Cantdosleepy

Seems to be a range of opininos of when's the best time. Complicated.....

Problem is that we live kinda scattered, and we never meet up unless we're practicing or gigging, and the guitarist is always busy working at a pub far away from the rest of us, so if I said let's meet up everyone would know something was afoot. Thanks for the suggestion, though.

So if you decided to tell the rest of your band that you want to leave, but are happy to keep playing until the currently-booked-gigs are all played & help them look for a new guy, what do you reckon the best time to tell them is? Telling at the beginning of a practice allows for discussion, but perhaps wastes the session and might devolve into cajoling and unpleasantness. Telling at the end of a practice means ledss discussion, but it means you have to stay silent all evening when members talk about future recording plans etc, which feels a little duplicitous. e-mail before hopefully gives the others a chance to digest then talk at practice, but everyone knows what's coming. e-mail after doesn't seem to have any benefits from where i'm sitting. Any opinions/stories of your own 'breaking it to them'? Don't want to do it by phone because you can only talk to one person and I don't like talking on phones.

Good advice guys. Seems that if this hypothetical band has gigs going into December then the hypothetical leaving member should offer to play at all those gigs unless they get a new bassist in before then.

Hypothetical situation - you're in a gigging band in London, playing a show about every three weeks. The rest of the band are decent guys, but for one reason or another you no longer want to play with them. You don't want to screw them over. How long after announcing that you want to leave do you give them to find a new bassist? Did you ought to play all the shows that were booked whilst you were in the band? Give them a month to find a new guy? Finding a new bassist can be a bit of a chore.

[quote name='Crazykiwi' post='306168' date='Oct 14 2008, 01:04 PM']Sometimes the guitarist will stop playing (the guitarist suddenly finds he needs to retune a squier strat that he actually tuned 2 songs ago with his electronic tuner) so its just the drums, the singers, the bass and percussion...[/quote] Sounds familiar. I'm in a four-piece, and every set the guitar will disappear at a random point for a random length of time.

[quote name='WalMan' post='305214' date='Oct 13 2008, 09:08 AM']That SVT patch on the BOD [/quote] Cheers Ped&Wal! Will have a play with this in the next few days! I'm a big fan of a slightly tweaked Huge360 amp model. That's with a Jazz going into a little mark II and an ultralite 1x15.

Apologies for the profanity - just pasted it straight from the e-mail and didn't think. Sorry guys.

"Hey guys, Good gig last night - enjoyed your songs. First of all, thanks for phoning ahead to say that you were going to be late and wouldn't be able to supply the drumkit. Soundcheck was a bit of a shambles (when isn't it?) but the house luckily had a kit so everything worked out, a little behind time but that's how these things tend to go. I'm afraid I am going to take umbrage at your behaviour once you arrived, though. You arrived late, didn't listen to any of the support bands (not even having the courtesy to stand at the back of the pit at a fairly sparsely populated night) and just tucked yourselves around the corner, not making the *tiniest* effort to say hi to anyone all evening. We're all out there for the same reasons - to have a good time and make some music - and it takes the smallest of gestures, nothing really more than a handshake, a 'really enjoyed your set', a 'nice one champ' or any tiny recognition that some people other than yourselves might exist - to create the kind of goodwill that transforms the whole evening from a just-another-gig to something a bit more human and enjoyable. At a regular evening, totally blanking the other bands would be a bit rude. At a gig where you promise to provide a drumkit and don't, then arrive late, not making an effort to apologise is unarguably Primo Douchebag behaviour. A fifteen second "Sorry we couldn't bring the kit and for being late" comment from you guys to any member of any of the supporting bands performing this evening would have immediately elicited the usual response of "Don't worry about it mate, it's all worked out" or similar. That is all it takes. It's not any kind of rocket science. Not making the smallest bit of effort to chat with the people below you is c**tish, frankly. You were bottom of the bill once, and saw other bands swan in late after disrupting the evening having not even made eye contact with anyone else playing, and hopefully thought, 'Man, that's not really how respectful grownups should act'. I liked your music. If you had come over and said 'hi' you would have had a new fan. Same thing goes for the other three people in my band who thought you guys were good, the four people in one of the other bands, and the two dozen people who came to see the both of us. Notice how the pit was almost empty when you were playing? Moreso than it had been all evening? That's because you had weaponised the whole pub against you before you stepped onstage. Your music is great. Seriously. Really like the tunes on the Myspace. But I will not ever buy any of it, and will tell anyone who mentions you that you are massive assholes. Every time you act this way you are building a street team of people who badmouth you. Even if you have no interest in participating in friendly line-ups, you have to at least see that this is poor business sense. Here's hoping that you display a degree of courtesy towards other people at your next gig. Regards, XXX XXXXXXXXXX"

Adrenochrome is the only person so far to have put 'don't slap' in the correct column. Come on bass players, try harder!

I shower every morning and it's one moment of the day when I'm completely relaxed and unstressed, a moment of calm between the horror of getting out of bed and the stress of packing stuff for work. When I'm stressed before a gig I just close my eyes and call to mind the feeling of being in the shower. Weird but it works.

I hear that J.Jamerson liked a drink or two. I'd like to go for a pint with Mani.

Still makes me laugh - thanks for the reminder bunny! God I love Radiohead.

My head used to be Mr H's, my cab used to be wildman's. Very happy with the both of them. Thanks guys!

Lefty-playing-a-righty here. Learned on my brother's right-handed strat.

I approve of this development.

My special lady-friend has 9dB filters for her earplugs for travelling on the tube and that kind of thing. I've worn ER20s for a year now and I'm very happy with them.

Krishnan Guru-Murthy.

If you're looking for a free, fairly-easy-to-set-up, loads-of-possibilities site, I'd advise something like Joomla. Wordpress is pretty good too. The inestimable Jeff made the website of our last project - [url="http://www.goodoldneon.com/"]http://www.goodoldneon.com/[/url] - but that one's a different matter, as we don't do gigs or owt - it's just a funky repository of our (free!) album.

[quote name='The Funk' post='256378' date='Aug 6 2008, 03:21 PM']That's not what it means. At all.[/quote] Yeah - I'd advise you not to listen to me as a starting point. Maybe the Funk will tell you what it means. Or you can Google it. The internet is full of this kind of information, although wikipdeia pages etc might not be the most beginner-friendly resources.

[quote name='larrikin' post='256154' date='Aug 6 2008, 12:17 PM'][quote] 4/4 is all you need[/quote]See, not a clue what that means haha [/quote] 4/4 is a very, very common time signature for rock music like Kings of Leon. It basically means that every fourth beat is accented. You know when the drummer clicks his/her sticks together before a song starts? Or the famous thing of someone shouting 'One, two, one-two-three-four'? They're showing the band how fast the song needs to be played. Don't want to seem patronising here, so apologies if I am being a bit simple. Put a KoL song on now and just listen to it, saying the words 'one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four' over and over in time to the music, with a gap of probably a bit less than a second in between the words. Does it feel like you're speaking in time with the music? Now try saying 'one, two, three, four, five, one, two, three, four five' over and over. That will probably sound wrong - you'll be getting out of sync with the natural feel of the music. Agree with above - get a metronome! And play with other people whenever you get the chance!

Nah, haven't. And it's not in the mind. In the first song, for example, the guitarist had the distortion he uses to do his solos turned up too loud, so when he stomped on it he was surprised at the volume increase and fluffed the beginning of the solo, causing him to drop out for the next four bars. He then came back in on the solo, but in the wrong key, which he didn't notice until a couple of wildly dissonant phrases, then dropped out again saying out loud 'nope, I've lost it', leaving me and the drums to finish the whole of the buildup into the final chorus. Which didn't build up too well. Most of the songs had a similar sort of gaffe at some point.

[quote name='cheddatom' post='256077' date='Aug 6 2008, 11:04 AM']It's just a strange name for a pedal, it was mentioned in the effects section a while ago. Are you going to get yourself some dirt? I think it'd help you cut through! Amazon sell all kinds of random stuff these days![/quote] To be honest mate, after the last gig I'm thinking of getting an ax. We were shocking. Also I'm one of those douchey POD kids - digital approximations of everything FTW!

And it's selling through Amazon- [url="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001C1A6HS/ref=pe_20140_10111810_pe_snp_6HS"]http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001C1A6H...1810_pe_snp_6HS[/url] Very, very odd.

Didn't drink last night. Band played like a bunch of eejits. Feel bad today. Sent an e-mail about how bad we were. No-one agreed. Feel worse.