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So I had tremendous GAS for a Music Man bass. Whether a MM Stingray, Sterling Ray34 or something else, as long as it had that Music Man sound and feel. So I posted a "wanted" ad on several platforms and got a message on Bassic.de from a guy in Belgium that was selling a 1994 Music Man Sterling. Black, with mutes, great condition, birdseye maple neck...exactly what I wanted. I had a gig in Belgium yesterday, and the bass was practically on te route, so we left an hour early, and I picked it up. And it's absolutely great. Good shape, great sound, birdseye neck, Hipshot D-tuner (but the original tuner was in the case), new knobs (but I also have the original knobs)... Awesome bass. It's from October 1994, and I can't wait to use it extensively

So after a quite honestly disgraceful 2021 of buying and selling, followed by an equally disgraceful January 2022, I've arrived at this lot: Back Row L-R: 2015 Thunderbird/Guild Starfire 1/ Hohner B2A (not fully working). Front Row L-R: Stingray 5 Special (strung with rounds)/ Stingray 5 Special (flats)/ 1989 US Fender P Bass (flats)/ 4003S/ Fender American Pro II P Bass (rounds)/ G&L CLF L-2000/ Custom Fretless. My Ibanez EHB1505MS is not included as I've put it up for sale. I spent a really nerdy day yesterday, cleaning and setting up this lot. I must say it was rather fun I'd really like to think I'm done and ideally would like to lose a couple, although for the life of me I can't decide which ones. If anything, I've got a hankering for a lightweight G&L SB-1 but we'll see...

Tonights gig was 6-9pm one in The Cave, Paisley, Glasgow with the punk band. Thoroughly enjoyed it. Not overly busy but a good crowd and good few comments including some specifically for me. 1st comment after 1st set was about my bass tone and how clear it was. They could hear every note. 2nd comment was about how easy i made it look especially playing punk fingerstyle. I was pretty chuffed. Band was complimented by several people after the gig. Asked to come back on a Sat night either 6-8 or 9-12 whatever we prefer. Venue has 2 bands on a Sat night. Also another venue owner was in and wants us to play his club. Now have his details to contact him directly. All in all a good night. No vids but a few pics were taken. Hopefully some vids will appear soon. Dave

Reminds me of when I was asked to join an Abba tribute. I was concerned about how their name might invoke legal difficulties but I was told "It's all right, were just going to use ABBA backwards'.....

I have come to the conclusion you have too many hats.

Tell her your mates from BassChat request ''Smelly Cat''.

Sabbath. A Black Sabbath/Abba crossover. Versatility, that's the name of the game.

Here we go then , another year down , a new start to the monthly challenges, so lets just do it The picture to inspire us was chosen by Novembers winner @skankdelvar who offered the following titbit with the image .. "it's a picture of the universe and everything in it that has existed or happened, is in the process of existing or happening, and might exist or happen in the future. So there's scope to write a tune about absolutely anything that takes one's fancy." Now this has produced an brilliantly eclectic range which will start with ... 1 @Leonard Smalls This month I've been mostly listening to Albert Collins. So I thought I'd do some blues, with keyboards duelling with guitars, more guitars and more keys. I felt this was far kinder than unleashing my much-feared "blues voice"! 2 @Dad3353 An audio exercise, capturing (more than...) fifty shades of real Grey Noise, representing the neutrality of The Universe, and literally pitching this beside a Human Condition notion (somewhat dark, maybe...) and a more potentially joyful version, both stemming from a deep cultural heritage going back eons. I'll freely admit, with no apologies, that it's not the most EDM of my stuff, and will not garner many votes, but that's where the picture led me, so... The fundamental key is the genuine grey noise, playing a theme from an operatic piece by Massenet thanks to Sforzanda, flanked on each side by a set of Kontakt voices, to render a human aspect, and another set of Kontakt balafons, to bring a touch of light-hearted optimism 3 @NickD A song about wondering, I guess. 4 @fingers211 Tried to create it to scale, but didn't have the time. So this was it ! The 6 parts are ,beginning,creation of earth,stompy human race, end of race and new start in Dminor, new creations and lastly, endless time. The titles are more 'grandiose' than the actual pieces,but t'was still good fun to do. 5 @upside downer Here's mine. Skank said there's scope to write a tune about absolutely anything in relation to the picture. I was planning to use only samples but that idea died like a louse in a Russian's beard so instead I've written a tune about everything and nothing. It's a tune that exists digitally in this universe. There, nailed the premise. 6 @SH73 In this month challenge I decided to experiment with Ableton live. I tried to produce some electronic song for change, so enjoy 7 lurksalot with such a open goal left for us with this picture , I have taken it upon myself to have a dig at songs that refer to themselves in the song, I think its despicable and lazy song writing , so I did it as well There are 2 swearages in at the end , not as bad as last months , but they are there . 8 @alittlebitrobot This is not so much a composition as a bunch of ingredients for what should have been some kind of arrangement. Still, at the eleventh hour, here 'tis. 9 @skankdelvar A slice of cheesy 80's synth-pop. Guaranteed no real instruments. 10 @Doctor J We've never been able to see further away but, these days, rarely gaze past our hand Well that lot is a great listen! I have to say I find it incredible what you all produce given barely three weeks , fantastic. Enough Already ..3 Votes lots of listening and 3 votes deadline is midnight on 31st January Good luck Y'all

We're ( Maple Road ) opening for Joanne on April 15th at The Bend Theatre. I'm really looking forward to this gig. Blue

If those legs get tired, rub in some dancing cream, make them feel much better.

Also Shaw Taylor. I’ll get my coat. PS - enjoy the gig!

Time to put my head in the lion's mouth

Not the prettiest, but it works a treat!

Hectic one, this 😀 Haven't been on BC for a while (3 years according to soundcloud 😮), and just remembered the Composition challenges, only to find it was deadline day. My beloved Ableton8 is no more, so I had to make this with version 9 "Lite" (meaning only 8 tracks, and I LOVE lots and lots and lots of tracks). This is not so much a composition as a bunch of ingredients for what should have been some kind of arrangement. Still, at the eleventh hour, here 'tis. Looking forward to next month already 😁

I find lines help me, some people will vehemently disagree with me, each to their own. I tried a lot of fretless basses over the years and thought it just wasn’t for me and assumed that was because it was so difficult but the difficulty came because I hadn’t found the right fretless. When I tried a 30” scale I found I could play it ok. So try lots of fretless basses and don’t give up if it’s too difficult, it might be you just haven’t found the right bass. I have lines and side dots, gradually you rely on them less and less as your ear improves. Some of the best advice I had on here was to just play the same as you would on a fretted bass, bass lines you are familiar with then you’ll hear when your intonation is out. For me the weird thing was after playing fretless exclusively for a couple of months, going back to a fretted bass felt very restrictive, fretless can be a very freeing thing. People will give you all sorts of advice and tell you their way is correct, there is no correct way, try out all the advice and settle with what form of practice suits you.

Well... I've had a lot of gear dramas. If you see my posts here you can tell I'm a usual criminal of sales trades and whatnot. I picked up a guitar recently after letting go of one of my (admittedly redundant) Limelight P basses (jazz necks, nordy pickups)... And guys even if I was a guitarist in a past life, for the last 3 years all I've enjoyed is bass. Got a fender US special tele guitar last week with hopes to record demos or gel back in and gosh I just do not enjoy it anymore. It feels closer to doing the dishes than making music. I find ideas for bass whilst playing guitar and switch in a moment to my preferred instrument... ... With that in mind I did some reflection and thought 'what is the bass that is different to your Limelights that you'd still use?' - I hate having stuff I don't use in the house, and well the options for buying new are slimmer considering how the prices are lately, and I've gone through gear worth 2.3/3k£ and can admittedly say that for my budget and the price/quality, the 1k£ish range is what I prefer most... I've also gone through 19 basses since I started playing in October 2018 - yep you've read that right - mind you some where returns the next day or week or just passing by as part exchange etc.... but I've learned enough about basses to know what I like. Comfy neck, passive, fender types... ... So I decided to round it up to 20 basses and will want to retire for a while (admins, can I be banned from marketplace?.... Seriously.... can I be banned from there?). I saw a good JMJ for £800 and went for it - I'll be selling the guitar and back to three basses - the short scale is handy for when I'm on my mates' little Ford Fiesta for gigs so that I don't have to keep my bass in my lap in the rear seats for 2hrs. A short scale should fit nicely in the boot, as it's just a bit longer than a regular tele - Probs not bigger than a baritone guitar. The pros: * Finish on nitro, tasty relic * 'Grown up bass' sound - it feels like a real thing! Very nice sound, proper passive P vibes but with a sweeter top end I'd say (probs the scale/strings) * I don't like big necks and this is a P profile, but being short scale means it doesn't dig into my fingers like a regular P/Stingray does. * Light at 3.5kg which is a big plus... I'm used to 3.7/3.8kg tops these days.. * Flat wounds make a lot of sense on a bass this type, does pick very well which is grand The cons: * Why on Earth did Fender use LONG SCALE strings on this bass? the actual strings on E and A roll around the tuning peg * Why on Earth again does it come with a LONG SCALE gig back? These cons are honestly a joke - easy to fix which is good, but man.... seriously 🤣 I get it's probably money saving but it's very cheap of a bass that retails over 1k£ I'll be putting appropriate labella flats (760F-MUS) soon and may get an appropriate gigbag I will post picutres if someone points me in the right direction - the last months I've not been able too as all my pictures exceed the 3.5kb limit it says? (of course it does, who has 3.5kb pics?) I'm really hoping that with this journey having gone from actives to passives, from 5ers to 4 stringers, headless basses, modern, classics, cheap and pricey..... I'm genuinely hoping I can retire or go on a long hiatus of not buying more stuff - I've put a lot of thought into all my rig to continue going down this way ugh! Best, Ander.

I'd like it if someone did Abba Abba Hey in some form:

You’ve had that sabre far to long now, basses are like socks, you really should change them every day…

Real bassists, or just some of the people who post on here?

This has to be, hands down, the biggest rip off I think I've ever seen. It's beyond chancing, beyond cluelessness, beyond performance art. Absolute chancing gits! Do they not think somebody looking for a Wal and having that sort of money to spend isn't going to know, within 10,000 paces, this is as much a Wal as I am a Peruvian Parrot named Pavel. Lawd above!!!

The Shaw Taylor of TV’s Police 5 fame is her dad. Hence why she uses that name.

Melding the songs might be a problem... Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! Some Sweetleaf After Midnight? Paranoid Chiquitita? 'S hard work...

For some reason I had tonight in my head as the deadline for this and only started it yesterday so it's rough as foook. I wanted to do some jingle-jangling with the 12 string I picked up last year so this is chord based in a way I don't usually do stuff. I still wanted to have a little space freak-out in there somewhere, though. The technical stuff : Drums are Yamaha kit into Behringer pres. Bass is a PRS EB4, guitars ares are a Gretsch 12 string and a Bacchus strat, all into an Avid Eleven. Poorly screeched vocals into an SE mic. Noises are courtesy of Reason, space voice from Talk Any and all mixed in Protools. About the song: We've never been able to see further away but, these days, rarely gaze past our hand

Agreed. Mine are both S models as I found the binding really uncomfortable.

All my Shuker's are 32" to the nut. Slightly longer to the end of the frets for the low D.

Just a thought, Vintage make a short scale EB3 copy - the VS4. I've never played one, but they look decent - Wilkinson hardware too. In fact, is this reviewer our own @Dood?

That's still nowhere as bad as the drunken woman repeatedly invading the stage area and yelling into Damo's microphone at that Dynamites gig in Ware a few months ago. (That particular woman had to be escorted away by a male punter who looked like he's done that before...)

Guessing its Fender-shaped object? Either that or Flatulent Sheep Owner

Speak to @AndyTravis he’s the expert at not impulse buying stuff especially basses, he’ll put you straight…

A slice of cheesy 80's synth-pop. Guaranteed no real instruments. Lyrics ↓ For a change, here's the boring technical stuff ↓

There are no 'benefits' in the same way that there are no benefits of the cello compared to a bass. It's just different. I don't bother with mwah and sliding all over the place, and definitely don't want to play it like Jaco did(I hate that tone and it does nothing for me), and these are things which can be done far far too much on the fretless. I don't play it much differently to how I play the fretted. Most of the reason why I play fretless is for ear training so I bought an unlined. And I suppose I sometimes like the more organic sound too and the potential for more expressive playing for home projects. Whether lined or unlined is a moot point. The side dots on a lined are the same as fretted, but on unlined they're where the frets are. If you just like the sound of fretless and nothing else, get lined. If you want the full experience and want to help train your ears too, go unlined. The beauty of the unlined is it helps you to see better with your ears and rely on them more than you would with a fretted or lined fretless.

My medium scale Alembic 8 string from the 1980’s.

More tonal options. Portamento, pulled harmonics, easier vibrato, Microtuning ....There is so much more to fretless bass. You lose slap, sustain and some attack of course. I often take a fretless to jazz sessions if the double bass seems too much hard work; the other players prefer the DB, but I can "get away with" the fretless. People often think it's going to be hard, but really it's the same as playing fretted. If you find you're out of tune you maybe need to work on your fretted playing too. I admit to struggling a bit with frets ... Accidental fretting of the g when reaching for a note on the b, not pushing hard enough and getting fret rattle. 1mm too far up the neck = wrong note rather than right note a bit out of tune etc. My fretlesses have side dots only. Sometimes need a quick glance, but only in the same way as I do on a fretted. The fret lines on my fretted bass don't add much.

The forgotten bridge grounding is a myth. All the basses I had to fully shield, and we are speaking hundreds if not thousands, all had a grounded bridge and a theoretically perfect ground continuity... The only way to solve this typical Fender (and relatives 😉 ) issue is to do a perfect shielding with all cavities linked to have a total continuity. The graphite paint or so called copper paint is not working at all, which is explained by the poor conductivity of the paint (check with a meter if you don't believe me) and the lack of links between the cavities. I've been telling that Faraday principle for years and I'm glad someone else is also "telling" it.

Simon Smith and His Amazing Dancing, Bare ～ Randy Newman

And this one... @Frusty, you still got this one?

My 5 year old son has just been chatting to me and checking out my basses. His observation was that one of them is 'broken and not right'. I suspect he is not the first and will not be the last person to conclude this in relation to headless basses.

Fender Shaped Object, but Flatulent Sheep Owner is funnier. Most of the people who complain about the ergonomics of the 4000 series tend to come to them after exclusively and extensively playing Farting Slug Ovulations, and are therefore used to playing bass that way, with little willingness to adjust their playing style to match the instrument. It's kind of like expecting an SUV to drive in exactly the same way as a Hot Hatch. The principles are the same, but each have their own idiosyncrasies that the driver has to adapt to, in order to get the best out of each, rather than expecting the SUV to drive exactly like the Hot Hatch (and vice versa). I'm quite sure that each and everyone of us has spent a considerable amount of time playing Flying Saucy Onions, but have all come to the 4000 series basses with an open mind and a willingness to adjust & adapt in order to get the best out of them. But there again, some people might just simply hate the ergonomics of them. 🤷‍♂️

That's very true. Then again, he doesn't turn up to a session with a f***in Harley Benton...

it IS I!

These "I like my cheap bass, so why does anyone pay any more than I did because they aren't getting anything better than my bass" threads are tedious.

Personally, if you have played fretted for a while or have good technique, then leave the fretted packed away and just take the fretless. My switch was when I went to a 3 day song writing session and I took my fretless along as well. Picked it up in one of the sessions and found I could play it with very little problem and just played it all the time and haven't looked back I now play unlined fretless only and actually find switching back to fretless takes some adjustment. I even sold my 1975 Jazz that had lines and blocks on impossible to play as there was so much clutter and distraction on the neck with the frets, blocks and lines. I only have fretless basses now

You could also listen to the album “Ten” by Pearl jam, Jeff ament used a fretless in a lot of the tracks on that to great effect

What's the benefit of playing fretless? It's a slightly different beast and you can get different tones and effects on it that you can't totally replicate on a fretted bass (the reverse is true too). It may improve your ear, you may find it easier to play. I love the tone and like the feel of it. Plus, I get to try and emulate Pino, John Giblin, Mick Karn, Tony Levin, Larry Klein, etc (not necessarily with any great success, but I try).

I bought a Ric about 20 years ago without playing one and just hoped I liked it as much as my ears liked the clank it produced. Luckily for me, I loved it! I've just put flats on it and will be bringing it to a blues rehearsal on Tuesday. Can't wait!