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Last year I had a moment of slight madness and sold my short scale ACG. A month ago or so I had a much more serious moment of absolute madness and I sold all my basses and amplification, all I had left was a forlorn bag of leads. Yesterday I regained my sanity somewhat and was very lucky to be able to buy back my ACG Recurve SS 4 and very pleased I am too, this beauty is for keeps. @Clarky gets visiting rights.

Oh to be perilously turning 30 again...

It depends what you’re wanting from it. Each of them does something different and if that’s the thing you’re looking for it’s the best. After reading @MGBrown’s comment, I went back and had yet another listen and the low down, solid sound of the G&L is beguiling, I really like it (it’s not unlike my Mustang, which I’m massively in love with currently). I like the ‘Ray for the added bit of nasal midrange that makes it sit well, but still stand out (if that makes sense) in that track. The Celinder, unsurprisingly, has elements of both the ‘Ray and the G&L due to its J bass DNA, which, to my ears, makes it less distinctive. Ultimately, as I opened with, it’s down to what you’re looking for, which leads to each of them being the best for a given set of parameters. If I heard any one of them on a recording or in a live setting, my ears would be happy.

I just recorded this clip. I tried for ages to get it so that the song played and the basses switched between as you go through but I gave up in the end. There's a few mistakes and so on but it should give a fairly good idea of how they sound.

Bottesini used to do it all the time.

The muted slap tone on the G&L seems to complement the rest of the sound of the bass best for me, after 3 listens, eyes closed, the other two have a slap tone our ears are more familiar with but overall the G&L tone works best for me in these examples, it's more striking, maybe because it is less often heard

One of the most comprehensive rebuttals that springs to mind is Frank Zappa. He turned 30 in December 1970 with Over-nite Sensation, Apostrophe, Joe’s Garage I, II & III and many others ahead of him.

This looks like the same vintage 1970s MIJ bass that I’ve seen variously with different brand names, such as Grant, Antoria, Ibanez, etc, and a couple more in Europe that I can’t remember the names of now. Almost every one I’ve seen has been that custard yellow colour that some Fenders have, but I have seen sunburst ones too. Surprised to see this one has been stripped, most folks are fussy about plywood. I wouldn’t mind it though. The bridge isn’t right, it would have had a low quality BBOT originally, and sharp-edged bridge and pickup covers too. Playability and quality wise they’re not far off the old Shaftesbury Tele bass copies (I know they were Italian, but the overall feel was pretty similar). I’ve played Antoria and Grant versions and they were both short scale, but there are also 34” scale versions that look very similar to these. Maybe any Minutemen fans can confirm whether the Tele bass copy that Mike Watt played was one of these? Mods? I’d change the bridge and then just play it. But I’m basic AF 😂 Enjoy it!

Stingray for me. A bit more fizz and nice depth too

OK sod it! That's a 1x112 ordered from Muzik Produktiv to match the one I've already ordered locally. Nice little 2x12 600w lightweight stack. Can't go wrong at that price. Even with the delivery charge it's cheaper than the one I bought locally, which itself was cheaper than any of the UK retailers 😁

Strange this subject should pop up as we have just taken on a new drummer in Somerset, although he is from Dorset. We played an outdoor gig in Dorset around 5 weeks ago at a pub and in the break one of the band got chatting to this guy who was a drummer. Turns out he'd done a gig that night and it hadn't gone well, he'd driven past the pub, heard our music and thought he'd stop and have a pint. In the second set we offered him our cahon and he accompanied us on a few numbers. At the end he thanked us and left his contact details saying how much he'd enjoyed our set. (We do Americana type stuff). Then a couple of weeks ago myself and our banjo player could not do a gig at short notice so this drummer was contacted and asked if he'd like to come along, which he did and played the whole set ( which was changed to avoid banjo and bass-heavy songs). At our next rehearsal the band leader was gushing about this drummer and how he really dug our material: last week she announced he was joining us! Whilst slightly put out as I was not consulted ( me being head of the rythmn section......) I thought let's not get too arsey until I hear him play. Given with the last 2 drummers I had to suggest what they played as they appeared to have no natural musical intuition or ability (!), this guy was a breath of fresh air. He did not over play, he picked up on the starts and endings and any stops within the songs. He played for the songs and not himself and could keep steady time too.....! Needless to say, rehearsal volume levels were higher ( we are harmonica/vox. acoustic guitar/vox, electric guitar/vox, Bass, and Banjo) but the addition of drums seemed to help tie things together. So he'll join us for the bigger gigs ( we have a Country Festival gig at the Bath & West Showground in a couple of weeks) and he'll sit out the smaller ones. Our Banjo player got all excited saying 'how wonderful this drummer was and how he'd like to rehearse with him every week' but the drummer lives an hour away and he neither needs to nor wants to do all the travel just for the sake of hearing an out of tune banjo(!) so sanity will prevail. He's a bit like some the deps we used to get when I played in West Yorkshire: we did not have a f/t drummer but used Leeds College of Music students, most of whom knew the material ( female vox covers) and could easliy carry the drums all the way through a vaguely familiar song! So hope I have not jinxed our new drummer.....!

I 💙 the (OPPOSITE BUS GARAGE) detail

From my experience, and that of various friends who have sold an instrument through them, they tend to sell it for more than you might on here, helping to mitigate the commission fee. They’re also responsible for the shipping, and completing customs paperwork, and for any after sale service. They’re a long-established shop with a good international reputation. It makes sense - to me at least - if you’ve got something a little out of the ordinary, to use them. They have a wider customer base to sell to. If you look at the BC marketplace, there’s some instruments that have been for sale for absolutely ages.

I've found fitting Ultralites is a game changer as the weight at the headstock end exerts the biggest leverage effect on the pivot point, i.e. where the strap sits on your shoulder. At around £100 for a set of 4, even if you fit them yourself it's not a cheap fix though.

IME neither will a real drummer.

So I've had it a couple of days. Quite into it, it's not quite the same as headphones but it's certainly more in that direction that my previous cab (which I am now going to sell). Put it on a stool so it's closer to head height. It can go unpleasantly loud and make things in the room vibrate. Eventually I'd like to mic it and also run the line in from the head and record some comparison clips.

I'll be using my battle-worn home-made 15 foot radius dish to form the back curve of the walnut. I positioned the mould and made a couple of mahogany side pieces that will become the ends of the hollow wings and also the mating faces with the through-neck. The side pieces clearly also need curved bottoms (no, @SpondonBassed. Just no. ) These will also be used to press the thin walnut sheet down into the radius dish: They will sit here, either side of the through-neck, glued to the walnut sheet backs with bent sides ( back and sides acoustic-guitar style) and flat-bottomed ebony panels on top: I will be adding some acoustic-like cross braces to hold the shape of each wing's back. I also measured the depth of the intended chamber to ensure enough room for the jack and pots and then cut the tops of the two bearers to final size. The dotted blue line on the mould sides represents where the tops of the sides will sit, with the flat ebony sitting on top of the bearers and sides, either side of the visible through neck: This isn't the neck (or planned lamination), but gives an idea of what the top will look like:

As a young punker in Chester we had no money, and no access to any fancy punk clothes shops (though one of our tiny band had a rich dad, so he had tartan bondage kecks and a leather jacket). So we used to make our own clothes; me and Swamp hit on the idea of Sh!t/Fwck tshirts - black t from tesco, spatter bleach on it so it'd also go holey, then write the immortal words in big top and bottom. Then we made our own bum flaps - mine was from greenish curtain material and had "Slits" written in orange day-glo paint. My trews were an old pair of flared jeans I made into drain pipes, then spattered a bit of bleach and paint on 'em, dyed them puke green and cut some slashes in to insert flourescent zips. Jacket was an old RAF blouson with more paint, and shoes Major Domo doc martens rip-offs held together with orange string. Hair was spiked with soap and sugar water, dyed with cochineal. We looked a proper state!

Tonight (13/8/21) at 7pm on Sky Arts there’s a programme called ‘Mick Ronson by Gary Kemp’. Not sure if it’s been aired before but could be interesting.

First gig back for me in a couple of weeks. My band Soldato opening things up on this.

From our last "sold out" gig at a tea room 🤣

Caught up in the problem rather than the fix. When I used to fix office equipment for a living, I’d often end up down a rabbit hole and need a fresh of eyes to look at it and say, “It’s that.” The BC hive mind is probably the best thing about BC, I’m glad to have been of service on this occasion. As mentioned above, an appropriately tied bandana is another option.

Or to put the other point of view, any DAW that doesn't come equipped with the kind of routing power of Reaper, down to phase inversion of aux sends, is really just a midi editor playing at being a DAW.

I won't say I told you so. Yes I will. I told you so.

Couple of things: * It's only to be expected that musicians working in rock and pop might feel uneasy at the prospect of hitting thirty. For one thing, we live in a society which widely venerates youth and beauty, and beautiful youth. Pop music and its deriving genres amplify this societal foolishness but one can't get away from the sad fact that a pretty face sells product. Next up, the characteristics associated with hormone-drenched youth - impulsiveness, wild emotional swings, excessive focus on the 'now', idealism, a consuming desire for friendship and lurve - look a bit odd (if not sinister) when exhibited by someone over thirty. Then there's the commercial aspect. It's much easier for a record company or manager to slit a bunch of kids up like a kipper compared to a bunch of wary, older types (though not always). So, signing young people and throwing them away when they get older is a music industry thing. Point of comparison: the vibrant and highly profitable South Korean music industry makes ours look like a playgroup run by social workers. The Korean pop moguls sign 14 year-old kids off the street for their looks, formally train them in pop music and image, put them on a salary, squeeze the life out of them for a few years then dump them at 21 or 22 years-old for being geriatric. * The confining nature of pop music (repetitious songwriting, simplistic musical formulas, trite melodies, stale harmonies) means that if you're any good with your voice or your instrument you'll have reached the industry standard fairly early on in your career and no one will encourage you to go any further. You might be bored mindless but nobody will let you make the Jazz album or write the string quartet or even slightly subvert the audience's expectations by dallying with another pop genre. That's why Anthrax had to shelve the Reggae album. Of course, in musical forms other than pop we find that performers and composers are more free to experiment and to develop as musicians and artists than are pop stars; the walls of the pop 'cage' fall away. Likewise age is far less of an impediment. Indeed, in Folk, Classical, Jazz (and even some supposedly 'rock' genres like Blues) age is a draw rather than a turn-off. When a celebrated violinist takes the stage at the age of 84 no one cries 'Where's your stick, Grandad?' or comments unfavourably upon his wrinkled hands. OK, some critics might bimble on about 'missing the fire of youth' but critics are ar5eholes. TLDR: Pop's a game for young people, no getting round it. Other genres of music offer the aspiring musician a longer shelf-life.

I can’t believe we’re back to the “they all sound the same” argument. Yes, it is perfectly possible to make very different basses sound similar, and the differences (or lack thereof) will likely be impacted by the person playing them (by some more than others), but certain basses have a distinct sonic imprint and response, particularly doing certain things or in certain registers, which is something often forgotten when doing blind tests. If you can’t tell the difference, it doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Maybe your ears just aren’t very good, or maybe you just aren’t as interested in it as someone else is. And as in the other thread, “the audience can’t tell” has absolutely nothing to do with why I make music….I guess YMMV.

Some rebuttals: David Bowie, turned 30 in Jan 1977, with Low, Heroes, Lodger, Scary Monsters and Let's Dance ahead of him Bon Scott turned 30 in July 1976, before Powerage, Let There Be Rock and Highway To Hell Back on point: Be Here Now was released 3 months after Noel Gallagher's 30th birthday

I guess if your only concern is neck dive but a lot of us play short scale basses because they generally (but not always) are lighter than standard scale equivalents. For me this is a major concern to reduce back and shoulder pain and compliments the other joint related benefit of reducing the fretting hand stretch. As others have said, reducing the weight at the other end of the lever (the neck) is just as effective as increasing body weight. For me I have found the ultimate example of that is the Ibanez EHB series of short scale basses. I know other headless basses are available but possibly at a higher price point. I have the EHB1000s and it ticks all the boxes for me: lightweight, short scale (chambered body), ergonomic and extremely well balanced either on a strap, or sitting.

G&L 1st Celinder 2nd Ray 3rd The G&L sits so well with other instruments. It's dirty & funky. A touch too much sparkle on the other two demands too much attention and they sit too high in the mix though maybe some eq would help.

Just moving these into my new studio space and couldn’t resist a pic.. four of the best basses I have ever been lucky enough to own.

Looks like an Antoria Tele bass, short scale. They're usually off white, but looks stripped and (poorly) varnished.

Good gracious, no..! What a horrific idea..! Indeed not; we ignore 100% of our audience.

It's funny, I was taught music practice and theory on the violin, so learned 5th tuning. I moved to guitar in my mid-teens, then bass, then double bass, and picked up 4th tuning easily. I started playing mandolin 10 or so years ago and really struggled with 5th tuning, really struggled. Then I picked up a fiddle again about 6 years back having not played to 30 odd years, and surprisingly 5ths felt completely natural on that instrument. But importantly for me at the time, my learning on mandolin was accelerated in large part by my playing more fiddle, thinking harder about positions, shapes and progressions as I did. What has been great is that I was classically trained on fiddle so very much orchestral in style, but having transferred my understanding of 5th tuning from violin to mandolin, as I started to learn bluegrass on the latter I took that back to fiddle. I'm no bluegrass fiddle player in real terms (I can prove it), but I'm able for the first time in my life to play music I actually like on the fiddle, e.g., Old Crow Medicine Show style bluegrass. But dare I say it, I think we could all learn a lot from guitarists also. As bass players we tend to be quite rigid around tuning but most of the guitarists I play with play comfortable in a range of different open tunings depending on the song, and while some use different instruments, some simply retune really quickly. Perhaps - and I don't know - part of the problem is that bass strings respond less well to being tuned away from their intended pitch than guitar strings, but either way, varying open tunings often allows guitarists to play stuff they couldn't play on standard tuning, and also aids the creative process by subverting their expectations of what a certain shape or progression is going to sound like. I guess I'm saying to the OP that I think it's good to mess with tuning, and that learning a new instrument in its standard tuning might send you on a journey that learning it in a tuning you're already familiar with might not. Good luck either way 👍 PS Owen, I've just remembered I still owe you a P-Retro.......!!!!!!!!

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Just my advice, I bought an Ashdown rig about 2004 with a 2x10 combo and a 1x15 cab. I was never fully happy with the full rig. I could never explain it but it always felt like there was a "hole" in my sound when stood in front of the stack, as though it was phase cancelling or something. When I joined BC, there were some well respected experts on here advising against having cabs of different driver sizes due to comb filtering effects of the drivers. I began to wonder if this was what I was experiencing. I loved both cabs on their own. I even sometimes ran the 1x15 with the 2x10 speakers disconnected in the combo. This is why I would have preferred to buy 2 cabs and a separate head as others have suggested on this thread. I now have 2x identical cabs so I can use 1 or 2 depending on the gig and it is always a great result. I'm not blaming Ashdown BTW - I had many happy gigs with the component parts of that stack before I sold it on. This is all just IMHO of course.....

@lownote@41Hz I ordered the RM800 on Friday it arrived yesterday in perfect condition, absolutely no dramas. I paid £286 it included Vat and import charges. Some of the Ashdown stuff is cheap but if you look at the Orange products for example, they are more expensive. They may well have their pricing wrong but I emailed to check before I purchased and they confirmed, at the moment, they are the correct pricing 😊

As a bassist and Medical Doctor, with a high risk wife who has asthma, I am strictly following the United States CDC protocol. Right now there are so many people developing the delta Variant of Covid- even if previously vaccinated you can get it and spread it, but your case will be mild, but if unvaccinated, you have a good chance of serious illness , hospitalization or even death or long term effects of the virus (long haulers syndrome). Today I had a practice session for a band I don’t usually play with ,and I brought along masks. The singer has not been vaccinated yet , so I first asked that we all don masks, which was done, and the we had a talk about why he had not been vaccinated. Someone told him that many people locally had gotten blood clots from the vaccine. I told him how rare an event this actually was and that getting Covid playing in clubs with many unmasked unvaccinated patrons was probably a far more likely event now that clubs were hiring bands again. He asked where he could get the vaccine , cost(free in US), and it sounds very likely that he’s gonna be vaccinated before our gig in 3 wks. It’s going to take years to end this pandemic if we don’t take steps to stop the virus from spreading. Remember, it cannot replicate or spread on its own , it needs a human host’s dna to replicate up to a billion virus particles per infected person, who then spread them around their environment, before they are even aware that they are sick. Masks, hand washing, social distancing ( set up early , stay away from the crowd, take breaks out side, and bring your own mics) are all still important since even if we are vaccinated, clubs are higher risk environments, and we could still catch this virus 🦠! I think discussing this with band mates, sticking to the facts and avoiding politics is the best approach. Peace, Sailcat69

Same here, it seemed to support the track better

(Get a) grip (on yourself) Stranglers

Red Barcheddar ～ Rush

I don't agree - a 70s bass stands out in a mix like anything, to my ears at least. And you absolutely cannot EQ a 60s bass to sound 70s. But it all depends on what you 'listen' to, and might not matter to most people. But we're bass geeks so...

Yep, arrived safely today. Here are some photos: Well, what can I say. Great bass. Very light and the neck is, as always for EBMM, super smooth and a dream to play. As expected, the TC sounds different from my other two SRs (2014 Stingray 4H and 2018 Stingray Special 4H). I especially like the series mode. Reminds me a bit of the OMG mode on my G&L L1k. It came even more to life when I engaged my trusted Sansamp and used it as a preamp. Man, the bass suddenly started shaking my living room's walls and windows. Killer. Maybe it is just me, but I really needed that oomph, that going to 11 😉 Speaking of 11, I am also glad that I got no 11 out of 50 as 11 is my lucky number (birthday). However, I do have to say that I like the wood grain on @drTStingray bass more. Well, you cannot have it all 😉