I was writing this (fairly short) list last week when all of a sudden we got asked to play a gig at 3pm on Monday for that night. Glad I held off putting this up :) I am now pretty confident that the gigging business will shut up shop for the festive season.
Chris and I @ Banff Castle, photo courtesy Kate James
06/08/11 - @Whinnyfold Fun Day with The Oxbow Lake Band. Personnel: Me, Chris, Andy, Daryl. Bass: Gibson IV
13/08/11 - @Cruden Bay Gala with The Oxbow Lake Band. Personnel: Me, Chris, Andy, Daryl. Bass: Guild B402-A
22/10/11 - @Banff Castle with The Oxbow Lake Band. Personnel: Me, Chris, Andy, Daryl. Bass: Gibson Victory Artist
29/10/11 - @City Cafe, Aberdeen with The Oxbow Lake Band. Personnel: Me, Chris, Andy, Daryl, Al. Bass: G&L Tribute L-2000
02/12/11 - @Cafe Drummond with The Oxbow Lake Band. Personnel: Me, Chris, Andy, Daryl, Al. Bass: Gibson RD Artist
19/12/11 - @The Lemon Tree with The Oxbow Lake Band. Personnel: Me, Chris, Andy, Daryl, Al. Bass: Gibson IV
Gig count now stands at 19. Not exactly hard working, am I?
Hey folks, it's yet another edition of Shameless Plug for my band. It's the launch of our album "Away From The Mainstream" and I'm really looking forward to it. We've been playing a few small, out of town gigs which have been highly enjoyable but it'll be good to come back to play in one of the established live music venues in town. We'll have support from Omar Bin Mohamed Afif who plays his amazing box guitar (genbre?) and the Woodland Roots Orchestra. DJs after the show, the party goes on until 3am!
Well, I hit my first trouble with BE late last night, the connection went down but because I was about to go to bed anyway I just left it. Two things happened.
1) It was working again in the morning
2) I received a text and an email from BE alerting me to the outage.
I have never seen the like before in all my life. This is quite a shock to my system, having recently moved from Orange, where you had to virtually wring someone's neck before they'll A) admit there's a problem with their stuff instead of walking you through pointless diagnostics on your computer and B) actually get around to fixing the damn problem.
Have I mentioned before how utterly woeful and bereft of any technical nous Orange were in my 18 months with them? I might have, but they pissed me off so much that I'll happily ward people off their broadband until the day I die.
Shameless plug time - The Oxbow Lake Band have a couple of gigs this month which I'd like to bring to your attention:
Saturday 22nd October - Banff Castle, Castle Street, Banff
Another new venue for me, I have never played here before in my life. Come to think of it I haven't spent a great deal of time in Banff, despite being schooled 8 miles away in Turriff. I think it was a Turriff vs. Banff school thing (not that I ever felt any affinity with "Turra" - I just went to school there - I'm from Fyvie, another 7 miles further south. Anyone who even suggested I was from Turriff was swiftly corrected.)
Reminiscing aside, it should be an interesting gig. Apparently it's some kind of open session first where anyone who comes along with an instrument can play. Then we play our set. I've never done anything like this before, I'm looking forward to it.
Saturday 29th October - City Cafe, Netherkirkgate, Aberdeen
Another gig, another new place. It's been a long time since I was in this establishment, I think it's changed hands at least twice since. The last time I was in here it was called the City Bar and it was when the bandit jackpot was £6 and wins above a certain threshold were paid out in 20p tokens which could either be fed back into the machine or used to pay for stuff at the bar but curiously not allowed to be exchanged for money. I was in there with a mate and we had a shottie of the bandit. The football was on. We won the jackpot and a repeat, I believe. The machine then proceeded to spit it out 20p at a time, much to the consternation of those watching the football. We got glowered at quite a lot.
Come on down and see us play in a place where I didn't even know bands played!
Upgraded bass amplification!
On Friday I took delivery of a Zoot ZB410 - a 4x10 speaker cabinet which handles 1200W at 4ohms. This reduction in impedance means that I will have 350W available to me instead of the usual 230. Unfortunately the cab arrived slightly damaged in that the HF horn has cracked at the corners and is hanging loose in its mounting hole. Oh dear. Thankfully it was insured in transit. I have sourced a replacement horn and it will be ready for the gigs. The main bonus to all this is that I have replaced my old cab (my trusty Ashdown ABM) which weighed nearly 80lbs. This new cab is a much more svelte 52lbs. But louder ;)
Jayne's away in Birmingham just now at a conference thing. Chico (the cat) has gone outside to take care of business, get some fresh air and maybe hassle some local wildlife. I have wasted most of my day watching films I've already seen.
I haven't been completely useless - I took Jayne to the station, managed to get the recycling out in time, did a load of washing, hung it out to dry, worked on a bass project that I'm building just now, took care of the dishes which had built up, fed the cat and posted a letter for Jayne. But I don't feel like I've made much use of another day out of my allotted time on this planet.
The day is drawing to a close and the only sounds I can hear are the call and response of two clocks ticking at each other, a slight whirr and occasional chatter from the hard drive of my laptop, the clacking of the keys as I type and the very faint drone of a ship in the harbour.
It's times like these when I marvel at how lucky I am to have met someone as amazing as Jayne. It's times like these when I imagine how empty my life would be without her. I hope and pray that we're together for the long haul and that I don't fuck things up, either with a single catastrophic failure or a slow build up of little failures. I know she'll be back in a couple of days, but during the very occasional times we're apart, I get as sad as the sad looking house on the electricity monitor which tells you you've gone over your target consumption for the day.
I love you, Jayne. I miss you and I am just plodding along until you come home again.
I think if you've been to 5 practice sessions and you haven't been told to get lost then I think that means you're in. I've joined The Oxbow Lake on bass. It's good to be back in a band again - haven't done anything since December and haven't been in a band properly since August last year. Things are going well - the lessons have really paid off and I'm finding it so much easier to pick up tunes and come up with something on the spot.
Hopefully there'll be some gigging next month. I'll keep you posted.
I have decided to sort out some stuff that I should have done years ago.
1) Give blood - it's taken me 17 years of adult life to get around to it, and I'll carry that shame to my grave but last Tuesday I finally gave blood for the first time. No problems - I passed the questionnaire, the interview and the blood iron test and was able to give my donation.
One cool thing is that I'll get to find out my blood group - I have never known this. I'm a bit disappointed that I have to wait 12 weeks to go again - with reference to the guilt/shame above I want to go again! Jayne got a badge for her 10th donation (it was actually her 12th but they forgot to give her the badge at the time - it was a long time ago) and a badge for coming back. The badge score is 2-0 to her and the competitive side of me is craving badges!
Seriously though, everyone who is physically able and medically allowed to give blood should. Help a premature baby live and get a free cup of tea and a biscuit - no brainer!
2) Embark on a course of bass lessons - some of you who have seen/heard me play might be thinking "at last!" but it's been something I've been thinking of doing for a couple of years now. My primary motivation is to improve my sloppy, self-taught technique and learn the whys and hows behind playing. I'm not content to simply play notes because they sound good and to learn songs in a painfully slowly note by note way. Already I'm reaping some benefits from knowing major, natural/harmonic minor scales and pentatonic scales. Some of the theory is taking its sweet time to stick in my head (should have done this 20 years ago!), but I'm confident with continued study and application that I'll get there.
There are other things which are in the process of being sorted, but I can't talk about them right now because they are in the very early fragile stages and the cat isn't ready to be let out of the bag. Cat owners will know that the cat will leave the bag when it is damn well good and ready unless said bag is violently shaken ;)
I heard on the radio this morning that the EU has ruled that it is sexist for insurance companies to charge different premiums for people based upon their gender. I nearly ran off the road in surprise ;)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12606610
Of course this means that women's premiums will go up big time, and mine will go up too to pay for all the administration. However, there is one benefit to this outcome - surely it will sound the death knell for Sheila's Wheels. I so despise those adverts. I think the worst one was this:
Women are safer drivers are they? Half the time in that advert they don't even have their hands on the steering wheel. Driving forwards and looking backwards is safe is it? Apparently Sheila's Wheels now do home insurance. Is that home insurance only for women too?
That got me thinking about all the man bashing going around at the moment. Prime culprits for me are:
1) Feminax Express "Pain"-killer
This is the kind of crap I can't stomach. Let's look at the evidence - what has the guy done wrong here? OK, he possibly has his feet on a table which even I would find a little irritating. He chuckles quietly at something on the television - hardly a crime. He is examining the results of a possible nasal or aural excavation and has dropped it on the floor, that's a little disgusting but surely merits little more than a verbal warning. But NO! He is violently ejected out the window by a woman meting out disproportionate summary justice! Take that, man, you utter bane of my life!
2) Oven Pride
This is the worst of the bunch. I can't begin to tell you how demeaning I find this. If you don't think this is sexist then you're an idiot. Sorry. They've also brought out a sequel for Shower and Bath Pride with the same theme. Great - more man bashing.
Why am I writing all this? I've never had to make a claim on my car insurance that was my fault, and I've got 14 years of no claims discount. I can clean and have cleaned ovens before, using nastier chemicals than that Oven Pride stuff. It may work well, but I'm not buying it on principle because of their stupid, sexist adverts. My wife won't mind me saying that I iron better (and more often) than she does. Any woman who has a problem with my behaviour and deals with it in a highly disproportionate way would be shunned like any idiot. "Please stop doing that" or ejected violently out the window. Who's the baddie here?
This man bashing must cease. It isn't funny, it isn't fair, and I don't see why it is tolerated when turn about would most definitely not be fair play. If the roles were reversed in any of these situations, these adverts would be banned very quickly. I think I'm a pretty fair guy - men and women are different, but why can't these differences be seen in a complementary way? There certainly should be no difference in terms of opportunities. If you want to do something, do it - it matters not one jot to me what revision of the human hardware you are. What I strongly object to is putting my television on and being told that I'm rubbish. I'm not. I'm really not. Why am I being made to pay for historical wrongs which I do not and have never perpetrated?
Some of you may remember the bass I bought back in June - a Gibson Victory Artist. Anyone paying attention will remember the awful cosmetic state it was in, but in case you need reminding, here are a couple of pics:
Well, on Wednesday I got it back from my good friend Rich who had performed his magic on the body and neck. Please excuse the large burp of pics but all I can say is wow:
Hats off to Rich, he really has done an amazing job. At the moment the bass is sitting on its own stand while the lacquer hardens some more and some neck adjustments settle down. It sounds amazing, and now it looks amazing too. The only down side to this bass is the weight - that all maple construction makes for a very heavy instrument. To combat this I am waiting for a special strap to arrive which I hope will stop it from destroying my shoulder/back.
I picked up a very cheap laptop a few months ago (a bit bashed, no battery or charger), but to cut a long story short I had a reasonable 2GB Intel Core Solo laptop up and running for about £50. I decided to install Ubuntu on it and have a good go at it.
I used to dabble in Linux many years ago (usually Slackware) but always got frustrated with the software availability and the amount of time it took to fix something I broke if I was tinkering. Things have changed since then - Ubuntu 10.10 is a very polished environment with good package management and both hardware support and software availability has improved greatly.
There are only a couple of things which prevent me from going to Ubuntu permanently. One is the proprietary Windows based CCTV software which I need to keep for the installations I monitor. The other main bugbear was Spotify.
I love Spotify - I don't mind ads and it's great for discovering new and old music alike. Need to practice a set of tunes for a band - just queue them up. Unfortunately a native Linux Spotify is only available to subscribers because they haven't found a way of delivering the ads yet. However, I was surprised and pleased to read last night that Windows Spotify will work quite happily under WINE. Bonus! I gave it a go and apart from a bit of experimenting with audio settings (and having to go against the advice I found online) I got it working. Sweet!
Now all I need is for the antiquated CCTV systems I referred to above to be replaced then it's bye bye Windows!
Happy new year everyone! Being very much between things musically, I decided to look back at all the times I have graced the stage armed with a "big guitar". Not prolific by any means over the past few years but here goes:
Me@The Lemon Tree 03/04/09 - photo: Andy Thorn
09/08@The Music Club (Open mic). Personnel: Me, Jayne, Karel and Charlene. Bass: Squier Bronco
