But I have always had a thing about the SR71 blackbird, it's a bonkers testament to cold war paranoia when it met scientific insanity. A mach 3 monster, this thing was a spy plane that flew at 80,000 feet with surfaces that could get to 500 degrees and more, they had to wait half an hour before servicing it on the ground to let it cool down!
Awesome ;-)
Wierd gig, this one-not played this venue before, 5 bands in one night: tony is providing PA and his guitar amp, I'm providing the CCL plus 4x10 cab as bass amp. Apparently tony volunteered his system after having heard the system oin face bar-it is a little older, I guess-and the sound in there is pretty good as a result of Tony's system.
However, the guys here wanted us here at 3pm! Now, I am still a wage slave at the moment, so to speak. So this was def not possible! ;-)
Anyway, it'll be 930pm before we're on. junkyard scientists are on after us: I hear they're great, and I do like their sound. Coolio!
Z) spend more time through the full stack and work on the sound through the multitude of signal processing stuff to try to make sure levels are the way you want and the Q-tron is actually going "whah" in the way you intended
€) don't have more than one drink. ;-)
Schloop) while playing, ensure you are shorter than your drummer
12.5) start your gig with the theme from FilmXXXX (tonewheel jackson rules!)
Great gig. Loads of fun.
We're on after a couple of acoustic acts: the pic here is of a fella who has really nice songs and a cracking fingerpicking style on guitar: a little like newton falkner, and he's got a great sense of humour. "if i am a biscuit tin, you are a bourbon" :-)
He's even sharing about the perils of carbonated drinks and burping mid-lyric. Love it!
Today I got really hacked off at a lack of summer, lack of 2 week break and, indeed, total lack of a complete break at all: so I booked NEXT year's summer hols, at Metochi Cottage in Crete. This place is magical.
And now I'm suddenly happier: visualising the future pleasure of a familiar 19th century stone built cottage with a nice small pool of your own, tree coverage that seems to be perfect all day long and a local lidl with wicked cool beer.
Good times to come. And italy in a month where I buy my iPhone!
And a good gig tonight. I'm on the stack, and the sound is wicked out front.
Not come along to a "sunday social" before, I found out about it through Loz Lozza, champion of inependent music.
Trouble is, they had a big gig around here last night, and apparently the afterparty is still going. Elsewhere. So there aren't many musos here at all, which is a little sad. Not having a solo repertoire, I suspect I might manage a pint and then head back, but we'll see.
With a few people in it could def be interesting though. Bang Bar, it's at. Google for address.
Many thanks for your email XXXXX.
However, my opinion is that the BBC is reporting on another “mass self-hypnosis” (with the last being, in all quarters, both public and financial sector, that the financial boom was sustainable).
Our last 10 years of growth were generated by financial magic, which turned out to be borrowing from the future in an exponential fashion.
Right now, people are buying cars, houses and plasma TVs by borrowing money which has been borrowed from the Treasury in the form of gilts. This has now caused those who have access to the media to start reporting that people, and now businesses, are feeling better about themselves. However, until we all wake up and realise that the money has to come from somewhere, and that organic financial growth cannot be in double digits (which is what the stock market and fickle day-traders have come to expect), we are heading for another cliff after what might feel like a small plateau, when governments and central banks finally realise they simply cannot hold up the edifice which we have all contributed to in the last decade.
I had to respond to your email – I do apologise if this is an odd reply to get!
I too saw the BBC report but it simply doesn’t ring true with me at all. I’m not paranoid enough to believe that central government is seeding stories like this – I don’t actually believe in sinister top-down management, frankly the management I see tells me that most people who rise to the top of the tree are struggling to control their own small empires – instead, I believe humanity builds complex systems which it cannot hope to control (or even understand – economists being a case in point, they really ought to be called Economic Historians), and which often blow up in our faces due to forces within them which align (usually on the basis of simple human instincts). In the case of the last decade, we’re looking at a financial system out of control on its’ own drunken binging on wholesale capital markets, with individual human greed in investment banking arms (bonuses et al) and a lack of oversight on the part of governments who just loved all the tax that came in. Collective hypnosis and an unwillingness to listen to those who tried to warn the system of its’ own lack of foundations led to where we are now. The people at the bottom just loved being able to buy all those new cars and plasma TVs.
I see no underlying changes either in the mindsets of the participants or the system itself which can make me believe that the recession is coming to an end.
It's 4 acoustic acts and then us and the venue feels really nice, actually - small enough to feel like a gig in your living room. This could be a great "underground" venue.
The pic is of the first acoustic act: they're pretty good, like the waterboys actually, nice sounds with guitar, bass and mandolin/banjo. case Hardened, they're called.
On my front - I bought a powerball for exercising and warming up and it ROCKS! i can seriously recommend these if you're a musician: I did about 5 minutes 20 mins before our soundcheck, and when I started playing it was like I'd been playing for hours-totally warmed up!
If you're a muso, get one now. Low impact, high strength, and no loss of dexterity. Sweet!
It's 4 acoustic acts and then us and the venue feels really nice, actually - small enough to feel like a gig in your living room. This could be a great "underground" venue.
The pic is of the first acoustic act: they're pretty good, like the waterboys actually, nice sounds with guitar, bass and mandolin/banjo. case Hardened, they're called.
On my front - I bought a powerball for exercising and warming up and it ROCKS! i can seriously recommend these if you're a musician: I did about 5 minutes 20 mins before our soundcheck, and when I started playing it was like I'd been playing for hours-totally warmed up!
If you're a muso, get one now. Low impact, high strength, and no loss of dexterity. Sweet!
Anyone who reads my rants will remember my posting a few days back where I was pointing out that their company are a bunch of shysters making money out of your private number. OK, they don’t give your number to people, no, they SMS you the contact details of the person who made the enquiry!!! Apart from being an utterly pathetic sop to privacy, this business idea has several flaws:
These are further points garnered from some excellent thoughts from friends and colleagues.
However - my original post seems to have been picked up by an employee of 118800! How nice! You’d think they’d be more concerned with trying to get their pathetic website up and running so we can all apply to be made x-directory, wouldn’t you? But no! This comment appeared on my last 118800 rant…
Hello, Joe from 118800.co.uk here.
Our service on 118 800 and 118800.co.uk was being tested in June. There are now developments we want to make to improve the service for our customers. But due to the high levels of enquiries we are getting, we are simply not able to complete the technical work required whilst the service is live. We are sorry for inconvenience and will be up and running again as soon as possible.
Just to reassure you that we’ll never actually give out anyone’s personal details. When you search on 118800.co.uk, we’ll send an SMS message to the person you’re looking for, giving them your contacts details and it is then up to you if you wish to call them back or not.
If you have any questions or concerns, please contact us on contact@118800.co.uk
I do love the stipulation that high levels of enquiries are keeping them offline. “We are sorry for the inconvenience!” – if you’d read my post, Joe-Bot, you’d have noticed I think you should be offline permanently.
And my only concern at this time is with the poor bastards who have backed this company with capital. You won’t be seeing any return dudes, this one was a turkey from the start. Who thought this could work???
I arrived pretty much on time – 5:30pm, yet! – and Fatima Spar and the Freedom Fries were just finishing their soundcheck. Lovely guys, great double bass player who reminded me of Cooter from Dukes of Hazzard – lovely sound from his bass, despite having to use an old TNT 150 (I had one of those about 15 years ago!). They’ve got a great sound, it’s a real summery infectious experience.
Once the main act were happy with their sound, I did my usual routine of waiting for Armen to work out where his kit would go – he takes up the biggest amount of room onstage so it makes sense to see how the stage looks when he’s set up. To my delight, the Freedom Fries had no problems with moving pieces of kit away a little so we had good space to set up – far more space than any of the other places we’ve played in Reading – and I found a useful spot to place the Monster Stack, on top of the subwoofer for the PA.
My amp does hiss on the tube channel a bit (it’s the tubes, it’s what they do!), and the sound engineer noticed it – he dived in with a DI box (I didn’t mind!) but it was switching to channel 2 which really cured the problem I reckon. I also got a good reading from the engineer on balancing the synth sound for The Vibe with my live bass sound, which sounded great on the night.
A wide-angle view of the stage shows how much kit there was up there! Apologies for the focus, when I upgrade my phone (finally – the ones on offer are all shite at the moment)
I was really pleased with the setup (you can see my W as a blue smudge on the far right!) – you can see Tom’s stuff on the left and Jacquoda got centre stage which is ideal – as it meant I could dismantle my stuff and get it offstage ASAP.
The gig went pretty well – I had spent all day doing mouse work at work, and my right hand was oddly stiff – took ages to loosen up – and that’s my excuse for the cack bass work on Turn me On. And I’m sticking with it :).
One thing though: as we’ve played a lot of small venues so far, we’re really not used to be spaced out across a stage: we needed better monitoring, but this isn’t easy in a short timespace (we only found out we were supporting 10 days ago!) – we’ve agreed that we need to rehearse in some bigger rooms, and some in-ear monitors for Jacquoda would definitely really help I suspect, she’ll be able to hear the whole band and we can tailor levels of different instruments so she gets the best mix.
Me? I don’t need no stinking monitors! I’ve got 900 watts of Warwick Neo POWER! And a very loud drummer.
Before the last track (turn me on), Jacquoda seized the initiative and did the band introduction bit, which was great – we launched into one of our patented jams, which funked up quite nicely, and when jacquoda ran through the names we got great rounds of applause and some cheers from the audience. Very gratifying. I was actually pretty pleased with the audience reaction, we reworked the set with a lot of the quieter numbers early on to “bring them up to Funkerton” – they had, after all, come to see Fatima Spar and her Freedom Fries, who aren’t quite as LOUD as we are when we get going…
All in all, a good evening with plenty of learning curves all round :)
