Leaderboard

Played it live

BOOM! Got the job!!!! Band is called Fraudio btw. Absolutely stoked and in need of a beer or two. Now begins the hard work!

Not a bass - my first-ever 6-string guitar was a quite decent Columbus SG copy which I had in 1980. Aside from a bolt-neck & fake humbuckers, it was a pretty reasonable facsimile of the original, down to having a very slender, volute-free neck/headstock junction. Can't quite remember how it happened but it probably involved the enthusiastic execution of inept powerchords, playing along with Motorhead or somesuch, and a surprise meeting of Columbus headstock and bedroom wall. I do remember a sudden loss of string tension and very rapid de-tuning. And then the "plop" as the newly-liberated headstock hit the floor. I lacked the skills to correctly repair my newly decapitated guitar - but I didn't lack imagination: I've still got it now.

Hi. In no particular order....(brain dump) Sounds are obviously identical. Addition of headphone output and master volume is Awesome! loving the colour screen, all the info in one place! and color represents block type so its easier to see at a glance what the blocks are doing. on the HXFX there's a lot of info, but its all spread around, and in B+W. moving blocks around the chain is harder, and unnecessarily so as there's plenty of knobs. You have to use Cut/paste the knobs seem to respond better. i love that it shows the midi PC on the preset selection screen. this makes it so easy if your using a midi controller. love the form factor Its TINY!!!! i wish they had put the screen on the RHS as i tend to play notes with my right hand and change parameters with the left. doing this mostly covers the screen with my hand. still, better than the HXFX i will miss ability to turn off more than 3 pedals on the HXFX addition of HPF and LPF in the global is awesome!!! HXFX doesn't have this copying blocks to another patch is easier on the stomp ill come and edit this post if i think of any more differences

Did you know....I only found this one out two weeks ago!........ When using youtube....Bottom right there is a wheel/cog/settings sign next to the YouTube logo. Click on that and you will find Speed. Click on that and you can slow it down to 75 % which also keeps it in tune. I never knew this all this time and have spent many extended hours trying to catch micro snippets of something going back and forth. Learning things slowly really gives me a chance to grasp exactly whats being played. Once I really know it slowly, I find it a lot easier to bring it up to normal speed. I can learn something I find complicated so much faster overall using this. Probably a bit of stating the obvious for a lot of folks but its a new discovery for me so if that helps anyone who like me didn't know🤩

Sold it on eBay for £26

Adam Clayton managed two gigs in a row once without a new signature model for the third gig, does that count?

So a while back I fancied having a mess about with a foam mute with the flats. Of course, dish sponges got sliced up as one does. But to be honest, they always looked totally naff and we’re a pain to thread into the tiny space between the bridge and pickup on my two Wals. Fine on the single pickup Aria. Still looked crap, though. Then I spotted these mentioned on a thread here or on Talkbass... https://www.facebook.com/pattonmutepadbassmute/ - maybe it was @wateroftyne who got one and posted about it a few years ago. Unfortunately by the time I spotted them they’d stopped making them. ☹️ Fast forward a couple of years and a few months ago Amy from Patton Bass Mutes drops me a mail saying, I’m starting making them again. So I ordered a set, one for each bass - she makes them individually to fit the dimensions of your bass. They arrived a couple of weeks ago and I’ve been messing about with them at home to good effect. However, last night was my first chance to try them in anger - on my ‘79 Wal Pro IIE. It’s got a slightly more old school sound than my other one so was a great candidate. I was so impressed. It worked perfectly. The custom size and little loop meant it was dead easy to pull in under the strings and gave the perfect amount of damping - also to whip back out for a couple of tunes I wanted to play unmuted. Played a number of songs fingerstyle and with pick and it really did add a totally old school tone. Particularly liked the pick sound on a couple of rocky, funky numbers. Brilliant. And picking without having to palm mute was surprisingly freeing! The big surprise was that it changed the pitch of the strings by about a quarter tone but when you think about the change in the free vibrating length of the string that makes sense. I was doubly surprised that it didn’t completely mess up the intonation which was still fine. The mutes are beautifully made and several cuts above some scraggy bits of old foam both on operation and in how they change the aesthetics of a beautiful bass. If you fancy trying that old Motown, Wrecking Crew style muted sound then the cost of around $15 plus postage for a Patton mute is well, well worth it. And hey, Christmas’s coming soon! Here’s the mute for the Pro Bass in action. Tell me this doesn’t look better than a bit of old dish sponge from Tesco...

Don’t 👀

Here's my twin Stingrays....and my real twins 😍 They're my babies, all four of them.

Hence the forum name then, Bassassin?

Blame it on Woody's tip off about the 10% discount. PMT had two delivered to the store on Friday morning and they had both been sold within an hour of the store receiving; I paid my deposit and they kept behind the counter for me to collect today. Look on the bright side, at least you got a £46.50 discount...not to be sniffed at! And in my case it was third order lucky so I'm not feeling too guilty at having finally got mine

Late 1970's - The roadie of the band I was in somehow managed to leave my '63 Precision (in it's case) overnight leaning up against his gatepost at his house after returning home after a Sat night gig - we were playing the Sun lunchtime and he'd agreed to leave the gear in the van but take all the guitars indoors overnight. Two little boys had knocked on his door about 10am on the Sun and asked him if he wanted the 'old guitar' that he'd left outside and 'was it for the dustman ?'.....

Took a bass off over my head onstage in Derry and smashed it straight into the lighting rig above me. About 25 years ago after seeing a Mr Big gig I decided to try supergluing three picks together like a clover and sticking it to a drill. Too impatient to let the glue dry properly I fired it up, splattering the bass with little beads of superglue which I never managed to remove. Oops. If anyone out there owns a black Charvel model 1 bass with mystery little bumps all over the front, that's the reason....

Here we go. All cased up for recording tomorrow, so the expression pedal is elsewhere. Compressor >. ES5 > Hall Fame. All the rest are in loops, so I can run the PS6 as a detune chorus after the filter or as an octave down in front of the Rat, with clean in parallel or bitcrush in parallel with the Okto etc etc. Game changer. The only downside is needing to bench the Mastotron because the Rat is so big. A mini clone will fix this problem for about 25 quid. Sorting the patch cables won’t be cheap though. I have a bigger board waiting, but this is the practical limit for band gigs.

You'd think that people like Sting and Bobby Vega could afford a decent re-fin, wouldn't you?

We've been looking forward to this one for a while: We were so grateful to be asked back to play the John Peel Centre. Shortly after arrival the exited manager tells us its sold out! We knew we were in for a good one! Sound was awesome, crowd were awesome, no technical hitches. Why aren't they all like this?

Major update. Stomp replaces Hxfx and the Es8 is back. I missed the loops

On Saturday we played a breakfast gig (8:30 to 11:30) for an investment company and its clients and staff.Our jazz quartet has done this gig for about six years now and although it is essentially playing "wallpaper music" we do get some occasional applause and a lot of comments from individuals.Over the three hours about 300 people came and went while we played some lighter jazz and some Christmas songs and we view the gig as a good rehearsal and play some songs that we don't play too often on our regular gigs. It's always fun to hear our singer/keyboardist do "Santa Baby" and we do some "jazzy" arrangements of Christmas songs and we all enjoy "Everyone's Waiting For The Man With The Bag" and "Baby,It's Cold Outside" which the singer and I do and is a lot harder to sing while playing a good bass line that it sounds but we nailed it.I used my DB and had fantastic sound straight into our Bose PA using just the Schatten Mini Pre for volume control and the EQ on the Bose. I know it sounds like a dreadful gig to some of you but it is held in a beautiful venue, we are fed well from a huge breakfast buffet, easy load in/out, nice friendly crowd including some young kids who dance up a storm and we are well paid and can pretty much play what we want.We are booked for next year already. Downside...I leave home at 6:30 for a snowy one hour drive for 7:30 load in.

Nah - he bought it relic'd by some guy in Denmark Street to make it look like he knew what he was doing.

I do it because I've seen other bass players do it, and I think it will give the illusion that I'm quite professional. 😁

What The Actual F@ck 🤤

People pay extra for that these days

I was walking/staggering home after a gig and the case opened. My P bass fell out and bounced down the road. I just picked it up and put it back in the case. Next day I saw some very large gouges out of the top of the body. It was a shame but what is done is done. The impacts became part of the life of that bass. I did buy another case.

Only a 25 minute walk from the office...I suspect that could prove to be fatal in 2020. Basement is full of keyboards and synths. ...and I managed to pick up the last piece of bass gear I will ever need (well until the next "game changer" thing comes along! 😂)

Bilbo and his Wal.

You would have been cheaper picking up the Magellen too Dave

On a recent documentary Wilco said Fender had built him a couple of custom shop Tele's as exact copies of his famous beast, I believe he plays those now as he was terrified of losing the original (not sure terrified and Wilco Johnson really belong in the same sentence!)

Thank you everyone for your input on this. I took the bass to an excellent luthier here in Bristol. He took the tension off the strings and the truss rod - said the neck looked good, with a slight back-bow in it when under no tension. We then set it back up again with the same strings, then loosened the strings again before a final tune up. When he tuned it back up we were actually able to release the truss rod quite a bit - he said sometimes they can work better if you do it this way - so you're tensioning the strings against the rod, rather than the rod against the strings.. if you know what i mean. Also, he was impressed with the bass. Liked the weight and the slim neck. And how easy it plays. Anyway, I've currently got a good bit more adjustment in the rod, which I'm happy with. It also does seem sensitive to small tweaks. Might change to lighter gauge strings to see how much more that gains me, will update if i do.. but for now i'm happy I've got a good bit of headroom if i need it. I'm keeping the bass! Thanks again, Ben.

-

At the risk of repeating myself, its actually not that hard and all you need to do is learn what note is represented by the blobs on the ledger lines. I say "not that hard", you need to physically do it and there are no shortcuts to learning that skill, but its still the same reading music thing and its achievable, and done by others.

exactly this. If he was the BL and it was "his" band then while it's still worth discussing, you're probably not going to get very far, and the question is whether you want to be in a band where people get treated like that. At best you might get him to put his points across in a more polite way However, he's not, so the question is whether the band is going to put up with him behaving like this, and if not, is he going to change? I'd echo the idea of having a chat with the other band members first, to see how unhappy they are with him behaving like a toolbag. I've been in bands with members like this before, and it's not pleasant, but it does take someone to stand up to them. Is he as good a guitarist as he thinks he is? How difficult would he be to replace? I've certainly procrastinated, or avoided the issue when one band member has been behaving badly for one reason or another, and it's never ended well, but often the band hadn't wanted to deal with it, either for fear that the band member couldn't be replaced very easily, or simply not wanting to have that awkward "it's not us, it's you" conversation. It's fine to make suggestions about arrangements, how people are playing, etc, but there is a way to do it so that it's constructive, and it's not by spitting your dummy out if you don't get your own way. And putting a solo into a cover version where it's not in the original - somebody needs to give his over inflated ego a good kicking and explain that the concept that a "band" means that it isn't all about him.

I did it once twenty years ago, trod on my lead and pulled it out, even at rehearsal I'd take it round the strap now.

Sting has been using his 57 precision for over 25 years and and apparently uses a Jazz in the studio that he has had since he first started out in Last Exit

Practice is the only thing that will get your ability and technique up to speed. Use a metronome and set it to a count where you can just about play that line. It'll get very boring, but you keep playing it until you feel comfortable and it is easy to play. Then you speed up the Metronome a little. Go around that loop until you can play along comfortably with the record.

So he’s a knob then

At a pub in Crowborough, we had a punter bring in part of a tree and dance with that. He was the only person on the dancefloor.

Why is quitting the first advice that is always given in these threads. Is this guy the band leader? If he isn't then nicely tell him to stick it. If it is his band then the rules are different. I'd still try to negotiate the end of this micro managing, but either way you've got to come up with interesting parts that show you can be trusted to think for yourself. Quitting should only ever be a last resort and be way down the list.

Pitchshifter at the Garage on Friday night. Haven't seen them for close to 20 years. Superb gig - full of energy, playing an excellent collection of songs, and the singer is a brilliant frontman. Aided on one song by Mikey from Sikth Excellent bass sound - crisp, full and dirty, and very present in the mix. Finished with Genius, great song led by the bass. Loved it

I messaged the seller.

You could find a good function band. I was in one for quite a few years and apart from anything else it was very lucrative. Great audiences, too - they're out for a good time and are usually well primed and up for it by the time you start playing. It's still covers at the end of the day, but you are well-rewarded for your efforts. I had to quit in the end as the false bonhomie with the punters and the 'audience participation' routine made me cringe to my very soul. I do miss the money though, even now.

I've had the pro 17s for several years - wouldn't play without them. They did take some getting used to, maybe half a dozen or so gigs. When I first gigged with them it felt like I was in a different room to the rest of the band, but persevere, you'll get used to it. I also have a set of 20dB filters I use in the same plugs for loud bands or venues where I am very close to the drums.

I don't think it's much of a gamble at all to be honest. I'd say the reports suggest reliability is absolutely fine. There's a "?" on the wattage rating - but as I've said before, it's how the player feels about it in action that counts. Yeah, it might be a bit naughty of them to suggest 2000W in big letters everywhere without really qualifying that (apart from in the manual) and even then there's some "?" over whether it really is 2000w peak.. but unless you need some sort of monster amp the (probable) 500-700w output will be fine for most players. And that's what the reviews and user comments suggest so all good. Now, if they could get their distributors not to put the spec in RMS then we'd be motoring...

Just received this via the marketplace here.