lozkerr

Aaaannndd... I'm out. Snapped up a Boss RC-1 looper from my local music shop. Oh well, maybe next year...

Stage left for me too, even when I'm down the front. I find it easier to watch the drummer out of the corner of my right eye. Though I guess it might be the other way round if I was left-handed.

Opened for Queer as Punk tonight at Edinburgh's Wee Red Bar. First outing since our new guitarist joined the band. Also the first outing for our new song, which had people singing along by the second chorus in spite of said chorus being liberally peppered with f-bombs. I think we struck a chord there with the mainly female audience. The WRB's bass amp was bust - again - so I brought my Eden rig along. 118 and 210 cab underneath a WTP600 head. It sounded good but a sharper distorted sound would have been better, so I may drop out of the gear abstinence thread soon ☹️ But all in all, a great gig!

Rispek, bruv. I hate that song, too.

The Zutons original or the Amy Winehouse cover? I'm with you all the way on the Winehouse cover but the original's bassline is great fun!

I'm rapidly falling out of love with Blondie's Call Me because we've played it at every gig my 80s band has done, but I don't hate it, at least not yet. The two songs I really do loathe are Wonderwall and Frankie Valli's Sherry. Apparently the see-you-next-Tuesday responsible for that horrible noise wrote it in fifteen minutes - I reckon he must have had writers' block. I genuinely have to leave the room if I hear Sherry on the radio because I hate it so much.

That's pretty much what I do. Out of interest, I've just been through the songs in both my bands' current repertoires and found that only two need notes below low E - Song 2 needs low E flat and She Sells Sanctuary needs low D. But there are a lot more that I do use five-string fingering so I can stay pretty much in one place. It works out like this: Total songs: 62 Need notes below low E: 2 I use five-string fingering without dipping below low E: 39 Songs all in the higher registers or five-string fingering more difficult: 21 I really like having the flexibility and being able to stay in one place helps when I'm concentrating on singing.

I switched from a four to a five six years ago and I can't see myself ever going back. Once I'd got the hang of extending box shapes across the fretboard and re-positioned the starting notes for scales, everything just fell into place. I did go down the rabbit hole of thinking I had to play across the fretboard for every song I was learning though, and it took a wee while to break that habit. Five-string fingering very often makes things easier, but sometimes it makes things harder. Depends on the song. The only time I play a four these days is when I'm teaching the Girls Rock School Edinburgh bass class, as that's designed for rookies - it's more of a confidence-building environment for women than an attempt to discover the next Suzi Quatro - so four-string basses and tabs are the order of the day.

The Ghetto Blasters.

The Leg Warmers.

Agreed 100%. I've had to do that when permanent theatre lighting wiring decided to sulk half an hour before doors opened. I pulled the plug from the dimmer, ran 15 amp cables to the affected lanterns and the show went on. The sparky sorted it out the next day.

If I'm playing somewhere that doesn't have backline, or only has a weedy PA, I have three racks that get trotted out: A 2U rack for my Eden WTP600 head. A 4U rack that holds my stand-alone IEM set-up. A 6U rack that holds the PA amps and crossover. One thing that really speeds up setting up and packing down is panel-mounted connectors on the back of the rack. The PA rack has four Speakon connectors and two XLR connectors for the mixer, with the electric string tied neatly out of the way inside the rack. Everything's labelled and colour-coded, so the only thing to ensure is that the colours on the cables match those on the connectors. The IEM rack has labelled XLR and jack inputs and outputs, with the IEM transmitter permanently connected to the rack mixer via a jack cable with right-angled plugs front and back. The only fiddly bit is the backline speaker connections. The amp has a cycle switch that changes the colour of the Speakon sockets between 4 ohms, 8 ohms and 'do not use'. I've not yet found a reliable way to extend that to a rear rack panel, so there's a bit of faff involved in plugging the cabs into the right sockets. But apart from that, I've found that carefully-designed and wired racks can save a lot of time, especially at the end of the evening when I just want to get out and get home.

Great dealing with Rob for a Behringer mixer. Good comms and gear well packaged. Thanks!

Definitely my bass. I only do people when a nice Chianti and some fava beans are involved.

Hmm... he and I might have crossed paths. Or perhaps swords. BT could only deliver the contract they'd won by employing a shed-load of contractors, many of whom were incompetent wastes of space. Some of them ended up in manglement positions where they did a hell of a lot of damage. Others were in more lowly positions where they hoarded their knowledge and became deliberately obstructive. I ended up spending a lot of time devising strategies to circumvent those guys so that their contracts would not be renewed as their knowledge had been secretly transferred to permies. I even came across what I still think was a deliberate attempt at sabotage. If it had succeeded, almost every NHS system in England and Wales would have gone down. So yeah. The over-reliance on self-certifying chancers was a massive risk that TPTB were happy to take. I can well believe that an incompetent clown who was fluent in bullshit could have made (and in many cases did make) a packet at the expense of the British taxpayer.