Ed_S

Mine would be my pair of Rockbass Streamer LX 5s. The black one is a pre-2024-revamp model, came as very cheap and scuffed b-stock with a dead preamp, neck like a banana and frets hanging off the edges, but quite a light example at 3.8kg so well worth saving. Fixed it up and it's now a passive workhorse. The white one seems to be a 2024 with the new frets etc. but still came as cheap b-stock (maybe a demo unit for the new spec?) and whilst it needed setting up, it seems to be perfect. Average weight at 4.2kg, but looks smooth under stage lights. One of us needs to, and it'll never be me. The Ibanez SR Premiums have gone and the Warwick RBs are my main gigging pair. Have to also give a shout to my travel-light front-of-gigbag rig, which all arrived this year: Fender Telepath wireless -> Tech 21 Bass Fly Rig v2 -> TC BAM200 The BAM obviously has its limits, but it's so much more useful to me than the Elf I had; it's loud, it takes the Fly Rig well and its EQ actually does something. Worst... nothing's really coming to mind. I've not bought all that much, and I think it's all been alright.

Sonata Arctica on Sunday, and Battle Beast last night - both in Manchester. Sonata were still very good but I ended up drinking my way through their support bands. Last night was, however, exceptional. If you like cheerful metal and get the opportunity, definitely go and see Majestica, Dominum and Battle Beast.

Fair point. I guess my opening attempt might be to define it as playing the instrument and learning/remembering songs only by listening rather than using visual cues, be that written notes/notation or watching hand positions/signals of other players etc. Though I do visualise my own fretboard and finger positions to some extent while playing, so I can’t say there’s no visual element to the processing; just not the input. I wouldn’t go much further than that, as I don’t think the term necessarily tells you anything about what you do with the musical information you just took onboard.. only how you consumed it. Personally, I learn songs monolithically end-to-end rather than in sequenced chunks, so it can take me a good few listens if it’s a long and complex tune. Learning the lyrics helps me to remember the song long-term. On topic, in the rehearsal room it does mean that my least favourite question is “what did/do you play for that bit?”, as I genuinely have no idea. Play your bit, I’ll join in, you can watch and tell me!

Heh, I do appreciate it more now I understand that not everyone does it, but it comes with mixed blessings and curses when it's all you have to work with. The most obvious issue is that I'm stuffed if I can't hear myself properly on stage, but having to commit every song I play to memory, to the same extent, irrespective of whether I like it or not, does occasionally make me wish I could just read them on the gig and then not be humming them to myself for the rest of eternity.

Personally, I don't wait for the amp to fail before using a preamp to the desk; I work on the basis that consistency and reliability of the DI feed to the FoH is the most important thing, so I run a pedalboard with HPF/compression/preamp on it that gives me the whole sound I want to send that way every time. With that sorted, the amp on stage is really just for me so it only has to make the pedalboard loud and perhaps EQ it a little to suit the particular stage and monitoring situation. It does mean that I can't use the preamp as part of my wider tone - it's the whole thing - but working the way I do actually means that the amp (and its built-in DI) becomes my hot-spare backup in case the preamp goes down. Even better than that, it doesn't have to be the same amp every time.. or even mine.

First proper rehearsal (after the initial meet and jam session) with the new covers band went really well, and we've very easily agreed on a couple of simple rules of engagement; [1] we want to make the singer sound as good as possible, so we'll play it where he needs to sing it and if it ultimately doesn't suit then we won't waste time on it, and [2] nobody has to play anything they hate. Plan is to get an initial set together and do some open mics to see what response we get, but the main drive behind it is that we play what we like and have fun doing it. With that in mind we went down the initial list, booted the couple I just wasn't going to have anything to do with, swapped some others with better suited songs by the same band, added some to look at which are my influence and they'd never heard of before, self-assigned some homework which are their influence and I'd never heard of before, and even chopped up and reordered a tune on the spot to get rid of a keyboard solo and make 'our' version. We have a better list for next time and it feels like everyone is pulling in the same direction. It's been ages since I've had to explain my odd (so I'm told) musical ways to new people, so that was fun, but they had to understand that keys / notes / dots / tabs / chord charts / number systems are all meaningless to me - I play by ear, have no idea which notes I'm playing, 'know' a song if I can literally hear it in my head, really don't care which key you move it to.. etc. It felt like one of those initial dating conversations where you start to question whether it'd be easier to just stay single than go over all this again, but at least they know now!

We played the 7pm slot in a new all-day power metal festival at a large social club yesterday. 6th band out of 9 on the bill, but I got there for the first band at 2 and didn't leave until midnight so it was a long enough day to be feeling it this morning. It had the usual metal-crowd friendly atmosphere, though, and the other bands were all really good with enough in common but not so much to be samey, so it was nice to make a day of it. Being a social club in Sheffield, the Stones bitter was fresh and not too expensive. Of course it had to be absolutely bucketing it down so everything got a water-tightness test on the way in, but cabs were provided so that made things easier. Said cabs were a pair of Vanderkley 1x12s that I was told were good for a thousand watts so am assuming were MNT112s. I thought we did alright, but I personally made a bit of a balls-up to begin with. I have two Warwick RB Streamers that I use for gigging - the black one was b-stock with a dead preamp so is gutted and rewired passive, while the white one is factory-spec with its preamp intact. Correct settings for the black passive is everything on 10, whilst for white active it's Bal/B/T in the middle detents and just the volume up to 10. I've been playing the passive recently, so of course picked up the active and without thinking set the balance fully forward (not a massive problem) and bass / treble boosted to max. Was a very brief line-check so it didn't really hit me how wrong it sounded until we started. Half way through the first song I twigged and had to give the sound guy a minor episode by correcting the EQ and messing up his mix, but despite that, everyone I spoke to afterwards said we sounded good. One guy commented that the vocals became much clearer from the second song... mhmm..! Streamer LX 5 (active..) -> Telepath wireless -> Fly Rig v2 -> Markbass Nano 2 -> 2x Vanderkley MNT112 (?)

If it's all I'm taking, I favour something 'real' that doesn't have to boot up. For example I personally wouldn't entertain the HX stuff without a backup because my very-light-home-use-only HX Stomp no longer boots - it just sits there with the backlight on but nothing happening. Support told me I was out of warranty/luck and could pay somebody to look at it if I wanted, but tbh it was never useful enough to warrant throwing good money after bad, so it's a paperweight. Fly Rig v2 is a good unit for travelling light (or at very least I like mine) but make sure you mark the positions of your settings, as the little knobs and buttons are easily scrambled in transit.

Got invited by the drummer of a band I've depped with a couple of times to check out another band of his which is being rebooted. Went down to meet and jam this afternoon, and it's a four-piece alongside singer, guitarist/bv and drummer, playing upbeat rock/alt-rock/indie-rock covers that aren't my usual fodder but I can still see being fun. All involved seem to be affable and have realistic expectations, the singer can sing, the guitarist had his combo up off the floor and was playing at a reasonable volume... sounded pretty good, so I reckon I'll see where it goes. Travelled light as I was on the bus and knew there was a decent cab I could borrow in the room: RB Streamer LX 5 -> Telepath wireless -> Fly Rig v2 -> Markbass Nano 2 -> Hartke VX215

Hmmm.. fair! It all seems to be about fan-fret, headless 5 or 6 strings round these parts when I'm out and about at gigs. Maybe if they'd given this one a 35" scale and set it up BEAD out of the box it might have added something. At least two paragraphs of AI word soup, if nothing else!

If I was still gigging 4s I'd definitely have one of those. Not because of that advertising copy, mind. Seems odd to target the metal market and not offer a 5, but it saves me from myself.

I've only done my first few dep gigs in the last year, but off the back of them the band I helped out say they now consider me their go-to, and I've also been invited to check out one of their drummer's other projects with a view to joining. Pretty happy with that, tbh. It's their original material that I've been playing, so I guess it's a bit different to knowing a set of covers or standards, but turning up rehearsed, equipped and suitably attired was how I approached it all the same. I was very quick to check before accepting the gig that they were happy for me to play their songs 'as me' rather than trying to mimic their bassist's style; I just don't find that a fun thing to do, and fun plus a couple of drinks was the pay. Fortunately they were fine with that. The one thing I did which might count as advice, is learn more of their songs than they'd asked me to. As it happened, one of the gigs was on a snowy evening which stopped another band on the bill from travelling and unexpectedly increased all the other set times in the lineup by 10 minutes, so me saying that I could play them another three songs was appreciated. After the last gig, one of the singers came to apologise profusely for not having publicly thanked me on stage for helping them out (again, seems to be the done thing with originals; possibly less so with covers bands?) but said that she'd forgotten I wasn't actually in the band! I thought that was thanks enough.

Never had any significant problems with the DI100s deployed by techs at small venues. I've generally found DI20s to be quite noisy and/or susceptible to interference, though, which is a shame as they're handy in concept.

I played many a gig through one of the earlier Rumbles - not sure whether it was a 2x10 or 1x15 but it was about 100-150W and it had a red light in the port to make the whole thing glow. It was the house amp at a venue in the middle of town where available storage space and parking dictated that most would make do with it rather than bring their own, and in fairness to it, it had the absolute ever-loving kicked out of it for literal years and held up better than I would ever have expected. It never sounded great, but it was identifiably bass and it was loud enough. Having also played through a few loaner Ultrabasses and Lowdowns, I don't think it'd be much of an upgrade. I had a V3 Rumble 500 (2x10) for a while, bought as a "let's see what the fuss is about" kind of experiment. The fuss is legitimate - they're great combos for gigging and I agree with the consensus that they sound much better than the previous models. I sold mine on as, in preference order, I use a small amp head with whatever cab somebody is willing to lend me, or take a lightweight Barefaced cab if I really must; as good as the Rumble was, it was always surplus. I'd happily play through one as provided backline, though, and personally I thought the tone when testing it at home was really quite good. I think clearing the decks and getting one of the smaller V3 models would likely be a worthwhile upgrade. Don't think I've ever played through a Cube for bass. I used one of the guitar versions and found it somewhat underwhelming.. bit better than a 'Spider' but not as good as a 'Vypyr'.. but that's neither here nor there!

Referring to 'top' and 'bottom' strings in terms of relative elevation in conventional playing position, instead of musical pitch.