asingardenof

It's been a little while now but as I recall the main issue we had was that soldering the pickups to the back of the blend pot was a frigging nightmare. The solder just did not want to stick no matter what we did. Eventually we managed to rough up the surface of the pot to give the solder a better surface to attach to and that seems to have worked. Other than that it was just niggly issues: Wiring the battery harness was a pain Actually fitting everything in the control cavity was extremely fiddly There's also a free-floating earth wire you need to secure to the inside of the cavity so the bare wire touches the back of the shielding on the scratchplate, and if you forget about it you'll get an almighty hum until you take it all apart again to find out where it is You can rewire the blend pot so that the knob turns the more conventional way (i.e. clockwise = front pickup, anticlockwise = rear) because for all his wisdom Roger Sadowsky is wedded to the idea that they should work the opposite way. Soldering the pickups to the pot was so frustrating that we forgot to do that, so now I have to turn the knob both ways on a gig to remember which way round it is Overall though I'm extremely happy with how it turned out.

Second gig in a fortnight at a WMC near Bradford last night. We've played there before and went down well, so there was no reason to think last night would be any different, and so it proved to be. Our new songs are bedding in well, and the onstage sound was vastly improved over the previous gig so we could all hear each other and ourselves. Not a large venue so I went with the Elf as amp this time, and it sounded great, the first time I think I've used it for a gig since having the Sadowsky preamp in the Sire, and I'm definitely looking forward to doing that again. An appreciative but not lively crowd, apart from a hardy half dozen or so who were enthusiastically dancing at various points, with the other thirty-odd punters remaining resolutely glued to their chairs all night when they weren't at the bar. We lost a few towards the end but went down very well and have already been booked again for next July. A few minor mistakes, but we've become quite good at styling them out now so nobody noticed, it if they did they didn't mind. Back home to the joyous sound of our neighbours having a domestic. Which was nice. Obligatory "last night's office" photos below. I don't know why our guitarist insists on using that stand at every gig. Last night she was complaining that it was just firing at her arse all night so I don't know why she didn't just put the Katana on the stage like I did with my rig and save herself a foot of floor space.

Yep, that about sums up my gigging career to date.

I'd did that last week, had to forgo my drive pedal which is only needed on our second encore which we weren't sure we'd get to. It starts with a bass solo and I could barely hear it so had to go au naturel.

Gah! This is what I get for trying to update while having a conversation with someone.

One song we play a semitone louder lower than the original recording, but I hadn't yet figured out how to play back the track at a slower speed maintaining the same pitch when practising, so I'd practise with the original and make a mental note to drop the key when we played live. I'm sure you can all guess what happened next.

Our sound guy is our keyboardist, but our "soundcheck" usually consists of our singer wandering about the venue with his wireless mic checking if he can hear us OK. Keyboardist and drummer have monitors which apparently all sounded OK, but some sequenced bits need remixing to make them more prominent. I'm thinking I might need to invest in one to give myself a fighting chance.

Are we back to ranting about Scott Devine again? If you so forgot "super awesome"

If Ashdown will ever make a standard ABM with a smaller form factor then I'll stop doing this.

You've got to be careful with that sort of thing though, because the man who invented the Graphics Interchange Format thinks his invention should be pronounced "jiff", proving that inventors aren't always correct.

My personal unit-related bete noir is newspaper style guides that don't allow for the degree symbol when they write about temperatures, so they have them in Farads or coulombs.

Oof!