Casa have been busy learning a completely different set for our drummer Dave’s wedding reception: big band and Commitments-style soul tunes.  My parts for the new songs were supplied in proper musical notation, nary a TAB in sight, so it was a case of sight-read or busk it.  While I did busk a lot of the tunes that I knew already, I found that the more I read, the more I was able to get at least a vague idea of what I was supposed to be playing in the tunes that were new to me.  Obviously this is the only way I’m going to learn to read music: have a stack of music dropped in my lap and a room full of expectant people stare at me, waiting…

Remember I mentioned the rise of basstalk?  Turns out the rise was followed particularly rapidly by a fall, partly from the acrimony of the original move from bassworld.co.uk, and partly due to a name conflict with talkbass.com.  However, from the ashes of this online low-note BBQ rises basschat, the premier community for UK bassists.  Register, contribute, and get to know the person in your band who plays a guitar that’s lacking a few strings that little bit better.

It is the habit of Kyla and I to have a boiled egg with soldiers on weekends. We popped down to visit my dad at his place in Cornwall a while back, and he gave us a pair of goose eggs, along with a few bantam eggs. Now as any American will tell you, bigger is better, but damn! Look at this beast:

They’re too big for normal egg cups, we had to break out some espresso cups instead!  10 minutes to boil, and to be frank, I’m not sure it was worth the wait: the white was weirdly translucent and gelid, and the yolk, though large, was largely tasteless.  Should have had it fried, as Dad suggested.

I’ve got a Yamaha BBG-5S at the minute which I love the sound of but don’t like the fact that the neck is wide enough to drive a bus down.  I try and keep to the idealised hand position of thumb on back of neck, wrist flat, but that results in a bit of a bit of a stretch to reach the E and B strings. However, after an hour or so in gigs I’ll start to get tired/lazy and drop my wrist to make the stretch easier, which compresses the tendons and leads to wrist strain. Now this is obviously at least in part a technique issue, but I felt that it might be slightly alleviated if the neck of the bass wasn’t quite so wide… so I went shopping .  I headed down to London, specifically to the Bass Gallery in Camden.  After initially being put off by the shutters over the windows and closed door, but I rang the bell and gained access to a veritable Aladdin’s cave of basses. The guys there were very helpful, and I worked my way through a few different Laklands (the Joe Osbourne signature sounding particularly good), Ibanez (a Soundgear which felt and sounded a bit cheap, though does have the narrowest neck in the world; and a K5 which sounded very good), a Sadowski (neck wider than my current Yamaha!), a Status, a Warwick (which Kyla liked the best), a Fender MIM Jazz…

After all of which I decided that despite being one of the low end Yamahas, my BBG-5S is actually pretty damn good, and doesn’t have a ridiculously fat neck after all. In fact I checked the measurements of the neck against the Lakland website, and barring a certain confusion over crappy imperial/decimal mix (what the heck does 1.8″ mean? 1 + 8 tenths of an inch? Surely that should be in 16ths or 32nds) I think my yammy’s neck has nearly identical dimensions to a Lakland 55-01, though the B string on the latter was a lot clearer and “articulate.”

All of which means that I might not be rushing out to buy a new bass soon… unless GAS out-weighs sense