bassbiscuits

I quit my last band because I was fed up with the choice of music (and my say in the choice of music), the interpersonal dynamics, the uneven sharing of the workload, the stagecraft and quality of live performances, and general balance of power between those who saw it as their band, and those who actually made the band any good. Ive been gigging solo for nearly two years now and haven't looked back.

This. Absolutely this.

Of course it doesn't. It might make you think you look more or less cool playing it, but it isn't responsible for how you play.

You know it makes sense...

Yup it's happened to me. Left my bass, my amp head and a bag of leads/bits in the boot of the car while I dropped my then-girlfriend off at her house one night. When I came out half hour later the car was gone. I was working as a signwriter at the time in some pawn shops and gave them a list of the missing kit. Unbelievably I popped in a couple of days later to check up and a guy got off the bus outside carrying my bass on his back and came in to sell it so we nabbed him and called the police. Turns out he was very well known to them. Another shop rang about half an hour later with the rest of my stuff. The car was found dumped in a nearby alley the next day. Really shook me up and I immediately went and insured all my kit! Very fortunate that the thieves didn't know what any of it was and just tried to offload it locally - ironically to the people I was working for. Very lucky escape and three days I never want to relive!

Nowadays it's just three. Currently a 1970 sunburst / rosewood / tort Fender P (my bass I've had for over 20 years.) A 2003 Yamaha BB604. A 2013 white/rosewood/tort MIJ Fender Mustang. Oh yeah and two electric guitars (mid 90s MIJ sunburst strat and an Epiphone Casino Gary Clark Junior) plus three acoustics (an early 2000s Crafter DE7 which I gig all the time, plus a small travel size Tanglewood and a now fairly wrecked Hohner I bought at Argos in 1988 - the guitar I learned on). I used to like buying and selling and treating myself to gear when I was gigging a lot more regularly. I sold off the stuff I wasn't using which was taking up room and meant thousands of pounds was locked up in it. I could easily live with just the Precision, the Crafter acoustic and the Strat to be honest, and it may end up that way at some point. Stresses me out when I have loads of unused kit lying around.

Mine was an awful short scale Satellite double cut thing vaguely like a Gibson Melody Maker. It was 1986 and I owned it for a year before trading it in for a white Westone St Spectrum which was a different league. It cost me £60 brand new, and another £60 for a 10-watt practice amp called a Badger Piccolo. The Satellite resurfaced in the late 1990s at a secondhand shop near where I was living - I recognised the dings I'd put in it - and the shop guy insisted it was brand new blah blah blah etc. I was briefly tempted to buy it back for old times sake but then I realised how rubbish it was! Here's a pic I found elsewhere online of exactly the same model/colour bass, tho not mine.

You're right Norris - I had a Peavey TNT130 back in the day - decent amp but weighed a tonne. Your Fender Rumble sounded lovely at the bass bash. Genuinely impressive and compact bit of kit that - is it 2x10 and 300w or so? Ive ended up using all sorts of bits of supplied backline at gigs lately and it's really challenged my preconceptions of what you need to sound good at gigs - some stuff I've never thought about at all has been at the very least adequate and at best very very good.

I used various Peaveys for years, as they always seemed to be cheap, very well built and really loud, though they don't seem as common as they once were. A head and a 1x12, 1x15 or 2x10 is generally enough, tho a 4x10 is better and more flexible if you're ok with moving/lifting/transporting it. I don't know your budget, but anything around 300w would be plenty (double check tho, because lots of combos claim to have 300w heads, but need an additional speaker connected to get that sort of output). I've used a couple of newish Hartke combos lately as part of supplied backline - they are nothing i'd ever think of buying, but they were much louder and better sounding than i expected. EDIT: For what its worth i've been using a secondhand Little Mark LM2 (500w at 4ohms) into a secondhand Schroeder 1210 (800w) cabinet for years for most size gigs and it sounds great.

Sure thing - "stupid o 'clock" is never the most accurate of descriptions I find.... Turns out its actually open 24 hours a day every day. Nice.

Yeah there's always the McDonalds at Red Hill Circle, Leicester, which is open till stupid o'clock. But that hardly classes as a bona fide late night food establishment. Well ok then, yes it does...

Plaza Fish and Chips 142 London Road, Leicester, LE2 1EB Opens till 1am I have wound up here many times on the way home from evenings out, and some on-street parking nearby if you've got a car full of kit from the gig. Good burgers, fish, salads etc.

Youre right mate. I currently have three basses, all different, and I don't know what the wood is in them, and I don't care. Come to think of it I don't know the spec of what pickups or electronics are in them either - they all sound good, and they all enable me to play like i want to play, and because I use the same fingers for all of them, they all sound like me anyway! I've had two ash-bodied basses, one of which sounded good, and which which I didn't like much, so I can't blame the wood either way.

Britain has some great current blues players of its own which are well worth checking out too - Aynsley Lister and King King for example. Americans Gary Clark Junior and Eric Gales are also both very good 'new' blues musicians, and I've always liked Robert Cray.

Ah they look happy together. They make a nice pair. I can see a 'meet up for an evening of geeky bass comparisons' on the cards here... no bad thing at all

It's weird isn't it? I used to do jiu jitsu up to a pretty high level, and when we got to blue and brown belt syllabuses they introduced left handed throws. It was as if our brains had never experienced jiu jitsu ever before, even tho we'd all been training four or five years at that point. We were dreadful. Relearning all those techniques left handed was so weird - knowing it was one thing but getting your body and muscle memory to do it was like starting from square one all over again.

They probably make some small difference to sound but not enough for me to rush out and change them. I've had a BBOT, USA deluxe bridge and Badass II on Fender basses and I can't say any sounded better than the other (without taking into account all the other variables). I wouldn't change a bridge unless it was faulty. Better off spending the money on some better pickups if you want to improve the sound.

That's interesting - mine is a 1970 and so technically the era of the poly 'thick skin' finish. But it's thin and with lots of chips on it and a patch of wear just like that one on the back. You can pick it off with your thumbnail and it seems to have come off where the rubber of a guitar stand cradle rests on it too. Its not nitro but nowt like modern poly finishes either. Importantly it looks cool ha ha

Looks very cool. Love her tanlines too.

Alder I believe. Definitely doesn't sound like ash. Could be basswood I guess but pretty sure they're alder. Mine's nicely balanced tho it seems to be happier worn pretty low on a strap - maybe it's the lack of body contours that make it feel funny up high.