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With absolutely no offence intended to the inhabitants of the dependent regions the Welsh, the Scots and the Northern Irish I must point out two salient factors: * Mr @Bluewine 's spiritual home is Liverpool, Ingerland * Notwithstanding his inner Scouse the language of Mr Bluewine's comments indicate that he is - in fact - a Cockernee. As support for my dialectological observation I commend to the forum's attention one of his recent posts: " Just done a 8 hour gig at this minging boozer in downtown Milwaukee. We orl tip up and the guvnor says to set up in the garden room away from the bar. Fakkin' muppet! So we goes on, like, and this hen party comes in and some fat munter who's been on the sherberts orl arfternoon goes ar5e over t!t right on our lady singer's mic. So she hauls one off on the munter and orl fakkin' hell breaks loose". Res ipsa loquitur, I think. Our very good friend Mr Bluewine is English.

I was pretty disappointed with this too. I signed up hoping to talk about cans of shandy, not all this music palaver!

That kind of thing really boils my p#ss on any forum. There's nothing new under the sun, and when a forum has been around for a few years then pretty much everything imaginable (at least in any way relevant) will have been discussed before. So what then? Are people supposed to just stop posting and use the site like a big online encyclopedia? What a boring forum that would be. If it wasn't for new people asking old questions, most forums would die pretty quickly.

BANNED!!!!

Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! You've gouda brie kidding!

As a parallel, my previous optemitrist optemertrist eye-doctor (a lovely female lady doctor from Dresden), once told me 'its nice to sometimes just sit back, breathe, relax, and close your eyes for a while...' I tried this technique whilst driving home from my appointment. And I have to say it was quite disastrous.

You didn't miss much. Basically 47,000 paragraphs of sententious tosh about issues of 'responsibility as a moderator' with a garnish of preposterous nitpicking. You go, girl. Nee-naw, nee-naw! It's literally the Literal Police. Bang him up! 47,000 paragraphs indicate otherwise. Speechless would be an improvement.

Were I to find myself in the OP's position I would at this point be suggesting that a piano might work better with a cajon than a guitar and that the guitarist could take over lead vocals on a few of the songs while the lady singer moves to trombone.

The site was the inspiration for this one and there’s a huge amount of experience and some great people on there. With any site that size you’re going to get some arses who like the sound of their own voice but imo if you ask a good question and don’t give them any room for stupid replies to generally can find what you need.

I’m on TB and have found people to be very helpful. There’s a wealth of knowledge to be found just as there is on BC. One forum may cover some subjects more than the other so it’s great to have two great resources. I’ve read some threads on there that have turned pretty nasty, but there are some people out there who just live for that. To my mind BC is nowhere near as bad but there are people even here who just seem to post negative comments at every opportunity. People have differing views but how some choose to put those views across is questionable.

So licking the wax off before squidging them back in's a no-no, then? Asking for a friend...

This reminds me of former BC-er BassFerret whose reply to most polite enquiries was 'Google it, FFS!' Eventually he went completely mad and passed over to the other Other Forum - FinnBass - which was in part a sort of refuge for disaffected former BC-ers who thought BC was just a wee bit too uptight. At one time we spoke here of little else than FinnBass and the possibility that it might pose an existential threat to BC but everything went quiet and we just carried on as normal. Great times.

Oh queso... Ricotta get through this! Talkbass needs to change - we can make America grate again!

Bastard!!!

I noticed Ricky added a thank you to that 😂

The NHS website confirms they assist. Earplugs are sold with attenuation specs that have to be supported by testing to comply with advertising rules and Health and Safety Regulations. Thus there is ample proof they are effective. You have also been provided with analogy such as the crash helmet that still means a wearer is at risk of head injury. To sell earplugs "that do not work" would be a criminal offence of fraud, as well as contravening the various Sale of Goods statutes and Consumer Protection Regulations. Using standard dictionary definitions of the words you used in your title and in your original post there is no other way to read it. It is obviously and demonstrably inaccurate. If this forum was subject to newspaper oversight from the PCC a retraction or correction or clarification may well have been ordered. No earplug maker claims they protect against 100% of hearing damage. No PPE maker of any type would make such a claim. But they do have to show that what they claim about their product is true - particularly for any formal safety standards markings. A steel toe boot is very protective - unless you drop 3 tons on it. Does that mean it doesn't work? No. It will have specs as to impact resistance and deformity under load. I do not have a habit of making demands on anyone and I am not bullying you. I am however arguing robustly and pointing out the flaws in your position. The only personal thing about that is that you make the original claim. Please do not assume robust argument is anything other than robust argument. You may find my tone strident. Frankly I am unconcerned. I am far more worried that someone might take your initial post as gospel and stop wearing earplugs. That reader might not read the rest of the thread where you either ignore questions, move goalposts or backtrack from your original post. You are a moderator on a site where the members are often exposed to high volume levels. Claiming that a proven method of noise attenuation doesn't work, without caveat, is irresponsible. When I, and others - including your fellow moderators - have asked you to clarify what was said you have ignored those requests. Even the simple request from WoT "Did he tell you they literally don’t work?" you have ignored. Perhaps you didn't see the post. Now I have drawn your attention to it. It is a simple question. If the "expert" literally said they don't work, then this would be an extraordinary claim that would require extraordinary evidence to over-turn decades of accepted medical advice. If the "expert" did not say it then you expose the inaccuracy of your Original Post. It must be one or the other. It is not unreasonable to expect you to answer such a simple question that is of great importance to anyone who gigs at volume. Perhaps there was additional information. Perhaps the expert said "They literally don't work.... if you are using a road drill all day." That would be a very pertinent matter you neglected to mention and would massively change the applicability of the information in the Original Post. As a moderator, presumably you would delete medical advice posted by others that was demonstrably harmful? Breaches of the Cancer Act for example? Claims that some home-made concoction can cure a condition? Some idiot claiming that a mash of herbs is a better choice than chemo? Are you not concerned that your Original Post might cause others to abandon ear plugs, thus leading them to harm? This is a forum of noise lovers. It's of interest to everybody here. I think that brings additional responsibilities as to the accuracy of what is passed on as an expert opinion about hearing protection.

They're already building one in the South. What we need is for Canada to build one in the North, then the rest of the world can chip in for a lid.

Disagree with you there. TBH this place reeks of jealousy most the time when talking about Talkbass. I have found it a hub of useful information and some very friendly people.

They way OP is attacked in this discussion is shameful. Even when what he was told was incomplete or incorrect, there is no reason to mock someone so harshly for sharing what they consider New Information. I work as an audiology assistant at a major university hospital in the Netherlands, where I spend my days measuring patients hearing loss, indexing their tinnitus levels, establishing speech recognition scores after cochlear implantation etc. etc. A Google search will tell you that ear defenders struggle to attenuate more than 30dB SPL on average reliably. They encompass the ears but rest on the os petrosum, the bone behind the ears in which the cochlea is molded. Ear plugs, of any make, wil attenuate SPLs up to 25-30ish dB, with a bonus for blocking the auditory canal (the shape of the auditory canal boosts volume around 2k Hz -3k Hz). Together, at most 50-60 dB of attenuation is achieved. This could be comparable to hushed or polite conversation levels. Sound louder than that will make your head function as transducer and when the skull vibrates, so does the cochlea, making it send that information to your brain and you hear sound. When this attenuated sound level reaches intensities that causes fatigue, it can damage the cochlea just like pressure through the auditory canal would. Now infection. Ears require sufficient clean air to stay healthy. Closed off for too long, temperature and moisture may rise just enough for fungi or bacteria to flourish in spite of you earwax trying to hold them at bay. Keeping your ears and sinuses airated helps against festering and inflammation (hence the eardrum tubes for chronic sufferers). I hope you all read this in sir David Attenborough's voice.

We took lots of ideas from TB but left some others out - for example I still don’t like the ‘supporting member’ system because it creates a sort of two tier class system where supporting members tend to feel their opinion is more important.

That question is usually asked with the word "why" on the front.....

Hasnt Teebs been arrested ?

I wonder where they've all ended up? Where's Young Teebs, by the way?

I've been busy and not been on here for a while. Have I missed anything exciting? 😁

Oh, I went there!

So many responses have occurred to me that I regret I must defer my reply until such time as a clear winner has emerged.

Yes, because none of us ever post something contentious which is founded on the implied understanding that it might be a generalisation. As for pulling the shutters down, well, who wouldn't when there's trouble in the air and women are hustling their children inside. It seems pretty clear to me that Mr Apple threw one out there with a top dressing of hyperbole to which a few people took exception. Only a ghastly moron would actually think that earplugs are not to an extent beneficial and far from twisting myself into knots of patrician concern that such an individual might be misled into eschewing any form of hearing protection I would instead cheer the likelihood that Darwin's Law might take effect and our nation's average IQ be increased when the non-earplug wearer fails to hear an oncoming elephant and walks into its path with fatal consequences to himself. While recognising the distress that might be caused to the blameless pachyderm, obvs. As one who likes to go on and on and on and on it ill behoves me, perhaps, to poke fun at others whose desire to shine exceeds their brevity. But it really is a bit much to ascribe the collapse of Western hearing to the title of a post intended in part - I suspect - to rouse debate and even more so to suggest that Mr Apple is manifestly delinquent in his resps as a custodian of the forum. I detect a large bee in a tiny bonnet. In any event, I am now off to B&Q to effect the purchase of a rattle-can of black paint, the better to daub the bridges, overpasses and walls of Salisbury with the legend: "Billy Apple Is Innocent". It is time to go old school and I will not rest until justice has been done. The forum can paste that in its collective hat.

I'm outta there! Ricky ➡️ ⬅️ Teebs

You could both join up and see who gets kicked off first. Tell us how you get on in a 'Ricky and Teebs - adventures on TalkBass' diary thread on here.

I did, and it's worth it.

I use for reference on gear when thinking of buying. I always use BC first and then onto TB to get as much info as i can. I currently have shortcuts to Mesa, Bergantino and "Scotch" (better known as Whisky over here) I can't be bothered trying to go thru the vast menu levels looking for things I've also found that many jump on you just for the sake of arguing. Maybe its an American thing where they enjoy conflict. Much prefer BC where we are generally a caring, fun bunch with vast amounts of genuine and accurate knowledge without the attitude (well most of the time) We always have our comedians tho and that for me is what makes it kinda more interesting .....EXCEPT WHEN I'M SERIOUSLY LOOKING FOR ADVICE.........(and YES you know who you are) Dave

Yeah fair play for putting yourself out there. I definitely couldn't do it. Not only because I don't have the knowledge of talent, but I don't even like gigging with the band I'm actually in.

Low frequency friends i've taken the plunge on the Sire. I thank you for your responses, and if anyone was about to message me saying this bass is the worst thing on the planet...well too late I think as long as it allows me to express myself without falling apart or falling out of tune that's the main issue right now. Maybe when the Flower Kings need a new bassist (Jonas Reingod is my new bass hero) i'll be able to afford a superstar P Bass or Rickenbacker. Until then, thanks for the responses

Oh, oh! The puns begin. Be afraid, very afraid. I think think some folks are angling to derail this thread. I don't disapprove, as some lightheartedness can tackle some of the heavier comments, which often ends in the posters making a rod for their own backs. Ooh, is that my coat?

Just my opinion, but the choice of language being correct or incorrect is irrelevant tbh, it has created a debate which, through independent research, has revealed some very interesting information. I'm willing to overlook a bit of hyperbole if it increases my understanding (even indirectly) of a subject of such importance. I'm not a singer or wind instrumentalist, so the info uncovered doesn't directly effect me, but these guys are fellow musicians who play in our bands, being in a position to raise their awareness of this outweighs the wording of a headline.

Jean Jacques Burnel for me. He’s used Swing Bass for as long as I have been playing bass and it’s kinda etched into my mind now so that I just buy multipacks of Rotosound Rotobass and re-string every new bass that comes through my door. His bass playing is unique and aggressive but melodic and punchy without being too twangy, that’s a good basis for my own bass explorations. Tough too, they can take a lot of hard playing. I know what I like and I’m not going anywhere. I always carry a set of 45/65/85/105s in each bag, (as essential as fresh knickers and anti-social “go away” earbuds.)

^^^ This. Play as many different basses as you can. Go for something second-hand - you'll get a lot more bass for your money, and you shouldn't lose any money if you sell it on. You'll probably find your next bass on t'internet, but whatever you do, play it before you hand over the dosh.

This. Noone would expect a flawless set, note for note from a dep..well in the function/wedding circuit. A few fluffs are fine... It's how how you cope with them it's the cool thing. But if you're a decent busker you'll be fine. By the way, bands are always looking for dep bassists so your number will start doing the rounds and you'll get plenty gigs if you done s good job. Exact thing happened to me. Im not the world's best player, but solid with good gear. Im reliable and il do my homework. That's about 90 percent of the battle I've found.

You may listen to internet wisdom or use your legs. Take your bass to a luthier and ask for a professional setup. If it is impossible - which I doubt - then turn to another instrument. Remember to take a new set of strings with you, so you get the ones you like, if you already have a preference. Ask for help, if in need. Another thing is to go to a store and test different instruments. This gives you a slight idea of what the others may offer you. It is about touch, ergonomics and sound among others. Brand has nothing to do with how suitable the instrument is to you. Sometimes you just feel that this is the one. The setup may be similar with several instruments and then that certain body may just fit yours. Ibanez? Metal oriented? My Affirma has been with me in theater and dance gigs alike. She can jazz, too.

I certainly wouldn't rock up to a shoot with a pair of ACS PRO 17's 😄

You’ve posted something here which potentially turns perceived wisdom on its head. I don’t think we can be blamed for not taking it as gospel, given that there’s other hard evidence anywhere that anyone has found (yet?) that back his statement up, and now you’re backtracking slightly Believe me, I want to do what is right and practical for my ears, and ‘This bloke at a H&S conference says..’ doesn’t qualify. Was he representing and ear defender company by any chance? Pneumatic drills, jet engines and that?

I have been on Talkbass since 2007 and have never been abused, slagged off or insulted. Every now and then I've had disagreements and people have disagreed with me. That's life! I've always found TB and the vast majority of its members to be a great source of information, opinion, experience and ideas. There are always things to learn, stuff to agree with and stuff to ignore. Isn't that the point? You take what's good and disregard the rest.

I was kidding but am a bit pished at the pub and couldn’t find emojis, @Bluewine is an exemplary American and definitely an honorary Englishman.

A little bit of progress. I've hollowed out the inside of the walnut core, drill press followed by router. I routed a wiring channel for the switch and drilled a small hole (that you can't see) that will hopefully line up with the bridge ferrule so it can be grounded. The back ash plate was already glued on when I took the photos, and the front plate is in a vacuum bag being glued on to the front as I type. I also glued together a neck blank using wood from a beautiful Walnut board I picked up at Brooks, my local builders hardwood yard in Nottingham. The board was a perfect 8" wide and about 8 feet long. It's got really beautiful grain and some flame, even if a bit hard to see in the photos. For £80 it was really a bargain. It was also almost at the top of the pile. Sods law clearly had taken a day off. Here I've glued it together as a 9 piece neck - Walnut/maple/rocklite ebano (an artifical ebony) with black & white veneer accent lines. I forgot to take any pictures of the gluing process (and anyway it's somewhat hectic), but it's really a great moment when you scrape back the dried glue to reveal a perfect striped blank. Any in my limited experience they are stable in a way that non-laminated necks never are. A gratuitous stripey shot.... (Diagonal lines are from the drum sander, not the wood)

This one was fun...

@EJWW I've read down your OP, interesting. You spend the first six stanzas doubting your ability and the final one of which you're saying these guys were PROS; you then follow this by saying you had an uninterested audience, you started Teenage Kicks in the wrong key (I'm sure Michael Bradley would be having a meltdown at this) and that you got the evil eye from the singer. Never feel that you need to be in awe of other players and never be scared of whatever ability they may allude to have. While you may consider them as being PROS (your capitalisation), they're just a covers/wedding band; testament to the fact that they're covering 40 year old punk covers to an uninterested crowd. I've encountered many bands like this, many Creme Brulees.

Did he tell you they literally don’t work?