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I just couldn't let this one pass. On profit or loss I bought a bass just because I liked the look of it. Not an original, but a copy(!) of another bass. The original is the Fodera Imperial - out of reach for most of us, at least for me - and this is a copy built by the Ukrainian luthier Stas Potokilo (or Potokylo) some years ago. He uesd to work at Fodera it is said... I got it really cheap, didn't really plan to buy another bass, but you know the nature of bass players... (I sold a lot of stuff, just so you don't think my middle name is Musk... ) It arrived nicely and well packaged, took a while to get inside the wrapping, but what was in the cocoon was a really nice bass. New strings and a setup to my liking and we were ready to go. I used it yesterday at the school's Christmas party in the church in the village where I work.

The restoration of this little bass is nearly complete when I got it the action was really high and couldn’t be lowered much. The neck angle was slightly off. Investigation showed that the pocket was pretty much straight ok but the neck and pocket weren’t quite tight even though it felt solid. The body didn’t just have holes for neck screws, the holes had a thread. So unless the neck was clamped tight into the body the neck plate wasn’t really doing its job. The nut was angled in its groove so slightly out of position too. The stock electronics are shite. The pots are on/off and the poles on the underpowered pickup stick out so far that string contact is inevitable. They went in the bin. Now it has an EMG PX. The X series P is way better than the original EMG P. The action is now very low and it sounds ace. There’s a bit of neck dive that will be solved with some Hipshot Ultralite tuners when I can find a shop with some in stock, or someone responds to my Wanted post. I now have a pair of these. The other has an Aguilar 60s pickup and La Bella DT Flats. The new one currently has Elixir nanowebs. I will be swapped them to some DR Hi Beams 50-110 for a bit more tension. It’s great fun to play!

Hi everyone, I just wanted to say a huge thank you to all of you who have supported the site this year—whether by becoming a Supporting Member or purchasing tokens for the marketplace. Your contributions enable us to keep improving the site, reduce our reliance on advertising, and dedicate time to supporting our community. I mention this now because December typically sees a noticeable drop in revenue, and with the challenges many individuals and businesses are facing right now, I’m especially grateful to those of you who continue to renew your subscriptions. Of course, I also deeply appreciate everyone who visits the site, shares their knowledge, and offers support to others. A site like BC is only as valuable as the knowledge contained within the membership. So, thank you once again. I’ll be taking a bit of a BC break over Christmas and New Year, so I want to wish you all a relaxing, joyful time with your friends, family, and instruments 🎸. Cheers, Ped

This all came about rather by chance than anything else. I was working (I WFH) one night and during a quiet moment I had my personal laptop open browsing the BassChat Marketplace (idly browsing, I was not in the market for any new purchases) and I was looking at this BB 1025, and The Wife came in to say good night and she saw me looking and rolled her eyes at me 😂 I showed her some more images and said I'd always like the pickups on these, so she said good night and turned to leave the room and pointed to the screen and said get it and I'll give you the money and it'll be your Birthday present. I was a bit shocked, but not enough to argue with her, so I contacted the seller. The sale was going well, until it wasn't. Nobody stepped forward to offer assistance, but I contacted that seller again and suggested I arrange the courier myself. The seller was onboard with this, until I asked for the packaged bass dimensions … and then he stopped replying to my messages. The Wife said "just look for another bass!" 😂 Like it's that easy! Turns out, it actually was! Following her advice, somewhat downheartedly, as I'd set my hopes on the 1025, I happened upon this marketplace add for a BB1025x! Contacted the seller, they were happy for me to arrange courier, provided packaged bass dimensions and weight, and the sale went through, with the resulting obligatory NBD post. I love this bass. I love the black and chrome aesthetic of it. I love the sound of it. My Ashdown has been put in its case and into my wardrobe and the Yamaha has taken over use of the stand. I've changed the strings for my usual Rotosound Flats and I've added strap locks. I really want to change the cloverleaf tuners, but can't find any direct drop-ins that aren't also cloverleaf as I don't want to be drilling extra holes in the headstock. But this bass is ace. I had my heart set on the original 1025 I linked above, but after having this for almost a month now, I know this was the better choice of bass for me. But you probably didn't come here for stories, and as I'm a firm believer in PoiDH, I have some new photos to share … (Apologies for the slightly fuzzy nature of the images, it turns out I now need to be wearing my glasses for photography 😟) There's more images in my Flickr Album. Shoutout to @david1711 for being a fine gent to deal with and putting up with all my messages to get this posted to me. Mark

Colin Greenwood of Radiohead using a 70s Mustang (from his new book of photographs over the course of his career)

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It's mostly confirmation bias. If you think a speaker will sound a particular way it will. Seeing an aluminum cone the natural assumption is that it will have a brighter sound than pulp, so it does. Going to an aluminum cone was a stroke of marketing genius on Hartke's part, as it separated them from the rest of the pack. The same applies to Markbass. There's nothing special about their drivers, but the yellow cones would lead one to think that they're somehow different. Confirmation bias in audio is pervasive; even those who you'd think would be immune to it are not. That's why good engineers never trust what they think they hear without confirming it with measurements. So are Hartke brighter? I don't know. I've never seen them measured. http://seanolive.blogspot.com/2009/04/dishonesty-of-sighted-audio-product.html

Short-scale basses are becoming very popular lately, and there are many reasons why, not least because they are so much lighter than full-scale basses. Personally I'd never really considered short-scale basses before I had to play one when covering for another bassist on a gig. This particular short-scale bass was a Fender Mustang, and I've got to say that I was pretty impressed! The Mustang was instantly easy to play, and through a decent amp, it sounded much fatter than I imaged it would. So, of course I've gone out a brought one! In my latest YouTube video, you can check out what I think of my new Mustang bass, and hear how it stacks up against a full-scale P-Bass. This is a useful video if you’re considering buying a short-scale bass, and you want to hear how a Mustang bass sounds. Enjoy!

Singer (one of our regular lead vox crew) arrived 15 mins before we were due to start due to public transport issues, and was obviously stressed, bless her. I'd managed to lose my IEM headphones at a rehearsal (for our NYE gig earlier in the week) but didn't spot the loss till the gig, so I made do with standing next to the PA speaker for monitoring. Dep drummer was playing with us for the first time and we'd not rehearsed with him, and the venue, one of our pub residences, was rammed with Christmas party revellers and perhaps busier than it's ever been. So what could possibly go wrong?! 😅 There were unsurprisingly a few loose ends! But we managed to get by with eye contact and put on a decent show which seemed to go down well, and overall it was a fun gig. A large receptive audience can clearly make up for a multitude of sins it seems! A little clip of the gig and venue. Happy Christmas all!

You are very welcome, all of you.

There was a test in an acoustic lab, when I studied, so this was long ago. There was a set of hifi stuff, one CD, and three sets of speaker grilles: black, brown, and white. The listeners had a short break between "changing speakers", while only the grilles were changed. Guess what? White was slightly aggressive, brown pretty dull, and black most balanced. Aluminium! Shiny aluminium! Therefore Hartke has to be aggressive, and what were their words in the advertisements? Transient attack! (The question remains, what does it mean?)

The OP specifies a Frontman and that's where the rot sets in. A singing guitarist or bassist or even (God help us) drummer can express their creativity through their instrument. A dedicated vocalist frontman HAS to think of himself as the epicentre of the band just in order to function effectively. Nobody wants a shy, retiring, ego-free frontman.

Hence a separate post about singing lessons!👍

Aluminum cones are used quite a bit for hi-fi. The principle benefit is rigidity: they flex less than most other materials, which results in lower distortion. The principle limitation is that they lack the internal damping of softer materials like pulp or polypropylene. While all cones exhibit break-up at high frequencies, softer cone materials tend to spread the break-up across a range of frequencies, while aluminium and other stiff cones like carbon fibre ring like a bell at a single frequency. The frequency peak can easily be 10dB and getting it under control needs heavy filtering. I'd guess what you're hearing when you listen to Hartke drivers is the ringing and distortion inherent to all aluminium cone drivers. This is the frequency response of a high-quality 10" aluminium cone driver:

Two much better photos from last Saturday's In Isolation farewell gig:

There's also kevlar, fiberglass, polyethylene, and my favorite, hemp. If you smoke that cone you really smoke that cone. 😁

How is the ISP going to do this? Who is going to tell the ISP the block list that changes every second? Who is going to pay for the hardware and the software to do this? The second it's published it's out of date, mind you it was never accurate to start with. Who.is going to collate all the VPN'S in the first place? No obligation of foreign VPN'S to even publish their IP addresses they use, so how's an ISP going to know? The UK govt wouldn't know. How are you going to know that an https request to a non UK website isnt actually a vpn tunnel? The ISP can't know as it appears to be on port 443. How do you stop somebody tunneling through an ssh session? I run some of my ssh sessions on different ports as it's easier to configure on the firewalls. You'd have to do a man in the middle hijack to look at the initial handshaking, however to do that you'd have to spoof the TLS certificates. You see this with some WiFi connections as they try to manage the certificates and get it wrong. Also not everybody has an ISP. I've setup direct leased lines between businesses. Some people buy their lines. Some people pay to lay dedicated lines. I've had them explicitly laid down that follows certain routes in the road for redundancy so they go through roads. Some large companies have direct international lines. Some companies lease capacity on their lines at different times of the day and night. None of these use an ISP as they want to control what they do. How are you going to control those? The VPN genie is out the bottle now, its like saying to the ISPs to block porn. Too late, you can block the main sites but there are 10,000s of sites out there. You can't put the onus onto the ISP to do this, it would cost 10's of billions. The govt looked at this and backed off years ago. Netflix has tried to block VPN's and failed. There are simply too many and they change all the time. Also setting up a VPN on a home server is a true VPN. Just because its not sold or advertised doesn't make it any less of a VPN. It uses high grade encryption, if I wanted to use even higher grade, i'd probably go for dedicated hardware which isn't that expensive. There are so many different and easy ways to get around anything your ISP puts in place. Never underestimate the skills of a 16 year old boy wanting to look at adult sites.

Despite having preferred Gibsons and other s-s basses since I started playing, I've got mixed feelings on this. Here's a few random thoughts: When I bought my first bass (a Watkins Rapier) back in the mists of time, I chose it on the basis of what felt most comfortable and looked cool without even knowing that different scale-lengths were available; Gibson's shorter-than-Fender-standard scale was/is equally valid and hearing this constantly referred to as 'junior' (i.e. 'not for real men') - notably by Fender - p155es me off; In light of the above, what have Fender's marketing people got for brains? IMHO, they could have a big s-s market running in parallel to their 'standard' scale-length offerings if they didn't dumb-down on their s-s products; Mitigating against my love for Gibsons is the fact that, for me, the strap-balance that comes with having the top strap button at the F12 'sweet spot' is essential (and why I moved away from SGs); Like it or not, the perception that 'proper' bass guitars have to look like a P or a J (with the possible exception of the Gibson SG) is widely held, especially (but not only) outside the bass-playing fraternity; That's why I feel happier playing my Sandberg Cali ll on stage than my equally excellent Vox Starstream Artist, although this may change as my latest band members share my love for the quirky looks and wonderful Aguilar sounds of the Vox; IMHO, the main-stream bass-guitar manufacturers have held back the natural evolution of the s-s bass guitar - Gibson through a mixture of incompetence and dodgy quality control, and Fender presumably in a misguided attempt to preserve the purity of the brand's original DNA. There, glad I've got that lot off my chest 🙂

Audiophiles would argue about which color sounds best. 😄

Finally get to have a play with the DCX Bass, loving the EQ mode for some light touch tone sculpting 👌

It has been done...

I like the proportions of the Jaguar SS, but it's based on a guitar body. The long scale version looks a bit gangly.

Both my short scale EBMM Stingray and Maruszczyk Jake (P style) have scaled down bodies to keep them visually in proportion with the scale length. I don't know exactly how much but I'd have guessed they're about 7/8ths, which would be in keeping with a figure of 12%ish. I love the fact that they are very obviously Ray and P shaped/sounding because I physically struggle with the full size versions, and this way I don't have to miss out on having those classic looks & tones. I never got on with large bodied basses even before I moved to short scale, so as a result I'd never owned a Fender in the 35 odd years I've been playing. These scaled down shorties are a godsend.

I must say, I prefer short scale basses that have their own shape, as opposed to a scaled down body from another bass. That way they feel like an instrument in their own right instead of a mini version of something else.

I'll expand.... I've played in a lot of bands, some I auditioned for (both pro and am), some I was invited into, some I forced my way into (long story), and some have simply emerged from conversations with friends. By far the best have been the latter, and specifically the guys I'm playing with at present, who are 1) a guy I've known for 15 years as a friend but who seemed musically well above me (multi-instrumentalist/multi-genre), 2) a close friend with whom I've gigged a few times but with whom I've drunk beer and talked band ideas more times than I can remember, and 3) a good friend of his who is (was) a casual acquaintance of mine. It's a project I'll expand on here as it develops, but the main thing is that the core sentiment of the band is goodwill, there's not been one argument despite the fact that at least two of us are very good at arguing, everyone turns up at rehearsal having learned their parts, no-one is trying to take the lead, there's an implicit group decision making that is quite unusual in bands in my experience. But most of all, we enjoy playing the set and that means that at rehearsals, while we may arrive with the weight of a day's work/kids/families on our shoulders, 30-minutes in we're in the groove and I think it's fair to say we all leave feeling a whole lot better than we arrived. And I am by far the least talented member of the band! I've only ever been in one other band like it, and that band was the same, a group of friends. They are without doubt the two best bands I've had the pleasure of belonging to. Friendship is I think a major player in bands I'll update on this band's gigs etc in another thread as things develop 👍

Try singing yourselves = no frontman issues + more money each

Make it clear at any auditions that what is heard is what is going to be played and that if that’s not suitable for them then thanks for their time but no thanks. Sometimes the direct approach might seem to take longer to find someone but it’s usually quicker than having 2 or 3 unsuitable people in post trying to make changes and getting on everyone’s nerves.

Bit late posting, but last week after our staff Christmas Party a few of us went on to the Apple and Parrott where it was Jam night. My colleague was on drums and we joined a guitarist and singer for Paranoid and Whole Lotta Rosie. Another colleague videoed some of it and the image below is a screen shot from the video.

Pre-penultimate gig for our residency and it was the one we thought might happen at some point. The whole room was one firm, lots of gentlemen dressed in what I call Haute de Countrywide- gillet, checked shirt brown boots, aggrieved at having to pay inheritance tax, you know the type. Just a general stand offish impress us attitude. Anyway, we get them ticking over nicely in the first half, get to the break, have ten minutes in the room we’ve been provided to modify the set to taste and return to a distinctly frosty atmosphere. Turns out two factions have had bit of argy bargy outside and now no one’s interested in partying. Until, and isn’t this just typical, we play our last song to indifference really, the dj insists we do an encore, we play Fairytale and then they go nuts and want another…. Left quietly as the police watched the would be pugilists get taxied off. Two more gigs to do- I think they’ll be much better.

2024 ended with a cheeky little trip over to the Southgate Inn in Devizes. Armed with just my mandolin, I actually got the bus over. We got a heroes welcome from the regular customers and were greeted with "here come the goths". 😺 My wife snapped this one picture that sounds off a comparatively quiet year on the live front.

In your position @thisisswanbon I would have 2 pedalboards fully stocked/ready to go. I know this is fund dependent but I also know me and I couldn’t be bothered swapping pedals from one board to another depending on what the gig was.

Thanks to the BC legend that is Ash, I've welcomed a short scale Sterling Stingray to my wee collection It's in great condition, extremely well set up with a low action and well cut nut. It sounds just the way it should, and is great for my back and bad arm. I had one before, but just couldn't the action where I wanted. So that's that itch finally scratched

well…as predicted, massively rushed… But we had fun

My JMJ is actually heavier than all my longer scale basses. However, they are particularly light, 3 of them being chambered. But the Mustang is still a tad heavier than my Squier P bass. With all that said, the perceived weight of the Mustang feels less, due to the balance.

Rockin’ and rollin’ tonight with Western Rock at the Market Inn, Yatton BS49 4AL, 8.30 start. First time out for my recently acquired Jule Monique 700 head. Mmmm…

Never had any issues with 34 in basses , but about 25 years ago I picked up a Dano Longhorn. At first I wasn’t keen on the 30 in scale. Sure enough , it was to become a favourite bass , today I have around a dozen short scales.

I feel like I've played with my fair share of difficult non-compromisers - mainly singers and guitarists. The way I look at it is that I'd rather be playing than not playing, and so even (often!) when we are not doing things the way I would want to I try to put on what I imagine is (as I've never actually been there!) a professional/session type attitude and just do what I'm told as effectively and accurately as I can. I'm also careful what I say afterwards when packing down and loading - twice I've been in bands that have lost members following an argument in the car park!

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The ‘Ray is scaled down certainly. I’ve not seen or used a Lionel but, if the pictures are anything to go by, they are smaller than the full sized versions too.

All cone loudspeakers flex at high frequencies and adding a second whizzer cone to boost the highs was a common trick back in the 70's when a lot of PA speakers lacked horns and a crossover. There are still a few manufacturers making "full range" 12" drivers such as this The use of Aluminium in speaker cones has a long history, as @stevie has said and the characteristics are well known: stiffer than most fibre cones, poor damping of cone resonance and very pronounced breakup modes at high power and frequencies. Often aluminum was used with other materials to damp the resonances or to further stiffen the cone to get pistonic movement. There was even a craze for DIYers to add aluminium foil to their hi fi speakers at one point For pulp cones there is a lot of careful mixing of different plant fibres to get the right mixture of stiffness and self damping of resonance so people who design the drive units can to an extent control the way the cone behaves under breakup. I can remember one speaker that used banana fibres in the mix. I can't believe the people who came up with Hartke's signature gimmick weren't aware of this, or of it's marketing potential. Given the involvement of Larry Hartke I'd imagine a lot of this would simply be him asking for a 'bit more of a brighter tone' and then picking something that sounded good to him after a few iterations. They wouldn't have been looking for a flat response, just something that sounded good and would sell well. I quite liked my Hartke

I have some time left at the moment: Ashly SC-40 clone

We've got one of those - the band would be much worse off without his ability to engage the audience. He's also totally ego - free and values the input of everyone in the band. Some of our guitarists have been tw@ts mind, but the current one is a good'un.

Also I don't know if it's a new thing, but I'm really enjoying the BD YouTube channel

Thank you so much, we feel we have definitely upped our game and striving to make everything as good as it can be for the customers