Leaderboard

Played The Navigation in Newark on Saturday night. Interesting place, it's a former wharf warehouse on the River Trent and was nicely full. We're a Country Rock band and it was great that a couple from Virginia USA were in and told us we'd be awesome before we started (gotta love the +ve attitude). We launched into Folsom Prison (the song, not the jail ) and kicked off the evening. Lots of nodding and foot tapping during set 1 which ramped up in Set 2 with much singing along and shape throwing. We finished with the obligatory Sweet Home Alabama (ok, it's not really a Country song but nobody cared) and got loads of compliments post gig. Emma, our singer, had someone tell her she's exceptional.....she is to be fair Top night and we'll be back later in the year. My usual Mike Lull P4 and Handbox rig did the heavy lifting

One from a little jam session a while back with my Smoked Crome Special. I love this thing.

Despite being a serial purveyor of bass and long-time BC member, I’ve not posted a NBD before! However, due to the scarcity of reviews for these basses I felt I should add to our collective record here… This appeared for sale in a local music shop here in South Wales, I stopped by to have a look and left with it. The info received so far is that it’s a 1984 Wilkes Savoy Deluxe, alder body, bolt-on maple neck with ebony board. Schaller 232 bassbucker pickups and 2-band (unknown) active eq with passive switching and passive tone control that only works in passive mode. It feels like a high quality instrument, the neck is particularly playable, a slim profile and lovely feeling finish on the back of the neck. Sonically, it’s got a nice resonance to it and very full and fat tone from the dual humbuckers. Lots of tonal options with the 3-way selector switch and a polite eq that works well. I’m looking forward to seeing how it sounds with the band. I’m surprised we don’t see hear more about these lovely instruments! I’d love to hear any others views / experiences about Wilkes basses. And yes, it looks very similar to a Jaydee. Cheers!

I don't. All the adverts are full of old people's music.

Hi everyone! I'm Federico Pecci from RIVIERA Gear. WEBSITE LINK - BASS PAGE I would share with you what our company make! We are a company that manufactures licensed guitar and bass bridges with an integrated top-down tuning system. These bridges are designed to create headstock and headless instruments. The tuning pegs are placed vertically to the bridge therefore the biggest advantage over competitors is being able to design the instrument without having to cut the back to reach the knobs. This freedom stands in stark contrast to competitors, where compromise was often the price of going headless. As we know the headless bass world is booming, we designed the smallest headless bass bridge on market that allows the builder to design the instrument without compromise. Also, in combining with bass bridge, we manufacturing the Bass string locker for headstock basses. The huge advantage of this product is to cut down the weight on the bass head, this guaranteed a more balanced instrument and smooth design. Made in Italy. About any question please do not hesitate to text me, i'm happy to answare! Thank you!

Bought nowt in 2023 and have almost got half way through this year, purchase free though twice I nearly succumbed, including last weekend in Bass Direct where I almost bought a pre-owned Musicman SUB 5-String White 2003 for £799. Some lovely stuff in stock at the mo'. I could've comfortably afforded it but I went home to re-think in the cold light of day and common sense won out.

I suggest you use the 8 ohm version of the Faital. These are schematics for 800 Hz 8 ohm high pass and low pass filters for midrange and woofer respectively. The capacitors are poly or mylar film, rated for at least 100 volts. The coils are solid core, of the smallest available wire gauge with no more than 0.4 ohms DCR (resistance). You can find these at Blue Aran. A plus/minus 10% tolerance of the component values is permissible. Build each filter on its own thin plywood board. Secure the components with hot melt glue and plastic zip ties to they can’t vibrate loose. All connections are soldered. To test for correct polarity download a pink noise generator to your laptop. Get this app on your phone: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dom.audioanalyzer Set it to Spectrum Analyzer, 1/3 octave, C Weighting, Slow Response. Wire the low pass filter to the woofer. Place the speaker face up. Connect the high pass leads to the midrange but don’t screw it down yet. Connect the laptop to your amp, play the pink noise. Look at the response in the region of 800 Hz. There should be no response dip. If there is reverse the leads to the midrange and test again. That should eliminate any dip.

Surely a Faith acoustic? They have a wide range and an appropriate name on the headstock?

Too many breakups to recall, over the years, but the best one went like this: Guitarist came up to me on stage just as we were about to start our set, eyes wide like dustbin lids. "I can't feel my hands" he mumbled. He couldn't feel his feet either, as it turned out, and stumbled around looking to get a stool to sit on. We started the set with the guitarist slouched limply on his stool but still making an admirable effort to play. While our completely improvised jazz-metal explorations sometimes worked, were engaging and listenable, this was not one of those nights. It was not a great night to be going through a bout of intense paranoia in a semi-sedated state, I discovered. As we lumbered on, banter between our singer and lads in the crowd was turning serious... and aggressive. Beer was spilled, insults were issued. The rest of us were unaware of this, however, struggling to move fingers and limbs while floundering in our own mental treacle. Singer walked off-stage, out the door of the venue and out of the band, halfway through a song, followed by a couple of lads looking for a confrontation. We didn't really notice, straight away and, after we did, finished the set, regardless. Afterwards, as we struggled manfully to pack up, I truly understood the sorrow of St. Hubbins when he said "Well, I'm sure I'd feel much worse if I weren't under such heavy sedation." Better than a whatsapp whinefest, any day.

A great bass is a great bass. A room full of also rans is just frustrating. Life's too short to play crappy guitars.

Against my better judgement that was kind of me on Saturday. It was the wedding of a good mate of mine, the singer in my technically-still-going-but-don't-do-much-these-days hard rock band. Thanks to the excellent Sound Cartel for loaning us some gear, even if I do have the sneaking suspicion that you just felt as though you couldn't say no to the groom. Still, the others were going to do it over my objections anyway, if you can't beat em, join 'em. Anyway, here we are trying to remember some songs we used to play. I think it's clear that I'm rather embarrassed about the whole thing and I'm trying to hide. Unlike our lead guitarist. VID-20240602-WA0000.mp4

So second gig of the weekend at the glorious Old Fox in Felling (on the Gateshead side of the river Tyne close to Newcastle for those born in the south). This is a proper music venue pub, with live music on four or five times a week. The Sunday afternoon slot is a coveted slot because you are almost guaranteed a full pub, and a full pub of music lovers. This could not have been more different to our Friday night gig, and we all played so much better. Our usual eclectic mix of country, Americana, and blues went down a storm with the enthusiastic crowd. Gear-wise, my trusty old Ashdown ABM 1x15 Neo combo, EBS Stanley Clarke, MicroThumpinator, and my fretless Tony Franklin Precision and NS NXT EUB. More compliments on the sound so I must finally be getting to grips with the old PA malarkey (I’ve only been doing it for twenty plus years 😂). A busy three gigs in eight days have bedded new guitarist Steve in nicely (for a band that only plays around 20 gigs a year).

Does this cut your mustard? It's a cheap Harley Benton Beatbass fretless 😁! I fitted a very cheap piezo pickup (not a bass specific one) that I found in the shed, and ran it through an upright IR in Helix. Annoyingly, it sounds more convincing than a pickup on my real upright...

For me this comes down to something more than tone. The upright bass requires (forces) the player to adopt a different style in terms of structure and timing of the parts by comparison with electric. It's less tone and more 'I can tell that's not upright because that's not how you'd play that part on an upright'. I played in a Jazz combo a few years back and the composer/keyboard player had recorded all the original demos using software (keyboard triggered) for the upright parts, he was a very competent composer and musician. He understood the limitations of the instrument he was emulating and you could hear this in what he chose to play even though he was using a keyboard to record them. It's not about sounding like an upright, but playing whatever instrument you're using as you'd play an upright.

Bit late at the posting but a few pics have turned up from the weekend gig at The Peacock in Huddersfield last weekend. This was the first pub I played, as a dep at the time, with Glam Fever and it’s still one we look forward to.

If you genuinely believe that then I'd suggest that you aren't listening widely enough now and were not doing so back then. Or, as noted above, the rose-tint of retrospect has filtered out a lot of the dross that the charts/radio/TV have ever been full of. Just in case you're open to having your mind changed, here's some recentish tuneful stuff that tells stories and has interesting compositional quirks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1qlK5dF5s4 - The Weather Station https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqXSfHO-7f0 - Jesca Hoop https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QY7MIqZ6Bvo - BC Camplight https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OHfnY_ZE_4 - Carwyn Ellis/Rio 18 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFu5wYMflSI - Mick Head

I would say that as the BC collective is generally a friendly bunch (yes you are), and this thread doesn't have any serious consequences (no prizes/awards at the end) then let @Geek99 stay. Absolutely the last thing I would want to do in any thread is to prevent a BCer from being able to drown out a geetard. 😃

Reminds me of the first time I went to Rebellion, a whole load of punks & skins line-dancing to The Sweet. Rather bizarre but they were enjoying themselves immensely.

Well, the harpsichord arguably has taken a beat from acoustic piano. The problem with it was that technically you had no dynamics. But the acoustic piano is still going strong. Any time I have seen live a traditional jazz band playing with an electric bass, I was hopeful but then I was ultimately disappointed. Admittedly, those bass players were clearly not trying to get the upright sound, so I don't know how I would feel about somebody with a Mustang, a mute and tapes live. Maybe I would like it. But it is interesting that, after some 70 years since the first P bass, despite searching, I have personally yet to find a successful traditional jazz bass player that imitates the traditional sound with the electric. Maybe Anthony Jackson live with Michel Petrucciani, but only to an extent, and it is more of a case of him being already famous than him becoming famous by doing that. I may have missed one or some important example (would be glad to learn about them) but to me this suggests that an electric bass could maybe do a good imitation but cannot beat an upright at its own game. To my ears best examples of jazz with electric bass come from player that do embrace the difference of the electric sound and find a context where it fits in (eg Mark Egan with Joe Beck and Steve Swallow with Scofield)

I can't ever go back to roundwound strings...flats for life!

There seems to be a lot of 'vintage' references throughout advertising at the moment - fashions, cars, skateboards. Are people finding it hard to look ahead with positivity, so advertising cleverly let's them look back to perceived better times?

If you subscribe to basscentric You Tube channels you should have seen this beauty by now. Man alive, how I could have used this a few years ago rather than trying to build tone off a variety of guitar distortions (GT2), BDDI/VTBASS stomps and ABY boxes. Sadness is that while the XO will integrate with most boards, the new Tech21 XB driver stomp will/should be a one box solution.

I suffered a fault on my RipleyFall, and it was kicking around for a while amongst my spare pedals. Anyhoo, I decided to reach out to Jam pedals to see if they could do anything. So I just wanted to post and praise what for the most part is a rare example of outstanding customer support. They arranged transport to collect the Pedal, repaired it, returned it in good time at zero cost. Just thought I´d share here in gratitude. Happy daze

MarkBass set up Mick, little Marcus 500 with 2 x NY121. Fits in the Mini….

😎

Great to see the Forty Six & 2 encore last night. An amazing gig - sounded great, looked brilliant and loved the no photos rule. More like this please!

As well as generational prejudice, let's not forget that time is a great filter. When I was growing up (80s/90s) it was almost accepted as fact that 70s music was crap: pundits, talking heads, chat show hosts and guests all happily echoed the line that 1970s music was all some tacky and regretable post-60s aberration. Similarly, 1980s music -long the soundbite-seekers' bête noire- is now routinely used in ads and shows and also in cheeky references in new music. The quality of music being made over time is presumably fairly consistent, unless there are weird, internationally-consistent variations in levels of talent, with only the good stuff (and the atrociously terrible stuff) being remembered.

Petty sure the reference is to the "dancer" in front of you guys...sound really solid to me!

A great bass can isn't necessarily an expensive bass though, and an expensive bass isn't necessarily great. You can definitely find some gems that don't cost a fortune but they are few and far between. I've played and owned some excellent inexpensive basses that were useful and satisfying instruments. I've played and owned some high-end basses that were poorly made, badly designed and not worth the asking price. A great example would be the JV Squire basses I had back in the early 1980's when they were new. I had a Jazz and then a P Bass too. At the time they were the best I could afford, and I was just waiting to buy something more modern with active electronics ect, as was the fashion at the time. I eventually got through loads of high-end basses, good, bad and indifferent. Now 40-odd years later armed with knowledge and experience, when I can have anything I want, I would be perfectly happy with the JV Squire basses.

I Can't Go Cravat (No Can Do) - Hall and Oates

If you are generally unfamiliar with current music then you probably won't spot it being used in a TV Ad.

The Roland SPD WAV pad is a sort of one shot trigger pad. It can be triggered using your foot (their other products include percussion pads in the same form factor and they demo them being used as stomp things for acoustic guitar players). You could load up to 12 samples in and switch between then and just trigger with your foot if needed.

Gents, when I say he shat himself, I mean an unscheduled bowel evacuation took place mid-scream; at that point his sense of humour failed and shortly after that, so did mine! Quite how it was anyone's fault was beyond me, but the screaming fit that followed the screaming sh1t put the blame firmly on the rest of us.

That's strange. It sounds like bass guitar to me, even down to the string noise. It sounds good, but I can't picture it in my head as a DB.

Walking bass?

The Stranglers Nice 'n' Sleazy. Man, that bass 🥰

Humbleton was a 5-8 acoustic gig. Over an hours drive in rural Wisconsin. We were in the middle of nowhere. Older brewery and family restaurant. The building must have been from the 60s. At first I thought it was going to be a dud. However, the dining room slowly filled up with several fantastic families. We were basically background music. The staff and owner were great. I got paid 100 bucks plus 75 dollars in tips. Before we left the owner gave each of us a rack of barbecue ribs. A fun evening and home safe by 10:00. Thumbs up. Daryl

That Sire looks great. They are great basses for the price. I bought a P8 at Christmas and I’m playing it more than my custom-made 5s at the moment!