Luckystrike

All the bands I've joined (apart from the first one as a teenager) were through JMB. There are plenty of chancers, but it's easy to see who's serious and who has sound clips/video, a grasp of the English language etc. In fairness to the chancers, most of them know it and are fairly up front about being a pop punk band who only got a guitar 6 months ago! I think that helps to funnel the good people on there despite the daft ones. It's a small price to pay - if one in 10 people are worth talking to but 30 people respond that's 3 people worth the effort

Looks like I'm in a definite minority here - 2 of my basses are case queens for my enjoyment or recording. They're in excellent condition and the aesthetics of guitars are a big thing for me, so a dink or chip would really bother me. I have others with battle scars that are just as aesthetically appealing for their history and character, but I can see why people can be precious about immaculate instruments certainly.

Dream. We don't even have permanent desks, let alone somewhere to store something like a guitar.

He said in his post - everyone agreed on "it"... Works for after the show I guess: "well folks, that's it for tonight!" 😎

Might have been the same guy - small world 😃

@uk_lefty - not quite, but fairly close by - south Essex at the time. Does he sound familiar? :s

@josie, any video or sound clips of the fretless with a stone pick? I bet it sounds really weird and cool!

No worries There are indeed now workarounds yes, but enough people have just closed their accounts for a critical mass of stuff to be fully gone rather than just unnecessarily awkward to access. I can't fathom what kind of echo chamber has to exist to make something like that seem like a good decision!

I like the tone of a pick, and it feels more 'fun'. Anything soft or quiet gets played with fingers. I find a kind of hybrid 'pick'n'pop' works quite well for string jumping in quick sections - pick held between thumb and index, then either middle or ring plucking or popping a string or two up.

I know a fair few people use Imgur now. Side track rant, photobucket's actions are atrocious. For anyone not familiar, they ran a free image hosting service which over the years got progressively worse to use due to awful web page design and crippling amounts of adverts, but as millions of people had been using it for years and it's a ballache updating thousands of embedded image links across forums people stuck with it (including myself). They then decided that they'd charge something like £500 a year to allow third party linking of images, so overnight the majority of pictures on forums were replaced with a "this poster is stingy and bad" default image and hyperlink to give photobucket half a grand. People thought it was a joke but photobucket doubled down, so many folks just binned the whole thing off and lost their hosted images. 6-odd months later they lowered the price to 50 quid, which frankly is still an insult but a moot point as the damage was done. I use various car forums and previously superb how-to guides and build threads are in tatters - completely unreadable now. I vaguely remember something similar when GeoCities folded.

Been lucky enough to never have anything truly terrible, but three that stick out: Pub cover band going through a few lineup changes for a variety of reasons. During guitar auditions one guy arrived in triple denim with a guitar worth more than my car and a strap with so much brass on it looked like it was pinched from the wall of a country pub. Widdled badly away to himself regardless of the song, and decided to sit AC/DC out because (quote) "it wouldn't sound right with two guitars". During drum auditions for the same band a chap turned up who was friendly enough but struggled for time and just didn't have the chops - seemed like he was super rusty rather than just bad but we wanted to gig so didn't want to wait a year for him to get up to scratch, but... He was planning our futures the second he walked in, most of which seemed to centre around renaming the band Oi Oi Saveloy..?.. profit. He was genuinely nice though, hope he sorted something. Finally, a drummer audition in the current originals band. A week or so of talking between BL and drummer on joinmyband sorting out mp3s and organising a date. When the audition rolls round the drummer arrives, sets up his cymbals, then tells us he didn't have time to learn anything. Annoying, but the drumming is weird timing and technical so we give him the benefit of the doubt and ask what songs he knows so we can jam along if we know it and hear him play. "I don't really know any covers". In a last-ditch effort to salvage anything of the evening, we suggest putting on a simple enough song that he should be able to muddle through to some extent (it was something like buck rogers by feeder) - "yeah I don't really play anything I don't know." We then try to figure out why he even bothered answering the ad as we watch him awkwardly pack away his cymbals and leave, having not played a thing. Even more awkwardly, 2 days later he served me and my girlfriend in a shop in town and pretended he didn't know me after I said hello. People are odd.

Fat Mike from NOFX got me into it. I loved the band anyway and the bass had such interesting lines and runs, especially for a punk band. I quite like underdog stories anyway, and the bass felt like the underdog of rock instruments. Fat Mike was the underdog winning against the odds. Edit: The Decline is a pretty thorough showcasing of the variety of bass sounds in NOFX, but I don't expect anyone who isn't into punk to listen to 18 and a half minutes of it

What will you be using it for? I have a behringer head somewhere that I bought because my main amp crapped itself 3 days before a gig and it was the cheapest amp on GAK at the time. It works, and makes sounds but that's about as far as it goes. I do remember it barely being powerful enough - it was pushed pretty high to stay in the mix, and consequently had little headroom. I think of it as a Toyota Auris of amps - acceptable white goods.

I've probably got about 600 CDs that I've built up since my teens, and a few dozen LPs of classic albums and personal favourites that warranted the sense of occasion that vinyl gives. Despite this, the overwhelming majority of my music listening is now Spotify. I like being able to continue listening to the same playlists from the work pc to the car to the hifi at home, and when I come across artists and albums I like I buy the cd. I'll occasionally line some vinyl up for an evening of albums, and very occasionally stick a cd on in the car but I'm not really sure why. I hope none of the formats die - at the very least, I'm fully on board with the concept of a complete album rather than it just being a collection of tracks, and digital media makes it all too easy to skip around and lose the cohesion of a well thought out album. The counter to that of course is that as specific tracks are regarded independently to their album brethren it is much more difficult to get away with dross or filler that might otherwise have been used to pad out an album, so there's pressure to increase the overall quality of songs. This is a fun chat. Impressed at the absence of format evangelicals and hipsters, well done all!

Appreciating the sympathy - I'm going to assume that this is 15 years of fortune stacked up ha ha. On the plus side, nothing's broken today! (I've not touched anything just to make double sure) Maybe it's a sign that I should go out and buy new gear? I think that's the safest way to interpret everything.