Muzz

I notice he didn't bring his talentless wife along for that one...

Dunlop Nylon 88s, Split-P pickup in the right position, good roundwounds (preferably Elixirs) and I'm 80% there. The rest is tweaking and window dressing, really...

Not the guitar system per se, but a thumbs up for the Lekato 5.8Ghz stuff: I use a Tx/Rx MW1 pair for my inears (with a small headphone amp), and they're great: no dropouts, good range, etc...

Well, I'd be looking for a S/H Helix in the store, if not, an ME-50B, because I know how they work...I doubt I'd like to be sitting around with the manual for anything else reading 'Congratulations on purchasing your XXXX Digital Multi-Effects, please turn to page 223 to get started' while all hell broke loose around me... Failing that, as above, a tuner and a DI box (I wouldn't have brought an amp)....

Can I just say that 'with a bag of rocks', 'a shark's face' and 'a section of pebbledash wall' have all now gone straight into my lexicon for badly finished things? Ta. 🙂

Ahhhh, I see it now: that explains the widely-spaced tuners...still a fnarr-fnarr daft headstock, tho... 😁 I like that other body, too...

That body shape's quite interesting, but the headstock...oh dearie dearie me...

Wouldn't be without my Stomp, it's 'my sound(s)* in a very small box' - I use it in front of big amps, into small onstage monitoring amps and DI (TRS, tho you can buy an XLR/TRS adaptor for a tenner, too), and just itself for inears/DI. You can also split the output between clean and effected. Then there's the pitch shifting, which is very good, and means you never have to transpose anything ever again... 🙂 * And Chris Wolstenholme's Hysteria sound...and Tony Levin's Sledgehammer sound...and Flea's 'Ray sound...and....and... 🙂 Caveat: the talent, sadly, doesn't come with the sounds...but I try... 😁

Just a shout out on the Tech front for Matt Ryan - he's up in Milnrow, North of Manchester - I've had him do a couple of fret dresses/setups recently, and he's very good, he's done work for some big names, too...

Nope (see my comments about the 79-year-old Roger Waters' great show), not at all (otherwise I'd be buggered), I was just suggesting that 'When should bands call it a day?' isn't a simple answer...

Our BL's just bought one of the new gen of smoke machines, and I was initially alarmed to see he'd mounted it on one of the lighting rigs, and yeah, it is a daft thing to do, but despite flooding the stage with its effects, it wasn't like the coughing nightmares of the past, in fact it was barely noticeable...apart from the fact I couldn't see the drummer for a while...or the audience, come to that...

OK, let's put the cutoff at 55...anyone on here still going to be gigging? Yeah, I didn't think many... Want someone in the pub to come up and tell you you're too old to gig? I'm sure there's 20-year olds who think 40 is too old to gig... Personally, I'm not a fan of gig arena stuff these days (tho the 79-year-old Roger Waters put on a hell of a show recently*), which is where the older 'legend' bands tend to be, but if people want to go see them, great. There are also plenty of older musicians (and singers) who can still do it; Steve Hackett's 73, and his last tour was breathtakingly good. * With some compromises, obv, and we paid about a third of the price for the tickets (Twickets is a good thing), otherwise I wouldn't have gone...I'm not that big a fan...

The main gigging band (4 piece) do pubs for £300 minimum, and I'd expect 2.5 - 3x that for New Years...unfortunately, for various complicated reasons, it looks like this New Years might be the first one in the last 15 or so I'll be in the house and missing out...still, the Boy's home from Uni, so that'll be nice...

A game of two halves this weekend: Friday night's gig was one of the regular ones we play, but the pub's not exactly thriving, and this week was just terrible; about a dozen people in, which dwindled to two by the end. We're gonna give it a miss till into the new year, if it's still open... 🙁 Satdy was a last-minute 40th booking in a pub (buffet set up on the covered pool table, that kinda thing), busy (yeah, the rugby was on, but once that finished the regulars got involved, too) and an engaged audience...turns out the birthday boy, who loved it, manages 14 pubs in the area, so the BL unloaded a big wedge of business cards...fingers crossed...

I'm no virtuoso, but I get by OK, I'm a busy player (not in terms of notes - quite the opposite - but in terms of gigging a lot), but I think that's because I also have a set of skills that can be just as important as chops (over a certain threshold, obv) in any band; I'm reliable, I'm cheerfully sociable, I'm dependable and I don't panic, and I have a professional attitude no matter what the circumstances.

I started on Rotos for a good while, because they were pretty much the only game in (my) town, and I didn't know any better...then DR Sunbeams and HiBeams, and occasionally flats (Chromes) and groundwounds a couple of times on specific basses. Then I discovered Elixirs about ten years ago, and that's been that, apart from a brief flirtation with NYXLs and Slinkys and a couple of others I can't even remember, but they didn't last (SWIDT?), so it's Elixirs all the way now...

...and you'd be wrong; I've been trying to convince the BL that the band in general has waaayyyy too much gear for the pub gigs we play, my example is evident each gig...my other gigging band has literally half the gear. The drummer always arrives last, and because I set up last (see breakdown activities but in reverse...again, three minutes) I'll help set the PA and lights up and give him a hand, tho he's nearly 40 years younger than me and therefore far more qualified to lift heavy things...

Yep: switch off Stomp, unplug power supply, unplug the desk feed lead and bass lead, coil into rucksack, put inears and transmitter/receiver in bass case with the bass, zip em up...done. 😃 If I'm feeling particularly philanthropic I'll lend a hand...I generally do one end of the gig or the other... 🙂 I arrived early (unexpectedly light traffic) just as the van with the PA, lights and guitarist/BL did, so I unloaded with them, but at the end I broke down the PA and left the three of them to it...I might get across the principle sooner or later that we need less gear...call it Tough Love... 😃

Handed my 414 over to a well-regarded local tech for a fret dress and setup (she's earned me lots of money over the last year, including being the House Bass at a regular weekly jam night (tho this has now finished)), and picked her up Satdy before my gig, and she plays and sounds as well as anything I've ever owned. If she was a pound lighter (and I wasn't such a collector) I could probably sell everything else...

Satdy night pub gig up in the sticks Nelson way, main road, no car park, but I cared not a jot as my load-in these days is a rucksack with leads and Stomp, and my bass case. Just as well, there wasn't much room for the band. It was quietish (I suspect would've been even quieter without the rugby on) early, we were scheduled for a 10pm start, but the landlady asked us if we could go on at half past 'because it gets busy after that'...I looked at her skeptically, but it turns out it was one of those pubs where it's the last place open (1:30am closing) in the locality, so people end up there...sure enough, by 11 it was banging, which made a change from the last few evenings of sparsely-attended indifference we've had of late...it's also nice to see a well-run pub can still make live music work... Inears were, as always, a joy, and I was packed up and loaded in the now-traditional three minutes, which made the 35-mile trip home a lot easier...

Yep, my Lad's in Uni now, and his rent (£200 a week! Plus living expenses...) is what I'm playing to pay these days...

There's an app called Moises, which uses AI to split mp3s/wavs, etc down into mixable tracks (it's very, very good), and you can drop everything out but the bass. Free for a few goes, it's also a great practice app...

That is dreadful...and he looks so pleased with himself, too...drugs are bad, kids... I watched most of it during the day, then went out to a rock club and watched some of the US stuff later at a friends house, but I was kinda worn out by it by then. Queen put in probably the greatest 20 minute shift in rock music that day, they were completely on it, and they overran their 20 minutes (including Freddy's audience singalong) by 20 seconds...

Rival Sons last night at the big Academy in Manchester. Sold out, absolutely rammed, the band were great, but overall the experience was brought down by one of the most yattery audiences I've ever stood in (I moved several times, and at one point had to tell one booming bloke who just wouldn't stop telling his two mates about how his brother-in-law has got a new car (yeah, you couldn't unhear the conversation) to shut the hell up), and secondly by yet again a stooopidly loud kick; the drummer has a 26" kick, and the soundman must have really liked it, because it was the main instrument all night; it turned into kick drum vs band, and the kick won. The band have some intense slower songs which were ruined by the mix...

If I can find just one person in the audience (and most of the time there's usually one, no matter how small the crowd) who's listening with some interest, I play for them. If no-one at all is listening, I play for myself: I concentrate and play the very best I can, which is an achievement in itself: getting through a couple of hours of live playing without dropping a single note or a single beat or a single nuance and staying right in the pocket with the drummer is an achievement, and that's a good thing. I work on things like playing without looking, too. Then somebody pays me for having done that. It's all good, sometimes you just have to look a little harder...