lemonstar

Relatively unknown album from 73 I came across as a fan of Keith Emerson
Check out the credits on this album...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Creek
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_from_Free_Creek

11 minutes ago, Twigman said:

After days of being subjected to non-stop christmas tunes over the office ceiling speakers I have at last wrestled back control of the sound system. After pissing everyone off last week with Bauhaus 1979-1983 Vol1, I am now subjecting everyone to Recoil Unsound Methods......I'm looking forward to the reaction when we get to Luscious Apparatus .....

Happy xxxmas

Understandable decision @BrunoBass - let us know how it all pans out. I reckon there is more to come with this story.

I think we're all baffled about the way they went about it. Dumb and drummer.

Wow! My opinion took a bit of a beating!

It's only a flesh wound....

I'd go with a t-shirt "Sacked bass player looking for new band" no?

It sounds like a sh1tty way to deal with the situation that, I guess @BrunoBass, you were really aware of until the drummer brought it to a head. Does it not point to poor communication - openness and honesty within the band? Blokes aren't always good at doing that imho. The timing - I just don't understand at all.

I still think it's wise to factor in the "you never know what might happen in the near future" type thinking - it's paid off for me a few times. I don't know the history of what's gone on though over the the time you've been in the band - what do you really want @BrunoBass?

Dep rate idea does sounds reasonable if you're open to doing it.

I haven't read every reply but I'm surprised by the apparently unanimous advice to not do the gig. I really wouldn't do that - what's going to look better on your CV/track record - leaving them in the lurch or doing the gig under upsetting circumstances? Plus - you never know what might happen in the very near future - they may want you back if they can't find a replacement or the right replacement - it depends what you want - are you upset because of the rejection or the way they did it or because you really want to stay in "this" band?

I think someone else said - well - maybe it is a chance of a new start. If it's a gig with other bands there - isn't this the perfect opportunity to showcase both your playing and your professionalism and a whole host of other qualities?

Maybe there is something you need to reflect on - maybe not - I don't know all the details. If something wasn't right that couldn't be fixed maybe this is for the best anyway. Why didn't you socialise with the other 2 members - I can't picture being in a band where everyone didn't hang out on some level with everyone else.

Even if the drummer and the rest of the band as a whole have gone about this is bad way and even if you're upset about it - I still think you should try to salvage as much that is positive as you can from a situation you didn't want or expect to be in. What's the best way for "you" to gain something? I think you'd be wrong to think you'll gain from the satisfaction of screwing things up for them. What story might they put round about you letting them down at the last minute if you did that? I'd try and get your name and contact details round at the gig - approach a band you like and drop your details off - you never know - someone might need you to step in.

It sounds like it would be hard for you to do the gig.

Good luck with whatever you do - look ahead - in a months time it might seem like a storm in a teacup and things might work out better than you imagine.

Maybe some performers are more inspiring than others 😈

I've been listening to all of The Clientele music I have - that's how I tend to listen these days - binging on one band or artist for weeks on end before moving off to another to do the same. One of the things I like this band is the sound of the dark sparse recordings - the way everything is mixed means the guitar and drums leave space at the bottom end of the frequency range so you can hear the bass playing.

Strange Geometry probably edges it as the album I like best.They're British and IMHO rather overlooked.

I sang 3 songs at an open mic on acoustic - I was nervous and messed up a few times. As I came off a guy I didn't know asked if he could borrow my guitar for a couple of songs - I didn't want to be unfriendly so I handed it to him and he hopped up, tripping slightly - he put a dent in the front of the guitar - not terrible tbh - but he then made me look and feel even worse by singing, playing and performing brilliantly... even did a Nick Drake song! - cheers mate - every time I look at that dent I think of that night.

I think it's a small minority of listeners that really listen to lyrics - I don't think anyone really needs to - there are other reasons to like a song (I still think Da Da Da by Trio is great!).

I've been writing lyrics for my songs since 2005 and poetry - the documenting real life type - since the death of a close friend and work colleague in1999 (reading contemporary poetry for a lot longer) and I've written 3 one act plays so words matter a lot to me  - I will always listen to the lyrics - even for songs I don't like - I find them interesting - I think people can miss out on something if they don't take the lyrics in but there are still plenty of good songs even if the lyrics are mediocre at best - I do wince at bad lyrics, clichés and lack of imagination.

Writing lyrics is a real challenge but a satisfying thing to do - much like solving crosswords (which I also like doing) - I listen because I get ideas about what other people write about and how they go about it and it's inspiration for me to keep writing.

I also read a lot so I'm just someone who is probably more interested in words than a lot of people - even read a dictionary when I was about 14 - and found a spelling mistake in it.

On 29/11/2019 at 12:56, bartelby said:

Whilst I was in the record shop earlier I picked up a copy of Siouxsie and the Banshees Tinderbox, to replace the one I lost many years ago. So now I'm listening to:

Read about what happened to me (Neil) at a Siouxsie gig in 78 here(scroll down below the ticket - you might need to be logged in to Flickr to see it, not sure) - unforgettable gig:-

The Rosebuds - Christmas Tree Island

Completely OTT in places
The Prog World Orchestra - A Very Proggy Christmas

Chris Squire Swiss Choir

34 minutes ago, Silvia Bluejay said:

Thanks for that very interesting site comparison, with technical bits, @lemonstar. I'm on several other music sites too, but Basschat is the only one I visit regularly and I'm happy to have been moderating since 2012.

To answer your query about the calendar, after the interface redesign in Nov 2017 we have been trying to figure out how to get the best out of it, but IMO it's still not user-friendly enough: every event has to be added to it manually (which is fine), but then, well, they stay there. No reminder feature, no particular main page prominence to the calendar, etc.

I think that's another feature the admin team will be looking at in due course.  @charic is our developer, and he's working on this site alongside his day job, so his availability is limited, and there is always a need to prioritise tasks.

OK understood - I used to have a Joomla/Moodle/Wordpress/etc site and I know how tricky it can be finding the right add-ons for a site - plus the configuration and patching/maintenance. I now have a much simpler site for my work.

I just found the Events sub-forum which lists the bashes.

thanks

Neil

This is the Setzer album I have:-

I have a great Brian Setzer xmas album - can't remember the exact title (will look it up in a bit) but this is something similar from YT. Scan through  - it's great imho.

I've got more - I'll post the names later unless someone else mentions them.

On 26/11/2019 at 20:08, Richard R said:

I recently finished reading "Watching the English", which is a serious anthropological study of English culture disguised as an entertaining pop culture book. Looking at many aspects of life the author tries to identify essential English traits, and there are longish discourses on pubs, special interest groups, and male friendships. There is no claim that good traits or bad traits are exclusively English, but she does try to work.out what the combination and proportions are.

BassChat works because it's like a proper but very friendly local pub full of blokes with the same interest. Very quickly if you understand the culture you are welcome, and if you don't then you aren't shunned, you're still welcome unless you're offensive.That culture includes being helpful, gentle teasing as part of bonding (stop sniggering), occasional willingness to share important stuff, accepting that it's not winning an argument here that counts it's getting the wittiest answer in, and a few other unwritten rules that I suggest you read the book to find out. It is almost a textbook example of the better traits of national character.The mods are the equivalent of the bar staff. 

I think the Bass Bashes help a lot as well. I have only been to one so far, but having met some of these folks they are now real people, not just strange avatars.

The only other forum I have found vaguely comparable is the Sound On Sound forum, which is also fantastic. However it is more focussed on the topic in hand and less likely to get sidetracked.  By soup, for example.

I scanned through the calendar link at the top but can't see any Bass Bashes listed - where do the dates/places get posted? I'm a regular reader and I've picked that book up a Watching the English book couple of times - I buy a second hand books for a couple of quid several times a month - much to the annoyance of my wife, I have too many books - there's almost no fiction and a lot is technical - maths/statistics/chemistry/physics/science etc for my tuition work. I'm sure I'll bag that book before long.

Sorry bit of a long reply - I appreciate the replies.

This is insane - seeing a thread grow like this from such a dull question - it's like I planted magic beans - it's spun out of orbit a few times but... to be expected I guess.

It was a serious question - I spend a lot of time wondering about things and I've never quite been able to put my finger on why a site that I've been on since early 2008 has never (imho) really flourished - but finding basschat has given me something to compare it with. I don't want to name the other site as the owner and mods are doing a "pretty good (*)" job and are investing time and effort in it (and the owner/admin is forking out to keep the site up too). I drifted off it quite a few years ago and but came back to a couple of years ago but it's still got the similar problems (imho) that bothered me then even though it has changed in a some obvious respects - it is actually powered by the same software platform as basschat so it looks uncannily "similar" to basschat but the visual appearance and structural differences, I think, are important.

I went on a web traffic comparison site (https://www.similarweb.com/) to see if there really might be a difference in activity and you can see the difference is huge:-

BassChat

Global rank ~135,000,

Arts & Entertainment/music rank ~1800

The site has been getting 370,000-300,000 page views per month over the last 6 months and of that traffic

About 60% are users that login directly to the site

and 40% get there via a search

and a fraction of a 1% gets there via social media.

The other site

Global rank ~1,300,000,

Arts & Entertainment/music rank ~16,000

The site either isn't hooked up to Google analytics to make any traffic data available or it's just very low but

About 25% are users that login directly to the site

and 67% get there via a search

and 5% get there via social media

But the question is - percentage of what figure!? I think basschat is way more active - just looking at the list of logged in users.

I think the internet dream is failing in some respects - the impersonal "firing shots in the dark" social media looms large over the world of special interest user forums these days. I worked as an electronics & software development engineer for most of my life and can remember being in a a group of engineers going up to a local uni to a lecture on the internet - the focus was on usenet groups, the Mosaic browser, Yahoo! (who maintained a page with an ever growing list of links to a other web pages) and Archie was a primitive search engine.

The differences between basschat and the other site as I see are -

Basschat has a far higher percentage of its users logging in or logged in to view pages - however you interpret all these figures it speaks volumes about engagement and the community aspect (well that's what I think) but I was interested in why.

I suppose it's obvious to say moderation style must be a factor - and I think it is and maybe it's the demographic in terms of age, geographical location and degree of focus - I think basschat is a lot narrower in its range of interest and aims than the other site so that I think helps draw together a more cohesive community anyway. The other site could, I think, divide itself in two - at least in terms of clearing up the user interface (which is an issue imho) for the two main groups of users (as I might want to see it - I think you have the amateur and the pro oriented musicians - there's an overlap but they often don't have the same concerns - gigging, contracts, production process and physical product issues, marketing, promotion, etc)

The other site is a .com not a .co.uk site and I think this makes a difference - a .com domain is likely to be higher up the list of search results for people in the US and elsewhere, i.e. outside the UK, for people looking for a musicians forum. The other site has a definite international feel to it which I don't think helps it - there is less cohesiveness as a consequence and time zones also interfere with real-time comms sometimes - but having said that, I have great contacts there in the US, Japan, Australia

The user interface isn't half as well organised as basschat - if I compare the main landing pages - basschat has a simple vertical list of forums with some (not too many) top level structure (The Local, Gear, Performance, Guitar Chat and some (a decent number of) sub forums under each (Under "The Local" Introduction, General Discussion, Off Topic...) - you can see a lot on that first page and it doesn't take much scrolling down to see pretty much everything on offer on the site. Just that top level structure putting "the community" aspect at the top is so right. This is a familiar structure that you see in a lot of open source forums phpBB, Simple Machines Forum, myBB - it's common, it's basic and it seems to work fine.

The other site has customised the interface using features in the wrong way imho - it doesn’t use a simple nested (main heading with subtopics underneath) vertical list - it uses several rows of "playing cards" - each card has an image on it symbolising the main forum heading and on the card, under the image, is a list of links to sub forums) - unfortunately, because of the real estate this uses up, this means you have to scroll down a lot to see everything and it's just not easy to pick out and read the sub forums. The ordering of the forums and the organisation of the sub forums is all over the place and is the main reason it's confusing to navigate around - I have put my point privately a couple of times about a year back but nothing really changes. Personally - I think these features - the playing card layout would work fine on a site selling clothes for instance so you’d have playing cards with symbolic images for shoes, bags, blouses, trousers, etc - anyway - basschat visually and organisationally just makes so much more sense - I wonder if there was ever much experimentation with the basschat site layout of whether they just went with what was probably the default, the vertical list and stuck with it.

(*) moderation. This must be the hardest thing to get right - just getting anyone to do it is hard enough let alone finding the right people. The mods on the other site are active in their own right on the site and spend a lot of time welcoming new signups and responding - and there always seem to be a lot of new sign ups but subsequent engagement is weirdly low. I've not encountered any real issues with the mods other than one mod ticking me off privately for "mentioning another site" a couple of times (this was about a year ago) - it felt like Chinese style democracy in action - I think it's ridiculous - the site mentioned is only active (hugely so) for about 2 months of the year and only overlaps with a very reduced set of interests covered by this other site.I got the impression so far that basschat isn't going to be so touchy about that kind of thing.

Basschat is more gear oriented - the other site is very weak in that respect unfortunately (and inexplicably), but it's stronger on the music creation side of things. Socially it's pretty inactive - at any one time you're lucky to find a handful of people logged in but the site must have many thousands of users - it's been around a long time. I think the international user base is partly to blame - time zone issues as well as differences in culture. Also the other site seems to be to be preoccupied with musicians leaning towards the professional rather than the amateur end of the spectrum - with two main groups of users coming from and heading in different directions the site is like a crossroads without any traffic lights - confusing for everyone - mainly the bedroom/kitchen/open mic level musicians like myself who don't harbour any unrealistic expectations.

Anyway - I'm going to pile my belongings into a shopping trolley and wheel everything round to basschat.

I'm reading, I'm following - I'll reply a bit later - I kid you not when I say I have to make some soup before my wife gets in from work.Honestly - it was a serious question about something that baffles me. Signing up for different musician related forums over the years has been akin to venturing into an unknown cave and flicking the torch on to find a great empty cavern  - finding basschat is startling - like finding a cave where the roof is covered in bats!

I'm on and have been on a few other music sites and lot seem to struggle to stay active and sometimes there isn't a good vibe but it's hard to say why.

I've not posted much on here but I've only just started thinking about playing bass recently so I had no reason to be here but it seems to me, on what I've seen to be a site that "works" - any idea why that is? I can see one difference that I think is working in favour of this site but I'll hold that back and see if anyone else mentions it. I've built several websites and still have a couple for my work and I know it's very hard to know how to make a site work - to get people to sign up and actually take part. It's also a lot of effort just keeping on top of installing patches for open source packages (which doesn't always go smoothly!).

On 08/10/2019 at 20:34, Frank Blank said:

In fact, if you are anywhere in the vicinity of a Bass Bash you can try all sorts of basses and talk to a load of folk who know their stuff in a far less freaky atmosphere than that of a music shop surrounded by people who are interested in a sale rather than you finding a bass you really like. One of the brilliant things about this forum and the Bass Bashes is that since I’ve been a member every time I’ve entered a shop to buy something I am fully informed with brilliant unbiased info and can make my choices with a wealth of BC knowledge behind me. Go to a shop or a Bash try out everything, discuss any issues on here with the vast hive mind of experts and then buy a bass from the BC marketplace where you’ll get a much better bass than you may be able to afford if you bought it new...

...I sound like a fanatic don’t I? It’s just BC has completely, top to bottom, revolutionised every aspect of my bass playing experience. I wish I’d had access to something like this when I started out but, there were steam engines then, weren’t there.

I didn't know about the Bass Bash - I had a quick look but I don;t think there's one coming up near me any time soon - I'm half way between Crewe and Stoke-on-Trent so Birmingham or Manchester - even Leeds or Sheffield (as I visit those places because my daughters live & study there atm) would be in range - I really wanted to get playing in the next 3-4 months.

On 08/10/2019 at 20:33, jezzaboy said:

Where in the world are you? I have both long and short scale basses that you could try out and see what one suits you if you are in the West of Scotland.

And the fact that they are both for sale has nothing to do with it  

 

Scotland - I love the place - I'm up twice a year (will be up more if I can fund a camper van) but I'm between Crewe and Stoke-on-Trent - a long way off sadly but thanks.

On 08/10/2019 at 18:19, TheGreek said:

Don't talk to him....he's one of them...

OK, maybe just a little bit....but watch what you say 😉😉

It's a very strange realisation I've had - I think I've only really been listening to half the music most of my life - wanting to play chords on an acoustic or electric guitar and write songs I've definitely not been tuning in to the bass parts anywhere near as much as I should have - it just hit me recently thinking about making full recordings that I really needed to think about the bass and it's been a revelation thinking about how much more interesting the songs are going to sound. I don't expect it to be easy though - I'm listening to the bass playing on everything now - it's a whole new world to me.

I was reading about the short scale not being as popular as it once was but the article seemed to be saying they are worth considering because of the lower tension, the playability (I think because the frets are closer together) and a sweeter tone high up the neck - the only real bass player I know (plays in 2 function bands, is a multi-instrumentalist, conductor, arranger, accompanist, etc) never seems to have any strong opinions about anything - active/passive basses - he just "plays stuff" and really doesn't seem to think too deeply about anything!

Any thoughts? I played a couple of used basses in a local guitar shop (they didn't have many) but I'm a guitarists (acoustic mainly) who suddenly had the urge to start playing bass - mainly because I want to start making some proper home recordings of the songs I've written over the last 12 years.