bassbiscuits

Aye. My basses need to be under 4kg these days unfortunately. It rather limits me!

Hello - yes the Gotoh tuners seem to be a direct replacement by the previous owner. They look lovely and work well. I've looked for a BB605 but can't find one that is light enough for me to find comfortable to play.

Very good - nice work.

I appreciate these are BB Basses in name rather than in appearance, but I’ve recently acquired an almost identical twin to my long-serving BB604. They are both from 2003 (serial number says even the same month…) identical colour, spec and weight (both are 3.8kg and well balanced thanks to that small headstock.) My main one is a bit more scuffed up and feels a little bit more resonant and loud, possibly because I’ve played it to death for the last seven years. Both strung with D’Addario NYXLs too. The newer bass has got replacement Gotoh machine heads, my main one has the originals. When I got the first one back in 2016 it quickly became the best value bit of gear I had and a proper Swiss Army knife bass to cover loads of different stuff. So I’ve been on the lookout for another for a while and this came up on Basschat over the summer. Delighted. Excuse to play it loud at a gig expected in the coming weeks.

Aha. My sense of deja vu was not entirely misplaced then.

Oh yeah I once made Neil Murray a cup of tea at Roland HQ in Swansea in the late 1990s.

I once bumped into Nicholas Parsons in a taxi queue in Birmingham. When I was a student I used to work in a shop round the corner from Swansea Grand Theatre. At various times we were visited by Alvin Stardust, Catherine Zeta Jones and the bloke who played Nasty Nick Cotton on Eastenders. Also in Swansea I once got chatting to Rod Hull in a pub toilet. Same pub as we spotted Marguerita Pracatan I believe.

Kiss foodie special: Cod of Thunder Love Bun 100,000 Pears Lard Luck Woman

Hovel California, by the Eagles Drive My Cat, by the Beatles Wind Cries Gary, by Jimi Like A Rolling Scone, by Bob Dylan

Well I enjoyed it anyway - cheers @Happy Jack

Solo acoustic guitar and vocal gig at the Organ Grinder real ale pub at Loughborough. Had some gremlins in the first half - one speaker not working and the other one buzzing annoyingly. Got it sorted at half time and the culprit seemed to be a pedal power supply! Nice crowd, some good singing along and made feel very welcome! Update - buzzing traced to the shredded cable on my Boss pedal adaptor. That’ll do it then…

I hear you Andy. I suppose it depends what else is going on in your life with other commitments, goals etc which can mean there's little time or enthusiasm for playing music sometimes. I've been playing since 1986 but not continuously - sometimes I've just gone off the boil and not really feeling it anymore, and didn't play bass for a number of years after a messy split up with a band. But things moved on and a few years later I got the itch again and got involved once more. I guess I mean it doesn't have to be a continuous thing - if it comes and goes from time to time, along with everything else in life, then that's ok too.

Thanks Phil that’s dead helpful. I used the same kit for last weekends gig and it was fine so I assume it was a weird characteristic of the venue wiring.

Yeah - I think the drummer is the only one who didn’t play lead guitar at some point! But he did a drum solo, so that made up for it. They were great tho - a good match with our little trio in terms of the sort of material and audience they attracted too so it worked out really well.

Had a great time as one-third of the Andy Wales Blues Band, opening for a band called the Cinelli Brothers at the Musician Pub in Leicester. Good crowd came to see the headliners (who were ace) and thankfully it was already pretty full when we played our 45-min support slot. We are quite a new band but seem to go down really well, mixing up some carefully chosen old blues/soul covers with our own original material, and turned up dead loud. What’s not to love?

I've bought a few things that haven't worked out, but I don't regret that. I needed to find out for myself. And it's always stuff I've been able to sell on. All part of the journey.

I think any of those Markbass amps would work fine. I've got a couple of Little Mark heads (the same amp as the combos I think) which I use with either a 102P traveller cab, a 121H cab or a STD102HF (the bigger 2x10 cab), which creates much the same set us as a combo. A cab with two speakers will sound louder than just one speaker, as it shifts more air and will have greater SPL (sound pressure level) rating usually. But any of the combos you mention would work fine, and give you the option of adding another cabinet in future if needed. Good luck, and enjoy!

Nice one that’s a nice clear explanation. I do wonder why it has suddenly happened tho and where in the system the problem might lie - plugs, cables, leads, basses, pedals, venue wiring etc?

To add to the issue of lightweight amp heads moving, I use a roll of black rubber non-slip matting from our local Wilko store (RIP) which stops anything creeping about on top of my cab mid-gig.

Did a gig last weekend and halfway through my bass amp started making a horrible humming noise (it's a Little Mark III into a couple of MB cabs). Even with the head turned off, there was a massive loud noise thru the PA every time the channel for my DI was unmuted. Eventually we flicked the Ground Lift switch on the back of the LMIII and the buzz stopped. a) What on earth might have been going on there, for it to be generating such a racket even when turned off? b) How does that ground lift thing even work? c) Could it have been something to do with the cabs (I was test driving one of them for the first time, but it seems to work ok), the amp head, the wiring at the venue, or something else? Just interested to know what was going on really! Did my head in mid-gig.