Rosie C

Thanks @Kitsto !

Does anyone have a checklist they use when booking gigs that they could share? I have a meeting coming up with our town council and I'm trying to think of things to ask...

Others must have had better experiences, but every instrument I've personally bought from Thomann needed setting up again by a local luthier. +1 on getting an adjustable bridge - as well as being able to try different heights, you can fit a Realist Lifeline pickup. I play bluegrass and jazz - I'm a big fan of Innovation Rockabilly strings - a lovely dark sound and much easier on my hands than metal strings. Only suitable for pizz though.

John Taylor - the inspiration for starting to play bass back in the 1980s and still my favourite bass player.

That's about the rate our band have been working at. When you add in holidays, Christmas, sickness, etc. it's taken us about six months to get a decent range of songs to suit a range of situations.

Exactly the same in our church - Fridays used to be our rehearsal, then a meal at Weatherspoons next door. But it took an evening, and it was rare everyone could make it. So now we meet up an hour before the service - works just as well.

Some sort of reference tome, like the Oxford Companion to Music?

I use the gold Herco for mandocello, once I tried them I've not used anything else.

I suppose in the 70s & 80s the UK had student grants, so there was the route the likes of Bowie followed of going to art college and having a few years to experiment. Maybe I'm just too old, but for me loud volume is killing live music. We were at a pub last weekend, just for a beer. There was a band setting up and we would have stayed, but they were SO LOUD. The drummer was wearing industrial ear protectors...

Yes, I do "Sound of Silence" and America. But vocals + mandocello, not bass.

My Squier jazz has alloy tuners. It made a huge difference to the weight. I believe they're Hipshot Ultralights but they don't have the Hipshot logo on so maybe copies. Sadly I can't help with sourcing them - my guitar technician had a second hand set in her workshop. But I would recommend that style - from a post I made on another bass forum it saved 6.5oz on the headstock.

that's what I would do, I bought a mandocello mail order a couple of years ago. There was a 10 week back order but suddenly one was available. It didn't feel right when it arrived though the only thing I could see was a couple of dead strings. I needed it for a gig and didn't want the hassle of a return to an overseas company. A few months later my guitar technician reported the neck was cracked. My guess is it was a return passed off as new.

I was ready to give up playing in bands, in fact I probably posted earlier in this topic. But just this week I met a potential band member - a mulit-instrumentalist with similar music tastes to me... meeting up for a jam after Christmas. 😎

I might have to hand in my basschat membership card at this rate, as once again no bass was played. After a sudden decision 4 hours before the performanceI I played the bass lines on piano accordion. We did some rock'n'roll classics, T-Rex, etc. It's the closest I've ever got to a genuine Marshall stack... and wasn't plugged in to it

Gift vouchers for a music shop? My Christmas pressie list often has Andertons vouchers on it.

It's look like it will be Lindisfarne who are playing locally next summer. I've not seen them since the early 1990s and Alan Hull was still alive, so it won't be the same, but maybe it will still be good

Me. I have a fretless jazz and a plywood economy upright which somehow manages to sounds great. Other than a novelty Lego bass on the wall, that's me done.

Arrgh, my back was fine when I read this topic yesterday. Today I can barely stand straight. I think I just slept in an awkward position, but I did move some PA speakers yesterday afternoon, or was it just the power of suggestion?

I assembled a bitsa - Squier body with a Fender fretless neck that fitted when I went fretless. It looks like a Fender and I feel like a fraud and correct people (mostly schoolkids) who say "ooh Fender". Really I should sand off the Fender decal and get a Squier one!

Not personally, but the mandolin player in our band has just hit 1.8M streams for his ancient Greek music on Spotify. As far as I understand, it's hit a sweet spot with some of the "algorithms" and is being pushed out to new listeners automatically.

Tonight, and it was good. I began the process of handing over the bass 'seat' in our community big band to a teenager who's just starting out. He plays a left handed bass, which is kind of cool to demonstrate as our basses were mirror images of each other.

“ELECTRIC GUITAR 4 str. semi-acoustic art. 426 r PCT RSFSR 508-75 MAA 1987 The price is 125 rubles. 197061, LENINGRAD USSR he is Chapaeva, 15 r. coch T. Lenuprizdat” Just a little correction as that's two words that aren't used anymore and it's incredibly rare that the Russian O-level night classes I took in the 1990s have any use!

I play with the Widders Border Morris in Chepstow. You're not a million miles from us if you ever fancy a visit, especially when we're doing a dance-out.

Our band is mandolin+accordion+drum. Some times I do melody plus simple root-chord oom-pah bass patterns, but sometimes I leave the melody to the mandolin and focus on more complex bass lines. Sousaphone or tuba on the bass... now that would something!

No bass for me today. Tonight's gig was outdoors at a foggy -2˚C morris dancing at a Christmas market. I would have been playing piano accordion but with the weather that stayed at home and I took a plastic recorder and did the best I could with stiffening finger joints and condensation in the instrument. It went down well enough though. Skiing thermals underneath, chemical heat packs in my pockets to pop my hands in between songs, and hot chocolate between sets saw me through.