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Yes I'm still here in Essex with a full order book for Zoot's, Funkmeisters and Zoot Boudica "Wal-a-likes". I still have a vac' oven and all the stuff to start making Carbon Graphite necks again, I just don't have the time with my current work load. regards, Mike.

I'm going to work on those moves!

Ricicle Race - Queen (ventriloquist remix)

The guitarist hates him. Looks like he’s thinking “here he goes. Every bloody night…”

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what it's all about. When I stop doing this, it's the point at which I shall give it up.

Had a strange one on Friday night at a private Do just outside of Cheltenham. It was a 7pm start and we were finished by 10. I still have no idea what the occasion actually was but we seemed to go down well. Throughout the first set I had a bloke in the crowd staring at me intently and taking photos. Believe me, I'm really not someone you'd want to have a photo of, so I was a bit confused. During the break he came up to me and said "I really like your Kingbass. How much do you want for it? They're not making them anymore so I'll pay you whatever you're looking for right now". I asked if he was a bass player and did he want a go but he told me he was just a big Level 42 fan. I thanked him and politely declined his offer but I get the impression he usually gets his own way as he was very persistent. In the end he got the message and made sure I took his contact details but it was all a bit weird.

Not really a settee but close enough and an addition I've been enjoying - and color coordinated!

Brogue Madonna

I'm not looking to sell, just lend you what you need until you get contact with Smoothhound, or get sorted permanently, if it helps you. All I'd need is a PM with your home address and I'll post a Tx. You can keep it for as long as it's useful to you. No need for complications such as payments and stuff. Over to you...

This morning I got a bag from Shaller with 6 replacement tuner head parts, so I have a few spares when they break! Also some plectrums. Unfortunately the first one actually damaged its tthread (Although that was replaced by Jon Shuker, so no prob) but I have the parts of the current one, so should be able to put that back on

I ran a workshop for a group of music students on mastering recently. You're welcome to my Keynote slides and the handout I produced for them.

In the interests of both pseudoscientific opinionated curiosity and shameless self promotion, Im posting this video I made that addresses a lot of the common themes I've seen posted on social media (including during my brief tenure here on Basschat) about the P Bass...... enjoy, comment and discuss?

June was a hotly contested challenge, and with congratulation to @Dad3353 @Leonard Smalls @Nail Soupand @skankdelvar for their most excellent compositions. As it was his first win, the honour of picture choosing has fallen to Nail Soup , who offered the following ..... "Its a small ornament I saw on holiday in the hotel lobby" This has provided obvious inspiration to some fantastic work , raising the bar yet again! Have yourself a listen through and choose you your favourite 3 , The choices on offer this month are as follows 1 @Dad3353 Passing on the Message, from generation to generation, as has been done for generations past, and will continue for generations to come. Simplisism, with the Mother Tuba encouraging the Baby French Horn to have confidence, to follow, then lead, staying synchronised, all the while having great fun..! There's a lesson there for us all to learn, maybe..? 2 @NickD The image spoke to me of circus tricks, which in turn tickled my sinister bone. There's always been something about circuses that makes me uneasy, and I've always had a sense that behind the thin veneer of spectacular glitz and glamour there's probably rampant animal cruelty, violent, alcoholic clowns, and all sorts of dodginess. ... this idea of the sideshows distracting us from hideous goings on, naturally led me to draw comparisons with dodginess going on behind the curtain while we watch amazed at the current shitshow. 3 @Leonard Smalls This month I done a song about Infinite Regress, which is where in an infinite series of entities, each entity depends entirely on the existence of the previous entity. This is often illustrated by the idea that the world is supported on a turtle, which is in turn supported by another turtle. So how far do these turtles go? All the way down. But every fool knows it's hippos, not turtles! Hence, we have this achingly beautiful melody: (good luck ☠️) 4 Lurksalot OK then, I have enlisted the help and vocal skills of Fat Harry White , the Hippo of Luuurve , and he is on form let me tell you 5 @xgsjx I give you Hippo toe to toe at the hippodrome - Toe Toe 6 @Nail Soup The picture evoked care-free playtime between parent and child (with my parents and also myself with my kids when they were younger), so the lyrics are from there. The music came from a quick mess-around with some jangly C86 ideas. 7 @Doctor J I took a literal approach. The Hippo, nature's most untrustworthy beast. 8 @upside downer A lolloping, lazy saunter with a vaguely hip(po) hop groove. Mucking about at night is all well and good but, c'mon, the blazing sun is on its way; let's get ourselves in the refreshing water. It could be a bit tricky limiting your choice to 3 , but the voting will close on the 31st July. Good luck to all

I think Funeral Plans At The Retail Park are probably some sort of stoner metal, but welcome your suggestions

Wired up the speaker sockets and pre-amp valves, except the heaters - I leave those buggers till last!

Lobster is a bit of an EBMM fanboy - he has a bunch of them. For him to be putting down an MM instrument it must be pretty bad.

Sometimes ash bodied Precisions can bark a bit, I nicknamed my old 78 Ian Paisley as the bark from it just reminded me of how he sounded.

They just seem to be doing it right, don't they?

chocolate jesus - tom waits

They should have it somewhere in the midlands. That way, people don't have too far to travel to point out in person that they're not interested in it and never watch it.

For 'boot-camp', I poured meths onto a pair of socks, and wore them for a day or so before a trek. No funny looks, as most of my comrades did the same.

Answered by Dad 3353. Alternatively you can put a few drops on your finger tips and let it soak in. Repeat a few times. It's a bit of a faff though compared to using an egg cup or similar to dip in.

There's loads of great P bass slap! Including what might be a contender for the best known slap tune ever - Forget Me Nots (aka Men in Black) with Freddie Washington on the P bass with steel roundwounds.

Had another think about this re-mastering @Velarian's old cassettes. EQ's obviously the way to go and a dynamic EQ / multiband compressor is a refinement of this approach. Then I remembered Kenny Gioia's tutorial on frequency splitting, a method which allows you to apply EQ, compression (and other effects) to defined frequency bands with a hard cut-off between each band. This uses Reaper's stock frequency splitter VST The end result is a group of effected tracks broken out by frequency band (e.g. Lo track, mid track, hi track)and which you can balance with your track faders. A further refinement would be to automate each frequency track (or track effects) so they become controllable across the duration of the song rather than being a static EQ profile from beginning to end. Example below uses an acoustic guitar but the principle is applicable to a whole song:

Wee pub gig with the punk band last night 6-9pm slot. Great time to play as i get to kebab shop before i get home. Only downside is that i need to leave the house at 3pm to get to the gig for set up. Audience size varied thru the night from half full to busy and back to half again towards the end. Everyone seemed to be enjoying it. Standing very close to amp meant i couldn't hear my tone properly but it sounded ok on Vids that have appeared. Has anyone else noticed that with many mobile phone vids the bass drops out a bit when the vocals start. I'm guessing the phones have some sort of built in limiter/compression of some kind.

I have been doing the exact same process, bringing reel-to-reel tapes from over half a century ago of bands I played with, rehearsing, into the digital age, playing them into Reaper for preservation and, if possible, treatment. These, too, are stereo mixes for the most part (some mono...), so nothing can be done on the 'stem' level. The frequency analyser, along with just listening, gives some clue as to what can be done, but there's also a lot that just cannot. My unwelcome suggestion would be similar to that posted previously above; that's to say: know when to stop. Once into the upper ranges, no distinction can be usefully made between Vox, keys, guitars, cymbals, noise... and pursuing perfection becomes a hunt for the Dahu, or Chimera. If it's as good as it gets, it is sometimes (often...) as good as it gets, and that's all. There are moments when a doctor has to decide when to pull the plug on a terminally-ill patient. That moment will be retarded as long as possible, but, eventually, the time of passing will be pronounced and a sheet pulled over the departed. It's sad, but that's Life. Just as an anecdote, and no more cheerful, I had all my weeks of painstaking transfers of tapes on an external USB Teradisk. One day : nothing. The disk was dead. I even sent the disk to the specialists, who could, for a very hefty fee, recover info from dead media. To no avail. I signed up to pay in case of success; they tried, but failed to recover this disk. All, then has been lost, and I must dig out again my crumbling tapes and start again. Lesson..? Back-up, then back-up the back-up, if the stuff is precious. Digital media are fickle, and go 'Poof..!' when they choose to, not when you would like them to. Good luck with your audio archaeology; hope this helps in some way. Douglas

I know what you're thinking... was this thread bumped after 12 years or was it 13?

Unless your wife is, at minimum, 30 years younger than you, she's not qualified to answer that question. Sorry, the rules of what is rock 'n' roll are very strict in this regard.

That's not only not unusual, it's common. How sound waves work isn't the least bit intuitive, so it's a field where you must be taught. Figuring it out on your own isn't impossible, somebody was the first to do so, but it's not easy.

Well I would play 10,000 hours, and I would play 10,000 more ...

Played a gig last night at my local squash club with a band that I haven't played with since before lockdown. It was arranged fairly last minute as fundraiser for Ukrainian families who've ended up here in the north east. It didn't look like it was going to be well attended due to the early tickets sales numbers but we were pleasantly surprised that the place was almost full on the night with a great friendly/family atmosphere. We played 2 sets of Brit Pop covers with me also singing lead vocals all night. I normally play in a classic rock covers band sharing a quarter of the lead vocals so I woke up this morning feeling a little bit hoarse. The drummer's son has been learning the guitar so we got him up for a few songs which made his parents and grandparent's very proud! The drummer played an electric kit which, although I'm not a massive fan of electric kits, made for a much more manageable backline sound. The only negative thing about the night was that the room was really warm as we couldn't open the windows while we were playing due to the nearby houses, one of which was the guitarist's parent's house which was literally across the street! I'm not normally a sweater but it was running down my forehead in buckets last night! That could also have been due to the fact that I was flying by the seat of my pants on a few of the newer songs that we threw in at the last minute as I was reading the lyrics from my phone, whilst also controlling the mixing desk from a tablet(not normally my job in my regular band). We made it through the night without too many mistakes, the audience went home happy and we raised some money for a worthy cause.

Gigs are like buses... Nothing for a while and then 3 in 4 days, including 2 yesterday. In the afternoon it was an hour at the Cider, Rum and Reggae festival in Trowbridge. Utterly brilliant, such a happy vibe and some great ciders flowing and some amazing food -- curry goat, jackfruit & ackee and a roti, oh god just thinking about it is making me drool. Superb PA sound with a maHOOsive wall of bass, we played really well and the crowd seemed to love us, some of them were up and dancing from the B of "Buster..." and by the end they all were. The evening was 2 hours at a private party thrown by a bandmate's friend, they also fed & watered us and everyone danced the night away. Probably helped by the copious amount of Red Stripe being consumed a brilliant day, but oh holy mother I am so broken today.

The legendary cellist Pablo Casals asked why he continued to practice at age 90... “Because I think I’m making progress,” he replied.

Thanks! The prep is crucial to good results. Using poly or similar makes much more sense with flake really. Much easier to get the thickness needed and clarity. A lot of the originals from the early 60's were actually done with acrylic which holds up much better and does not yellow much either. Some were done with nitro but they look bumpy with a rough surface now as the nitro has shrunk over the years. Bass VI will look terrific! You've seen this Champagne sparkle original '63?

Her comes the hot stepper - ini kamoze

Blimey!

I'd have taken the opportunity to test his obsession/wallet combination with a 'Ohhhh, it has sentimental value, nothing short of ten grand could persuade me to part with it...' Then you're onto a win-win; either he buggers off, or you're looking at a payday... 🙂

As I say, the old 10000 hours trope is aimed at treating the task like a full time Uni course or an apprenticeship. It must be specific and full on. 40 hours a week minimum.

Personally, I reckon unless we had several fivers in the mix, it would be too much of a giveaway if there was just one...the last shoot out was all four string basses. I was open to anyone submitting whatever bass they wanted. All this is detailed on the blog post below (there's video!) by @Silvia Bluejay: https://bassclef141.wordpress.com/2018/10/26/basschat-south-east-bash-2018/

+1 for surgical spirit. I also find that if you soak a pad of cotton wool or lint or whatever with the spirit and actually rub your fingertips with it rather than just soaking them, the hardening effect is even quicker.

Pedant alert! I guess you mean 'exude mojo' rather than "extrude mojo". Interested in why you chose to slap the 5 basses. Not the 'regular job' of a Pbass. Very minor gripes in the scheme of things, and neither diminishes an interesting video.

By finishing their drinks and leaving when you are too f n loud

Another wedding gig last night. We set up in record time after the usual late-running wedding breakfast, only for the guitarist to encounter a terrible buzzing which we narrowed down to his Kemper. Fortunately I carry a Digitech Bad Monkey for guitar-amp-related emergencies, so he played through that straight into the PA for the whole gig. Afterwards several wedding guests came up to complain about the guitar sound. Oh wait, no they didn’t! The Kemper worked fine when it was tested at home later that night.

Haha, brilliant! Just think, in a few years we'll be moaning to the youngsters about what it was like in our day having to lug a 20kg 8x10 around!

I found this one even more useful (and less click baity):

A fun day yesterday at CarFest North, after 2 years of cancellations. We played on the Wigwam stage, which was fortunate, as that one was built, unlike the main stage, where they had a few issues, meaning they ran very late and Richard Ashcroft ended up not playing.

I've recently re-bonded with a 1973 P that I bought about 10 years ago. I used it a few times but it had some dodgy frets so it sat in its case for a few years and I used a Sadowsky HPJ instead. At one point I thought I'd sell it but decided against it. Glad I didn't. Eventually I got it re-fretted and plecked at Chandlers in Kew and fitted with a set of Rotosound flats. Like many Fenders it had a dead spot on the G-string but when I bought it there was this headstock shaped brass plate in the case. A "Fathead". It fixed the problem. It now sounds just like a P should and is a joy to play. It's now a tough choice between this and the HPJ for the next gig.