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So about eight days ago, I start a new job. My background is in credit management and analytical poop; I'm supervising a team of eight ladies, they're all pretty lovely to be honest. A couple of days in and I'm facing a battery of questions, you know, 'Are you married?' (Yes), 'Do you have kids?' (No, cats), 'What you you do outside of work?' (I play bass and read a lot). The latter question is always a way of saying that I do music, used to gig a lot, but don't now, it's a studio project and so on. I rarely make an effort to big myself up, I mean why would I? One of the ladies says that a heavily pregnant member of the team has a husband who plays drums, so I make a mental note, because drummers are hard to find. I sat down with her last week and we're just chatting and the conversation moves to music. She asks, 'You in a band then?' I explain yes, but no, but yes and it's all studio stuff. I mention I'd heard her husband played drums and - wondering whether he'd be up for a jam sometime - I ask whether he plays in a band. 'Yeah, he's in Scouting For Girls. They've been on Sony for about ten years.' I just wondered why the ground didn't open up and swallow me.

Hey gang Following a recent fling with a '63 Precision, which made me realise the early 60's neck profile isn't for me, I'm back in the bosom of the lovely fat early 70s P neck. I picked this up a few days ago - it's a '72, with a neck stamp dated the month & year of my birth. It's light (about 8.5lbs) and resonant, original black, with a maple neck. They're just teaser pics at the moment as it needs a little bit of love, but I'll post the full story soon. In the meantime, I can barely stop playing it...

Hi bubinga5, I feel sorry for you, and you're taking this rejection like a champ. But there's a few things that don't quite stack up - you joined a band doing soul/funk covers - presumably because (a) you enjoy playing these and (b) you know you're going to get regular paid work because the band are playing this material - bums on seats etc - and then along comes your new singer, and all this goes out the window because the guitarist and singer want to do the singer's own material ??? WTF ??? Surely the singers own material should be a side project - you don't sacrifice a perfectly good gigging set up just to appease some guy with his own material, and just because he wants to get off on this. And then you say the new bass player is a 'pro' - what, in terms of ability? Because if the band's suddenly going to start doing original material then they'll be joining the other 10,000 original bands in the UK scraping for any work at all, so your new bassist won't be able to give up the day job any day soon. So, tough as it may seem, you might be well out of this, and you can then find a band that has much clearer goals and objectives from day one. Best of luck !

I was once sacked for not having the right look and direction that the band wanted. It actually boiled down to the fact that I wasn’t willing to hand over £6000 to help set up a rehearsal studio. The band in question got their studio, haven’t ever gigged and never released any material. Bovvered?????

I know it's not a six string Dingwall custom shop but I've played it a few times and it's what I need in my price range!

Couple of pub gigs this weekend. Well received and a couple of people even noticed the bass player. I was accosted in the car park and complimented. A very pleasant footnote. These gigs are a bit rough and ready, people out to get hammered, have a dance and a singsong, but not out specifically to see us. I have no snobbery around this at all; I'm a musician, my job is to entertain people not judge their lifestyle. Having experienced venues with back stage rooms, riders, quality PA and all that jazz there are times when I think how nice it would be to be back up there again. However I quickly squash such thoughts, reminding myself that not long ago I couldn't get any kind of gig at all.

Never been asked either. In fact many of the venues we play could do with their electrics checking!

Take overs happen. That's always the risk when "mates" are asked to join. You're in good company with Brian Jones, Denny Dias and Syd Barrett.

Yes, it was built and painted for TM Stevens but he didn’t keep it. Has barely been played and sat on display for over 30 years!

I did both in my early teens, practising technique and using my ears. It just seemed like a natural thing to do and went hand in hand for me. Learning theory early on, was relatively easy, because I was enthusiastic and keen when I was Thirteen...Plus, it was a way into the school Orchestra, which was jam packed with girls.

I'd almost made up my mind to pre-order one of these Classic Vibe Mustangs... but then I saw this! 😍

Ok, so this is copy-pasted from another bass forum, but for a lengthy review of the Ken Smith BT5 that I recently purchased from Ped as well as a few words on my Eich Bass Board that I also purchased as a result of Ped, please read on. For as long as I've known about (the other bass forum for middle class Americans) , which is the better part of 18 years now, I've wanted a Ken Smith, particularly the older BT shape models which I prefer to the newer shapes. I used to play electric guitar and my switch to bass was fairly recent, I've been buying my dream basses. I think I've always secretly been a bassist, I always coveted exotic basses more than exotic guitars and I always loved the role of bass in a band, but that's a whole other story. Here we are, in 2019 and I'm now a bassist. I actually posted last month in the "What will your next bass be?" thread, that my next instrument would be a Ken Smith. I've always loved the design ethos, the exquisite craftsmanship and forward-thinking design Ken's basses had and have. I think they sound great in live and studio recordings, though I'd never heard or even seen one in person until I purchased mine. Last Sunday night, my brother (who is a long-time member here, India_Sierra) sent me a link to a classified ad for a Ken Smith BT5, for sale near York in the UK, which is about 2.5 hours drive where I live in the north of England. The few pictures in the ad looked great, the price seemed very, very fair for the condition of the instrument and as the seller was the owner of the website the classified was hosted on, I felt confident to make the trip down with the full asking price in cash, knowing the bass would be as-described. As it happend, the bass was in virtually perfect condition with barely a mark on it. It has clearly been loved dearly and pampered over the years. So here we have it, a 1991 Ken Smith with koa top and back, mahogany core and maple layers. The neck is maple and morado. It's the old skool 2 band EQ with all original electronics, all the pots work smoothly with no noise at all and the jack socket was recently replaced. The action is super low but so playable - it gives just the right amount of buzz when you dig in hard but otherwise is easy to play clean. It requires so little strength and physical input that it just feels effortless to play. One of the big draws for me was the Ken Smith sound. There is a characteristic and quality to his instruments that no other bass has, it's present in every Smith recording I've heard. I know Ken has been famously picky about which woods would be offered, he has his ideas about what works in combination to get the best sound and I have to say, I believe in his wisddom. Despite being a large instrument, with quite a large but thin body, the resonance and sustain of this thing is incredible despite it not being particularly heavy. It's very loud and resonant unplugged and harmonics ring out with such clarity and purity. The build quality is flawless. The attention to detail, the thoughtfulness of the design, the amazing way the neck joins the body almost imperceptibly, that famous brass nut, it's beyond superb. Plugged in, it gives that instant Smith sound. I keep it flat on the EQ, pickups balanced 50/50 and volume on full and it just sounds so perfectly even and balanced, with a rich quality to every note. I struggle to put into words exactly what this quality is; it's neither a dark bass, nor a bright one, it's warm but extremely clear and articulate. It isn't harsh, but it's not mushy or soft. I think it is perhaps best described as "balanced". I think a good balance in the sound of a bass is perhaps the most important property I look for, tonally, in a bass. For me, every note must be as loud as resonant as every other note, there must be no dead spots, no strings louder than one another. There must be no booming, overpowering bass and no harsh treble. The Smith delivers on this perfectly. Another remarkable trick is that there is no volume increase when slapping - a bit of black magic I haven't quite figured out yet, I could happily slap on this without needing a compressor to stop volume spikes. It's as if it has some magical in-built compressor. I see now why Ken's basses became one of the session bass industry standards. The EQ is as flexible as two band can be and remains musical throughout the settings, it doesn't quite have the extreme (and IMO generally unusable) extremes of EQ that some modern preamps have. No matter what you do to it, it still sounds like a Smith, so it's not a hugely versatile bass, but I don't need it to be - the sound it makes is so pure it sits perfectly in many, many genres. If I played bar-room blues or heavy metal, which I don't, the Smith wouldn't be the right choice, but for gospel, latin, jazz fusion, funk, pop etc, it's fantastic. The electrical package is one of those things Ken just got right. There's a reason people who buy Smith basses don't tend to want to change preamps or pickups, everything is just so perfectly matched, it just works exactly as it should. The bass came with the original Smith teardrop case and what appears to a 1991 strap, judging by the age of it. I purchased another Dingwall racing strap in brown leather and some Dunlop straploks for the recessed locks. The Dingwall straps are fantastic by the way, I have one on another bass in my collection, but the leather is so thick that getting Dunlop straploks on is a two man job. I know it's early days for me and this bass, but in contrast to another recent thread where a user lamented his dream bass just not working for him, the Smith is perfect for me. Smiths have always held a mystique for me and I've always wanted one. I am glad and grateful for the opportunity to make this happen and of course, I must thank India Sierra for pointing me to the advert - I spent less than 30 seconds in considering to buy it as the vultures were already circling in the for-sale thread. I think it was on sale for less than an hour before I snapped it up. As it happens, when I tried the bass at the seller's house, he was using a headphone setup, with headphone running into a digital bass synth / amp unit and an Eich Bass Board underneath his office chair, powered by what looked like a little TC Electronics head. The Bass Board, if you haven't seen it, is a board that you stand on, or sit on with a chair as you play. It has two incredibly powerful drivers which take your amp signal and turn it into vibrations that you feel through the board, but the attenuation of the vibration is so perfect that you can literally feel the music in your body as you play. The Bass Board is also incredibly quiet - standing on it gives the impression of playing bass in front of a cranked up huge rig, if you've ever played a huge rig or been to a really loud concert where you can feel the bass in your whole body, that is what this gadget gives you. It has useful applications for people using IEMs during gigs who miss the feedback of "feeling" the music from their amp, but I just liked it for home practice. The engineering is spot on, when standing on it felt like I was standing in front of a huge rig, yet when not standing on it, I noted that the vibration bleed coming out of it was absolutely minimal. It has a headphone input too so it could be a great option for players who have family who get irritated by bass vibration shaking the house. I play a Markbass Ninja 1000W into a Markbass Ninja 2x12 at home, I've got some wattage to spare, so I've purchased myself a Bass Board for home use. I don't spare the decibels at home, but even at moderate volume levels the Bass Board creates an illusion of playing really loud, as if you've just walked on stage at Madison Square Garden (or the Baked Potato if that's more your thing). Sadly the speakon cables I had at home aren't long enough to connect it to my Ninja 2x12, so I've had to order another cable and I can't use it until that arrives. If you ever get the chance to try one of these Bass Boards, I urge you to do so, particuarly if you play live with IEMs and no amp as a monitor on stage with you. Even if you just want to make your home practice session feel like you're doing the closing set of the Montreux Jazz Festival, this thing will not fail to make you smile. Thanks for reading if you made it this far. I hope if you have a dream bass, that you are able to make it happen. Life is too short to settle for less. If you have not played a Ken Smith then you absolutely must. I've been lucky enough to play and own some fabulous instruments and this is better than them all.

A commodity broker friend of mine who played a bit of saxophone in an amateur big band was talking to a client with whom the conversation turned to playing music. After asking my friend what he did he said his wife was a singer. My friend did the obvious - oh, she could come and sing with us. Turned out the client, a Norwegian shipping magnate was married to Diana Ross 😄

If I show you mine, will you show me yours.😃 Edit for I blame @Teebs for the smutty enduenue in my posts.

Got one on order

Classic example of mission creep brought on by personnel turnover. The band has clearly descended into a vortex of ego, narcotics and procrastination so you're better off out of it. Now go find another band, gig yer ar$e off and trouser some wedge.

I'll compromise and change the scratch plate 👍

150mA should do.

Along with buying a mains safety trip plug....

Unfortunately this is an argument that is going to go on till the end of time!!!! In my opinion and what I’ve experienced in the difference between my basses is they all have maple necks and quite a few of them have Rosewood boards and some have Maple boards but they have different body woods (Alder, Basswood, Paulownia, Ply etc) and they all sound different but is that because of the timber combinations or is it they all have different style pickups in them or is it they sound different because some are passive and some are active????? So my point is I think the choice of pickups and preamps etc is more important than the timber used, and does the timber really make that much difference to the sound or do we like to think there is a difference to justify the fact that spending ridiculous amounts on custom basses using exotic woods in the necks and bodies will give you the sound you want????? But there again I might be completely wrong!!............🤔

You don’t happen to wear a full nylon based stage outfit do you and sweat a lot

Like the OP, I've always been a little bemused that the Akai seems to command such high prices from willing buyers, when there is a modern equivalent in the form of the Future Impact which starts with the 9 preset sounds that the Akai provides and then adds a further 90 presets and a whole bunch of options to edit and create your own effects patches with a much more powerful synth engine inside. However simple supply and demand come into play - the Akai doesn't come up for sale that often. And at some point any product that has a degree of scarcity can become a collector's item which transforms its value. You only have to look at classic car prices to see the effect. PS: while I'm on the sibject, a little plug for the FI, if I may: it's better than any multi-fx synth engine I have tried so far, including Helix, @HazBeen is currently on his fourth one (sequentially not all at once, I should hasten to add!); we have an expert in residence in patch creation and editing in @Quatschmacher who has been engaged by FI to create new patches for their (hopefully!) soon to be released Firmware 3.0 upgrade. And our own @GisserD has designed a neat smaller housing for the FI which has sold in numbers both here and in the USA.

The Moogerfooger is good fun but there are so many parameters you can change that it's going to take a while to get used to. Now, that SVT 4 Pro..... I just gigged it tonight. It's absolutely awesome.

Each to their own, as long as people are happy doing what they do, that’s all that really matters. I teach music, it’s a moment I always love when I show someone something; that Eureka moment when they realise that they’ve just learned one simple thing that will have massive benefits to their playing, cutting out the hit and miss of note selection, the reduction in the hours spent sitting down trying to work a part out by ear. The harmony and theory module of my BMus was one of my favourite. I opted to do a module on my MMus called ‘material form and structure’, which studied scores, and analysed compositions. The theory and ‘nuts and bolts’ behind music is something that’s always fascinated me, it’s really beautiful when you look at it. I’m a little weird though 😊.

I wonder whether hofner would still be selling their viola basses today if Paul McCartney had got his hands on a left handed Fender in Hamburg in 1961?

Many artists have made gear popular. Frinstance Bob Marley and ganja, Grateful Dead and acid and Doctor Feellgood and amphetamines...

BB350 (1990’s) BB1500a (1990’s) Active BB - STD (1990’s Japan) all J/J

Take your point about R&D Cam, but I think the first part of what bassfan said hits it on the head for me. If you want a great PJ bass which brands would you think of? Well Yammy would be right up there for a lot of folk. The Yammy PJs are arguably as good as any on the market, certainly at the price points they pitch them at. If you want a great J bass, well where do you start? The choice is endless and as well as being a very crowded space, Yammy could potentially just end up with a relatively run of the mill J-bass, which might even lower their stellar reputation with bassists if folk found them a bit meh? I think Yammy have played a very canny game and done it well over many decades. They have a dedicated following with both their BB and Line6/Helix brands and quite a lot to digest and sharpen-up with Ampeg now in the fold.

That's really nice, except @Teebs has one just like it. Maybe you could paint it a different colour?

Valve pedals tend to have much higher requirements than usual 9V Boss type analog pedals. I'm not sure you can damage it but it's likely it will not be very good. I have had several valve pedals that I tried at different voltages. With some, I lost headroom. With others, they just didn't work, giving me faint noises. Also, it's not just the voltage, the current rating is important, probably more so than voltage alone. If your pedal required at least 120mA, and you're daisy chaining several... chances are it will not work very well. You could fit a 2-way into your pedalboard so you can power the valve pedal separately, but still using a single plug off the board.

Ha, saw the bass yesterday in Dublin.

Not always. The VT1 Pro Bass Drive works off a centre neg. I have a 2-way 13A extension socket on my pedal board, I'm not a fan of training wall wart cables across stages either.

Hello Basschat; my name is Richard (formally Richard II when onstage), I am a session musician of the (currently) semi-professional variety, I have just returned from my first genuine big boy tour, and I would like to tell you about it! A couple of months back I mentioned this would be happening in another thread and it was suggest that I post a trip report - the last month has been something of a blur and this will mostly be an attempt to collate some of my memories into a parsable format so I thought there might be some interest in reading about something not many people get to do. Wembley - Night 2. Please excuse the hair... For roughly the last 18 months I have been working with a lovely set of musicians called Bang Bang Romeo covering various roles including bass, guitar, and keyboards. They aren't famous (yet), but are a little higher up the ladder than most club bands so it's been a real pleasure to drop onto most of the gigs they've been getting. I've known them on and off for a long time as we're all from the same town and there are only so many people working at that level in the local area so it became inevitable that our paths would collide. About a year into my stint our agent told us to clear our summers and kiss our wives goodbye as we had dropped onto a big tour. He admittedly says this a lot, but this time it turned out to be a genuinely life-changing run of 14 dates supporting P!nk on the UK Beautiful Trauma Tour around the UK and Europe, with an option for another 6 dates if we didn't manage to show our entire asses on the first leg. I was nervous but just about keeping it together until I received the tour manifest through and found that the SMALLEST date on the run was a 30,000 cap stadium... The next six months were mostly a blur of rearranging songs for maximum impact and paring the set down to a machine-precise 25 minutes until about a month before we left when it really started to hit home that this was happening. In particular there was a moment of panic where the other guitarist and myself were doing a stock-take of equipment and realised that we had no cables long enough to reach our pedal boards from where the amps would be at the back of the stage. We'd all played some big events before, but this was a whole new kettle of fish and we were very much the amateur chancers on this tour - yes we were playing two nights at Wembley but right now we were still fitting rehearsals around our day jobs! In the end it was probably the best introduction to the touring life that we could hope for. Pink hires the best in the business and every single person we met was lovely to us. I was however reminded on regular occasions that this is unusually cushy for touring life and I shouldn't get used to this standard in the future... Her band introduced themselves to us early on and we got quite chatty with them over the course of the tour; Justin Derrico is the loveliest guy as well as a MONSTER shredder who incidentally has not just the best LP with piezo sound, but possibly the best acoustic sound I've ever heard in a live setting. Regarding gear, we are luckily good friends with the Hiwatt UK guys who kitted us out with rental amps and overnight shipped a replacement when one went down at Paris, so I can't give enough love to those guys. Initially I took my Tokai SG and a second guitar out, but after a string of equipment failures in the second week I was left with no usable guitars. I contacted Gibson Germany in a blind panic who very kindly talked me off the ledge and provided me with two gorgeous black SGs as loaners for the remainder of the dates. In the middle of the run we also flew from Belgium to Switzerland to play Montreux Jazz Festival with Sting and before you ask, no I can barely believe that particular sentence myself; at one point I actually burst into hysterical laughter in the airport shuttle because the whole thing had begun to seem so ludicrous. I think we stayed in Switzerland for about 18 hours before catching another flight back for the Wembley run (see above regarding hysterics) but we were privileged enough to play a full 50 minute set in the Stravinsky Auditorium with the best in-ear sound I've ever heard. While I can't hope to entirely do justice to the legendary spirits of improv that have walked those halls, we certainly gave it everything and it was possibly the most technically perfect set we've ever played. We also dropped onto the lakeshore to do a session for Swiss national radio with me on bass in the traditional four piece lineup while our tour bassist (Phil) chilled in the lake for a bit. I initially thought I got the better half of that bargain until we spent an hour sweating under a brutally hot tent canopy trying to parse the French-speaking interviewer's questions as Phil gambolled and frolicked in the blissfully cool waters of Lake Geneva behind him. I'm incredibly sad to be back now, but at least we have a few dates left on the run as I go back out for the Scandinavian leg of Copenhagen, Oslo, and Horsens in August. I'm not counting the days, honest... I'll spare the gory (and fairly tedious for those who aren't interested in tour buses!) details of each individual show, but here are a few highlights: Mercedes-Benz Arena, Stuttgart Mercedes-Benz Arena, Stuttgart - "Hello... gods, where are we? Hello Stuttgart!" Olympiastadion, Berlin - screw Wembley, what a venue! La Defense Arena, Paris - the gig prior to the SG taking a tumble! Montreux Jazz Festival - extra fly date supporting Sting. HELLOOOOOO WEMBLEY! (Night 1) Thanks for bearing with me this long - I'll be happy to answer rig questions or anything anyone might be curious about in later posts. If anyone is still interested in checking out more informal pics of backstage/touring life then my tour instagram can be found HERE.

I like to play with myself, and I also like to play with the band... But you can't beat a good gig, with a roaring crowd and groupies that are recognisably animal, vegetable and mineral queueing outside the enormous dressing room waiting to have a go on our extensive rider. Then there's the press adulation - HERE'S an example from 1991...

It's cheap as chips too.

Mark K is probably the most capable in the UK in terms of getting people to buy gear. If Status need a cash injection, they release a new take on a King Bass or whatever bass he happens to be using at the time. There will be plenty of middle class bankers, doctors, solicitors queuing up to drop the cash. Hell, that picture above has probably got more than a fair few Level 42 fans suddenly considering Mark Bass. In reality, whatever Mark K is using is irrelevant. The sound out front is processed by the desk and what he is hearing will be coming from wedges - or for those on inears, processed signal in the desk from a DI. The tone of a bass amp is becoming less and less relevant in these kind of scenarios. It’s probably why there’s a load of guys scratching their heads trying to figure out why they can’t cop the same tone down the Dog and Duck... it’s the lack of Digicos, Midas, Allen and Heaths etc which is holding their tone quest back!

I came here thinking this was going to be about Pete Townshend, as you were.

I bought a four-channel headphone amp and a matching studio control unit from Mike. All in original boxes, inside a stout containing box, all arrived swiftly in France in perfect condition. Very complete, with all the doc and power supplies. A quality affair, treated promptly and in the most friendly manner; a real pleasure.Thanks, Mike, you are hereby declared to be, in my view, a Good Egg.