An absolutely hilarious group with ridiculous original songs. I’m a recent member of the band but I’ve known them for years. The (excellent ) drummer, my old friend Vic, is even newer to the band but we’ve played together many times and we’re a formidable rhythm section. The venue was Mr. Beery’s, a dive bar about an hour outside the city on Long Island and the lineup was four female-fronted punk bands. All the bands were great, the atmosphere was very collegial, the local crowd was very welcoming and it was a really fun time. The high point of that one was the bassist from one of the other bands, a very lovely young lady who was easily six feet tall ( and a very good bassist) , coming up to me to tell me how much she loved our set, loved my playing and thought my Rickenbacker was beautiful! It takes one to know one. That ended up being a very late night for me; by the time I dropped the drummer off at his apartment in Queens and then drove home to Brooklyn it was past 2:30 but it wrapped up two fun nights of gigs.

I played in a band that worked that way, more or less. The bandleader had a binder with about 80 songs in it and he mostly knew all of them but he didn’t really know any of them. He didn’t like to rehearse and the band had a revolving lineup anyway so even if we rehearsed there was little guarantee that the people who rehearsed would actually be playing the show. He would call out songs, we’d be expected to know them - in whatever slightly wrong iteration he played them - and if we didn’t know it he usually didn’t notice. I got increasingly frustrated until the guitarist, a good friend of mine from outside the band, told me: “You’re thinking about this all wrong. Just jump in and hang on. The audience is having fun. They don’t care. Play, get paid and go home.” He was right, of course. We ended up playing every Saturday at a club in Harlem. It wasn’t a really big room but we always had a good crowd, they always had fun and we always left with some money in our pockets. I lasted the summer before deciding I’d rather play with a band that actually sounded tight but I got a lot of good ear training while I stuck around.

I neglected to mention that the band in Brooklyn also prioritizes drinking and smoking at rehearsals…. a further nuisance. The rehearsal actually went quite well. We have a new drummer (better than the last and an old friend of mine with whom I’ve played many shows) and that put the rest of the band on their best behaviour. There was no drinking and only one smoke break. It’s f’in amazing how much more productive a rehearsal can be when everyone is sober and paying attention! I still smelled like cigarettes when I got home but it was better than usual. I’ve known these guys for years and shared bills with them when I played in other bands. I’m fairly new to the group and the drummer just joined but we sound tighter than I remember them sounding in a long time. I think the 3rd will be a good show. I played the Ric, as planned, and plugged straight into the PA as the bass amp in the room wasn’t working. Shockingly, the PA did a pretty respectable job of amplifying the bass so it wasn’t a struggle. The Ric still feels weird. I have a week to get re-acclimated.

A good two hours in a hired room. Five new original tunes to be worked into the set for an upcoming gig on the 2nd. Punk/pop originals. Many rehearsal rooms in NYC are pretty run down but this place is plush; top-shelf gear, really good sounding rooms with good PA and a crew that actually knows their stuff. The bass rig was a Bergantino head and 3x10 cabinet. Very uptown stuff. It’s a pleasure to play there. Our bandleader/songwriter’s songs aren’t overly complex so the new songs came together quickly and we’ll clean them up further at one more rehearsal before the show. One of the guitarists had to miss our last rehearsal so it was good to have the whole band at this one. I took out the Rickenbacker again after a long stint of playing Fenders and I always need a little time to get used to the Ric and its quirks so I had to really pay attention to what I was doing. I mostly pulled it off…. Tonight I’ll be rehearsing with a different band in Brooklyn for a show on the 3rd. Their studio is a dump and a nuisance to get to so it will be a very different experience than last night’s. They’re nice folks, though, so it’s all good. I’ll stick with the Rickenbacker until both shows are over so my brain doesn’t break.

Well, that worked out rather nicely, didn’t it?

This looks like fun. Are you going to scrap the PCBs and make tag boards, print new PCBs or wire it up point-to-point?

I’m sorry to read that that was your experience there. I’m based in the US and I’ve been a TB member since 2009 and I’ve encountered very little jerkery, all things considered, and haven’t really found humor to be squelched in any meaningful way. …but that’s just my experience and you and I might have just been reading entirely different threads. I’ve mostly found TB to be a pretty welcoming community. I spend a lot of time on there. Sure, there are some jerks…. there are jerks everywhere if you look for them. Even if you don’t! I’ve been a member here since 2015 although I haven’t been around much lately. I can’t say I’ve found much to complain about here, either. Nice bunch of folks, all around. Another good, slightly different community. Perhaps your experience on TB is a reflection of the whole world being under a lot of stress. I sense it a lot more on social media than I do on forums but it does seem like an awful lot of people are squaring up for a fight; any fight, really. I just try to steer clear of all that mess and I try to cut a little extra slack on the internet where people’s intentions are sometimes not as obvious as we assume they are.

I saw them open for Rush (I think it was Rush) sometime in the early 1980s and they were great. Normally, at that time in my life, that would have spurred me to go to the nearest record shop and buy up their back catalog but it didn’t. That makes me wonder what went wrong; I do remember enjoying their show but I didn’t go and buy their records. Now I’m going to have to revisit their material and see if it strikes a chord with me or not.

A dear friend (and great bassist) who lives in a small Manhattan apartment called me during the summer to ask if I wanted to buy his 1967 Ampeg SB-12. He had realized that, with his bad back, he had only used his lightweight rig for the past several years and he didn’t want the Ampeg to languish in his closet. He offered it to me at a very generous price and, naturally, I said yes. To be honest, this was the best purchase of the last several years.

This sounds to me like the obvious first choice. A pickup you already know you like for that price is a pretty low-risk experiment. It will sound different on a long scale bass, of course, but how different, really? If you hate it you can always sell it here on BC for a few pounds less and you haven’t lost much but if you love it you’ve gotten one hell of a bargain.

Here in the US, the Duncan SCPB-3 is a popular p’up for those looking for a fatter, more aggressive scpb sound. To my ears it sits somewhere in between a scpb and a regular split p. The larger magnets give it a fair amount of heft. I suspect that the Duncan SCPB-1 might be a marginal improvement to what you have now but will probably sound pretty similar. Even very inexpensive pickups are pretty well made and sound pretty good these days. I’m not sure the scpb-1 - which is also trying to emulate the classic pickup - will be much of a departure from what you have. It might be a little better made but I doubt it will sound much different. How easy is it to get Fralin pickups in the UK? One of Lindy Fralin’s scpb pickups with a 5% overwind might be just what you’re looking for. It will be fatter than a typical scpb but still retain the essential scpb character.

Really enjoyable! An enclosed, heated rooftop bar "battle of the bands" in Bushwick, Brooklyn. We were the old guys playing with a bunch of much younger bands. Our singer entered us in the contest on a lark. We played rings around the other bands and then the judges chose the band that had three very attractive young women in it. So it goes!! It doesn't matter; We had a lot of fun. The venue's management and staff, the sound crew, the video crew and, especially, the members of other bands were all really, really nice with no exceptions. It was a very fun crowd and a nice scene to fall into. Hopefully we'll play with some of these folks again.

Elvis Costello - Pump It Up

I started doing my own setups in the early 1990s and followed soon after with nut replacement, then fret work. Complete re-frets with extensive fingerboard dressing: no problem. I already had a background in electronics so that’s never been much of a problem. These various skills were learned one at a time; Each time I payed a lot of money to a “craftsman” who did a disappointing job for me I swore to myself I’d figure it out on my own and never be taken in again. I’d find cheap, beater instruments to make my mistakes on and learn. Thankfully, I found a number of genuine craftsmen in the area who were very generous with advice and whom I can still turn to when I’m stumped. I also enjoyed restoring amps and cabinets but I’ve never designed my own.