Woodwind

As an extension user when I played double bass I absolutely love this!! Any more pictures of the whole bass?

I use sumup with my phone and have absolutely no complaints. Sumup now have phone free devices which would seem to be up your street: https://sumup.co.uk/solo-card-reader/?prc=AIR1799UK2021-s-AB2999UK2021-s-3GP11999UK2021-s-SOLO7999UK2021

I woke up one morning completely deaf in my left ear. This was rather distressing, but the most extraordinary experience was my brain trying to compensate with my working right ear. There was a weird delay/phase effect that magnified over the course of 48 hours as my brain "learned" how to interpret sounds from my left side. Fortunately My ear was just jammed with wax following two weeks of wearing ear plugs at work and my hearing returned over the course of a fortnight.

Wow sounds amazing! Thanks for the heads up, will investigate now

I love music that seems to really exploit these sounds. A lot of the early 20th composers were not just experimenting with atonality, but these fixed tone dissonances within tonal writing - Debussy, Satie, Messiaen all seem to explore this within their beautiful, slightly alien sounds Also Arvo Pärt with his tintinnabuli style. I bet the bell like effect wouldn't work as well with a keyboard tuned in a different temperament

Bit of a tangent, do you use your viola da gamba in any contemporary music making? Any links of so?

I was going to write the same thing. Instruments without predetermined pitches, so everything excluding keyboards and fretted instruments will be pulling and pushing tuning of notes, especially thirds, the whole time. As I was so conditioned by the world of fretted instruments I couldn't really understand how the root A of A major isn't the same tuning of A as the A in D minor for example, but then as a double bassist, then a woodwind player I found you adjust notes to be "out of tune" but actually in to tune without really thinking about it. I think it's worth playing around with

I've just done another search now for a band for an imaginary wedding. I'm not logged in and it seems like you have to create an account before it will show you the bands. As a punter this would put me off, although I understand why they would implement this. Looking forward to hearing others experiences

Beautiful, beautiful amplifier and speaker combo'. I would love one

I had a profile on there for a long time. It Kept becoming inactive for some reason, perhaps because I didn't get anyone contacting me through it, perhaps because I didn't log in enough. I play a niche instrument in an even more niche genre so wasn't expecting it to generate any solo bookings, but was intrigued about the session work capabilities. I've run a few test searches for all sorts of players or groups etc over the years and I don't think the site is really that active. Happy to be proved wrong 😃

Not what I play, but my ideal is a dark natural (non-coffee table) wood with just shellac over oil or wax finish with an ebony fingerboard. Failing that a black finish. My bass is a tobacco burst which I can tolerate. It has a black pickguard (and ramp) but my preference is no pickguard and a ramp that matches rhe body

Back with more. The first few minutes are great!!

A show at Kings Place on the 1st of October. It will be a great event.

I didn't do any setup work after putting the vinyl on, so essentially the action is now a fraction of a millimetre lower. i have the strings very low at the nut

Yup, precisely. The black vinyl is black the whole way through the material, but some of the other colours have a white backing which will show through as it wears, but that would take a good few hours of play. My tobacco burst instrument perhaps isn't the best canvas for colours, but on block colour instrument you could have a lot of fun with this. The 90's dance music band that I dream of getting together, would suit neon orange or yellow for example 😎 That would be most noticeable on a fretless, but there is no reason not to do this on a fretted instrument

Not like electrical tape, this is not particularly stretchy. I had a load left over from vinyl cutting stickers This doesn't leave a residue, but as said above if it did some alcohol would clean it off and then a good oiling of the wood would sort any drying 🙂

Pretty much this, yes. The stuff I have is thicker and not as flexible as that stuff though

I absolutely loathe the look of dots and blocks on the front of fingerboards/fretboards. Always have and on several occasions the presence of fretboard dots has stopped me buying a bass. I've been a fretless player for the last 6 years or so and my main bass is a defret. The aesthetics of Fretlines don't worry me in the slightest, but the dots make me want to cry, so one evening (after a few drinks) I decided to apply a layer of black vinyl tape over the board. I'd often wondered about the feasibility of this, using colours to theme a bass for particular performance settings, of a UV reactive colour for ridiculous stage presence under blacklight etc etc Would the vinyl mute the sound, would it wear through quickly? Well, it doesn't mute or dampen the sound and with half-round strings there is no noticeable wear after a fortnight of playing. The fretlines provide nice position markers on the edge of the board. I can imagine I'll keep this going while I own the bass.

I can sympathise! I've started rehearsing in earnest for my show on the 1st of October. It will be 23 months since my last gig(!?!!!) and in that time one of my amplifiers has developed a fault, my pickup is on the way out and I need to make a whole heap of new reeds (the woodwind equivalent of strings). Thankfully it's all showing up with a month to go...

OK own up, who was it? Who reported the harp+distortion pedal video and got it taken down by YouTube?🤣 I kid you not, the video got flagged for unsuitable content. It's back now, but Emily is rightfully a little miffed.

This is great, thanks for posting. I've been a big fan of the experimental harp playing of Rhodri Davies for a long time and he opened my ears up to sound palettes usng the instrument beyond its normal usage.

Another shout for the Double4. Superb amps. I have had keyboard players order them immediately after trying my amp at soundchecks. I use two in my gigs both as stage monitoring in larger venues and for smaller shows in more resonant spaces with no PA. Initially I cursed the use of the DC power adapter, especially after I lost both at a gig a while back and the replacements took ages to arrive. However I did some busking with one double 4 last year running it from a laptop battery pack and it worked brilliantly, so I rather changed my mind on the DC input. Worth noting brand new double4s use 240v ac input via kettle lead now.

Do you know what you want to do and how you want them to look in your head? This is important as diving into software will be enough of a distraction. Not wanting to teachnto suck eggs, but spending a bit of time with pen and paper experimenting with layout sketches etc will help when trying to translate your ideas into the software. Adobe products will do everything, but you will pay handsomely and I loathe subscription models rather than one off payments so have looked at alternatives for a while. Gimp is effectively a free photoshop. I have an older version and as I'm used to photoshop it's fantastically annoying. However it will do what you need and I believe more recent versions are less irritating. You can do all your poster design with this one piece of software and there are loads of YouTube tutorials etc If you want to get into vector graphics, which can be handy, but by no means essential for posters, the freeware equivalent of Adobe Illustrator is Inkscape. I haven't used this, but have friends who rate it. Finally Adobe Indesign will do all your layouts, again you can make a poster without this, but this opens up other possibilities. Freeware equivalent is Scribus, but this is a bit compromised in relation to publishing programs you pay for. Good luck and have fun!

Well I give up yet again. The ghost of my previous registration with spotify still exists, so it's my photo, my biography, but not my music and I have no way to change this. It's potentially damaging as anyone that is genuinely trying to find me on Spotify will then hear singer songwriter stuff with my photo attached. No one could sort this out 4 years ago and all this effort just to get one new bit of music on there is looking a bit daft. oh well

Yeah I too caught Coronavirus very early on - late march 2020. The part of London I in was absolutely awash with it. My symptoms were mild apart from the pain in my lungs when breathing and it took a good while before I'd got my lung function back to its normal level. Vaccine wise I have had two doses of Pfizer. My Mother was hospitalised due to an adverse reaction to her first dose of Pfizer , has been advised not to have a second dose and after tests has no antibody response, so protecting her anytime I visit is a priority for me.