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

That was my very first bass shop experience as a young teen 32 years ago. After being handed the slapped bass, I think I played each open string slowly twice whilst wishing the earth would open. I've often thought I'd like to walk back in with a Wal and a Ken Smith, point out to the shop assistants that they make commission on sales, and that they made a HUGE mistake not being nicer to me decades before...and then I remember that I'm not Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman.

I sold a fender combo to Patrick, great comma, fast payment, what a pleasure !

There's the difference I think. Andertons aren't just online and I get the impression they aren't that small. Either way, I share the OP's frustration.

Simple answer: yes

Here’s a pic of my pedalboard and chord charts... :-D

This isn't limited to shops. I had an email ding dong with Strings & Things simply ASKING I they could get Bongo pickguards. Them: We don't deal with the public and you need to speak to your local EBMM dealer Me: I know that, but CAN you get them?! Them: You need to ask your stockist. Me: Yes but then they'll ask you won't they ? I just want to know if you can get stock of them to avoid wasting time. Them: I'm dyslexic sorry. Yes we can.

Ahem. February. TWO THOUSAND AND SEVENTEEN. Hell of a thread revival for your first post...

You don't need a compressor because your technique is "not the best". A compressor will do nothing to compensate for poor technique. Every professional bass player uses a compressor - if not directly on stage, then compression will be applied by their sound technician at the desk. This is not fake news And it continually amazes me why so many amateur bass players haven't got their heads around why they should be using compression - and using it to their advantage. But heh, it's a funny old world innit.

For a lot of vocalists I've worked with taking away the PA would be more of an improvement

I'm surprised how many good guitar players are impressed when I play even a simple bassline, and think playing bass is harder than playing guitar. I don't have to hold down chords, and they do! Yes we need a strong sense of groove, but so do they. And we just need to hold the groove, they mostly seem to need to show off. On the other hand I'm no longer surprised, but utterly fed up with how many peeps are "impressed" by a woman playing bass at all. I've had so much disbelief and condescension I'll bite some man's head off one day soon. Or better just let my bass speak for me.

I had a 1x12 and a 1x10 - both very usable cabs. Lightweight, reasonably priced and powerful - TBH I should have held on to them but the temptation of a better named brand got a hold of me so they were sold. I can't think of a reason not to buy them TBH.

Love this amp. Powerful, light, versatile and reliable. After buying one to give it a whirl, I bought the next one that came up for sale, so that I'd always have a backup. I don't really use the distortion channel with the gigs i'm doing at the moment, but safe to say there are some great tones in there too! I like the Tone control. I had both the VMT and B3K pedals and sold them both because I actually liked their M900 counterparts more than the pedals themselves!

The spectracomp is great. As far as bang-to-buck ratio it pretty much can’t be beat.

Well if he ever retells those stories about us I'm tearing his page out of my address book.

Take out 'Chapman Guitars' and insert any other brand and that is pretty much the standard quote for a press release for nearly every signature guitar or bass ever made.

One thing about playing one is that you either have to keep it fairly simple of have a really good technique otherwise it ends up sounding like someone pushing a piano down some stairs