nekomatic

KOKOROKO at New Century last night. Monster band, great gig. Diverse but mostly youngish crowd, several hundred strong, out on a Monday night to get down to what is at heart a jazz band (if anyone feels like disputing this they played a song in 5/4 - QED). There is hope for the world, you know. Support from the highly entertaining Lady Donli who is also worth checking out if into a (very broadly) Afrobeat kind of vibe. My first time at New Century (well it has only been open two years now 🙄 ), great space but the stage seems a bit low for the size of the room hence no photos as they would have too many backs of people's heads in the way.

Say She She Great fun, would recommend (catch them soon before the one on the left goes on mat leave). Backing band solid and mostly invisible except for the middle of the show when the women left the stage for a break. Look, here they are!: Support from Gitkin, a three-piece playing sort of instrumental surf-dub. Not bad but not quite interesting enough to excuse them the cardinal sin of having no bass player.

Say She She at Manchester Albert Hall tonight, Kokoroko at New Century on Monday.

I was feeling bad that I'd not got my act together to go to this, and you've made me feel much better about it thanks!

I guess I would try finding one or more patterns or riffs that demonstrate the problem and practice them slowly and quietly, with a metronome, concentrating on fretting cleanly and with just enough pressure, so you aren’t banging your LH finger down excessively hard. Then gradually increase the tempo and volume. I find it’s easy to use too much force with the fretting hand, and something I need to consciously practice out.

To pass 7 mA through 1 Mohm you would need a voltage of 7 kV.

There are a bunch of crossover circuits on Rod Elliott’s site, some with PCBs available although these work out expensive with the shipping from Australia, unless you happen to be in Australia. If you’re building it yourself you can play around with the crossover frequency and see what works best.

I’m going to say Nautilus are trying a bit too hard there, while Mother Earth aren’t trying quite hard enough 😁

Well I just picked a video of people speaking Dutch at random and I'm going to say that while they do talk in a bit of a monotone much of the time, once they get excited about something there's plenty of pitch variation. Maybe it's not so much about the language, more the national character.

Do you have a clip or link as an example? I’m not sure most people will have considered this in such depth! Having some familiarity with Swedish, I can believe the claim that Nordic languages score high on the pitch range metric and the suggestion that it’s more so if the speaker is trying to come across as super-friendly or engaged. I always thought of English as a fairly middle-of-the-road language on that score. What about tonal languages like (any form of) Chinese?

That seems completely implausible to me. I just quickly looked up lithium-polymer batteries on CPC and a 2200 mAh 11.1 volt one is 100x34x22 mm which I think is about four times the volume of a PP3.

I always understood that qualitatively a steeper filter will have a higher Q, but I’m not up to speed with the actual theory of Butterworth and so on, so would be interested to know the answer.

Way too far off to commit, but put me down as a maybe!

Cool, do let us know how it was!

It was fun, but they had a backing track.

The Courettes at Night and Day. Great fun, but couldn’t quite forgive them for using a backing track rather than a bassist (and an organist). Although they very nearly won me round by their endearing habit of yelling “IT’S SATURDAY NIGHT!” when it was quite patently Thursday. Support was The Lotts, who had one trick and played it tolerably well… repeatedly.

If someone knows the cabinet they might be able to suggest without measurements, but if you can supply measurements then people will definitely be able to help out. It looks like this is a two-way cab with 5" midrange drivers as well as the 10" speakers, I assume these have their own sub-enclosures to isolate them from the main volume? You’d need to give the dimensions of that as well as that volume needs subtracting from the main enclosure. Also the diameter and length of the reflex ports, which will tell us how the cabinets are currently tuned.

Saw Otway with Attila The Stockbroker a few times back in the ‘90s, good times. Does he still shamble up to the mic, peer at the audience and announce ‘I’m Otway’?

Tonight, The Courettes (a ‘rock’n’roll duo’ - not sure how that works, I assume backing tracks) at Night and Day in Manchester - hope the neighbours upstairs don’t mind 🙄. Suggestion of a mate who usually suggests plaintive Scottish folk stuff - no idea what he sees in them, will find out. Thursday 24th, the always magnificent Honeyfeet fronted by the always formidable Rioghnach Connolly, Albert Hall in Manchester as part of Womex (so the support may be interesting). Seen them many times but never in such a big venue - indeed I wonder if they’ve ever played such a big venue? I heartily recommend these guys if anyone is interested.

Instagram detective work informs me it was Kielan Sheard!

I always thought of the Fender P as the Avometer 8 of basses.

Well. You can buy yourself an ICEpower Class D module from Profusion in the UK and some of them are all-in-one units that simply need connecting to line level input, speaker output and mains power, but the thing that would (and has) put me off a DIY with one of these is the thermal design - I assume commercial designers using these modules will have done proper engineering calculations and maybe simulations to verify that the thing won't overheat under the expected use conditions, or at least they will have built up experience of what they need to do in practice, but I don't have either the knowledge to do that or the time and money to figure it out - and you don't want to worry that your homebuilt amp is going to crap out on you on a gig. How about building the preamp stage in a case that would stack neatly on top of a GR Bass Pure Amp 800 - which has a 9 volt power output so you'd only need the one mains lead to power the combination?

Meanwhile we went to see the The Songs of Joni Mitchell project at the RNCM last night, which is Jesca Hoop, Lail Arad, Olivia Chaney and Gigi Williamson on vocals and guitars - Chaney also played piano on a couple of numbers - plus a guy whose name I sadly didn’t catch doing Jaco duty on fretless bass for a few tunes, and Josephine Oniyama as special guest for the Manchester date. Really superb stuff both in total and by each performer in their own way, confirming my maybe-controversial view that Joni Mitchell isn’t necessarily the greatest interpreter of every Joni Mitchell song. A special treat to see Oniyama live for the first time - she is a tremendous voice. Glasgow tonight is also sold out, apparently, but if anyone up there knows how to blag a ticket I recommend it.

The Planets is often assumed to be crowd-pleasing ‘classical for beginners’ but if you listen to the whole thing there’s plenty of it that’s actually quite advanced, and the end of Neptune with the offstage choir is properly spine-tingling. I would like to confirm that (a) that’s our favourite section to sit in too, and (b) yes, you do look like youngsters 😁

I’d say the same for the Marshall MB15.