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“Dude. Look inside the other bucket.†– yes, that’s an intentionally meaningless quote. I don’t want to spoil a thing.
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New gear!
I have had a Stagg BA-20 bass combo amp for ten and a half years. I was given it for Christmas in 1997, after I had been playing bass for a few months. It’s quite weak, with only 20W power output, but I actually used it for practises and small gigs for many years.
I was then given a real bass rig by my mother for my 21st birthday. It consisted of a Peavey Nitrobass head and a Peavey 115BX BW cabinet (which contains 1 15″ Black Widow speaker). The Nitrobass head is still manufactured under the name of the Max 450. I used this rig at a few gigs, and much like broadband internet, it set new expectations for my bass sound. The little Stagg bass amp now sounded pathetic and barely useable by comparison.
My mum gave me a second 115BX BW cabinet, I think it was for my 22nd birthday. However, I haven’t done a gig since, so I’ve never gigged with both cabinets together. In fact, I haven’t used both simultaneously for at least the last four and a half years. These days I keep one of them upstairs in my music room, and the other downstairs, so that I can take the head and one cabinet to band practises without needing to lug an 80lb cabinet downstairs and then back up again (also, I don’t really have room upstairs for both cabs!)
I’ve been considering getting a combo amp that is more appropriate for my needs. My dad was down this weekend, and when I mentioned it, he said “well, it’s your birthday in a couple of months, so let’s go shopping, and I’ll pay.” In the event, he forgot to take his credit card, so I paid, but he will reimburse me.
So I now have an Ashdown EB 12-180. It’s not as loud as the Peavey rig, but it’s loud enough for my needs. It weighs less than each 115BX BW cabinet, and will fit in the boot of my car. If I’ve done my calculations correctly, it has the portability of the Stagg amp, combined with the volume of the Peavey. It’s the only bass amp I need, and I can now sell the others (though I don’t expect much for the Stagg).
There is a possibility that in a few years I may find myself playing larger venues, and the Ashdown won’t have enough oomph. If this happens, then it will have made sense to hold onto the Peavey rig. But I think the chances of this are slender – if it does turn out this way, then I guess I’ll look for a second hand rig. But let’s assume that this isn’t going to happen.
The Peavey rig is in great condition, and it will be a shame if I don’t get 50% of the original price for it. My mum has a very generous streak in her, which sometimes leads her to buy overly extravagant gifts. In this case, she spent £900 on a bass rig for me 7 years ago, which I have never really been able to push to its limit, and all the money lost to depreciation has just disappeared into the ether (or into the pockets of the Peavey company, technically).
That said, I don’t think she’s expecting me to pay her back for it, so I’m actually going to end up £450 better off (albeit at her expense). Maybe I should just shut up.
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House Spider
It wasn’t actually even a particularly large spider. I just like winding Sevitz up.
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Ripples
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The one problem with the Nikon D40
I bought my Nikon D40 from a camera shop. I spent a fair amount of time talking to the expert behind the counter, discussing what I would get if I were to buy a more expensive camera.
The expert was telling me how a more expensive camera might have more megapixels, it will be more sturdily built (hence able to withstand harsher conditions), and it will have more buttons on the body which would allow me to change settings quickly (instead of having to navigate through piles of menus).
I nodded, and let him know that none of this was particularly compelling. I gave him one last chance to upsell me. I told him that I had no intention of buying another DSLR in the next few years, so I needed to get the right one first time. Was the Nikon D40 missing any features which, in six months time, I would really really want.
No, said the expert. Definitely not.
Six months later, with an interest in experimenting with HDR photography, I discovered that the Nikon D40 does not have Automatic Exposure Bracketing. Fuck you, expert.
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“The modern digital age has enabled bad music to be mass-produced very quickly and the wannabe famous “artistes “ in the basement are flooding the airwaves.” – all very true. Sometimes I feel like half of the world’s population is in a band. The market is saturated. Supply is exceeding demand many times over. But it’s free, so people download it anyway, which gives the illusion of demand. I expect that there will be a tipping point in the near future, and virtually overnight everyone will realise that unless you are in the lucky 0.1%, you will not be able to make significant money from your music (just like how virtually overnight everyone realised that food is getting expensive, petrol is getting expensive, and we need to save the planet RIGHT NOW). Lots of great stuff in the comments too.
Some humiliations never die.
When I was 13 years old, I made an utter tit of myself over a girl. Actually, I did that about a dozen times over the course of my teenage years. But one, in particular, was particularly cringeworthy ((as an aside, I’m thinking that one of these days I should write a top 5 embarrassing crushes blog post, in the style of *High Fidelity*)). I declared my undying love for a tall blonde girl, wrote her letters, the most hideously gloopy kind of shit. The tragic thing was that she wasn’t the kind of girl who appreciates romance and perseverance and all that, so I really was casting my pearls before swine. She wanted an in-crowd kind of guy, ideally one who was more than 10 years older than her. What was I thinking?
Eventually I woke up and realised that she was a phenomenally unremarkable girl, and that I was actually lucky that she’d deflected my advances for so long. And like that, it was all over. I was civil to her when I saw her around school, but that was it.
Nine minutes ago, I received a Facebook invitation from her. I don’t use Facebook any more, but I have subscribed to the RSS feed of my contacts’ status updates, and I still receive emails when people send me a friend invitation (though I don’t bother acting on them). In her invitation, she made a reference to one of the things that I wrote in one of my love letters. I’m not going to repeat it here, because this is my site, and you can’t make me incriminate myself.
Here’s a brief rundown of all the thoughts barrelling through my head.
* Oh god, she remembers me writing that.
* On the upside, she still remembers me writing that. Must have meant a lot to her.
* Or she’s taking the piss
* She could be taking the piss
* If we assume that, then this train of thought comes to a dead end. Let’s try something else. Let’s assume that she’s not taking the piss, and see where that takes us.
* Maybe those letters really meant a lot to her. Maybe they brightened up a miserable, superficial existence that she secretly despised.
* Maybe they gave her a genuine boost to her self-esteem.
* Maybe her life went downhill once I lost interest in her.
* Oh good, another name to add to the trail of devastation.
* I think she’s probably just taking the piss.
* Thanks for reminding me of all that. Thanks a bunch.
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“Nine minutes into the pre-recorded interview for Radio 4 arts show Front Row, the 31-year-old asked to leave the studio as he was not enjoying himself.” Chris Martin is a bit of a tosser.
Last night, I decided to perform some bicycle maintenance tasks that I’ve been putting off for too long, one of which was to adjust the angle of the saddle.
It is said that a bad workman blames his tools. On this occasion, I am the kind of workman who blames his tools, but ultimately accepts responsibility for buying shitty tools in the first place.
Shortly after setting out this morning, it became clear that I had not tightened the nuts sufficiently. As I rode over the bumps, my saddle tilted backwards a few notches. After stopping three times in the space of half a mile, I realised that something had to be done. Fortunately, I knew that just up the road was a garage, and I wouldn’t even need to detour.
I kept my bum off the seat while I rode onto the forecourt. The mechanic kindly loaned me a 15mm spanner and I was on my way again with no detour required, and only a five minute delay.