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Iron Maiden are coming in May! I have tickets with the old man. It’ll be the 4th time seeing these legends!

He's not a fan of crosses

Bali is like the go-to basic bitch holiday destination here for anyone who wants to go outside Europe. My dad's been there though and says it's nice in spite of it being very touristy.

Nah. More like obnoxious backpackers, pretentious instagram "influencers" and the spiritual-esoteric-yoga bullshit types.

Its okay honestly. I just travel and buy stuff or ask someone who is coming down to pick up what I want. Its how 70% of what I own has really found its way to me.

I've just seen this photo and decided I must go here immediately...

My favourite one of the season for obvious reasons.

I really want to try a Strymon pedal sometime soon - especially the one you've got, it looks like the holy grail of delay pedals. The reputation they have is just outstanding - the only companies I can think of that have similar reputations where it just seems like nobody can say anything bad about them are Darkglass Electronics for bass & Revv Amps for guitar (I'm sure there's probably other companies out there I've left off). It's all well and good though not being able to try out those extra premium brands - but for the stuff where it's cheaper and you've got a lot more options at the price point, but they're not always going to be the best options for certain applications... that's definitely where being able to try things out is the best situation. But even then, it can be very hard to try things out - like for instance, the pedal I just ordered off Reverb yesterday - I think my favourite shop here has one or two of them in stock currently. But it's a noise gate and part of the reason I want the noise gate isn't just "I need a working noise gate" (which I do), but also because when I'm playing upstairs in my little music loft and I've got my computer on there's about a 65% chance I'll get a shitload of interference noise. Whereas if I'm playing downstairs, basically anywhere else in my house there might be some pre-amp hiss that needs taming... but it's not that same awful interference feedback noise - so I can drop the threshold down a lot if I'm downstairs. I can't really test how well any noise gate compares to my now dead (RIP) NS-2 for the exact situation I'd actually need it for. I will say that I'm pretty lucky in that the group of people I jam with have pretty nice gear and always let me try stuff out and... you may have noticed from some of my posts on here... we let each other borrow gear we aren't using pretty regularly. Too bad they all have the most ridiculously priced gate pedal... so when I tried that (it works really really well, btw - but you can get fucked trying to sell me a gate pedal for that much ) I knew I wasn't going to be buying it. So if your pedal selection's fairly limited there... how's the instrument selection? I know a few brands I like have factories in India... but how available do those brands make those made in India guitars there?

If the Tories get a majority in December, I hope the left in this country does go all out for power. "They go low, we stay high" is potentially the most disastrous political idea of the decade. Sticking to fact-based, policy-driven politics has essentially amounted to the left bending over and spreading its cheeks, whilst rabid free-market psychopaths storm to power. The right-wing would never have apologised like Labour did for the anti-Semitism thing. Because politically, that would have been the smart thing. Once you apologise, you will be commanded to apologise relentlessly, to grovel more and more deeply, and you'll never escape it. The Tories never bent or broke ranks on Johnson's racism, or the constant evidence of racism throughout their party, and it worked perfectly for them. They weathered the storm, and now it's no longer front-page news. Anti-semitism still is.

Lets not get to instrument availability because that's another road that pisses me off even more. Most instruments I try I only get to do so because of my time with the music institute I visit. So many artists come and visit so I get to try a lot of what I want with those groups. But, whenever I travel anywhere I make it a point to step into a guitar store and give atleast four instruments in a run. You'd be shocked to know this and I am sure someone on here will laugh but over here if you want a Precision bass you will be shit out of luck. They don't carry them and if you find someone with one its way more expensive than it needs to be. Keep in mind this is not even elite standard basses. As for local manufacturers there are some nice ones. DGC (Darjeeling Guitar Company) is nice and I have played two of their three guitars which is just fantastic. We get most Asian manufacturers here like Ibanez, Cort, etc but even those we get the more limited models and if you want to actually play one to see how it is its better to just catch a flight to Singapore or Japan and just try it out there. Then there's the two kill approach on pricing. Firstly, the import price which already makes you think twice about buying locally. Then, the state govt. drop its GST on top of that import price. Now, vendors can't cut deals with customers to give them better pricing (They still try god bless them) so the natural inclination is to not try and get the more pricier instruments down even if there is a market to buy them. The only way I got my JEM I wanted is because I know the person who deals directly with Ibanez and I said I'd be willing to pay for it before they had it shipped here because if I had done the store price id have gotten fucked on the 40% markup from the original price. (P.S. I am going to go with a JEM JR and then mod it to what I want finally). I am thinking ill post pics in here of the entire process and how I go about it incase anyone wants to do it themselves.