Leaderboard

I'm in the house band for the two Sunday for Sammy shows next weekend. I can't give too much away 'cos the line-up is under wraps, but with 5,000 people at each show, it's going to be fun. I'll take some pics and that, and try not to make any mistakes. Disclaimer: I fully acknowledge this is a 'boast post'. Apologies.

Me - Could I take a closer look at this bass please? Them - ** reaches it down and starts slapping 7 shades out of it ** Me - Is that hard to play? Them - Umm...?? Me - Cos it's f**king hard to listen to.

Me - Do you sell Rotosounds? Them - Yes Me - Why?

You do know that all this could be avoided if you played properly... with your fingers...?

You know that lovely feeling when a bass you've been gassing for years shows up, coinciding with having the cash? Just happened to me..I'm over the moon. I've been drooling over this bass for many years..picked it up a few hours ago. https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/1977-Greco-GOB-1200-Electric-Bass-Guitar/302609356900?hash=item4674ec5864:g:dUcAAOSwdTJaY0Vf It has many dings and chips, but all the controls seem to work. Not sure whether to play it as it is or restore to its former glory. What say you fine gentlemen? PS does anybody know of a source of spares for these basses?

I'll be adding to this! After lots of uhming and ahing, I saw a post on their Instagram which had me going to see them at first given opportunity. Went up to Alpher HQ for a few hours yesterday, and this morning I ordered myself an Alpher. Words can't describe my excitement! It'll be a 5 string Mako Elite 5, with a crazy burl top and matching headstock. Ebony 'board with a birdseye maple neck. Body is single piece maple (it looks amazing), pickups will be three Aguilar Super Singles, and an OBP-3 pre amp. 33" scale (because I'm a short derrière), not much weight. Oh, and some of the offcut from the cap (the electric blue bit) will be going into a 12th fret inlay. Untitled by Dave Butterworth, on Flickr Untitled by Dave Butterworth, on Flickr

You'll miss them when the interweb has killed them all off........no nipping in to solve last minute emergencies

Looks generic and values itself too highly; therefore it's a great fit for the Chapman name.

If only we could swap local shops, all would be well in the world

Papa Was a Rolling Stone - same three notes, same pattern for the entire song, and still fabulous after all these years.

I've always been quite enamoured by Stings bass lines, always tuneful but often very empty, so I'll offer up the obvious Walking on the Moon

Use wire clips to hold the power wires in place. Don’t use those double-ended connectors, most pedal enclosures have a slight angle to the sides and therefore the jacks... using those connectors can strain the jacks and also makes it more precarious to remove those pedals from your board.

It looks like a giant steampunk phallus.

Single knob compressors are the work of Lucifer himself....

I use a Variax and while the 8 and 12 strings are decent approximations, and will do the job in their own way rather than take another bass to a gig, that is all they are, approximations. As is that pedal above. None of these will ever have the sound of real multiple courses, that slight delay between courses, the characteristics you get from actually striking more than one string. This can't be replicated by modulating the sound of a single string.

In the UK and in the USA, but you had to be there, obviously. And, featuring Ritchie Blackmore on guitar and Chas Hodges on electric bass guitar, here's Joe Meek's production from 1962 of The Chaps also known as The Outlaws ...

I’m sure DFS will have one in their never ending sale.

Me - I'm here to pick up five Yamaha tenor saxes we ordered? Them - What the f**k? We're a shoe shop.

Buy a Trace V-type preamp. Does exactly what you want and it'd be a lot cheaper than having something custom built. They sound AWESOME too!

I'd miss the good ones, but I suspect they will last longer because they're good. I certainly won't miss the arrogant chancers though...

* whilst walking through Ashdown section * Me - 'scuse me, I don't suppose you have a light?

The Sadowsky aluminium items are pretty good imho. Two screws to secure plus sleeve for those slightly thinner pot shafts. They look and feel amazing and with the little white marker are dead easy to adjust. Definitely not a 'value' item though

I read the title of the thread and immediately thought of Tina Weymouth, was going to suggest "Genius of Love" (by Tom Tom Club) as an example but there's a number of others too.

First rehearsal today - six hours' worth. It was loads of fun. The show's being shot for DVD, so everything has to be spot-on. We've got a week in the rehearsal hall, so we'll have the monitor mixes pretty much there by the weekend, so hopefully the check in the arena will mostly be tweaking stuff. The band is great.. the drummer's from Lindisfarne, the keyboard player's from Dire Straits, the other keyboard player and sax player are from The 1975's live band, the guitarist was a touring member of The Arctic Monkeys, and one of our vocalists sang on 'I Would Do Anything For Love' with Meat Loaf. And then there's me. I daren't pinch myself. Loads of pics here: https://www.sundayforsammy.org/sunday-for-sammy-2018-access-all-areas

Guitar or player?

Pitch to CV or MIDI for the bass guitar is just not feasible unless you have the world's cleanest and precise technique and are playing downtempo music. The laws of physics are always going to be against you. The theoretical minimum response time has going to be one complete wave cycle for the device to have a good guess at detecting the pitch. The open E on a bass is 41Hz, that means at the very, very best you are looking at 24ms between playing a note and the device working out what pitch it is. That's slap-back echo territory (i.e. noticeable), and in reality the actual response time is going to be closer to double that. Notice how in the demo in the OP you never get to hear the controlling signal in combination with the synth output except when it is making random glitching noises along with the drums. Also notice how the controlling signal is always something high-pitched like guitar or another keyboard. You can't blame the manufacturer for wanting to show their products in the best possible light, but I think a lot of purchasers are going to be very disappointed when they try and use these in a real world situation. There are various tricks that you can use to make the tracking quicker and more accurate but all of these take the expressiveness away from the controlling instrument, and IMO the whole point of using something like a guitar to control as synth is that you can make full use of that expressiveness. Otherwise you might as well use a keyboard and the standard synth performance controls. Also while in theory a monophonic device might be fine for bass parts, in practice one of things that makes the feel of a bass line played on bass guitar different from one played on a keyboard or other monophonic device is what happens when you play parts that swap between the strings. And once you've lost the feel of the bass part from that of playing on a bass guitar you might as well play it on a keyboard (or sequence it). There are players that can make pitch to CV or MIDI work for them. What you will find is that they are mostly guitarists and that they have spent years honing their technique and modifying their instruments to get around the inherent limitations of using pitch detection to control a synthetic waveform. I found very quickly that it was far easier for me to develop enough of a keyboard technique in a day or so that enabled me to play synth parts than it was to modify my guitar playing style to get the tracking to work well enough to satisfy my very basic requirements.

If such an inconsequential thing as pop-ups annoys you to the point of driving you from the forum you must indeed lead a charmed life. Heaven forbid anything important happens to you!

Probably best to avoid those people in future.

I thought there was just one, the key of bass

@Al Krow I could have shown you why that doesn't work at my studio if you'd said, but to sum up. There is no pedal or fancy processing you can do that will properly imitate an 8 or a 12 with a 4. You can mimic the note, but not the overtones and harmonics. That's what you won't get.

So if you hadn't heard of them they didn't exist?Pretty sketchy argument. I think I'm finished with this thread,Dad was right about the blinkers.

Like NJE I've always great service from S&T - the CEO is a really nice fella and has helped us out with the Bass bashes each year. I've bought 2x Ernie Ball Zippo lighters from eBay which I've sent him, he doesn't even smoke but loves to gloat when smokers try to borrow one. I won't have a word said against them!!

Top advice from the dudes above

The wattage of the VT Bass 200 is about 150 watts with its internal speaker. With an 8 ohm extension speaker it's 200 watts.

Oh god...too many shops I've been to where I've had to quite bluntly tell them, "I've tried Ernie Balls before, and I don't particularly like them." A few years ago an old house mate mentioned that he'd be up in central London and was meeting some friends near Tottenham Court Road, so did I need anything from Denmark Street? I replied that yes, actually, I was hoping to get some new strings, and wrote down the gauge and two preferred brands. Then as a failsafe I added "NOT ERNIE BALL" in case. Apparently the guy behind the counter gave "a knowing laugh" when he saw the note.

The ‘joy’ of the English language is that you can argue that Ghoti can be pronounced fish as well, the gh from rough, o from women and ti from superstition its a crap language really when you think about it :-)

Yeah I sympathise Spongebob. I left my regular band in April last year, one of the reasons being that it had stagnated into a generic pub rock thing with little in the way of new material, and songs chosen by the band leader on the basis of being easy rather than being good. I found myself on stage one night thinking "Is this it?" Once your heart's not in it anymore, it's hard to fake it and carry on, even if it is paid regular work. Leaving that band freed up enough time for me to say yes to other musical stuff instead - I'm now gigging with a original trio, doing regular solo acoustic gigs and bits of depping work. It's enough for me at the moment.

I've had similar conversations in quite large shops, they just keep ignoring my question and try to sell me something I don't want because 'they're popular'. I've been playing for decades, I know what I want (well what I want this week, next week might be different!).

That white Welsh bloke can groove with very few notes.

I recently bought a small combo amp from Chris. The experience was very positive! The amp it's self was in really good condition, communication throughout the process was excellent and I was both impressed and grateful for how much care Chris had put into the packing the amp safely for transit. Really appreciate the effort you went to @chrisgriff, thanks again!

You little BEAUTY well actually, dear reader, I mostly play funk disco and jazz through that board. For folk I use my U bass :-)

I suppose... However when I was getting into rock music and the instruments that it was played with in the early 70s, one of the things that made Rickenbacker basses stand out was the triangle inlays. In fact for a while I assumed that Rickenbacker must be the go-to bass guitar since so many of the bass players in my favourite bands used one, and I was quite surprised to find that they also made guitars!

I thought this was Alex and a co worker applying the Tolex?

I have an SR500 and have no problem with a straight Neutrik jack plug. I believe OBBM uses them. If you upgrade your lead to something fitted with Neutriks the problem will go away.

Nice. Hope it works for you. As a few people have asked, here is my 8 string. 😊

Agreed... ....and then he teases us that it looks lush without any photographic evidence

Possibly, but getting a driven bass sound to work in a band context is an issue that a lot of people have. Many bass drive pedals can be mushy or fizzy, but by pushing the mids you get a more usable sound that works well with other instruments regardless of what they are. And for most guys seeking a driven sound there's usually going to be a driven/distorted guitar or 2 in there somewhere, a driven bass with a mid bump will usually compliment this especially if the guitar(s) are scooped. Flea and JPJ lurking in the background? Wow, I've clearly got the wrong end of that stick