Andrew Beresford's Blog

I played a gig tonight.

We rocked.

I’ve been a busy bee over the last few days and will be busy over the next few.

Monday night I had a HudLUG meeting – Paul and I gave presentations and the whole thing was well received. I think we also had the biggest turn out I had seen for quite a while, a massive TEN people altogether.

Tuesday night I had a gig at a restaurant in Leeds. It was ok, the place was a bit quiet and the guy running it was a bit worried about us playing too loud. Hopefully things will pick up as people find out a live band are playing there regularly.

Tonight is my night off this week – I’ll be mainly sorting out the washing and doing some tidying up. Maybe I’ll water my plant too (thanks Emma, I’m looking after it I promise!)

Thursday night I have a jam night at Vox. I really enjoy doing them, although this time, because of my schedule on Friday, I won’t be drinking, which means I will be driving, and getting home about 2:30am. Work on Friday is not going to be fun.

Friday evening I’m driving up to Newcastle to visit Emma (and probably Laura K and other people). I’m giving Clare a lift up to Durham on the way, which should give me some good company. I much prefer driving with other people with me to chat to!

Anyway, so, busybusy…

Well, I’ve been on a bit of a selling and spending spree. I bought myself a load of patch leads for my amp, am in the process of selling my old bass amp, bought a new CD of Jackson United, Chris Schiffler’s band whilst he isn’t doing Foo Fighters. I really want to buy some Shure E2c headphones too, but I can’t afford those at the moment.

I managed to persuade the band to buy some equipment last night too. We’re about to order an Alesis 3630 Compressor, an Alesis Nanoverb reverb unit, a case for our mixer and effects, the rackmount kit for our mixer and a wedge monitor so we can hear ourselves!

[image:1267,left,15,5,0] Well, my replacement APM-1000 finally arrived from Sounds Live. I have to recommend them for anyone wanting to buy musical instruments/equipment over the Internet.

My beautiful guitar is poorly. I’ve just noticed that one of the tuners is all bent (which makes for tricky tuning) and that one of the pickups is giving no output when set to serial mode. Feck and arse. Let’s hope it doesn’t cost too much to get fixed.

Well, the unbelievable happened… my amp finally arrived! However, it’s not all good as it appears the power amp has been dropped either in transit or manufacture. I sent an e-mail to Sounds Live (the people I’ve bought it from) and they’ve organised getting a replacement. In the meantime I’m using the damaged one (which seems to work fine, but I’m not paying serious cash for damaged goods).

So I spent last night tweaking dials and generally trying to shake the house to bits. This thing sounds fantastic. It also seems that no one got the poll correct!

[image:1031,left,15,5,0] Well, I finally ordered the rest of my amplifier. The power amp is an Ashdown APM-1000, 2x500w Power Amplifier. I also ordered a 410T speaker cabinet to go with it. At this point, I have to recommend Sounds Live. Ashdown have had some manufacturing supply problems recently and as a result my stuff has been delayed, but Sounds Live have been keeping me up to date and even arranged a special deal on my stuff as I’d waited so long.

I normally prefer to buy stuff from my local music shop, in my case a fantastic shop in Huddersfield called GTR, but as GTR weren’t Ashdown dealers, I couldn’t buy it from them.