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Carol service this evening where along with all the normal ones we did a cover of the below that went really well, helped by a very awesome singer, equally good violinist and our lead guitarist trying out a new Irish Mandola - they did make me play Cajon though!

A long time ago I used to work for a business making t-shirts and selling them on eBay - the problem was that while we would pay our VAT and taxes and national insurance and run everything above board we were constantly being undercut by companies that would fire up, copy all our designs, flog them cheaper and then disappear - the only way you could do this is either slave labour, or avoid VAT by legal and non-legal means. Cracking down on this, and the likes small parcels of Chinese fast fashion avoiding taxes/import etc is really important unless we want to see a massive hollowing out of our society... So there is the likelyhood this might be rubbish for some hobbiests who flip lots of high value gear and don't keep receipts - but I kinda think the long term this is a good thing. It will protect jobs. Plus it's the data the HMRC are after for trends, going after Beedster who sold two Bitsas, or Dawn who chucked her cheating husband out and sold off all his precious fishing rods is hardly going to be cost effective... the guy flipping 4 cars a month, or the t shirt business turning over £1M+ a year and avoiding all taxes might be worthwhile their time...

Il est Ne, Le Divin Enfant by Dr John

I'm not sure if they're on Spotify, which I don't use either, but if Monk Montgomery's "Bass Odyssey" or "Reality" are there I would recommend them.

“Joys of Christmas” Chris Rea "December Will Be Magic Again” Kate Bush

Pros. Only 2 screws to slacken instead of 4. A few more grams of weight shaved off. Less chance some ham-fisted oaf can disturb components when prising the clip off the battery. Cons There is no universal standard size for 9v batteries. That can cause problems at a really inconvenient time, box was designed for Duracell but you're holding Eveready. Not an issue with a control cavity mount.

Regarding Mohini Dey, I wouldn't condemn her as being a bad person for playing unnecessarily complex bass guitar, or for trying make some money from it by endorsing AI, or whatever. I just think she's either made some bad decisions, and/,or been badly advised by someone on how to further her career via social media. In the Internet Age there's so many more opportunities to make bad decisions that can be instantaneously shared with the whole world forever. Everybody makes mistakes, I've made plenty of my own and then made more when I should have known better. It's important to keep things in proportion. No one has been irreparably harmed by Mohini Dey and whatever she does on social media. Myself, I couldn't care less about AI, it's going to do whatever it's going to do. Nothing is going to hold back that tide. To me it's more about Mohini as a bass player. I she can learn to play that proficiently why can't she hear how bad the end product sounds? It could all be so different if she did.

I always bring my rig to gigs and then decide if I´ll use the provided backline or my own stuff. Since I´m a soundengineer, too, I never had a problem to communicate my needs to the local crew. In the end it´s just plugging an XLR from amp 1 to amp 2 DI out and backwards. I´ll do that for them and all is good, no more additional work for them, no complaints. In my own location I have a Boogie Prodigy top + Powerhouse 4x10" as well as a rack with Sansamp RBI preamp + KMT DC3 poweramp + 2x EV15L (TL606) cabs as 2nd choice. This is clearly a serious kit. We had a few bassplayers in that were not happy, though. It always turned out that they were idiots and had no clue about sound.

Myself and @Dankology on this little beauty written by me - Yousef did basses and knob twiddling with the interface and mac I did baritone, acoustic and used his wonderful Rickenbacker 12 string. we had some mates in on horns and strings and a couple of other singers in. enjoy.

I had used MMC's in a few builds prior but always had a soft spot for the dimazio model one as it was what was in my first ever bass, so decided to try it paired up with an MMC. It can be a bit too much soloed, but blended with the bart they sound great together. In that fretted one in the pic above the signal goes from the blend knob to a bart NTBT pre to give treble and bass cut and boost which it provides plenty of sonic flexibility. When I first built it I was considering parallel / series switches for one or both pickups but having played it for ten years or so now I don't think it is needed, plus it would turn an already busy control cavity into a spaghetti monster. For the new build I am aiming for a more tidy wiring set up built around an east filter pre amp, sourced second hand from the forum (pic below). A Question I have for anyone who might know is, what are the pros and cons of a separate battery box over mounting the battery inside the main control cavity ?

Take a look at the Reggae thread.

That´s only in the Black Forest area in Germany 😘

Great: we had a fabulous time at the White Hart in Melton, rocked the place out, hot & sweaty. Sad: it's our last gig at the venue because the landlord and landlady are leaving. They can't make the place pay for itself. Sunday evenings always draw a crowd for the entertainment, but they have struggled to get people in on other nights of the week. Anyway we gave them a good send off. I took the smoke machine for a change, which made all the lights look even better. We didn't even keep track of how long we played. The only thing I forgot to do was to take a photo.

For some unknown reason, I have an itch to listen to some reggae and widen my understanding and appreciation of this genre. Not from a playing perspective but more of a listening appreciation. However, I know absolutely nothing about the groups etc. I do know a handful of Bob Marley track, mostly the well known ones and I really like them. I have heard of Aswad but only because they were in the charts in the 80's or 90's and sadly, I have heard of UB40 who I detest. So I guess I'm after the good shit to listen to. If Bob Marley is what Miles Davis is to Jazz, then who is John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Art Blakey, Charlie Mingus of the reggae world. Any recommendations greatly appreciated.

Just back home from the annual Christmas guitar club concert in my local village hall. Two concerts - one for the younger learners and one for the older more proficient kids. Amazing to see them progress over the years in confidence and musical skills. I bring the PA, the lights and an extra pair of hands to help with setting up and sorting/tuning etc between performers, as well as donating my bass rig for the evening and guesting on the odd song. Proper Christmas thing. Excuse the dull pic but it’s all I managed.

I just thought I'd write a quick first-impressions review here, as I can't see any other threads in the BC archives on this system. The basics first. The Distiller is an active resonant-filter tone circuit, like what you'd find on an Alembic or a Wal. It consists of a low-pass filter whose resonant frequency is swept up and down using the potentiometer. Everything above the frequency gets cut, everything below stays unchanged. You can also switch in two levels of boost at the resonant frequency. Before I go on to the review bit, I should say that I didn't buy a filter preamp because I want to sound like Justin Chancellor. This is an unusual situation in the filter-preamp market, which I've done my best to illustrate with the venn diagram below. I mention this because a lot of the existing discussions on these sorts of devices seem to judge them mostly on the metric of "how cool does it sound when I play the riff from Schism?". I, on the other hand, have no strong opinions about Tool, and just wanted something that gave me a wide range of tones without covering my bass in knobs. By that measure, I think this does a great job. The best part for me is the regular low-pass filter (with no resonant frequency boost), which is a very effective but surprisingly unobtrusive thing. With a gentle turn of the Distiller, you can roll off just that annoying clicky highest of high end without muddying the musical treble you want to keep. Go beyond that, and you have effectively a very precise and controllable version of a passive tone control. It goes from "normal but with the edge taken off" to "reggae through the wall from a house party down the street". The two boost modes are, in my opinion, very usable at the top and bottom end of the range, but perhaps not so much in the middle. At the top end with both the low and high boost modes, you get some great aggressive sounds while maintaining the option of cutting out the clicky noises. There are some good sounds there – particularly in the lower mids, and particularly with the low-boost mode – but a lot of them feel a bit too nasal and odd sounding to be useful. As you get towards the low end, the low-boost mode gives you some great dub-like sounds while the high-boost makes your bass sound a lot like a synth bass. I can see myself playing around with those a lot. So yeah. Two thumbs up from me. Oh. Also, here are some very quickly recorded and very rough samples of the three modes. Each one starts with the frequency sweep all the way up, and then goes down through the range step by step. I apologise for both the quality of the recording (just straight into Audacity) and my playing (best described as repetitive, tuneless noodling). No boost. (I checked this against old recordings, and I can confirm that the starting point sounds indistinguishable from the bass when it was wired passive). Distiller_no-boost.mp3 Low Boost Distiller_lo-Boost.mp3 High Boost (might be clipping the interface a bit here and there). Distiller_hi-boost.mp3

That's very helpful and informative, thank you. So essentially there's nothing too wrong with the Legacy in itself, but it's still distinctly different to the HAZ that's such a big part of the Spector tone. That's fair enough. I don't have a HAZ-style preamp as a point of comparison, but my assessment of the CST with the Legacy preamp is that played through my Bass Driver and Diamond BC1 Bass Compressor the tone is pretty epic and easily identifiable as a Spector NS2. It certainly seems to get fairly close to the sound we all know and love. As I said before, I'm no expert and this CST is my first Spector, despite having wanted one for more than 40 years. I'm in the market for another one, maybe even a USA model so I'm doing my research. I've got a lot of nostalgia for the Kramer-era Spector basses that as a young hopeful, I used to oggle in upmarket guitar shops in the USA in the late '80's. I've been toying with the idea of ordering a custom NS2 that looks like one from that era, with a HAZ pre, of course. That said, my CST seems so good that I might just get a Euro Doug Wimbish to keep it company. It certainly makes more economic sense to do that.