Muzz

Charity Ball at the Midland in the city centre last night, about 350 posh frocks and black ties...5:30pm soundcheck, 10pm start time (I went home and came back), which then overran (if there are two things in this world stone cold guaranteed to overrun, it's wedding speeches and charity raffles), pushing us out to 10:30pm and then 10:45pm start, luckily the organisers took the last 15 off our running time, so we only played an hour for the full fee...the downside was that GMP had decided to keep the parking suspension for the Tory party conference there (which had all finished on Weds) running till 9pm tonight (why?), so you couldn't park within at least a 1/4 mile of the place. I spent 30 minutes driving round and round in ever-increasing circles until I eventually found somewhere, at £12.50 for 4 hours... House/3rd party PA and engineer, but his monitors were tiny, good job I'd bunged the Rumble 12 in the boot, so I used that to monitor. All good, even better the load-out was fire doors 10ft behind us, we fetched the cars and were out in 10 minutes...

He definitely played a BB3000A (the active one) later, and even,(IIRC) a BB5000A... The BB3000S has a 40mm nut? Ohhh nooooooo, I thought I'd stopped looking for another BB because they were all (mostly) 42mm nut...this could cost me...

Yep, I have all my sounds in the Helix in various drop (and raise) tunings: helps with the fact that I play in multiple bands, some Eb, some E, and one with a singer who shifts down a lot, and at jam nights you have to be very flexible. Eb? Easy. Low B? Easy... 😁 I love a verrrry skinny neck, which is my main issue with 5ers - example: I love a BB bass, but the best one for me is the cheapest, the BB414, because it has the slimmest neck: no matter how good the 2024 is (and it is very, very good), I couldn't live with the fatter neck, so a 5er's got no chance...

On the upside, my IEMs are are frickin joy: no backline to shift, just my bass bag and my bits and bobs rucksack, my own individual mix from the desk, setup and breakdown in about two minutes...eeeeeeasy...it'd take something for me to go back to any backline other than my Rumble 100 on its stand these days... I should say that there's only me and the drummer on inears; the other two have a monitor, so it can be done without everyone having to buy in to IEMs...

Struggled with gigs last Weds (turned out to be the last one hosting the jam night, for ridiculous reasons not worth detailing, but that's £300 a month binned 😡), Friday and Saturday, I felt dreadful all week, but I'd put it down to two 5am starts for work Tues/Weds, a bad cold and the heat. Then my other half (the nurse) went back to her ward after some time off to find they're back on the masks (it's a Very Poorly ward, so particularly vulnerable), and she brought a Covid test home with her, and guess what? Yup. 🙁

I'm sorely tempted to post the BZ-5000 pic on a tonewood thread over the water and just ask 'So what does this sound like, then?'

There's me worrying about my thumb going over the top of the fretboard, while Suzi Q's is round the front underneath...and sounding great... 😁

Luckily, I can nap on a rail in full sunlight if I'm tired (or in front of a blaring TV, which might occasionally happen...allegedly), but yeah, I have a very dark bedroom... On that, years ago a friend of mine had moved into a new (shared) house, and his bedroom was at the back overlooking some woods; there were blackout blinds already fitted, and he set his radio alarm for 5am (it was Winter, too), because he had an early shift. It turned out instead of the alarm tone, he'd set it for the radio, so he was awoken to the ethereal sound of Enya, in an unfamiliar place, in total darkness...he said 'I just lay there, blinking, not seeing anything but black, with a choir of voices around me...for about a minute I thought I'd died in the night...' 😁

I wish...especially just as I'm getting up in the morning...ooooff... 😐

I should add that SWMBO is fully on board with it - the cash helps (got a Boy heading off to Uni in three weeks)... 😀 As far as wear and tear goes, I'm 60 next year, but a combination of Elixirs and mostly pick playing keeps that under control (and inears and minimal backline to shift), and I'd be lying if I said I don't enjoy all of it...even if a lie-down now and then is required (not onstage, obv...) 🙂 The setlists have some overlap (tho there's key shifts from one to another, too), but 70-odd songs to be remembering how to play bob on is the toughest bit...

I picked up exactly this setup last week, and after a couple of gigs I can confirm it's the best bang for buck I've come across...yeah, it's a biggish unit, but it clips to the back of my strap just fine, and works a treat. 👍

I've got five gigs and a rehearsal (three different bands) in five days starting tomorrow...today I shall be resting as much as possible (working from home)...

I've just got (another) new band on the go, and a dozen or more songs in the set are played in different keys to the original (mostly different keys from each other, too). Because I play many of the same songs in the original (or even differently-shifted) key (e.g. one band tunes to Eb for everything, another in concert), I use my Stomp as a pitch shifter, and it works brilliantly - I have all my main tones (half a dozen or so) in every combination, so I use the presets in Eb for one band, and I've also got specific songs in the different keys for this new band. Sounds complicated, but it's not, really - HX Edit means you can do it on a PC (drag and drop, etc) and it updates the pedal. The pitch shifting on the Stomp is very good, I haven't caught it warbling or hunting yet, even with big shifts...

I've been round this block a couple of times (I was/am thinking about flying cheapo with one, so I wanted a bolt-on to break it down even smaller), and I've ended up with a Westone Quantum, which is a 32" scale (I'm not aware of any Short Scale headless cricket bats), and it's a pretty good bass - I gig with it a lot when the stage areas are small...

One of the bands I play in has a BL who just doesn't want to stop playing (unless the landlord steps in) - if a single drunk shouts 'More!' after four encores, he wants to carry on...usually said drunk wanders off during the song anyway and you're left playing to an increasingly tired crowd, who are worrying about Last Orders and getting a taxi ordered... It happened a couple of weeks ago, after the fifth encore I put my bass down and went to the bog...that usually does it...

Oh, and I also got a new drop top for the Shuker, too... 🙂

The flooring went (moved house), the Shuker stayed... 🙂 Yeah, it sounded fantastic, but I found out a terrible truth about myself when I had it; it was supposed to be the ultimate modular setup for any size of gig...and I discovered my Bloke OCD meant I brought all three cabs to most gigs 'just in case'...and that's 90lbs+ of cab (albeit in three lumps), just when I was working very hard to reduce my lifting and carting work... 🙁

It's worth bearing in mind that Geddy's tone when heard in isolation is far clankier and rattlier (and possibly fizzier, these things are subjective and tricky to define) than with the other two at it, I'd be inclined to errr on the side of clank/rattle/fizz until I'd heard it in a band context...

Alternately, you can also run 3 x 8 ohm cabs, too... 🙂

My favourite Class D amp of them all...and very versatile: between the Contour and the Channels, lots of great sounds to be had very quickly (which is what I need, playing in a band with a wide selection of songs from lots of genres), I'd probably still have it if I hadn't moved to digital modelling with the Stomp.

The longest gigs I've been doing recently are the jam nights, tho this fluctuates wildly, depending on who turns up: last night wasn't too bad, there were a few bassists in, so I only played about an hour in total, but the week before was hard work: just one bunch of kids in as a band doing two numbers, then a guitarist played bass with his pals for three songs, the rest of the 3 hours was me...and maaaan, it was hot and sweaty: high street bar, so all windows and doors closed for the noise... 😐

I had one the Weds before last; usual jam night, same setup as always, same kit, same room, same people (well, our hosting trio, at least)...just couldn't get out of first gear. Nothing definite, nothing like a 'disaster gig', but it just sounded mostly rubbish - I was faffing about with the bass tone for about ten minutes to no avail (and I'm normally about two and a half minutes from walking in the door, setting up, getting a tone and going to the bar), and the harder I tried to bring it back, the more it persisted. Last Weds was night and day better (as it usually is), for no reason...it just happens sometimes...

Apropos a couple of Police numbers (Message In A Bottle, Roxanne) always going down well, we chucked in Walking On the Moon. Maaaan, that song goes nowhere fast; it was touch and go as to who lost the will to live first, us or the audience... Funnily enough, and proving Fitzgibbons Law Of Contrariness*, Stuck In The Middle Witchoo always goes down well... * Don't look for this one, I just made it up...

I'd just add that open mic/jam nights don't have to be about intimidating improvisation from the word go - you can start by learning a few 'staples' and asking the hosts if you can sit in with them if they know them (and even if they don't*)...it's a good way to start, and you'll make some good connections... * I co-host a good jam night with some great musicians, so I'm on the hop a good deal, but that's largely accommodating people who want to get up and say 'Do you know...?', so it's out with the iPad if we don't and often the person getting up knows it better than us...