Leaderboard

Most children are light enough to lift off of a surface without assistance. If it is an exceptionally heavy child seek help from another adult.

As others have said they were very much heavy metal. But just as R&B is unrecognisable today from what it used to mean ,Deep Purple sound closer to jazz than metal in 2021. It's actually a very interesting topic @Killed_by_Death because it speaks to the evolution of popular music.

Courtesy of Walshy for the stunning body, Lindy Fralin for the PUPs, Kiogon for the loom and an unknown manufacturer for the neck, this is on the basis of going back through photos my 19th bitsa build, and one of the best. Lightweight, resonant and articulate. Check out the wood.....

Eh up So..... It's been years since I was here last. Most of you won't remember me, but a few oldies might. I've been here since the start, since the "Bassworld" days which most of you won't remember. I've been totally out of it all now for at least a couple of years. I totally lost all enthusiasm for bass, and making music generally for no reason I can put my finger on other than concentrating on art. I've had every bass you can imagine.... I must be into 3 figures of them... fender, lakland, musician, sadowsky, ibanez, Yamaha etc.... from 3k to £100 (best P bass I ever had... a 100 quid knackered MIJ Squier from the bay).... Anyway.... 2yrs since letting my last 2 Yamaha BBs go..... I got the itch again... my Mrs has bought me (with my guidance) an old Yamaha RBX460. It's, really fun to play, made in Taiwan, around 1997 I think. I'm already looking for pickup upgrades lol.... but it decent as it is... anyways.. Just dropping in.... 👍🏻

STOP !!! STOP !!! STOP !!! STOP !!! STOP !!! STOP !!! Are you crazy, Mick ? It's a nitro finish and acetone (or nail varnish remover) will remove it too ! Don't ever do this to a nitro finish !!!

Just looking at this I think you've had some good advice. One of your queries was about power. Most of the amps have power sections that use basically similar or identical electronics. There are a lot that do 300W into 8ohms and 500W into 4ohms. Frankly this is enough for anyone and conveniently matches the power handling of a single 8ohm cab, and two cabs give four ohms so you still have the power of the amp and speakers pretty much where you want. With so much choice at the 300/500W range you may as well start looking there. I notice there is a fairly pristine Ashdown Rootmaster in the for sale ads here. Buying used means you can get most or all of your money back if you change your mind. The outlier amongst what you've been recommended is the Bugera which uses a bridged version of the Behringer power amps for the output and puts out a genuine 800W. I've only heard positive rsponses from people who own this amp. Ashdown are a great company, they are British and they take after sales really seriously often repairing gear long after their legal guarantees run out and always willing to offer advice, often in these forums. Hats off to @Ashdown Engineering The thing is with such a wide range of choices you really need to start testing things out because they will all do the job and the difference is in the sound. No amount of internet advice will help you there. In the end after buying a MarkBass and trying a range of others I bought a Peavey Minimax and just love the sound straight out of the box. It looks however like you are a combo man so try those first. It's hard to go wrong really so choose on sound and enjoy your new band.

Scarf joints cut, sanded and glued: The small holes at the edge of the necks are where they were pinned during gluing to stop them slipping when clamped.

Not this again 🤦‍♂️

Needs a 'not any more' option. A lot of 'classic' hard rock would've been called heavy metal at the time but as the music's become more extreme, the term's been redefined. Lots of speculation about the origin of the term - I've always understood it to have come from biker slang for large capacity (and therefore loud) motorcycles - hence its appearance in the lyrics of Steppenwolf's Born To Be Wild. Which would have been pretty heavy in its day.

This is my one: a Fender Japan Unlined Fretless Jazz neck, a swamp ash P Bass body I had made for me and a set of EMG Jazz pickups.

No. My kids think about it and my spidey senses tingle and I tape their hands into closed fists

🙂

Ask David Wilson. In fact, I’ll ask him for you. Stand by….

These kind of classifications are obviously entirely arbitrary and completely subjective and they've also evolved massively over time. As an analogy, it's like saying "is this a fast car or not?" Do you consider a Golf GTI to be a fast car or do you have to get into Porsche 911 territory for it to be classed as fast? And what about how things have changed over time? Back in 1901 this car held the land speed record at 65.79 miles an hour (achievable now on a 125cc learner legal motorcycle) but today I wouldn't want to be stuck behind one for too long in my 10 year old 1.6 Diesel Peugeot. Long and short of it - there's no answer to this question. 🤷‍♂️

It wasn't classic rock when it came out though.

Lots of pieces for this ready to go! These were originally going to use the birdseye veneer for facing the headstock but I'm going to try to source some walnut veneer to match the body instead.

This project is to make two semi hollow basses, on fretted and one fretless. One of the basses will use the body of a semi hollow bass I made a while back with a new neck. The second bass will be a copy of the first. When I built the first bass I had bought two pieces of walnut at the same time so I should be able to make these look very similar. The reason for making a new neck for the first bass is to change the scale length from 30" to 32". Both necks will also be made with angled headstocks to do away with string trees. Both basses will be maple bodies with an American walnut top, have birdseye maple necks, ebony fretboard (with an extended thumb rest), Luminlay side dots, Shadow piezo pickup, East preamp and a satin finish.

That tempted fate didn't it?!!! Not entirely sure how, but the chuck must have not been tight enough and router bit moved out putting a hole in the back of the neck. Time to build another neck...... I actually needed to build another two necks for another project so I've started making them all at the same time. After thicknessing all the neck blanks I used a bandsaw to cut the angle for the scarf joint. After lots of very tedious sanding (I really must build a jig to make this easier and quicker) I ended up with these: It pays to take time and get this right as it makes for a nice, tight joint. These are the three necks prior to gluing: The worst thing about wrecking the original neck is that I need to make new veneers for the headstock. I bought some ash veneer from different places but it just didn't match to my satisfaction so I made some by cutting thin slices from the offcuts from the body then sanding to thickness. That took ages the first time and now I've got to repeat it!! Oh well, it will be worth it in the end. Cheers

I’m all for discussing music, but that’s not what this thread is. As @Cato says, it’s about pigeonholing. It’s been done before (by you) and I don’t get it either 🤷‍♂️. What next? Was Elvis ‘The King of Rock and Roll? Was Michael Jackson ‘The King of Pop’? Was James Brown ‘The Godfather of Soul’? Can Marc Almond hold a tune? Are the Pet Shop Boys the best live act you’ll ever see? The answer to the last two are definitely ‘No”, but you get my drift?

Yeah, we shouldn't have Music discussions on a Music forum. What was I thinking?!

Nut, tuners and string retainers sorted. Side dots also done. And first coat of red stain on (will be sanded back). Staining Alder is always a little challenging, multiple coats and sanding back ensures a consistent finish.

It's landed and sounds sweet. Excellent build quality, the tuners are something else, and the tones!

OK so I fell out with my Canadian Dingwall ABZ,although it is undoubtedly a thing of beauty & plays sublimely well I just can't get it to sound how I'd like it in the band. Since I realised I was trying to make it sound like a P bass (which it isn't) I made up my mind I actually needed a P bass. After much research & browsing I didn't want a Fender as they are massively over priced,then spotted the Vintage Modern basses on Bass Direct. Contacted Mark & sorted a good trade deal out for this little beauty. It is a sublime P bass,sounds ace,build quality is spot on & it has a gorgeous roasted maple neck too. So I've gone full circle once again & ended up on a P bass. You'd think I'd learn 😁

And … it’s a guitar 🔥 it anyway even if it doesn’t have ink on it. The world will thank you

Maggot Brain - Funkadelic

Just rediscovered this blast from the past. Sit back, pop your class A of choice and get lost in its hypnotic groove.

The response was this: “Automotive panel wipe Get it from car paint shop supplies Upol brand is very good” ”You may have to polish it out with car polish , I use auto glym just there regular polish” “Think it’s called resin polish”

I think he has always truly loved the FI best 😉 And tbf if the manual and interface were half as good as they are now after a couple of years dedicated work by him, I almost certainly would have held onto mine.

I should say so!

Indeed. It’s semantics though. There was a discussion not long ago about if Judas Priest were Heavy Metal. They were classed as that when I was a teenager and were notable at least to my ears as being distinctively less rooted in the blues than their predecessors.

Prosaic answer: From 1981, I'm sure Lars never owned a copy... And how many artists mentioned on the front would by any stretch be considered 'metal' at any point after, say, 1985?

That was what divided the playground when I was at primary school in the early 60s! I'm off now to a rehearsal about 1/4 mile from that very school!

You can probably use your stomp to send PC messages to change patches on the FI. If you don’t have to make quick changes, you can double-tap the FI’s Program button to scroll down by 1. Obviously I’d recommend getting a Morningstar controller as it’ll unlock options on your FI and your Stomp.

With a friend, who like me was fed up of endless subcategories in the metal genre, we decided to call metal anything played with distortion and jazz everything played without distortion. It was a very effective way to categorise. 😎 That said, there's even a faster way to categorise things : music opposed to dire.

-

Sorry, but I’ll disagree. I think it might be helpful in terms of a new originals band that nobody’s ever heard to give an indication of what they are about by broadly categorising them as ‘rock’ or ‘soul’, but to be having conversations about categorising 50 year old songs? I just don’t see the point. YMMV of course.

Operates the pickup pan control. The lever/slider moves one gear which moves gears controlling two separate volume pots (the other slider is a master volume). Not sure why they used such a complicated solution as stereos with balance controls already existed in that era. Admittedly, the gears are plastic rather than brass... The bass is full of crazy features including active preamp (only on the bridge pickup) and a mercury switch to mute the bass when vertical on a stand and disconnect the battery - and this still functions perfectly 57 years on. I know they were doing the preamps at least as early as '63 and know of someone with a Meazzi guitar dated '59 which has the preamp as well. Makes me wonder who was first, them, Burns or someone else. Very well made bass. Full 34" scale, Brazilian rosewood (with matching rosewood binding to cover the fret tangs), hardware equal in quality to Fender, metal inserts for most screws (something I thought of only with modern 'boutique' basses), individual polepiece adjustment very much like on the old Guild/Hagstrom pickups. Really cool bass, though heavy.

For some weird reason there does seem to be an impulse to categorise everything and assign it to a group and tag it with a label. I've encountered it elsewhere in a non-musical context and I do find it frustrating as in that case it's about assigning 'labels' to groups of people.

I've never understood the urge to put labels on everything. It happens to extent in all broad categories of music but for some reason dance music and metal fans seem to to be the most obsessive about dividing everything into micro genres. I remember back in the 80s, when I used to listen to metal, friends arguing about whether various bands were speed metal or thrash metal, I never did learn the difference. Since then there seem to have infinite subdivisions, stuff I would have called 'Thrash' back then now seems to have subdivided with terms like 'doom' , 'sludge', 'math rock'. It all seems to have got a little bit out of hand.

It sounds like a P bass, played superbly, recorded in an expensive studio and produced by someone who knew what they were doing. As for re-creating that sound live, how much do you want to spend?

Too many audible lyrics. Too much melody. Not enough drum hits per second. Laid back guitar solo. Way too much fidelity all around.

Again I'm afraid I have no info on that specific model but I have a 5 string I have had for 20 years and it's an incredible instrument.