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Wow, what a fantastic wealth of replies! This is why I prefer bass players to guitarists (like me); you are so much nicer! Also, I love bass and am really enjoying it, so much to learn and this is where to learn. Some great responses to my original post, some entertaining, some a little close for comfort, some shot me down and some really good advice; especially as you only got my side of an incomplete picture. Thank you all so much, you were a great help. The meeting was an unexpected success, the singer held his hand up and said “I’ve been an derrière and thrown my toys out of the cot, I’m sorry”. We have started a set of band rules/expectations, the existing band diary is to be reinvigorated and handed over to me, a gig finders fee has been introduced, a deps-Black-book will be started. We all realise what we’ve got and we want to keep it. A plan of action has been created and there is a willingness to meet more regularly without instruments. We have been surprisingly mature for a bunch of musicians.

Unexpected. My first duo partner, the first other person I ever played with (we played together at our local om almost every week for a couple of years) had disappeared for months with a serious mental health problem. He appeared unexpectedly at last Tuesday's om, looking dreadful, but at least he was back. Last night we were going to do two songs together, for the first time in over a year, but I got there to be told he had been taken into care the night before. Have You Ever Seen the Rain was one of our favourites to do together, and one that he had chosen for last night. Something in me had no choice but to do it solo, for him. Playing bass and singing at the same time, unprepared, is hard enough. Add to that, struggling not to cry, and no surprise it was a bit shaky. But the whole crowded noisy pub fell silent for two and a half minutes, and stayed silent for an audible moment before they started applauding, so I guess at least the emotion came through. It's not a song you'd naturally think of doing as a slow quiet lament, but it worked.

It looks as though we have scared the OP off... So just in case they come back here is a sensible answer they their question: "Tone Woods" make a lot of sense when it comes to acoustic instruments. They are all about the transfer of the vibration of the strings through the top of the instrument to the air inside the body and projecting those vibrations out. Everything about the design and construction of an acoustic instrument is about getting a good tone at a usable volume. The shape and volume of the body, the thinness of the top the way the bracing is just sufficient to stop the instrument collapsing under the tension of the strings and the top sides and back are joined together with the minimum of contact to allow the maximum resonance. No compare that with a typical solid bodied electric instrument. The body is a big solid 1.5" thick lump of wood, and more often than not on mass-produced instruments 2 or 3 separate pieces glued together in an ad-hoc manner to produce a blank big enough to be cut to the desired shape. Its main purpose is to provide a comfortable and aesthetically pleasing platform for attaching all the other component parts - neck, bridge, pickups etc. None of the tone wood properties that are so important in an acoustic instrument matter very much in a solid body. Here the overall construction is far more important. I'm not saying that the choice of wood is totally irrelevant to the sound of a solid-bodied instrument, it's just IMO the least important factor and one that is impossible to quantify. Every single piece of wood is different and two bodies cut from blanks that came from the same tree can produce two different feeling and sounding instruments. So after all that what are the important factors when picking a piece of wood for a solid bodied instrument? 1. Strength. It must be capable of holding together under the tension of the strings and being hung from a strap. TBH pretty much any hardwood will fit the bill and even some softwoods. It might be worth considering long-term wear. Have a look at any solid-bodied instrument made 40 or more years ago, and you'll see the actual wood has worn away in several places due to contact while playing. 2. Weight. Overall the average weight for a bass should be somewhere between 4kg and 4.5kg, the closer you can get it to 4kg the better. 3. Appearance. If the wood is going to visible on the finished instrument then it should be something that you find aesthetically pleasing. And that's it. Good luck with you build!

Best way to get punters to know what the bass does is write arrangements where you drop out for a section, it doesn't matter one jot how tight the rest of the band is, how powerful it sounds without you, or how musically illiterate or not the audience is, when you come back in the lift in intensity is absolutely palpable. You are suddenly noticeable, a tiny bit of showmanship and you can make this obvious without for a second being a tosser about it. I promise this works, its a killer way to make the point that the bassist dude is the one making you boogie more than anyone else. Do not underestimate your audience, I get approached after every set, always. But then I make it my business to go mingle with the crowd, because that is super important for the whole band to do. Someone out there is a tuba afficianado who wants to speak to our trumpet player about how she switches from trumpet to tuba so readily. Someone else is having a great night having heard us from the street and come in for some fun and would love to tell us we made their evening. Another group of people see us every time we play that venue and rightfully want a bit of time with some of us to say how they are enjoying it and how much fun they are having, and we get to keep them happy. Someone would rather they were left alone completely by the sweaty fat git who just waddled off stage

Must be the iPad but she’s going to make me a what..?

Maybe that TV show you were in. They're probably a bit nervous.

Maybe it's me, we can walk off stage after a great set and everyone in the band is approached by punters except me. The only thing I can come up with is they think I'm famous or I'm some sort of Star and they know better than to try to engage me in conversation.😂 Blue

I picked up a bass recently from another forum. It's an Epiphone ET-280. Short scale, twin single coil pickups. It fits into the odd period post Kalamazoo when Epiphones were rare, and made in Japan, before the big surge in production in the late 80's in Korea then eventually China. This is late 70's Matsumoku. It's not top drawer quality wise, but serviceable. £30 you say? Yep. But to be fair, it's going to need some work on it:

Hi Not a large tortuous thread, you'll be relieved to know. A 'mature' former professional bassist I know was bemoaning the sale many decades ago of his beloved 60's Fender Precision. The two things he remembered - different to the cheap and cheerful no-name P he'd recently bought - were the smooth feel of the neck, and the lack of a sharp heel where the neck abruptly meets the body. I said I might be able to help by building a cheapish 'bitsa' and doing a couple of mods. The first was the neck - straightforward. Bought a P-bass neck, tinted it with chestnut spirit stain and finished it with the tru-oil slurry and buff approach described in a number of my tortuous threads For sorting the sharp heel, I wanted to use a cutaway neck plate but I also wanted to use an old Washburn body bought for a song - and for time and cost reasons - didn't want to have to strip and refinish it. Here's the plate: In that my mate wanted function over form, I could have just filed the corner off, stained the bare wood and treated the hole as an object d'art. Instead, I decided that if you can't hide it then flaunt it! So I decided to drop a piece of contrasting wood in. First forstnered and routed a pocket at the back: Then set in a piece of figured dark wood from a previous project: Shaped that to remove the corner: Drilled through the three relevant existing holes and the new offset one, then a touch of finish: And I've got to say, wow - what a difference! I thought that you would still hit the heel with your palm, albeit not on a sharp corner, but in reality, you can play right up to the top frets and your palm doesn't hit the heel at all. My mate is over the moon. Clearly, the fact that the offset plates are readily available means that this is a regular feature on some basses but has anyone else tried a retro like this? I'll certainly be doing this on my own VM Jag!

To the FAMOUS QUOTES thread the lot of you! This is BassChat at it's very best! You have brightened up my day no end!!

I was due to have new laser sights delivered by UPS...

a very good reason to avoid open E..

You're worrying too much. Just stop fretting! (I'm sorry. I'll get my coat)

Absolutely, well put. This is why I build/use Fender-fit bitsas; I can simply source the bits that work best together at the same quality point but at a fraction of the price and risk of a CS instrument. The bass below cost less than £300 to build, but it sings, is extraordinarily versatile (helped by a Kiogon series/parallel circuit), and is a joy to play. It also allows me the non-Fender option of a Precision width neck on a Jazz Bass. Is it as good as a CS fretless jazz? I owned the(now ludicrously expensive) CS Jaco Relic, and this knocks the socks off it

Thought I would add a few pics.

Maybe you look more like Security than a band member Blue.

Great outcome, hope it all works out, especially as it sounds like it's a great band

No need to despair Rodney,... if a company actually wants to be nice to their customers then surely it should bring hope? I think it’s nice to see positives in the little things. YMMV

Blimey. That is pretty...uhm...brutal. Even more surprising are the comments. I can't make out if they're all super sarcastic or not.

Where does that wood come from? I’m not sure it grows around Moffat?!

I think we can be assured that it won't be lonely...

I met up with Richard earlier and now have the bass here on the farm in deepest Wiltshire. Thanks @Grangur it was good to meet you for some real life bass chat! If it's OK I will hang on to it until the weekend when I can get to the studio my big amplifier is currently occupying so I can properly move some air with it! It's with friends...

Of the many, many covers of Imagine - 4,091,000 at the last count - I would nominate the version by Richard Cheese as being most faithful to the humanitarian core of the song:

My home from home studio for 7 days while working in Weston 👌 going to get a lot of work done on sessions, tracks & articles 🤞I hope!!

That's a very poor shot Andy. You missed Dood and hit an innocent bystander

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Body and neck, however, are more than serviceable - and lightweight too! Out came the Virtuoso cleaner and polish.. it's miracle stuff. Cleaner then Polish and it's quite good Before: After:

On enquire with our well featured @Andyjr1515 Check his thread about removing weight from a Harley Benton Jazz

I wasn't sure whether to put this video clip up or not. I recorded it yesterday, shortly before Tim collected it. It was a one take thing and only later in the day, that I replayed it and discovered that the recorded sound level is a little distorted. Anyway, I played the same riff and used the various pickup switchings to hopefully demonstrate the sounds on offer. MVI_6549_Trim.mp4

Very similar experience for me too (back in the day). Chatting, all four of us, to punters immediately after we'd finished one lady says to me, "Have you seen them before?" I said I'd never seen them.

Depends entirely on context! I've got 3 different songs that rely on either open A or D string ringing to provide a drone to a high melody. As for an open E, it's the basis of most folks slap technique!

They put a 5 year warranty on everything the sell new, and they design and build with a view to keeping things going indefinitely, the amp heads in particular. I'm pretty sure they repair free of charge within the warranty period, but there's likely to be some fees once you get beyond there. I can't think of many, if any other manufacturers who can match that though. You can approach Ashdown directly which is great, as there's no middle men complicating things and trying to take a slice Eude

Sorry to hear your conversion didn't work. I'm just in the process of doing this to an 88€ thomann kit I've had for a couple years (already modded: strung BEAD from day 0, reversed the P pickup, added a J pickup, added an S1 switch). Still some final touches to go (a threaded insert from the new bridge interferes with the bridge's ground cable hole -so far going "open air"-, pickups have been slightly moved so "routing" looks bad, probably need a new pickguard + some frame around the J pickup, or frames on both, I really like the distressed mirror guard), but so far it plays OK. I got a MM style bridge with 16mm spacing and a cramped enough metal nut, and my strings aren't as close to the edge as yours, and maintain that distance throughout all the neck. Still under 140€ even after all the mods, this kit has been a lot of fun. Didn't even mind making new sound samples, it sounds exactly as it did before (samples here, here & here), string balance is great (even tho' you can clearly see the A string is in no man's land over the J pickup). Also seized the oportunity to make this sorta' distressed Pino red refinish.

Bruford - One of a Kind with Jeff Berlin (instrumental but bass is excellent) Alain Caron albums (again instrumental but still fantastic basslines) If you are more into Rock albums with lyrics try Black Sabbath Heaven and Hell. Some great clear bass lines on there. Early Whitesnake albums with Neil Murray on bass. Songs like Fool For Your Loving is a classic. Cozy Powell albums Over The Top (Instrumental) or Tilt with Jack Bruce and Neil Murray on bass and different singers. UK albums with John Wetton on bass. First album was Instrumental but follow up had vocals. Hope that helps a little Dave

My favourite at the moment is 'Caribe' from the Michel Camilo Big Band. Anthony Jackson in total control.

Not just punters. I auditioned for a band, and afterwards they confessed to being 'amazed' how much they missed the bass when it wasn't there. Evidently they had run the audition songs before I arrived and couldn't believe how empty and gutless they sounded with no bass guitar. You will struggle to believe this my friends: the band is a three piece.

Anything by the Brothers Johnson. Slap bass how it should be done (as opposed to some of the over exuberant finger gymnastics that seem so popular on youtube these days).

Crikey! Judgemental much? It's a beginner's tutorial ffs! My only beef would be her use of the word 'intermediate' (which it clearly isn't). If you can already do the things on the video then it must be because you're a good enough player not to need the advice. No offence intended, but how experienced players could fail to spot that is not something I understand. /rant.

I love the album Tribes Vibes and Scribes by Incognito. Wonderful funky, soulful bass on every track. The Yes Album has great playing by Chris Squire (and check out Tempus Fugit from their Drama album - best bass line ever).

Well I`ve only had one Ashdown item not work properly, was a dodgy tweeter on a cab and they replaced that for me free of charge. I don`t know if everything would be dealt that way, but in my dealings with them they`ve been excellent. I really rate them, both their products and the way they deal with their customers, and them being only an hours drive from me really helps if I ever need anything modding/fixing/looking at. Rather than sort couriers etc I`ll just pop the item over and explain what is occurring - the usual charge to enter the workshop is a packet of biscuits, no getting through the door without one 😀

Like this...

My "dislike" of Fender is heavily influenced from an experience in GigGear Harlow some years ago. They had a genuine Fender and a Squier, to the untrained eye, the same bass. Both natural finish four strings. I played both.. The Squier was actually superior in fit and finish, the neck joint on the Squier was tight, a very good fit - you would have been pushed to fit a cigarette paper. The "real" Fender, on the other hand suffered from a poor fitting neck with a gap of "several" mm. Frets on the Squier were well finished, the Fender less so. What shocked me was that the difference in price was over £1k, and in effect you were paying extra for the "less well built" item. BC Members' often quote how their current J or P is "the best XXX I've ever played"...I can believe this. The build quality on Fenders has been erratic over the years - my memories of 70s Fenders leave me shuddering...misaligned bridges/pick ups, poorly finished and fitted necks and frets...in fact you couldn't rely on any of the parts to be correctly installed. Fender's reputation suffered because of the genuinely poor build quality. This left the door open for other, smaller companies to elbow their way into the Bass market. As market leaders, Fender should never have done this. If they had kept their eye on the ball we wouldn't have Overwater, Sei, Sadowsky, et al....From our point of view, their poor performance is our blessing.

To pay for a wedding, if you must know 😉 it’s back now, that picture was taken last year. The 55 was sold as I required a 5 string at the time... so is the wedding ring actually...so, yeah, both linked 😂

Ultimately it's why I now play Fender-alike bitsas that I put together by trial and error. I've played £5k basses by Fender that were crap and £250 basses by Fender (well Squier) that were outstanding. In the grand scheme of things, the most reliable of all Fender lines appear to be the old MIJ models. I've now got four basses, two Precisions and two Jazzes (fretted and fretless of each, although all four with Precision width necks), that cost in total about £1200 to put together and which I'd happily put up against most top-end Fenders, even CS and vintage. OK, I've had to hunt around for used Allparts/Warmoth bodies and necks, and have done a lot of trial and error - some neck/body combinations work, some don't, some PUPs seem to work on some basses, some don't - but I've got four great instruments. The reality is I think that you can't predict how well a bass is going to play and sound until you play it, and I guess there's not many QC departments in mass market manufacturers that get into that level of detail.

A made up one , I know

Okay, been saving these for later.