Rosie C

We have a kind of Blackmore's Night band doing folk rock-and renaissance music. We have a keyboard player who joins us for larger gigs, but for practice and smaller gigs I've been chasing this idea of harpsichord on a backing track. We're lucky to have a Kawai electric piano in our practice space with a USB slot for loading MIDI It's a bit heavy to take gigging though, unless we have roadies and a Luton with a tail lift 😉

I wanted to use it as an alternative to backing tracks in our performances. It apparently has a feature to do live beat matching so we could give it a harpsichord MIDI file and it could play out to trigger signal from our drummer. Too steep a learning curve for me though, easier to persuade the drummer to play to a click track 😉

Reaper is good. Logic is good. Ableton Live was the one which defeated me - utterly incomprehensible to me!

That's a fair point. I bought mine during lockdown from Amazon USA and yes it was almost as much as my Squier had cost from my local guitar shop.

I've nothing to compare with as I've only bought a Fender neck. But I liked it - I got a Fender pau ferro fretless jazz neck to convert my fretted Squier jazz bass. It wasn't just bolt on - the fretboard wood was somewhat unfinished, and the fret markings were slightly proud, so I had to spend some time sanding it smooth. Also the holes for the tuning machines were a size larger than the original, so there was some work there too. Overall though, once the work was done I'm very pleased with it.

Thanks Simon! I might need friends to help lift it into my practice space, but once it's there it can stay there. I've always fancied a Marshall stack, but lately Trace Elliot has the edge for me I think.

Every time I see a photo of Trace Elliot kit I inch inevitably towards buying some myself...

It must be, and yet it seems there's very little around.

I have a power pack, but I quite like my battery Orange amp with its internal battery - apart from not having to carry extra things, I like that there's no 240v if I'm playing outdoors.

Thanks Bill!

My current bass guitar / double bass amp is an Orange Crush 25B. Enough for practice and playing in church. I also have an Orange Acoustic 30 which is battery powered and I use for octave-mandolin. I very much like it being cordless, very handy for playing outdoors, or just not having to find a mains socket and run an extension lead at church. Battery bass amps seem a bit thin on the ground and quite expensive. I'm wondering whether a battery powered active speaker could do the job? Particularly it only has to be as loud/bassy as my 25W practice amp.

that is a thing of beauty!

A Zoom recorder, all the better to record my bass with and best of all, my sister bought me a "folk singers almanac" with songs for each month and for each festival in the year - this is bass related as I'll end up recording them with multi-tracked bass guitar.

Surely the photo should be ageing horribly, while you retain a youthful countenance?

I've played in orchestra, brass band, big band. When I first started playing folk-rock in pubs, I was conscious of using a music stand, but I've just accepted I am the sort of musician who uses a music stand. I do memorise the lyrics and guitar chords, but for the other stuff - the band use written music. Even the drummer sometimes! 😉

Our last gig of the year and traditionally our biggest. That's me on mandolin & vocal, though I feel little shame as we had a very talented friend join us on double bass for the night.

I took lessons for about a year - 30 minutes per week in school terms over a year, so about 15 hours. My teacher took me from being unable to sing to being able to front a pub band which got decent audience reaction and re-bookings. She taught me a bit of technique - having a solid support from the diaphragm, holding notes for the full length, hitting a note square on and becoming used to intervals. We also would spend some time working through songs I'd be performing where she'd point out where I was making errors. She also helped me control chest & head voice and helped me with higher notes adding seven semitones, so now on a good day I have a 2 octave range. At the school I went to one lady taught singers mostly for pop / rock / musical theatre. The other taught more along classical & choral lines. All in past tense as I caught covid a second time and within a couple of weeks I had a dairy allergy which has taken most of this year to figure out. I'm hopefully retuning to lessons next year. I have found the voice is a delicate thing. It's not like a bass guitar that can be played for 2 hours then chucked in a bag until the next a gig. I can't sing for 2x45 minutes like I did last night and expect to sing again today - though hopefully that will come with time and better technique. I seem to have had more colds since I started singing, though I think it's actually that because colds have such an effect, I notice them more.

Bass: John Taylor, Paul McCartney Guitar: Ritchie Blackmore

I'm having similar - I can post in some areas, but not the main discussion area

I did pop in, I play mandolin mostly these days, including a guitar-bodied octave mandolin and a Gibson SG clone converted to octave mandolin, but just found tumbleweed

I have a Squier 4-string fretless jazz bass. Sunburst with tort. Bought for around £350 just before covid lock down. It's been rebuilt by a local luthier, set up for me and I really can't see me ever buying anything else.

In the 1980s one singer in our high school band had an SM58. It was quite a cut above anything anyone else had. The other singer had something nasty by 'Realistic' or similar. I'm not sure how I first got into Sennheiser, but the E835 seems to suit my voice, though these days I make like Taylor Swift and use an ME3 headset.

I'd love one, but they are a bit pricey. I make do with a somewhat battered 1980s Hohner. That said, it feels like it's due for tuning, and at £500 a time, it wouldn't take much to get a second hand Roland, something like the FR-3XB.

Thanks again, it WAS in E. A simple bass line, but a lot of fun to play. Before the service I thought it highly unlikely there would be any dancing but the new vicar was indeed dancing in the aisle and waving her arms around, so there you go! We played "One More Step Along the World I Go" for the first time too, things are definitely getting more up-beat lately!

In some ways it's easier than changing key, providing the instruments can all change. I play piano accordion which is in A=440, and that just can't change. I gave up collaborating with a guitarist who didn't tune to A=440 and sent me recordings to play along to