SteveXFR

I've enjoyed many nights of metal in a nautical setting. It only seems polite to drink lots of rum in there. Who'd have thought a cargo hold could have decent sound?

Bristol is awesome for live music although doesn't quite fit the description of small town. There's a great selection of venue ranging from bars and pubs to old warehouses and an old cargo ship.

I've tried looking for reamers but tapered ones only seem to go up to 12mm.

I've just bought some Wilkinson tuners to replace the original rubbish on my Squier p bass. The holes are currently 12mm and I need to drill them out to 18mm. What would be the best tool for this job? I'm guessing it's not just a standard HSS bit

I live in Frome, Somerset. There's a great live music scene here. Quite a few little blues, jazz and folk jam groups. There's a pretty lively punk scene kind of lead by Far Cue and Frenzy who have been going decades. We have a good number of bars and pubs with regular live music nights. The local senior school has an awesome music department which is turning out some excellent musicians and putting them on stages infront of good size audiences to get them performance experience. We also have the Cheese & Grain, a venue which has everything from concerts for the local school and local bands to a punk festival and slightly more well known acts such as Airborne, The Stranglers, The Damned, Skindred, Frank Turner, Paul McCartney and Foo Fighters. Not bad for a small Somerset town.

Napalm Death seem like an odd support act for Volbeat. I imagine the Napalm fans will leave at the end of their set just as the Volbeat fans arrive

A friend of mine has worked with them and said they're a great bunch of people. No ego at all. He has many tales of the weird behaviour and unpleasant egos of musicians.

Music for people who don't like music will always sell more than challenging music. That's why Coldplay, Nickelback and Imagine Dragons sell so many records, it's background music rather than music to listen to.

Geezer Butler. His sound probably influenced most stoner and doom bassists. I still can't play like him. Maybe one day.

All groups (including punks) who claim to be individuals all seem to look the same and behave the same. They're probably less individual than the normies

Grade 2 are an excellent and quite angry punk band from the Isle Of White

They're a local band from Westbury in Wiltshire. They put on a decent show. Proper old fashioned punk rock

I love Idles. Incredible live performances, when they leave the stage you know they've given you everything they had. It's an hour and a half of anger, aggression, love, hate, noise and pure energy. Their bassist, Dev may not play anything fancy but he's a human metronome.

Hey man nice shot - Filter

I'm seeing some Japanese Squier precision basses advertised for nearly as much as a Mexican P bass. Are they particularly good? I think a couple were Phil Lynott signature

I think I'm probably going Mexican. From what I've read it seems they're decent and of consistent quality. I'll check out the 50's classic.

The tech has been there with guitar, just less popular. Guitarists have been using modelling amps a lot more commonly, especially at pro level.

The BDI21 is a preamp which just adds a bit of dirt, I find that works fine, i use a Le Bass preamp which sounds awesome with my Ray. It's when I get really nasty with fuzz or heavy overdrive it all goes wrong. Running through the effects loop makes no difference to this problem.

Underwater love - Faith No More

Generally 90's "punk" was just noisy pop music. Has there ever been a debate about what is or isn't punk or whether punk is dead?

That works if you only want one distorted sound. I generally have a base level of amp drive and then use either an overdrive or fuzz pedal on some songs or parts of songs

I think I'll give that a miss. Less flexibility than pedals but considerably more expensive.

Our drummer has volume control, it's just that he chooses to be incredibly loud!

I'd send away any drummer who turned up with brushes and only one rack tom. A double kick pedal and the ability to use it would be ideal as well