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I laughed a lot! Superb from Dunlop

Short answer, no, within reason. Get a cup of tea and read through this most entertaining thread on the matter.

As tempted as I am by blue pickup covers 😆 I decided to stick with the matching wood ones!

Honestly, f this whiny thread. Waaaaaaaah, why doesn't every shop cater to my every whim? Every shop should have a decent selection of statistically rare basses. It's so unfair! They're doing shopkeeping wrong. They're not, you're doing shopping wrong.

What if it's Rage Against The Machine? Then you won't get the gig if you do what they tell you.

I had a spare few hours this afternoon so managed to get the patterns marked, cut out and one side applied. I’m very pleased with the quality of the Levant. Id painted the baffle yesterday with satin black but it’s not a consistent finish so I’m going to redo it with just a matt black. As usual I had some excellent helping from Elvis 🙄

Been oiling my fretboards for the best part of thirty five years, no problems, only benefits. My luthier oils fretboards if they need it as part of his set up services. ***this is my personal experience*** I can also heartily recommend reading the thread referred to above for… a) the interesting and thought provoking points of view expressed. b) the total and utter hilarity of a thread quickly descending into a Hogarthian scene that would wouldn’t look out of place in Apocalypse Now! c)The horror, the horror.

And if they had, Fear Inoculum would only have been out a couple of months by now and we'd all be still very excited about it. (mental image: Tool newcomers collectively scratching their heads)

I look forward to seeing this in other finishes - a brown or olive called weaning baby poo; a white called 80s dog crap; a black called no 50 pences for the leccy meter; a red called Burned English man on the Med I mean, the possibilities really are endless.

As if by magic we have arrived at the end of the last true composition challenge of the year and we now need to sort the pecking order. The entries were all based on the picture chosen by Octobers winner , @upside downer Your choices are as follows in order of presentation , please vote for 3 of them 1 @xgsjx Well this pic for some reason really struck me. I decided to write about how much my wife means to me. There's personal stuff in here that I'm not willing to go into, but I think I've said it how I want to. 2 lurksalot what with COP26 going on and still being in a T-shirt, I thought a folky appreciation of the cycles of the seasons was in order , but this happened instead 3 @Dad3353 A celestial sculpteur, modelling a new vision for the night sky, after a fashion. Giving a fresh shine on an old, friendly face; somewhat daft, maybe, but with Good Intentions... 4 @Leonard Smalls This month we have a celebration of the Full Moon, in all its forms 😁 5 @fingers211 I heard a play on the radio a few days after the picture was posted. The play told a story of a clever young woman who manipulated two men, so much so that they ended up in a very bad state. Not with her body but purely with mind games, t'was very clever. So that was the premise. 6 @NickD Based on the picture, I had the idea of a shift tasked with resetting the universe after the day is done, and from here I got the notion that there are folks that do that in a practical, non-celestial way... The truck drivers, shelf stackers, train engineers, office cleaners, etc... so this is for them. 7 @Nail Soup Initially tried to do some thing free-form and moony sounding, but scrapped it and wrote something song-based on the acoustic with moon based lyrics. But even that ended up sounding completely different when transferred to electric guitar etc. 8 @Nicko We've all been there. A night out, moon shining, date looking great, and you spoil the romance by doing exactly the wrong thing. I don't know how you'd describe the genre - maybe indie pop. Unusually for me this is a proper song, with a verse, chorus and middle eight, although it's pretty simple musically. 9 @upside downer Here's my entry for November. It's a slow, mellowish instrumental with lots of chiming guitar to try and get that twinkly, night sky, relaxing feeling while everyone else is doing the heavy lifting to put things in order. 10 @Doctor J I kept looking at the picture... van... moon... van ... moon... and then it came to me... Mooned Ants! The next level of pest control using lunar gravity to discombobulate pesky ant infestations. Call Morrisson's today! 11 @skankdelvar Levon Helm and Garth Hudson are living in my head well that's it folks, another fine selection for your listening pleasure ... But please make your choices based on your favourite 3 Voting ends at midnight 30th November Good luck all

Entertaining in much the same way as folk slow down to look at car crashes.

It's also wildly inaccurate. He's much darker.

"Some Pedants" surely. The Pedants suggests they are all the pedants, and they can't be. I'm one, for a start.

I wanted my first post to be a series one so I will do my best. This is what I have seen to be true about English made basses. If you look down the fingerboard from the bridge to the nut the E and A strings can only down chromatically and the D and G can only go up chromatically. That is why English Basses can only be played from the right side. This is also why they are not imported to the America’s. Flat wound strings are for Apartment use only. The first bass played by James Bond ( Sean Connery) in the Sixties, was a double 0 fret model with 7 strings, made by Q Branch. Last but not least, all the valuables in the Tower of London are provided on loan by the bass players from Def Leppard, The Stones, Moody Blues and Led Zeppelin. thought I would let you know.

The machine in the bog in our local doesn’t need all that faffing about. Two quid, pull the lever thing and…… Sorry. As you were. These bloody glasses

Also taking this advice having never got hold of anything by Tool before. Listening to first album track. First things that hit me.... how "natural" the vocal is, for want of a better word. It's imperfect but not tuneless, it just has character that fits perfectly. Then, something I don't think I've ever said before.... The mix! There's space to let each instrument breathe. There's no washy synth filling sonic gaps, but the gaps are part of the whole thing. I'm enjoying this. I also like the Mars Volta and Karnivool but am not a "fan" as such, I just have one album of each that I really like. I think Tool needs much further exploration from me. How has this taken me so long?!

Gentle reminder... the docs I worked on is on this Friday, 9pm, BBC Four. We even made the Radio Times' pick list 🙂

The Grudge - Tool sorry that’s all that came to mind with Morrissey

Levon Helm and Garth Hudson are living in my head. Lyrics ↓

Sorry, you're right.... It wasn't me so it should be the Royal "you"...😉😉

In an old band I was in we wrote a song in rehearsals. I came up with the arrangement for the solo. In discussions at a later point re songwriting I asked why I wasn’t credited, and told I was just doing what I was meant to and that wasn’t creative input. My response was OK, in that case tell me exactly what notes to play and when as I’ll no longer think for myself at all when it comes to playing. I left not long afterwards. In no way did I think we would ever make anything out of the band anyway, it was the principle, you have no value as you only play bass.

In my last band we credited each of us equally, figuring that no matter who had the initial idea we all made it what it was once it was finished. We also figured that if we made millions a third of that would be nice, as would if we made nothing a third of feckall was no more disappointing than all of it.

Quite a unique style of playing, looks like he’s sort of double thumbing on the fretboard, I enjoyed watching this

I think it's always a good idea to share. In my last few bands, I usually wrote the music and the singer wrote the lyrics. We credited the songs to the band as a whole, though, because I believe the band should be like a gang. It's you against the world so you should stick together and share the spoils of victory (and the many, many defeats) as one unit. You need your bandmates, they wouldn't be there if you didn't. Everybody contributes in one way or another. You're either a band or a collection of self-interested individuals. Band every time, for me.

I hope that your fridge of choice will be a Smeg . .

Yup. I have no problem with that whatsoever. That's exactly the kind of thing that boils my p#ss. I think I'd fit in that band perfectly. Are they called "The Pedants"?

One the one hand, yes, it comes across as rude, but I totally get it. The amount of musicians out there who can't follow instructions/process the most basic requests/suggestions has led them to this (and led me to resign myself to the life of a perpetual bedroom warrior). EDIT: The more I think about it, surely it would have made more sense to NOT reiterate the instruction. Instead of filtering out those who don't listen, they've given them a free pass. Now they're going to hire someone who needs everything explained to them twice, in all caps.

These look interesting. From the pictures, my only hesitation would be the apparent lack of chamfering in the area where the forearm rests. Personally I don't like the feel of sharp edges.

I think how we are shopping wrong is by going into a shop, play everything, ask advice, then walk out and buy it on the internet because it's 5 quid cheaper. We had a great drum shop locally which folded for exactly this reason.

Agree with both of the above! I like to use heavy compression before a drive if I want to have a consistent level of saturation - say, when providing almost "bowed" like sounds from my bass. Placing the compressor after the drive means that on low gain settings I can use the compressor to "turn up" the overall level when playing lightly. Digging in means I get the extra bite but the compressor evens the volume. I SO love bass gear! Even switching the order of pedals offers so many tonal opportunities!

If he hasn't changed his strings since he started the thread they should be pretty dead by now.

They are all mates from School and they equally contribute to songwriting and coming up with ideas. The Edge and Bono are the main songwriters but Adam and Larry contribute as well. It just works for them to do a four way split. In my old band, the singer and I were the main songwriters, the other two didn't really bring much but as were were mates and a band, we split writing credits and royalties four ways. No arguments and makes it fair for all.

When you lay it out like that it should really be 3, 5, 8, 13 years. Come on Tool try harder.

Only just seen this topic. I’m not all that active on the forum, I guess I’ve mainly used it for buying and selling stuff. Good to find a chat for worship bassists though. . . Wanted to also quote the frustrations of @Sardonicus from the previous page, but it seems I can’t attach quotes from different pages. I will post further soon about how we do things and share some of my own frustrations, but after reading through the whole topic, I’m enraged at the attitudes of some of the leaders / musicians / singers / PA team members that posters have mentioned about here: The late sending out of songs for Sundays, late picking of musicians & singers, people forgetting they were down to play, turning up late and/or wanting to leave practice early, not familiarising themselves with songs before practice, not turning up in enough time to setup & practice on Sundays, etc. I’m quite astounded that this stuff goes on. This all seems very disrespectful, and some of these people need to have a word with themselves and question whether or not they can fully commit to the team. I appreciate its not always easy tackling these issues, but it seems like a few Team Leaders need to (re)instill some discipline in a few cases here. Also everyone surely must have a personal responsibility to give their best and respect the other team members. I feel our discipline is very good, but I’m certainly not saying we’ve got it all sorted, and some things within the team do grind my gears. But, I’m not sure I could be on team with people who are so slack, as described at various points in the topic so far. Finally for now, I’d like to give a shout-out and some respect to all of you who contributed to and/or edited lockdown online services. Personally I kind of enjoyed taking a year off playing, and didn’t take my bass out of its case the whole time, until we were back playing live. I’m not that tech-minded and wasn’t asked to contribute (that’s probably why!) so just saw it as a chance to take a break after playing regularly for about 20 years. But I appreciate that the online services were a lifesaver to many people who were stuck indoors and isolated. Whilst you were doing it for the glory of God, I think it’s good to honour people, so fair play to all of you who helped make those online services possible during such a difficult time.

Not so sure that they actually do. A quick look at the Musicman website has a section titled 'How to manufacture electric bass guitars in the USA' on the first page that says "At our factory in San Luis Obispo, California, we start with hand-selected tonewoods imported from only the finest wood suppliers in the world; bodies of alder, ash, poplar, basswood, mahogany, and maple are individually chosen and matched for their rich tonal qualities, consistent grain characteristics and exceptional natural beauty". I think that most top end bass makers are going to talk about the wood they use, as most people (outside of Basschat of course) think it is of some influence to how a bass is going to sound. As discussed above, probably a marginal one, but still important enough for many buyers to consider when they are looking for a new instrument.

I don't get the fuss, if you're happy playing a skip rescue and that does it for you that's great. If you have the urge and means to politely fondle a 10k art piece, sure why not.

First line of my CV, there.

I left this uncomfortably late to finish, but here we go. The technical stuff. The usual, Yamaha kit, Thomann mics, Behringer preamp. I picked up a Stingray a couple of weeks ago and wanted to use it for something. It is strung with flats and that lead me in a disco-ish direction. Guitars were the Tokai 335 and a Bacchus Duke P90. Bass and guitars into an Avid Eleven and everything got mushed together in Protools. My good lady is Italian and takes great entertainment in my poor Ronnie Drew impression so I wheeled it out again. The song: I kept looking at the picture... van... moon... van ... moon... and then it came to me... Mooned Ants! The next level of pest control using lunar gravity to discombobulate pesky ant infestations. Call Morrisson's today!

Brilliant! Was just thinking the other day how most descriptions are quite boring. At least this gets your attention in more ways than one. Clown vomit... could be a good name for a band!

The BDI21 will always give you a mid scoop, unless the footswitch is pressed or the Blend control is at 0%. Here's what my BDI21's frequency response looks like with Blend at 100% and all the other controls at 50%: There are effectively two sections of the BDI21 - the amp simulator controlled by the Drive and Presence controls, and the EQ controlled by the Treble and Bass knobs. The Blend knob bypasses the amp simulator, and the footswitch bypasses the whole thing. The whole of the frequency response above, including the huge 800 Hz notch, comes from the amp simulator, so if you want less mid scoop, turning down the Blend control will do it. When Blend is at 0% and Treble and Bass are at 50%, the frequency response is more or less flat. Something I didn't realise until I measured it was that the Presence control's behaviour is a bit non-obvious - turning it up applies a few dB of treble boost, but it also significantly reduces the depth of the notch. Here are overlaid frequency responses with Blend at 100% and Presence at 0%, 25%, 50%, 75% and 100%: So if you like the drive effect but want less notch, another option is to turn Presence up all the way, then turn Treble down a little to compensate for the treble boost...

Heard this on 6 Music just now - I know that the whole Lover's Rock cover version is not always thought to be the most credible art form, but I was struck by how tasteful the whole arrangement was - very mellow. Marcia Griffiths, The First Time Ever I saw Your Face.

I was being cynical. Let's be 100% honest, different pieces of wood do sound slightly different, but no-one can tell which have the 'richest tonal qualities' until they are made into a finished instrument. Wood is chosen chiefly on its appearance. I doubt any burled walnut or zebrano body has been rejected for mediocre tonal qualities...

Here in New Jersey we have a shop in Edison that carries, the last time I was there, a few Alembics, several lefties, 5&6's fretted & fretless, a couple of those short rubber-band basses, THEY EVEN HAD A CHAPMAN STICK. The owner met Emmett in the 70's and has always tried to have one (or two). Pedullas, etc. The place is known up and down the East Coast. And it's a SMALL shop.

In a lot of music stores BASSES are niche. Full-stop