Heh, as it turns out there is something bad about fitting fat strings to a cheap bass: the damn machine heads can’t cope with the tension. The A peg has escaped its gears somehow, so I can only tighten the string as far as G or so. Nutbags. It’s doubly annoying as I’d just recorded a couple of tracks of guitar and drums and was looking to add a bassline to finish it off. As I’ve got today off I thought I’d try and put something down without trying to tax my creative juices, so, inspired by The New Mastersounds, I recorded a little thing I’ve called Funky. As ever my timing’s dodgy; I first put down a track of metronome as a guide, then recorded the guitar following it. After recording the drums, however, I noticed that throughout the piece I was rushing the drum part ever so slightly, so I went back and rerecorded the guitar part to follow the drums. I must practice more with a metronome in 2005! Then I discovered that my bass is b0rked but I thought I’d upload it anyway, so passed Digital Fishphones Blockfish compressor over it and away we go.

Restrung that new bass of mine with 45 - 105 gauge strings; they are apparently for long scale length basses (e.g. 34″), but mine is a short scale (only 30″) so the fat bit of the string ends up being held in the slot of the tuning peg. Hope that’s not a bad thing. The new strings are definitely fatter than the old set, and are even fatter than the set I had on my old P-bass copy; the E string feels like a damn bridge cable. Still, tightened the truss rod to compensate for this and lowered the action while I was fiddling with it, which forced me to check the intonation. I was expecting having to set it in a compromise, as it only has two saddles rather than one per string, but surprisingly a little bit of fiddling resulted in a near-perfect set up. Sadly the lowered action has really highlighted the worn state of some of the frets, in particular the E string rattles on a couple of notes. Maybe I actually will defret it sometime in ‘05, the process doesn’t look too tricky. Another weird thing I noticed about the bass that I didn’t when I first acquired it is that it has a zero-fret. This is fairly uncommon in (six-string… err… non-bass) guitars; apparently the aim of it is to remove the difference between a fretted note and an open string, as the latter is vibrating against a piece of bone or plastic rather than a metal fret. Bassists are captivated by gimmicks however, so a quick google turns up a few examples of zero frets.

This has to be one of the worst ideas ever: they’re making a film adaptation of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever. A story that centres around a misanthropic rapist leper written by a man who swallowed a dictionary. They were some of my favourite books when I was a teenager and have the same epic scope as The Lord of the Rings (which I hear did quite well at the cinema), but… well, I’d say it’s got disaster written all over it.

Toying with a new style sheet as the old dark on white style was a little stressful on the eye; hopefully this dark blue background will be more restful.

Kyla’s brother and his wife have just had their first baby, Gabriel. Unusual name; I reckon they’d been influenced Swordfish and thought the Travolta character was cool, but they claim otherwise.
I’ve also had an addition to the guitar family… well, a swop at any rate: I exchanged my bass with another guy’s, as he said the frets on his were too low for him to learn on. It’s a jazz-copy, no brand but sounds pretty good and looks pretty too.

Needs new strings and the action tweaking, but plays as well as my old bass. I might actually strip the frets off and go fretless, but only if I buy a decent fretted bass first.

Kyla, Andrew and I went to the Living Room gig at CB2 last week. It was very good again, though this time quite folky in sound, rather than the last one I saw that tended more to an indie feel. It kicked off with Richard Ecclestone, who turns out to live on the same road as I do. He was accompanied by a guy with a telecaster and a lovely Marshall amp (no idea what model, looked like a 2×12″ combo so a bluesbreaker?) that he used with a tremolo pedal to give a real country vibe to the songs. Also on stage was a percussionist who appeared to be playing the bottom of a square foot-stool. Unusual, but very nice sound; he alternated between using a brush or beater with one hand, whilst the other either slapped the base for a kick drum sound or knocked on various bits of the frame.
Next up was Redhouse, who had a kind of Americana/R’n'B vibe going on. My favourite of the songs they performed was a cover of the Nick Cave version of Stagger Lee; if you read the lyrics, you can guess why this amused me.
Stryngs were on next. I’d been wanting to see them since “Bang Bang” Derek joined the band, and I wasn’t disappointed. Strings had the most impressive voice of the singers there that night, she put a lot of emotion into each rendition. She also gave a lot of background on the inspiration behind the songs, which almost got a bit much; I now know more about Strings’ life than I do about some of the women I’ve… well, enough of that.
The evening rounded off with Sunday Driver, who were also impressive, though they did repeat a song that I’d heard at my last visit (the one that involved one of the guys from Kill Freeman plus SD’s sitar). They did a couple of pieces of Indian classical music, which was interesting although really I wanted to hear more of their songs.
The evening definitely reinforced my opinion that having a good between-song banter is as important an element as well-performed songs; all the artists had a good interaction with the audience, which in the crampedcosy CB2 basement is virtually a necessity.
Andrew and I will have to put our heads together and work out what kind of thing we can do; I think I am going to use it as an excuse to buy an acoustic guitar sometime soon…

Some rather funky tunes available here: Comfort Stand - [Various Artists - Wakka Chikka Wakka Chikka]. Whether the wakka chikka is a wah pedal or… heh, something else… hey, it is “porn music for the masses”!

So get in the spirit of things with Monkey Beer, b3ta’s newest meme!

(No, I didn’t make that, I just nicked it.)

These are some nice tunes, from toffeedog; jazzy latin-tinged house. Seems to be something to do with the guys from down at the jazz funk jam session at the Haymakers that I’m never able to attend.

I saw this linked over on WAN; it’s a video of a guy pounding out the most amazing rhythms on what looks like four buckets, grab the video from here. (It’s 5.6 MB.)

Nuts, Casa have cancelled that gig I mentioned at the USSC, vork has pulled the plug on his site, and Kyla’s had a bike accident on the way to work. Still, this cartoon from Jolly Jack makes me smile…

A photo of me, complete with hangover. No, I’m the devilishly attractive one on the right.