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Dear Basschat, I know that I'm much better at talking about anything but myself, so please forgive the rather awkward reply. Had it have been a thread about my bass, then sure, I could talk all day about it. I'll keep this short and sweet for now. Due to ongoing (long term) circumstances out of my control indeed I am struggling. I'm not under any illusions I know that many of us are. So like many, I've sought to try to make ends meet as Daz39 has said by selling my work tools. I wish I could say that I did have piles of unused gear that I have accumulated, but the reality is that I only have a few items left that I am not using before we dip in to the kit I use every day. Andrew, you are amazing and making such a post has been really touching and the replies have also left me feeling slightly less invisible than I have been this last year or so. Thank you, really. I'm not really sure how to respond. In some ways it feels unfair that I am deserving of money to help me when I know there are others out there who are in dire circumstances. Don't get me wrong, I would kill for a lottery win! So, whilst I try to figure things out, I may ask for your help another way. I do work hard. I have income streams, so it's not as if I am sat doing nothing about it. I don't drink, smoke, go out much, nor have I been on any sort of holiday for years. 😔 There's obviously more to this that I feel uneasy about airing in public, sorry if it all sounds a little cryptic, but thank you for the kind and thoughtful words.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-65597518

Been a tad busy this week, but last weekend was fab. Just a local boozer where I’m squished into a corner, but my uni course is so intense it felt amazing just to feel like ‘me’ again for a few hours. This weekend is a double whammy so I’m looking forward to that! here's a few pics from Sat.

My first Jazz bass, liking the difference to my PBass In the new Candy Apple red colour

I'd chop off our keyboard player's left hand.......

Awesome! 👍😊 Same thing happened to some friends of mine in a band called KXB (from West Sussex) some years ago... They were playing 'Gay Bar' at one of their regular local Saturday night gigs, and Tyler Spencer, aka Richard Valentine, Electric 6's lead vocalist got up from the crowd and joined them on stage!

Pickguard on, pickup in with @KiOgon loom installed. We're in the home stretch now! One odd thing that took me a bit to figure out. I suppsoe my cavity was a bit shallow, so while the output jack was working, as soon as i screwed down the pickguard, the sound cut out. Turns out one of the pots was hitting the shielding and that was causing everything to cut out. I shielded the shielding with electrical tape and the issue went away.

I'd change the bass player 🙂

Gathered together various basses in various stages of construction today, all but two will be heading out (I'll let you guess which two). So many parts, so little time! There's a further two I couldn't be arsed to get out of the pile in the shad also 🤔

You’ll probably get better definition if you don’t play with your fingers crossed 🤣🤞

I finally bit the bullet, £349 delivered on coda music. Yeah I get it now. They are great bits of kit. Initially was frustrating pairing them up with Bluetooth and unfortunately the receiver thing doesn't fit my barrel jack yamaha bass. Apart from that they work well and are very handy. The two different Bluetooth settings boss audio and boss midi threw me at the start also. My biggest takeaway is how bad my tone and playing can sound with dry signal and no pre's Homework time. Overall would recommend 👌

I wish we could be more confident in all the non-playing aspects of band stuff - socials, publicity, tooting our own metaphorical horns and all that jazz instead of the whole "we're in a band but shhhh, don't tell anyone!" shyness/modesty thing. We don't have to turn into completely overbearing, arrogant knobs either, just somewhere between those extremes would be nice.

This arrived from Bass Bros just over a week ago. I was actually away on a residential course from delivery day onwards, so I had to confess to Mrs Rocks about buying it and ask her very nicely if she would stay at home and take delivery of it. She duly did, and even unpacked it and sent me pictures. Anyway, the bass! It’s a 1987 Made In Japan Fender PB-62 Reissue. These were apparently made by Fujigen Gakki for Fender at the time. The build quality is amazing, easily as good as anything I’ve seen from Fender. Acoustically it rings like a grand piano, very reminiscent of the 2016 AVRI P bass I had until recently. One of the most remarkable things about the bass is the condition, it looks more or less new, which is surprising for a 36 year old instrument. There are a handful, maybe four or five tiny marks on the body, that’s it, no buckle rash and no fret wear. It weighs 4.1kg, or 9lbs 1oz. It even came in it’s original shipping carton with matching serial number. The neck is lovely, very very close to my ‘73 P bass, 41mm nut, but just ever so slightly slimmer from front to back. I bought this bass primarily as a bass I need to worry less about than my vintage 70’s Fender basses. Also as a bass I can try things out on, looms, pickups, bridges etc, something I don’t need to be too precious about keeping original. So it’s going to get gigged, and changes will be made, in fact I’ve already made a couple. The first pics are as I received it, totally stock, with the white guard. I’ve been playing it like this since I got home, even with the rounds on it. Today, I received a new loom for it from John (thanks @KiOgon), so I was ready to make a few changes. Now it’s sporting a tortoise guard (thanks @dodgnofski) with full vintage style shielding plate underneath, Fender Custom Shop 62 pickup, new kiOgon loom, and new knobs. And it’s got a new set of TI flats on it. The action is low, it plays wonderfully, and it sounds great. The original guard and wiring with knobs, and the pickup are all stashed away safely if ever I want to put it back to stock. I’m going to take it out on Friday night to the local jazz jam and hopefully play a couple of tunes on it. Thanks for listening! Cheers, Rob

Bitter Sweet Timpani ～ The Verve

BassTheWorld?

Good luck if Steven Siegal ever jumps up to play guitar!! 🙂

Yeah, but now you know clearly how sh** you are! 🙂

I dunno about that. I listened to it later and we were still sh**

Designacable or Custom Lynx.... https://www.designacable.com/ https://custom-lynx.co.uk/

Swingin' - Tom Petty

How many exposures?

You guys think you had it bad, I used to be a teacher!

Born Zippy ～ Underworld

Kate Bush has posted about John Giblin on her website (https://www.katebush.com/news/john) Likewise from Jim Kerr on the Simple Minds facebook (remembering seeing JG at the Before The Dawn shows - also a hint at why he left Simple Minds) https://www.facebook.com/simpleminds/posts/pfbid02Ts2yZYGSY1h7rzKBsFrTQbSsme5EDqDdtPhw6u9a3iA2Q5w8vHc6k3MsnSdSxfL8l

My Lovely Horse - Father Ted Crilly and Father Dougal McGuire

I read a little piece yesterday about how Living Colour's Stain album was now 30 years old and how the initial US release had different guitar solos on tracks 2-4 (Ignorance Is Bliss, Leave It It Alone, Bi) - I was a huge fan (although it has to be said, I'm more Team Muzzy that Doug Wimbush) and have both the alternate and regular versions. This was kind of enough to kick off a bit of a Living Colour deep dive - been working though from the original demos, the official releases, bootlegs, the lot. This is a crazy mental version of Funny Vibe. Muzz was so great.

I'd really like my band to 1. exist and 2. be obscenely famous and rich and not at all dysfunctional...

Mine arrived earlier this week, very cheap and very fast from Scan. Best bass accessory I've tried, blows the PJB gear out of the water on functionality, usability and - surprisingly to me - on core tone (although let's face it the PJB headphones let the side down awfully). Strolling around the garden playing bass to myself, living the dream! Why no-one did this years ago is beyond me, thanks for the recommendations folks 👍

So following the stocktake I have done some experimentation The rosewood neck on the blue Precision (second top) works best on the natural Enfield The ebony Jazz neck on the natural Precision (top) works best on the 3TSB Enfield The Status neck works best on the Blue Precision, in fact surprisingly well The maple fretless neck works best on the natural Precision The rest all work very well as they are. Neck body combinations are like rhythm sections, more about magical chemistry than objective quality 👍

Love it. I was at a gig in Barbados and realised I was standing next to a rather well know singer. She was loving the band and getting really into dancing and cheering, and the look on the singer's face - he can't have been much more than 18 - when he realised who she was was priceless. I love it when celebs act like they're not celebs 👍

You should have kept that bit quiet, then you could have sold them in pairs on here as ‘tone weights’ and made a fortune.😆

Spy in the cab - bauhaus

There must be a fair degree of communication for you guys to have got where you're at? Transparency is a different beast. I can smell a fish from a mile off, so I have a fairly good nose for BS. Fortunately, all of the people I play alongside are also my friends, so I don't suffer from a lack of that. I can see how that would be an issue though, where there are differing agendas which aren't shared. I think you need to clear the air if it's troubling you.

Overwhelmed with this set up , the tone from the Handbox is unreal and that cab makes it sound like an earthquake ! All set to be making some people deaf this weekend...

I’m thinking of a humbucker upgrade to this one. The tone on the stock is ok but I find it a bit weak against my Fallout and I occasionally swap about in a gig. Anyone any suggestions?

It's no secret that I had to sell up everything a handful of years ago, all the basses, all the gear, everything, just to pay the bills. It's only been in the last year or so that I've been able to start assembling a modest group of instruments. It's a very depressing place to be, when one of the things that makes your life better has to go to pay the rent, and actually, at the end of it all, it made no difference really, selling anything, it just delayed the inevitable. I should have at least kept a couple of the basses.... I really miss my Stingrays..... All I can say, is that from personal experience, selling you prized possessions to pay bills isn't worth it. Unless you have a collection of Foderas to sell, that will really make a financial difference, don't do it... it's not worth it. That said.... I'll be at the front of the line to help, if I can, any brother, or sister, who needs the help.

There are two separate issues at play here: Firstly the importance or not of having amps and speakers for the individual instruments on stage. IME if everything is going through the PA then at best your amplification rig is a personal monitor and at worst a stage prop that could be messing up the on-stage sound. As soon as you have multiple single instrument sources on stage trying to arrange them on a typical stage, so that all the musicians are able to hear what is coming out of them is nigh on impossible anything but the smallest of venues, and if you look at the typical band setup most don't even bother. If they did, the amps would be placed at the sides of the stage pointing across, but when was the last time you saw that? Once you start having to put anything with its own amp into the foldback, you might as well dispense with on-stage instrument amps and give each musician their own wedge monitor and their own personal monitor mix. Instrument amps only contribute to the sound of the instruments due to a historical accident, because amplified music became popular while the cheapest way of producing amps was using valves. Let's face it electrical engineers would never have purposely designed an amp to distort no matter how musically "pleasing" that sound may be. Their original intent was always to make the instrument sound louder without adding any additional colouration. This has also lead to the problem that both the amp and cabs become part of the instrument's sound which is a particular issue for bass players because the PA rarely mic's up the bass cabs and even if they do, they will also take a DI and you have no way of knowing which source is actually being used for the FoH sound. If you want the sort of colouration that ancient amplification operating outside of its intended parameter produces, then it makes far more sense to dispense with the on-stage amps and speakers and use signal processing instead to replicate the sound. These days IME in a band mix it is indistinguishable from the "real" thing. And. if you play in a band where having a large and impressive looking backline is still part of the image then get some light-weight, low-profile empty ones to use as stage props that take up less floor space on stage and can be folded away to save space for transport. As you can probably tell, I've dispensed with a dedicated bass rig. I found that I was playing two types of venue - small ones where I was being asked to turn down so much so as not to overpower the FoH sound that I could barely hear myself from my rig compared with the bass sound coming out of the guitarist's wedge on the other side of the stage; or the large ones where even my big and impressive-looking rig couldn't even begin to cover the whole stage and once again I was mostly reliant on the foldback to be able to hear myself. I was asking myself what was the point of taking this rig to gigs (3 items that were all ideally a two-person carry) when most of it made no contribution to what myself or my audience were hearing? I now use a Helix for my sound and an FRFR cab for rehearsals and the very occasional gig where the PA is strictly vocals only. I've done only a handful of these types of gig with any of my originals bands in the last 25 years, and the FRFR has been a massive improvement in terms of dispersion (and consequently on-stage balance) compared with my much more expensive traditional bass rig. I've gone from having to be so loud on stage that I could barely hear the other instruments in order for the bass guitar to project into the audience, to being just slightly louder than I would normally choose. So really the only bass players who need a traditional amplification rig are those who only play small-ish gigs with vocal-only PA systems, or those who play in bands where the majority of the other instruments don't require amplification (like big bands). It seems ironic then that much of the advertising for amplification relies on "big-name" endorsees for whom the equipment they are promoting has little real-world benefit. The other issue is that of IEMs: Neither of the two bands I currently play in have made the switch to IEMs even though I think both would benefit from it. One of the bands is definitely more open to the idea than the other, and I suspect that finances allowing, this one will be be using IEMs within the next 12 months. The biggest problem I see with IEMs is that the band really need to be doing their own foldback mix to get the best out of them. Quite a few of the bands that I have shared the bill with over the last few years use IEMs and all of them take much longer to soundcheck and suffer form numerous problems integrating their system with the house PA at the venue. This becomes even more complicated if you are also using the IEMs for things such as click tracks which are not wanted in the FoH. When I make the change it will be because the band will have also added the equipment required to do our own on-stage monitor mix that can be kept completely separate from the FoH and include things like click tracks, count ins and other band-only cues. TL:DR pretty much everyone who isn't playing in a small pub covers band with a vocal only PA would benefit from ditching the traditional backline and using IEMs. Ultimately it's going to produce a better sound on stage and FoH and overall there will be less equipment to carry and set up. It's early days yet but I suspect in 10 years time we'll be wondering why it was even necessary to discuss this.

I was considering IEMs but if they make you that belligerent I think I'll give them a miss.

Just back from a rather splendid gig, 10 minutes walk from my front door. It’s not every day that an ‘80s star visits the boondocks.

Its twin is waiting ... 🙂