lozkerr

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.

I never knew they'd ported it! Every day's a school day on BC. I last worked with Solaris during the NHS National Programme for IT. All the Spine components ran on yuuge Sun boxes. I quite liked it.

I have rather too many memories of Xenix. It should have been strangled at birth. SCO was a lot better until the company sued itself into the ground. I used to run a SCO-based Usenet news server as part of my BBS set-up back in the 90s. Never knew Solaris ran on PCs though - I thought it was SPARC only?

So have I

I have a few: Brewdog, because of the owner's attitude. Which is a bit of a shame because the beer's decent. Wetherspoons, because of Timbo's treatment of his staff during the pandemic and because of his support for the B-word. BT, for being the worst employer I've ever experienced. Not so much lions led by donkeys as experts gaslit by sociopaths. On my last day, I nuked my laptop and Blackberry for no other reason than pure spite.

Not for me, even though my go-to bass is a Fender. I'd buy a Sandberg or a Sei and drink whatever was left over.

That's a shame. We've done two originals in the punk band by jamming. They'll have their first outing in a few weeks.

I guess it depends on your audience. In social situations, I've always had a more interested response when I say I play in a band than when I try to summarise what is a dull if esoteric job.

I do that. "I'm the Sabotagers' bassist" sounds way cooler than "I'm a data engineer in genomic research."

It's easy to be wise with hindsight, but after mulling this over for a bit, I'm pretty sure I'd have gone hell-for-leather for a pro career if I'd started as a carefree teenager instead of (cough, cough) years later. I absolutely love almost all* aspects of live performance - dance, drama and music - and I think I might have done OK. Even if I hadn't, at least I'd have tried. *Midnight load-outs, stroppy/drunk punters, lugging heavy gear about, hours on the road, crap hotels, colleagues with hygiene deficiencies and junk food from motorway service stations excepted, natch. But you have to take the rough with the smooth.

Thanks! I hadn't come across that one!

Indeed, but lighting software isn't cheap. All the packages I've looked at use a subscription model, which can cost £££££. I'd also need the ability to stop the moving heads without the stage going to DBO between songs and if anything went wrong on stage. A separate controller with pause and DBO controlled by a footswitch would be essential without a lighting person present. Experiments will continue.

Agreed. Without a lighting crew, there's only so much that's possible without making things look daft. I'm thinking about making wooden mounts to sit on top of the PA cabs, each holding three moving heads. Have them adjustable to compensate for the stacks being in different positions from the stage. Program some dynamic effects either along with the PAR cans chase or use a separate controller with a chase controlled by a footswitch. The latter might be a better option as it keeps the moving heads in a separate DMX universe. I'm still experimenting at the moment and it's possible I'll decide it's too much hassle.