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NBD! Moollon in da hoose!

Afternoon all, Well it happened didn't it. After much thinking and pondering I decided that with a bass as valuable (for me anyway) as the AB1, I'd be too precious with it and not want to use it out the house. So I set about getting a combustion. After a few emails and a phone call to Mark at bass direct, I put down my first payment on my first Dingwall. Really looking forward to playing it and can't wait for its arrival, but I think the AB1 will do me very nicely. Yep, irrespective of my own logic I went for the AB1. Heres the spec: AB1 5/3 candy cola finish maple board 3 pickup model Active preamp dual density ash body Dingwall USA strings Dingwall gigbag

Ding a dang my dang-along ding dong.

Mine is arriving in the morning The included hard case would normally set you back a third of this on its own!

Without taking anything away from Jaco (I am a big fan and adore his Weather Report era) I actually do find it very annoying that nobody ever wants to mention the contribution that the Welshman Percy Jones made during the same era with his fretless bass playing. His playing on Brian Eno's "Another green world" from 1975 is astounding, groundbreaking and it is blatantly obvious that he had a big impact upon the subsequent work of Mick Karn. In many ways his playing was in many ways more expansive and exploratory than Jaco ever was. Jaco stumbled across Percy in person once in the states (what are the odds?) and overheard him practicing...and was apparently completely blown away by his playing I remember the affect Percy's astounding bass work on the Brand X LP "Masques" had on me as a young player. As a British bassist he is criminally underrated in my opinion.

I am absolutely in favour of 'like the music you like', but I really don't get this! Why shouldn't a player utilise the full scope of their instrument if it serves to realise their musical/compositional/expressive goals?

The thing with Jaco is if you don't like jazz and R and B, you're unlikely to like his music. I think it's great - always have done - but there were plenty of other jazz influenced R and B players around at the time, and plenty of jazz upright players doing something similar - I always though Nils Henning--Pedersen, who played with Oscar Peterson, was absolutely a stand out player. I have taken the time and trouble to learn a number of Jaco's bass parts - some are pretty challenging - it has helped my overall playing and understanding of music greatly. However I am heavily slanted towards an R and B/ funk influence - jazz, rock, rock and roll and other genres influence me but not as much. There is no doubt Jaco was a superb bass player and musician whether you like him or not. Marcus Miller was a session player on R and B pop records (eg Somebody Else's Guy - Jocelyn Brown) - I first came across him knowingly (as opposed to having heard him on records not realising it was him) in Miles Davis's band in the early 80s - where he came across as a funk/R and B player with jazz influences - another fine player with totally his own style and musician-wise, way beyond just a bass player. I don't have a problem with people not liking Jaco - I suspect if you dislike jazz it's likely you won't like Jaco - similarly I dislike a lot of Paul Weller and Morrisey which is probably anathema to many people - just personal taste I guess.

OK You learn something new every day! Cheers! FWIW I didn't mind pressing return twice to create a paragraph....

I think when you asked for some replacement rubber feet, Alex got the wrong end of the stick.

I am indeed. Actually, I have an 8 string Warmoth explorer as well as my Hamer Chapparal. So, as to how they differ. The 8 (and all 8's I've ever played) have a more mid-range tone. The Hamer is much fuller in the low end. I've played loads of each. Only my opinion, but here we go. The Dean edge 8 is quite good. Circuit and pickups could get changed, but not bad. When I played a Spector I didn't like it. It's actually the circuit rather than the bass which plays well. A friend had an Esp (not the Frank Bello version). It was crap as it was a 4 saddle bridge. Avoid that and the Hagstrom for the same reasons. As for the 12's. I didn't like the Dean at all. Neck is ludicrously wide. The Hamer is much thinner and has better pickups and circuit. There's a reason they cost more. I've played a Jeff Ament Hamer 12 and the neck profile is the same, but of course the body is different and it weighs a lot more. As to how I use them, I use signal splitting via a crossover. Top is sent to a Digitech 2120 for distortion and in the case of the 12, quad chorusing. It's all mixed back to mono and there we are. I don't subscribe to the idea that an 8 is easier to get around because of the lesser number of strings. Set up well it doesn't matter.

One of my students bought an embassy and it was delivered yesterday. He brought it to his lesson, and we unboxed it first impressions are very very good. For a £330 bass this thing is excellent. Solidly built, and a comfortable weight. a nice vintage styling, with an eye to practicality. Pups are sounding great. - the pro buckers didn't disappoint in the slightest. Setup was good out of the box- only a slight tweak of the truss required

Looks in great nick, D and G strings have never been touched

I'd get Nile Rodgers to produce it - that seems to work.

Not exactly changed my world at the time , but certainly let me know I wasn't alone in it , which helps sometimes billy bragg , a New England

Thanks for all the good thoughts, people; I appreciate it. @roman_sub, yes, I figured it might be a useful opportunity to work on right hand stuff. It’s not the worst mishap I’ve heard of. A pro jazz pianist I know snapped the tendon in his right hand middle finger by putting on his socks! Was out of action for six weeks. He wrote a piece for left hand every day so all was not lost. Actually, some of the stuff he wrote and played during this time was incredible and he came away with enhanced technique and a body of new music. Silver lining indeed.

The neck joint should be as you have said should fit with a gentle push and you should be able to lift the body by the neck only without any slipping at the joint Well that’s the rule I work to anyway?

Just made their first breakthrough!

I do! I have a fraction of his vision or of his ability or of his skill!

Great work again, Silvia! Thanks for all your hard work on this, yet again.. ☺

Doesn't he look dignified with glasses on..

Here's one of mine Fender MIJ crafted in 2000. It's been dropped a million times but it's still perfect. Blue Blue

It's hard to choose top three but the way I feel. No jazz though. 1. Piece of Mind 2. Master of Puppets 3.so many to include

Don't forget, the thumb is a finger. Sometime I do it for ease (just on the E string) because if I were to try it with (other) fingers, I'd need to shift up and rest my thumb on the pickup; and if its horizontally not there, I'd need to either find the pickup (to rest on) or float my right hand around in mid-air, guessing. I suppose the correct solution is to buy a 5-string, since they have a 34" long thumb rest built in.

Honestly they blew me away. A "proper" rock band as it were. The energy and enjoyment coming froming the band was truly infectious! Here's a little clip of the only song I grabbed on my phone as the crowd was a bit calmer during this one!

Thanks for posting them, Silvia. Here's to next year's

Hi man. Good advice from dood here (as per usual). It totally depends on the scale length of your instrument. Most of our strings are available separately and most dealers will order them in for you at request.

Hi man. Adam from D'Addario UK here. The difference is in the coating method. The way we do it is to coat the wrap wire before wrapping it on the string. This helps retains the natural feel of the string whilst still protecting it. http://www.daddario.com/DADExpLanding.Page Hope this helps.

Sorry, my fault - they were set to Private. They should work now.

Looks great! I hate that I missed this one! I don't know if it's my work permissions or something your end but the videos won't play.

He still is. His new album is mint.

Been mentioned already, but pretty much anything from Dark Side of the Moon. So much of is still very pertinent today over 40 years after it was written. Roger Waters was a lyrical genius back then.

This is such a stretch that it starts to resemble goalpost moving - deliberate or otherwise. I don't know whether joking is involved or whether this is to be taken seriously, and a any rate, I'm not gonna discuss this further. Sparked by this post, however, allow me to talk about some concepts. LONG POST WARNING: MOST PEOPLE SHOULD NOT NEED TO READ THIS. See, I already sense/understand that this post is gonna be way too long, and only part of that has to do with me struggling to be brief in a foreign language. My apologies. Also, I'm not writing anything that I do not assume is general knowledge. It's just that some posts in this thread make it seem necessary to remind some people of some things. Apologies, again. Anyway, Bassman7755, in his very own words, said: In other words: he is able to judge that I lack social calibration. He's possibly right, and me defending myself is not why I use his text here. The point however is: WHY can he judge this? Because he himself is socially calibrated on a higher level. In his choice of wording, one of the unspoken premises in the whole enthymeme-like construction is that people have social calibration on different levels. Bassman7755 happily is one of the people who can judge that people like me (or me only) operate on a lower level. Now, I'm fine with this. I'm just about resourceful enough to realise that I'm a far-from-perfect being, and my social calibration is mixed. I do not agree with his assessment entirely though, supported by my happy experiences in the area, but I do accept that at least I should've worded more carefully and empathetically. BTW, when I used McCartney as an example, I honestly was unaware that that name was even mentioned already, and mentioned even by Bassman7755 in the same post I quoted. I naively used the name in expectation of people mentioning McCartney later. I'm truly sorry about that aspect of my post that Bassman7755 reacted to, and would have worded more sensitively had I remembered that Bassman7755 has used the name. I only had noticed him mentioning Kate Bush. But at any rate, Bassman7755 himself seems to accept the very concept that is at play here: Some people are better equipped than others in different areas. Some are better equipped than others to judge aspects about others. My neighbour judged that I had no talent at football. He was right. But if I'd shown any talent, then we'd probably need someone else than my neighbour to judge exactly how far I could go in my football career. In most or all aspects of life there are certain statistical distributions, and a startling amount of those distributions roughly follow the Gauss curve (standard distribution). This would for example mean that only few people function on a bottom level and very few on a top level - the easiest example being that few people have an IQ below 50, and roughly equally few have one above 150. Most people are less than a standard deviation away from average. As to being musically talented, without going into theoretical debates about what it is and is not, but just going by the regular term as we tend to use it, those that are least talented musically, either just have no relationship to music, or they only like the least demanding forms of it, and more demanding forms of music are deemed to be noise or similar. That non-demanding music is still easy to judge by others who're higher up on the staircase. The rest gives itself. The more advanced the music, the fewer people are able to create it or appreciate it. Theoretically, only one person at the top is able to appreciate all existing music and to create that stuff. In real life of course it doesn't work exactly that way. Oh yes, I hear voices in my head, Bassman7755's voice amongst others, but bear with me: What music can become very popular, and what music can become popular classics that we hear on the radio decade after decade? By definition it's the music that large groups in society can appreciate (not too demanding) and at the same time: that will not bore them easily. That last part is essential as it is there some of the quality lies.The quality does not often lie in the three chord harmonic development. Are those popular classics written by highly talented people? Very often: yes. Sometimes: no. Burt Bacharach and The Beatles are certainly highly talented, but others exist as well who just are not. Are they written by the one, single most musically talented musician of all time? Not very likely. Why not? Because that person very likely showed talent at an early age, and got this talent developed. That person would experience popular music as demanding little, and also as giving little, and would turn his/her brain to other music - music that is not only food of love, but also food for brain. Mozart at an early age could write much more well-constructed, well-flowing and error-free music than most of us can ever dream of, and since he only developed upwards despite his life style and general lack of Bach-like driving forces. In all likeliness, the one single most musically talented person of all time, unlike the many highly talented people of more regular shape who write popular classics, is in the group of people who are somewhere in that ivory tower that many people hate, where new concepts are created, and the borders of what can be art are moved. Bach conservatively stayed within that old baroque music, but at the same time let it go on paths where no music had gone before. If you know your stuff, the gap between Bach and Vivaldi is enormous! (I may earlier have written about how Bach and Vivaldi react differently when a certain chord/voice sequence brings the music to steeper, narrower paths with higher danger level.) As an example of what I'm on about: In the eighties, I heard two interviews. One was with a highly respected Norwegian folk music player. The other was with B.B. King. Both in all essence said the very same thing: "People always ask me what music inspires me, and what rocks my boat. But at my level, what I love, and what inspires me, is not the same stuff that the people who love my music love, and when I answer, they always respond: "But that isn't even blues anymore" / "That isn't even folk music anymore!". But it is blues/folk music! It just is more demanding, and it's appreciated by the likes of me - not by the masses who love my music." There! B.B. King said it, so it must be true even though I said it too. I'm sure I wrote some unnecessary stuff and forgot some essential stuff, but I'm quitting now. Again, I apologise for the length and for the low speed in the thought development area. I know some people on BC could have said the same in one sentence. I can't. I've started and deleted an answer many times, and have also thought many times I'd delete the whole thing written above. But I didn't. I just hope it's of service to one or two people.

Just bought Kev's Avalon U5,great guy to deal with,and very easy transaction, Cheers Kev,Regards,Julian.

Definitely. I've always preferred to play original songs, it's certainly more interesting than playing covers, especially when people berate you for not playing it exactly like the album version (usually the guitarist!).

niches is the key word here. If the audience is only a niche, no matter how popular you are in that niche, there will always be a limit I've been making an effort to listen to more modern pop music. It seems pretty original to me, at least a stinky poo load more original that the stuff on Radio 1 when I was growing up - Boyzone, The Spice Girls etc. That was real dross. The playlist on Radio 1 now seems much more varied. If there is a formula, I'd guess it's not a lot to do with the music, and more to do with what you do with the music - how you market it - but in the end no-one really knows what's going to be a hit

This does it for me, Mr Neil Young: "Rockin' In The Free World" There's colors on the street Red, white and blue People shufflin' their feet People sleepin' in their shoes But there's a warnin' sign on the road ahead There's a lot of people sayin' we'd be better off dead Don't feel like Satan, but I am to them So I try to forget it, any way I can. Keep on rockin' in the free world, Keep on rockin' in the free world Keep on rockin' in the free world, Keep on rockin' in the free world. I see a woman in the night With a baby in her hand Under an old street light Near a garbage can Now she puts the kid away, and she's gone to get a hit She hates her life, and what she's done to it There's one more kid that will never go to school Never get to fall in love, never get to be cool. Keep on rockin' in the free world, Keep on rockin' in the free world Keep on rockin' in the free world, Keep on rockin' in the free world. We got a thousand points of light For the homeless man We got a kinder, gentler, Machine gun hand We got department stores and toilet paper Got styrofoam boxes for the ozone layer Got a man of the people, says keep hope alive Got fuel to burn, got roads to drive. Keep on rockin' in the free world, Keep on rockin' in the free world Keep on rockin' in the free world, Keep on rockin' in the free world.

Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way.

Maybe they realise I was joking.

His advertising's not very good - I think he must be missing an angle.

Hi guys I've just got off the phone with the organisers and can confirm that BC will have a stand this year in the Foyer which will be an un-amplified space so we can chat properly. We'll soon be announcing a BC discount code so as soon as I hear I'll send information to everyone by email and add the voucher to our shop. More news as it happens - @LondonBassGuitarShow will be coming to update us, too. Cheers ped

I'd love to have played with the Funk Brothers in their prime, although I suspect they'd be begging Jamerson to come back after the first half hour.

OMG, ok, I'd love to replace Doug in Kings X. Replacing Daryl in The Stones would be cool too. except he's a bit too far in the background for my taste I hope everybody is happy, making me choose fantasy over reality.? Blue

Even if I was playing with the MG's I'd definitely think twice if Stevie Wonder called!

The greatest is entirely subjective. The most influential of all time? In the western world my vote would go to the classical greek who first developed harmonised choral singing, or the 5th century AD monks who perfected it and discovered and formalised the scales and chords we still use today. We don't know their names, but they're the ones who set us on the path to harmonised instrumental accompaniment, leading to everything from the three piece punk band to the full orchestra and everything in between.

Osiris is right, the pedal is better than the built in on the RH amps, and you can do an awful lot more with it. I don't hear any colouring in the setting I use. Dan Veall did an excellent video review of it on guitar interactive. Worth a watch..

It's why I position myself front stage with a mic,right along side of our lead singer/ lead guitarist and the other guitarist and play with a pic. People think I'm a guitar player. They certainly can't tell the difference. When I joined 6 years ago, I made it clear I was not a stand in the back by the drummer kind of guy. I'm a poser. Lol Blue

I recently acquired a Nano Mark 300 from a fellow BC-er, but I have held off the traditional 'NAD' thread until I could try it properly, not just at home. It's pretty tiny - about 20cm square and 5cm tall. Gain, Master Volume, and 4-band EQ is plenty for me. Everything I need and not much that I don't. At home it sounds a bit 'rude' on its own, at least until I boost the lows and lo-mid and cut the hi-mid. Blends nicely when playing to a recording. Real life test no.1 - recording pre-amp - with tone controls engaged but set flat, sounds exactly like the DI'd bass only louder, i.e. the preamp doesn't colour the sound. Real life test no.2 - big band rehearsal, 73 Precision via BF Midget - just perfect, sounds exactly as a bass guitar should in that context. If only my sight reading could keep up... Real life test no.3 - country gig, 73 Precision via BF Compact. For this I perched the Nano on top of my Demeter head, used the Demeter for 1st and 3rd sets, Nano for the 2nd, with volume and tone matched as well as I could - see pics below. I haven't gigged with so few watts (Nano produces 150W into 8ohm) for many years, but I can report that the Nano puts out enough power to fill a large hall without PA support, even allowing for a dep drummer who hits harder than our regular bod. It sounds quite big and fat. When I went back to the Demeter I noticed how much more touch sensitive and punchy it was - not surprising considering the price differential! Anyway the Nano has been promoted to spare amp, and the previous holder of that position is going up for sale.