Leonard Smalls

Some ridiculously good young 'uns from Japan...

Sergeant Pepper's. It's always annoyed me and I've always wondered why anybody ever liked it. Same for Rumours - just sounds safe, middle-of-the-road and cheesey to me. But then I like Derek Bailey and Jamaaladeen Tacuma's "Mirakle"...

I use the Pro17s... Used to use Etymotic £12 ones before that which didn't attenuate as equally over the whole frequency range - I found that with the Etys it cut down less on bass, so I was always too quiet. Now they can hear me! And, of course I can hear them too...

Good gig in Shrewsbury last night; decent crowd and good reception. We even got asked back after trying very hard, and failing, to clear the room! Only very slightly distorted (!), and be warned - there's a rude word hiding in there...

Nobody's voted for my entry in months... Though that could be due to being in my Tacet Musica phase.

We basically do hard rock with funk bass, so if anyone asks "what sort of music do you play?" we say "Frunk".

Here's a live recording of my band, now in their 35th year, with a song written in the morning, played through twice then recorded using a pair of crossed SM58s dangling from the beams of the garage...

One man's breath of entertaining air is another man's foul stench from the Devil's bottom! 😁 S'a funny old thing, taste...

While the performance is all very polished it bores me silly; it goes nowhere musically - it's just those 2 annoying chords with some very minor widdling over the top. And in common with everything I've seen from her it relies on a dance routine. Which is excellent for those that like that sort of thing - but I'm afraid I like the music to do the talking, all the extra froth is just a bit of polish. I'm afraid this music is lacking in cojones - but each to their own!

Awaiting velcro and appropriate length leads...

I thought that I'd get the - max amount of options this side of buying a dedicated mixing desk, so I bought a Wounded Paw V4 blender... It's got 3 fully buffered loops, 2 with different high pass filters, plus phase, level and 3 different options for which way loops 3 and 4 go, plus it's got a clean blend which can also be used as a 4th loop. It's the Dog's!

Wouldn't know... I'd be foolish to tear out the Wal electronics and place something inferior in there! 😁 However, I'm getting excellent results with a rackmount BBE pre-amp...

John Patitucci?

Since when would anyone on the internet look for context in a quote before mouthing off?

A peak implies "the best". As it's entirely subjective, and he's basically saying that The 1971 Who album was that peak, all we can infer from his comments is that he misplaced his rose tinted specs up his own backside.

Roger's just looking for publicity for his new album... And he's probably right that his rock music peaked in 1971. Just means he's stuck in his own past and hasn't noticed the world moving on.

Just discovered this band...

Indeed... But if you can't play jazz, I'd say don't even attempt it! However, I'm a fine one to talk; in one of our songs we have a longish improvised section where all 3 of us do a bar each which is supposed to build on and echo the previous bar. If we haven't got decent on-stage sound this can turn into a nightmare best forgotten...

Isn't the whole point of jazz to riff off each other? Not to play everything exactly by rote, the same every time, but to see where a tune can go? Otherwise it becomes like some classical concerts, where the front row is populated by people following the score and tutting if there's even the slightest hint of "Interpretation" rather than just enjoying the music...

Bit of a weird one... It was the gig with almost no promotion, where our band name was billed wrongly, where we foolishly accepted the fact we weren't getting paid due to the possibility of "good future gigs" (I know, I know!). Anyway, 'twas in a small Shropshire village, even smaller pub frequented by an odd mix of walkers, tourists and local heavy drinkers. PA was set up by the band who were actually getting paid - we had a 1 minute sound check which was pretty good when the landlord's wife came out of the kitchen next door saying could we turn down as they couldn't hear orders in there... So we turned down a touch, closed the connecting door which made it extraordinarily hot, and started playing; of course I'd turned down much more than the guitarist so had to keep fiddling. But we played well; at one point about 30 women, all dressed to the nines, came past the stage into the 3 cubicle Ladies toilet by the stage - it was like the initial walk-on in TV's "Take Me Out"; we were playing our one and only blues-ish song, which has a verse inspired by Killing Joke's "Change" and a funky slap chorus if you can imagine that. It also has some quite long pauses where the singer sings his line, then we come back in. One of the women came up to guitar/singer and asked if we did "Summer of 69" (we don't do any covers!), so rather than going back into the song, our Tim quickly sang the 1st verse of the Bryan Adams classic (!), stopped, and we all somehow continued the interrupted song - which showed we could busk it a bit! Of course, the young women -who turned out to be young farmers along with a similar amount of young men- weren't interested in us (if we'd been the Wurzels it would have been different!), but there were quite a few rockin' locals who enjoyed us - and at least 1 older hikey type who'll no doubt leave an appalling TripAdvisor review for the pub. She ran into the Ladies toilet clutching her head as if the demons of Hades were clawing at it - which in a way we were! Still, last unpaid gig. Not sure if the pub will ask us back anyway as we were a touch too "rock" as opposed to "pub rock" for them!

I like "Capitalist Disharmony", because I get not 1, but 3 bass solos in it... And "Fight The System" is always in there, wot with it being melodic, then punky, and having a sweary chorus.

I'm in 2 bands,I use compression (lots!) but don't have a compressor on my pedal board...There's one on my rackmount BBE pre, plus another 2 channels on a rackmount dbx which I use into and out of my fx loop.

Further update: pub contacted me to apologise for the band name pink torpedo-up - they've changed it on their website. But we've heard nowt from the promoter at all, despite having emailed him on Monday... His website banner is still wrong.

Our drummer has a decent e-kit which he does all his practice on... He's not keen on using it live for rock reasons as well! I'd be well happy if he did, then we could ditch my amp as well and tell Mr Guitar he just needs a decent amp sim/fx unit, go in-ears and he can sell his Marshall stack to provide some hookers'n'coke money

Indeed... I'm loathe to cancel, simply because we stupidly said we'd do it. If Shrop Rocks hadn't been so excellent with their help we might have cancelled well before any other alleged publicity was a twinkle in the promoter's eye... You haven't heard us Seems the going rate round here is £200 for 2 x45min-1hour sets. Unfortunately we've only written 10 songs so far, which means we double up with some mates and split the money. Luckily this gig is only 4 miles away, easy load in and out, the Mrs is driving and they brew their own beer which I hope/expect to get a few of for £0.