NWB - Community Blog

Smoke on the water. Daa Daa Daaaaaaaa

thanks to the tinternet I never go into guitar shops any more

when I did, it was usually some unrecognizable, fast & sloppy 'shred' wiggling, or in the bass section, some unrecognizable, fast & sloppy Mark King style 'typewriter' slap bass horror

funnily enough, it was never anyone actually playing anything that would show them whether it was a good instrument or not (like playing using a clean sound and playing every note slowly & evenly, chromatically up and down the neck & across the strings, testing for dead spots and inconsistencies in tone volume).... just wanking

Usually someone shite trying to do the opening riff to sweet child of mine.
Or some tool shredding and boring everyone.

I heard a bloke playin the passenger for near 20 mins on various guitars. fekin annoying
Also some git doin a cack-handed under the bridge

Mark

Ha Ha , i used tyo spend so much time in the old sound control in manc , that colin the manager would be waiting for me to lock up saying for fucks sake dave just take it home and gig it ,pay me next week lol
but being shy i never wanted anyone near me or to hear so i would have phones on so could play anything i wanted

It's usually dreadful attempts to do shredding whenever I'm in. Have you also noticed how whenever you go past the basses there's always someone doing a ham-fisted attempt at slap bass?

"Have you also noticed how whenever you go past the basses there's always someone doing a ham-fisted attempt at slap bass?"

it's cos it's such a niche style of playing, there's hardly anywhere a bass slapper's services are really needed - so they're forced to record videos of themselves in their bedroom, thumbs ablaze, and stick the results on Youtube, or go and annoy people in guitar shops... no-one'd ever hear em otherwise

Ha Ha! It's so true, I'm yet to see a bassist bedroom video where the person isn't doing some form of slapbass! The other YouTube bedroom musician paradox I've noticed is that if you search for demos of classic synths, 99.9% are done by people who obviously don't know what the black and white bits of plastic at the front do.

On the subject of bad shredders, I was in the guitar shop with my mate who's an incredible guitarist and there was this really annoying idiot doing dreadful shredding (think Nigel's solo in Spinal Tap) and we were trying to demo a piece of gear and we were being totally drowned out by this clown. Worst thing was that he had a face on him to suggest "I'm the best guitarist in the world, you're all rubbish compared to me!!" I was trying to goad my mate into "demo-ing" a guitar next to him and blowing him away but he bottled it! It would've been mint if my mate had launched into his note perfect "Hot For Teacher" and shut him up!

Though in terms of most bizarre pieces of music I've heard in a guitar shop, I was in one once and a bloke launched into "Sandman" as in "Mr Sandman"! He looked a right hard case as well. Though he was demoing a Gibson ES-175 type thing.

I like to play slap the bassist when I can

Mark

Slap bass is the Devil's work. If I go to look at a bass, I just do a
walking bass part and get the feel of the neck andthe tone controls.
No need to brutalise the thing and make noises I won't make on stage.

not a fan of slap, good hard driving bass is what I like

To be fair to people who play slap bass in shops (and to qualify my eariler comment a little), it's obviously fair enough if they do it on stage. I've never really studied the technique of doing it. Woody does a very good job of slap, as does Mike C - so I'd certainly expect them to see what they could get out of a bass while trying it out..