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Had a really good gig headlining a festival last night with Musical Youth.

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Edit: looks like this discussion is gearing towards 'all Ken Smith', so I modified the title accordingly! Good morning! I'm late with this, as I bought the bass now few weeks ago already - however! It would be a crime not to share it with you all I have a strict rule of 1 in, 1 out, and I generally only own 2 basses at a time (if not just one sometimes), AND I only have GAS attacks once every 6 to 8 years, so when that time comes, I GAS hard I present to you my latest purchase, this time justified as a birthday present to myself: a beautiful 2004 Ken Smith Black Tiger BSR6TN! Specs: Neck: 5-piece Laminated Aged Hardrock Maple & Bubinga with Graphite-Inlaid Bars Fingerboard: Macassar Ebony with MOP Top & Side Dots & matching Macassar Ebony Headstock Overlay Body Wings: 3-piece, Bookmatched Rare Figured Black Walnut Top, Walnut Back & Tiger Maple Core Hardware: Gold with Dunlop "Flush Mount" Straploks Pickups: Smith Custom Bass Humbucking Pickups Electronics: Smith B.M.T. 3-band 18-volt EQ Circuit with adjustable DIP Frequency switches for Bass, Mid & Treble with Pickup Blend and Master Volume Control (push/pull Active/Passive) + Series/Parallel Switches String spacing: 18mm Scale: 34 Finish: Classic Hand Rubbed Dutch Varnish over Stradivari Gold Oil Pretty much the most comfortable and fastest neck I've put my hands on, and it has an awesome character. Will enjoy spending the next few hundreds of hours getting to know her better! Happy times!

I’ve been talking to Holger about strings for my Sandberg California TT ,because I bought a new set of flats for it and they didn’t fit , so just a bit of info for anyone , the nuts are cut for, 128,100,80,60,40 strings 🙂

We have a band rule, band practice is not for learning songs or noodling sounds. You do that at home and come prepared. If llife gets in the way you let the band know so we cover something else at the practice.

@thebassist - that Emperor is pretty much exactly the embodiment of what the perfect Fodera looks like in my mind, beautiful choice! My entry for this topic, newly acquired Ken Smith Black Tiger BSR6TN!

Hi all , today is Mother’s Day in Luxembourg & it’s Sunday too... normally I didn’t work , but I can’t wait to finish this first 4 string bass ... Inserts for Aguilar P/J PU ,battery box , copper shielding, Straplocks installed ...

Had a few moments to myself today, a real rarity, so rather than having a wee noodle, I took some shots of my amazing ACGs. Enjoy... Eude

I’ve ordered the FL. Fingers crossed I like them

La Bella 760 flats, then you’ll realise you’ll want them on both basses 😄 Si

It's a holiday. Go and do holiday stuff. Make sure you practice enough before you go.

I came for the ad-sales and stayed for Jabba’s build threads.

2011 BSR4WT 2014 BSR5GN Claro Walnut

Isn't that all they do at the best of times?

I remember a keyboard player once who turned up to a rehearsal with a huge cardboard box... "I've just bought a new keyboard" He spent the rest of the rehearsal unpacking it, reading the manual and making wibbley-weebley noises.

I have a thing about keys players. Arrogant, full of their own self importance. If they arent't overly loud cause they think they are the star of the show they are playing the bass part with their left hand when its not required. Personally i'd get rid of him but its a tricky one with him and the gtr'd being best buddies. Maybe he had good reason for cancelling ......did he not say why as a matter of courtesy ? At the start of a new band the set list is short so there can be a lot of spare time at a 3hr rehearsal. Once set is longer you can "gig" your set list. Play it as if at a gig with no gaps or delays between songs to get a feel for how it will all work. That won't give him time to faff around between songs. Dave

Oh hello, everybody! New Smith owner here! My new bass so happens to be this beautiful 2004 Black Tiger, BSR6TN! It''s always been a dream of mine to play a Smith like this. I don't need to tell you all KS lovers how good she sounds

BTW, I've just been on KeysSpeak forum, there's a bloke from Lincolnshire complaining about the bassist in his new startup band. He reckons that the guy keeps missing rehearsals vcos he's off frollicking in the Lincolnshire Peak District, and when he does turn up, he keeps trying to play prog. What a coincidence eh? Also he says that the bloke's Rickenbacker sounds 'clanky'. No idea what that could mean...

Personally the the first alarm bell rang when you mentioned a keyboard player. We could do with some Hammond on about 15% of our set but we all know we'd never shut one up for the remainder.

I looked and looked and couldn't find the simplest of all pedals.. a simple in out mono switch to turn the distortion on/ off on my Billy Sheehan drive so that I could still use the clean channel loop. So despite being a cack handed fool with electrics there was no way I was shelling out £40 for a cheap drive pedal when less than £10 got me the components for this and I could run the in and out where I wanted. A quick Vicar and tart logo (vicar= clean in.. tart = dirty out...obviously) and it works a treat. More importantly it takes up little space on my board.

We played Speakeasy in the Left Bank complex in Hereford on Thursday night... It's a smallish underground venue - the gig night is run by 2 very nice people who helped us bring the gear up 10 steps then down another at least 15 steps (flood defence!). Which was good - having been told it was basically a concrete box and didn't need much volume to get it pumping I felt that the full 1500w rig was needed. Though carrying 90+ pounds of bass horn in was fun! There were 2 bands on before us - local punks Dead Beats and Fika from Cardiff who were far more eclectic,almost jazzy. Both were excellent and meant we would have to work hard to keep up the standard. However, having so much power meant I could turn up the octave down pedal; coupled with Future Impact pedal on Hammond organ setting and Fwonk Beta in full Bootsy mode plus the drummer's Tama StarClassic we made a wall of rhythm for the guitarist to smear feedback on and the singer to spray paint with anti-hunting and other lefty slogans. Surprisingly it went down very well, about 1/2 the reasonable-sized crowd turned into a moshpit from the 2nd song - they were tempted in the 1st song but I put a stop to that with a bass solo (might as well start with one!) . Not only that but we were paid, and i was back home with a large glass of Woodford Reserve by 2340!

I'm not sure whether anyone is interested, but I've just finished a guitar with a brushed nitrocellulose lacquer finish. I always swore that I'd never use nitro - too poisenous both for me and the planet. However, a friend asked me to make them a Tele using a beautiful piece of flamed spalted maple, and nitro was the only finish that worked. Polyurethane, oil and CA glue turned the test pieces into a dull splodgy brown mess, not exactly the look I was going for. Nitro though brought out all the beautiful colours and let the flame really sing. Here's the piece of wood before I started.... Although I do spray waterbased polyurethane, there's no way I can spray nitro so I thought I'd try brushing it on. The internet though had almost no information about whether it was possible to brush it on, how to do it, or what the results would look like. So, hopefully this thread will help you decide if you want to do it. It is definitely not an easy option, but.....let me get up some finished pics, and you could decide whether it was worth it. This is what I used: This is Rothko & Frost's standard gloss nitro that they sell neat, ie not in aerosol. This was a 250ml bottle and I used the whole thing plus a bit more on the body. I brushed it on with an artist's brush, a trick I stole from @Andyjr1515. You need to make sure that it's a brush for oil paints, with natural bristles, otherwise the solvents can melt them. I used a Daler Rowney Bristlewhite hog hair fan brush, size 4 (though a size 6 might have made life a bit easier). They are comically long so I cut mine to a more manageable length. Schedule was something like this: 1. Sand to 220 2. Grain fill with Aqua Coat 3. Ignore the fact that the grain fill was pretty poor and crack on with finishing (john, john, john, will you never learn?🙄) 4. Brush on R&K Nitro, thinned with 30% R&K cellulose thinners, probaly about 10 coats. 5. Curse myself repeatedly for failing to grain fill properly. I've made enough guitars to know that preparation is everything, and if you want a smooth finish grain fill is critical. Impatience though sometimes clouds my already pretty poor judgement 5. Wet sand with Wet/Dry paper (water with a drop of Murphy's oil soap) with 600 grit. 6. Another unknown number of coats. It felt like hundreds, but was probably another 5 or so. 7. Wet sand 1000 grit 8. 'wet' sand with Gerlitz Carnauba wax on a piece of Mirka Abralon 1000 grit. This left exactly the satin sheen I was after. I found the key was to brush the nitro on in one stroke, never go back over somewhere you've just painted. Because the nitro dissolves the layer before, I found the brush would start 'sticking' as it got caught in the previous layer. My approach was to do lots and lots of layers, knowing that I would have to go back and wet sand quite a lot of it off to get it completely flat. In reality, because my grain fill was....well, shite.....I had to do many many more layers than I otherwise would have had to have done. If I ever do this again, I'm hoping that 10 layers in total would be enough, assuming a flat surface to begin with. I lay the guitar flat on a 'lazy susan' turntable, did the top and the sides at the start of the day then turned it over and did the back and sides. Would I do it again? Ummm....yes, and no. Yes, if the wood was crying out for nitro, as this piece was. I'd be a bit reluctant to do it again on an entire guitar body though. Even though it was brushed rather than sprayed, the fumes were still pretty bad, and I wore a proper mask with organic filters at all times. On a guitar with a binding like this one, next time I'd probably brush the top with nitro, as above, but do the rest of the body with something else, tru oil probably. The binding would provide a natural break between the two finishes, so the two finishes wouldn't ever touch. And on a flat surface like a guitar top (rather than the fiddly curved inner horns) you could whizz through the process in no time. It's worth mentioning that the Rothko & Frost nitro specifically says it is not suitable for brushing, though I'm not quite sure why, as far as I could tell it went on perfectly nicely. The process also used much less nitro than you would get through if spraying (I think). With a proper grain fill I'm pretty sure I could do a whole body with one 250ml bottle. An aerosol contains about 150ml of nitro, so I used probably the equivalent of two aerosols worth. I've never finished a guitar with rattlecans, but I'm pretty sure it would be many more than that. So all in all I'm pleased with the result (but the next one is going to be Danish Oil, which I can do on the kitchen table😂😁). And some photos.....

Here's mine... Eude

perhaps he was saying it because of the boring well overlong last 3 minutes, if he wasn't he should have been

R400 and Barefaced two 10. Teeny weeny footprint, enormous sound, weighs less than a duck. 😁

Mefgames' post has brought my attention to the fact I never updated this thread. The sound is now bang on, wiring the two PU's in series has given it some serious punch, and still have the option of parallel for mellower tones. I'll get some pictures of the finish, it's in our rehearsal room at the moment, but just to prove it's now most definitely worthy, here it is being used when we supported The Chords.

Ignorance and/or ego. It worries me, this. No-one, absolutely no-one, fails to recognise that the sound of the amp is as essential to guitarist's sound as the guitar itself. Yet bass players are supposed to abdicate their sound to 'what the soundman thinks is best'? The relative cost and quality of the kit is irrelevant; it's the sound you get that matters and if you have spent a great deal of effort to get a sound that suits your style, the music you play and the band you play with why should the audience have to accept some identikit sound? IMHO the job of a PA is to be as transparent as possible, and that's why a good PA is so expensive. Even in my limited experience of being recorded, and DI'd, both times the engineers got me in the control room and sought my advice on the sound I wanted and involved me in that aspect of the mix.

Unbelievable by EMF. The track has a sample running through it that repeats 'Whoah! What the F*ck' throughout the song. For the avoidance of doubt the wording of the sample was included with the lyric sheet that came with the CD. The unedited song received widespread nationwide airplay. Apparently no one noticed the naughty language.

Heres mine 😊

Quick question - if this was an ongoing problem, why didn’t you seek to change what you were doing such that you could get the sound that you are looking for foh from your DI? You know the saying, “insanity is the doing the Same thing again and again and expecting different results”. As for foh mixing bass cabs, they are a source of mayhem for on stage as the frequencies, unlike a guitar, are omnidirectional - meaning that pretty much every mic on stage will pick up what you are doing. In turn that will destroy what you can do with the foh mix. I don’t understand why band don’t work towards doing the best for the sound of the band as a whole instead of just looking at what they bring to the party. It’s the sum of the component parts which make the band sounds the way it does - and that means that there could be some compromises along the way. A lot of bands will actually see the sound engineer as part of the band lineup - especially as they can make or break your sound. They know what’s best for FOH (especially if you are a visitor to their venue) so work with them. It’s the sound engineers reputation as much as yours. If your band sounds stinky poo because of what you are doing and not the sound engineer, that’s not really fair on them is it? Are you really doing any venues where you require those size of cabinets?* * it’s rhetorical. You aren’t. Nobody is. It’s just stage dressing. And as for only being as loud as the drummer, you do know that there’s loud drummers and quiet drummers... and Quiet drums and loud drums... (and cymbals)...?

I misread that as 'I'll have to bring my dancing toupée'

You need the stage lighting to see through the fog from the smoke machine.

Elixir own the patent for wrapping the whole string after it has been wound. All other manufacturers coat the outermost wrap before it gets wound onto the string. In my experience, the Elixirs work and the others (I've tried D'Addario and Warwick, won't be squandering any money on this kind of string anymore) are pointlessly expensive with no discernible benefit.

News in. Bonamassa open to the idea of letting the PA doing the work... Here’s his guitar tech doing a line check (with ear defenders)

Damn that stage lighting

The same keyboardist used to whine that the stage lighting was giving him a headache. It's rock'n'roll FFS.

Over the years I have found that people have two attitudes to rehearsals. Some people think that rehearsals are there for everyone to learn the parts, fiddle with sounds, go over structures etc and generally learn it at practice. luckily my attitude as well as the other folks in my better bands have always Been that rehearsals are to sort out intros and endings and vocal harmonies etc. It might be worth having some kind of chat to make sure you all have the same concept of what rehearsals are for, basically learn the chords, structures, solos and get your sounds sorted at home because only a small amount of fiddling around at rehearsal will be tolerated. There is a more blunt solution too...if you get to a song that the keys player hasn’t got a sound for it or doesn’t know the parts for it, give it one go through and just say “not everyone’s got that one, that’s homework let’s move on to the next one”. A little bit of subtle shaming works well sometimes.

Dammit... I'll have to bring my dancing troupe. 😬

For those who are interested, specs are as follows: Chambered Alder body with flame Maple top, Roasted Maple neck with ebony fingerboard, MOP dot inlays, black hardware. Weighs in at a very reasonable 8.65lbs/3.92kgs. I also had them fit a toggle switch on the control plate to switch between Active and Passive - I’ve never been fond of pulling up on the Tone knob due to the potential of changing the setting. Took it to my gig tonight and wow, what an instrument it is! Very pleased indeed 😍

Why am I imagining some kind of manic Bez thing? *shudder*

Maude! Do you know what you're asking?!? Once you see the gimp suit, you'll NEVER be able to erase that image from your mind!

If Higgie's dad worked out from first principles that a 5 sting Sadowsky NYC was the thing to get, then he needs immediate promotion to National Oracle 😂

Like this? I swapped out the non oem pearloid white scratchplate for a black one....