bassbiscuits

Having drawn all this attention to himself, the best bit is that his song on Youtube is an absolute sack of cack anyway. Awesome.

We often (i.e. mostly) practice without a drummer. It means we can meet and practice at front room volume and work on aspects like backing vocals, song structure, lyrics etc. Periodically we will record these on our phones, share them with the drummer and then meet to put it all together. Works pretty well as we are all too busy to meet at the same time most weeks.

I know it. That's a decent venue for original bands too.

Yep JC basses have some pretty full on neck dive. Great basses tho. I used a 3.5wide suede strap which did help grip my shoulder and went someway to curing it. Good luck!

Where's the gig?

What a tool

Just come back from seeing it. Thought it was brilliant and moving. Good solid bit of entertainment.

Chromes are well nice strings

Mine has the Mustang set of La Bellas. They are fairly standard tension (45-105 ish I think) but the shorter scale is what makes them feel different from my P with the same gauge La Bellas. I've discovered a love for flats over the last couple of years.

I recorded the same little riff at home using the P, the Mustang and an active Yamaha. In a blind test there's really not that much different between the P and the M. You can tell them apart side by side but if you only heard one of them in a gig you'd be hard pressed to say which one it was.

Hello. No it's the first short scale I've ever played and the first full gig using it and my usual backline etc. Found it great. A smidgeon less booming low end than a P, but lots more midrange so the overall sound was very pleasing and very usable indeed. It has always sounded a bit clanky and hollow played alone at home but in a mix of sounded superb. The string tension is a bit lower even with the La Bellas but that's ok. I dropped the E to D for one song and got a little bit lost. But no qualms about using it without a back up for future gigs at all.

I started off with just one bass when I was 12. A couple of my friends were doing it, and I thought I could enjoy bass in moderation. But over the years it spiralled into gigging, recording blah blah and costing me thousands etc etc....

I still love the excitement of aspiring to cool, new, expensive, dream gear, but these days I'm in no position to buy anything that i don't really need. I'm satisfied with my stuff. It's all good, solid, enjoyable stuff, from the most expensive bit to the cheapest one.

As long as you enjoy playing the particular gear you use, then it doesnt really matter what the cost of it is. I've got some modestly-priced bit of kit which play and sound great. It's taken me a good few years to realise there's no secret talent or magic locked up in expensive instruments that you acquire if you buy them.

Yup - definitely a BB604. They came in black, wine red sunburst and natural. They are very good basses - nice solid hardware, active circuitry with a so called 'mid sweep' activated by the toggle switch and controlled by the knob nearest the bottom of the guitar. I've got one and I love it. Mine is from 2003 I think - they're that sort of era.

The wider the better for me - currently using Comfort Strapp and a wide Levy's leather softee (3-5 to 4-inch wide i think) Love the colourful designs tho. Really cool.

Barry Manilow "Copacabana" = dreadful song, cool bass playing.

It's taken a while, but this weekend I played the first full gig with a 2013 Fender MIJ Mustang bass I bought secondhand back in the summer. Strung with La Bella flats, thru a Little Mark II and a Schroeder 1210, and up against two guitarists and a drummer and lots of harmony vocals, in a pub with a few hundred capacity. I'll be honest - at home it can sound pretty clunky, woody and midrangy; pleasant but not remarkable. But loud, onstage, it sounded brilliant. The tone was perfect for cutting thru the jangle of all those guitars; quite vintage sounding, but with enough midrange to really stand out clearly when your fingers wander up past the seventh fret...the kind of frequencies that i sometimes find go missing in the noise of a loud gig. Dead comfortable at 3.5kg too, and looks pretty cool. Happy that it's finally done a full show (did a short festival slot in the summer) as the old boy i bought it from had never taken it out of the house and didn't gig at all! Not before time then.

I've been reading a book called 10 Steps to Effective Storytelling, by Andrea Stolpe. It looks at useful stuff like how to come up with content for songs, how and where to use that for the best to make things sound good. Worth the £12 it costs on Amazon.

Most of the Stella available in the UK is brewed in Britain anyway, so maybe that's how they get round it.

I wouldn't insult my cat's a*se by using the DM to line his litter tray* *sorry someone has beaten me to it a few comments ago. At least we are in agreement!

My bro and I were discussing Queen this week and how John Deacon (who was apparently born a couple of streets away from where I live) has completely retired from the public eye, probably quite content to enjoy his old age with zillions of pounds and relative anonymity. Fair play to him. He's done his bit. I won't be visiting the Daily Mail website tho. As the awesome joke goes: "I used a copy of the Daily Mail to kill a fly yesterday. I read the first three pages out loud and it shot itself."

I have an almost identical one - very useful.

Cheers Matt - much appreciated

Thanks all for the input and suggestions. I did used to have one a long time ago on another guitar, and to me it sounded quite nice and natural, for not much money. I did later swap it out for a Baggs M80 which sounded a bit OTT to me - very loud and shouty. The Fishman Neo was a lot quieter output (got round that by running it thru a Boss EQ pedal) but is about the limit of my budget for what is essentially my back up acoustic. But yes - any actual measurements would be great. I notice in publicity pics the p/up tends to be positioned at the top of the soundhole, where its narrower, so I'm hoping the widest part of my soundhole may yet be big enough to accomodate it.