Leonard Smalls

I don't give a Fork - Suicidal Tendencies

Funk That Junk(ie) =- Brother Strut

(Optic) Nervous System - Killing Joke

Pub-lic Image -PiL

Back in the late 90s when I worked on a Well Known Soap, we built the first integrated Production/Post Production System in this country, possibly the world! And we had a rack full of Seagate 50Gb drives, each of 'em about the size of a modern desktop computer giving us an unheard of 1Tb! That was £tens of thousands without the aircon and other racks of switching stuff to communicate with the stages, edit suites and sound dubbing suites.

And only £900!

I taught myself the rudiments of bass playing by twangalongaBootsy on an acoustic guitar! So easy, but not easy, starters would be "Aah the name is Bootsy Baby", "Psychotic Bumpschool" and Stretchin' Out", plus Parliament classics such as "P funk (wants to get funked up)" (which may be Cordell Mosson on bass) and "Flashlight" (though that's more Bernie on the keys).

It used to! Though I think that was often due to certain plug-ins and possibly the amount of RAM I had. After some tweaking in the Ableton CPU preferences bit, and far more importantly buying a used HP Audio Workstation with Zeon silver processors and 48Gb RAM plus an upgrade to Ableton 11 Standard, it hasn't crashed. That's well over a year now...

Anything by Bootsy! While they're not overly complicated, getting the feel and intonation right is not so easy!

Funnily enough I started with the free Ableton that came with a first Gen Focusrite 2i2... And after some faffing I got it sorted. Now I have a Scarlett 18i20, with Ableton 11 Standard and I use both for both live recording and triggering samples live. YouTube tutorials are very useful!

Shoot your Shot - Divine

Shame! When I was chatting to Camille ( she liked our two bass set up, btw!) she was saying they were just off to That London to try and sort visas, then same day off to do a show in Newquay. They had about 30 shows to do in the US too, driving between all of 'em - none of yer rock'n'roll jumbo jet for the band!

We supported them in Nottingham earlier this year - they were lovely! We chatted to them for ages... I'd initially written them off as a cheap titillation band, but despite being very skimpy in dress, they're decent musicians - and have a horrendous gig schedule!

Return to Sender - Elvis

Prawn to be Wild - Steppenwolf

Think it's a triple flicky thing, Mr. Wooten does that sort of thing too...

Deeper Shade of Sole - Urban Dance Squad

Natty Dread - U-Roy

Christmas Time (Don't let the Bell End) - The Darkness

Poker Face - Lady Gaga

Rave On! - Buddy Holly

We did a couple of live streaming gigs just after lockdown using drums I'd programmed from EZ drummer. I recorded mp3s of the track with cymbal count-ins onto my phone and played that direct into the monitoring. Worked fine, though sound was a touch muffled - duff sound engineering by me I expect! Here's a bit, just before our proggypunk widdlefest!

Not Genesis... You can see it in his eyes! 😄

It's usually a given from the names... But then you get other bands like Screaming Headless Torsos muddying the mix... So perhaps a descriptive to add to the name would be useful, so we'd get Cattle Decapitation Death Metal/Borderline Djent Band, Priest Crippler plays Black.Death Metal and The Municipal Waste Death Metal Beat Combo. And of course, The Screaming Headless Torsos Who Knows What It Is But It's Just A Bit Jazzy And Microtonal Sextet.

Good thing my band is called The Sh!t band then!