nekomatic

First gig with the blues/soul band last night, also my first real gig in about twenty years barring the occasional school fête appearance. Beer garden of a pub as part of Stalybridge’s ‘Bridgefest’. Far from perfect, but we were pretty happy with it for a début! There was a guy sitting at the front during the previous band’s (very competent local music school kids under the name of The Fixations) set who I reckoned was a dead ringer for Marc Riley, but he’d left by the time we played. Probably for the best if it really was him. Also first gig for the homebuilt 1x12, which acquitted itself very well.

Thanks for posting that, it’s a thought-provoking perspective.

The Range have a surprising, er, range of stuff. I guess the clue is in the name. It’s well worth checking out, if you’re in range of one.

I could get there, depending on dates and commitments of course…

Aaaand The Bug Club headlining the tiny but perfectly formed Seek Out festival in Gisburn Forest in Lancashire, successor event to the much loved Cloudspotting. Great fun and Tilly Harris absolutely bosses it on bass. Also good were Mock Tudors (noisy), Bright Light Rooney (sardonic) and Neutrino and Goddess Collective (funky/jazzy). Blimey was it wet packing up this morning though.

Mark Guiliana at Band on the Wall on Tuesday, with Orlando Le Fleming on bass. A superb quartet, everyone filling their role without showboating which is never guaranteed when it’s the drummer’s band. Recommended, if they’re coming your way.

https://www.basschat.co.uk/topic/480642-unexpected-bassists/

Thanks so much for digging this out! I’d been contemplating building the 6 inch micro cab as a take-on-the-bus-able counterpart to my 1x12, but this looks to hit the sweet spot of oomph versus transportability. I can’t promise when I’ll get to building one but I think I have enough board lying around for it, so it’s only making the time to get started. That and buying a few clamps…

This 8 inch design… would there be any chance at all of sharing it here, do you think? Even if not fully written up with woodwork drawings and all that. (flutters eyelashes)

That's very nice.

Sometimes what happens in Palmers Green should have stayed in Palmers Green.

This may be old news to some, but in a rare departure from its usual parade of the annoying and irrelevant, Facebook's suggestion algorithm popped this on to my feed: Jona Lewie doing You'll Always Find Me In The Kitchen At Parties on TV in 1980 featuring a very fresh-faced Kirsty MacColl on Precision and BV's. For some reason the fact she's using the came-in-the-box Fender strap is especially charming 😊 (Note for younger or overseas listeners: Jona Lewie is known for releasing two songs 43 years ago, one was quite good, this is the other one.)

Is it the amp or the speaker that’s packed up? If nothing else, it should be possible to do something with whichever bit still works - for example take out a dead amp unit and use the speaker with another amp head.

Can I be first in with the ‘I have a digital bass… I play it with my fingers’ gag? But yes, I remember seeing someone with a MIDI-capable bass thirty years ago. Can’t remember what make it was but I think it was an early model this guy was helping the manufacturer to develop. It had each fret split into a different section for each string in order to detect by electrical contact which notes were being fretted.

I think that head has been in the classifieds for as long as I have been on this site, delighted to see it’s finally found its home!

I can’t slap for toffee, but Scott’s Bass Lessons are offering a ‘Slap Bass Accelerator’ course at the moment with a 30-day money back offer if you don’t like it, in case that’s of interest.

Cool! Hope it works well for you.

I wonder if you could use the pickup mounting screws somehow? Like a strip held in place by those screws that then presses down on the pickguard to keep it in place. Either that or a very long cable tie.

I haven’t built one but Rod Elliott has a variable frequency crossover design that I guess would do the job?

You can get little ‘media player’ gadgets that take a memory card and play whatever movies or images are on it out to an HDMI socket. Here’s one for example (not a specific recommendation though). Strangely they seem to be less common and more expensive now than a few years ago though, at least on UK eBay. Maybe nowadays everyone just uses their phone.

Sorry to hear that anyone has lost money and thanks for all the good advice. Not directly related to this scam but worth mentioning while security is on people’s minds, check that your phone doesn’t show the contents of incoming messages on the lock screen. There were reports in the news of a spate of thefts where people had phones and bank cards stolen from their locker while they were at the gym, then their bank accounts were cleaned out. The way this worked was the thief got the bank account details from the card and used them to set up the app for that bank on their own phone, which the bank verified by sending a code in a text message which the thief could see arriving on the locked phone. On iPhone you want to set Settings>Notifications>Show Previews to ‘When Unlocked, not ‘Always’.

To the very best of my knowledge the only thing special about orange mains extension leads is that they are orange, so they are easier to see.

The hi-fi community have decided that minimalist amps using these ICs are called ‘Gainclones’, so if you search for ‘gainclone pcb’ you’ll find some. How to judge which ones are well designed though…

Here it is and I only wish she’d done more like it. Superb in every way.