fretmeister

The double bass began as a 3 string so 4 and above are pointless…. Seriously though, I love a good 5. Easy for use with brass and Reed friendly keys and lots of fingering options. I don’t have a use for a 6. I don’t need the range at that end.

I've bought from Ishibashi before and from a Japanese ebay from another shop that I can't remember. Was great service both times.

Mono Sleeve for the bass (or the Sandberg bag that is nice too) I use a Gator 1815 Mixer bag for my amp head, cables, transcriptions, spares etc.

I would. There's plenty of music I like to play but wouldn't go an see live, for all manner of reasons. I don't listen to disco unless it just comes up on a random shuffle play and wouldn't go and see a show but playing in band doing Jackson 5 / Chic / Sly etc etc would be great fun. Same for punk / pop-punk too. I don't listen to it, but I bet the energy of performing it is great.

I used to do a 4 way blend using a POD Pro XT Bass, an Ampeg SVP-BSP into a Yamaha P5000S power amp and a pair of cabs. There were additional compressors and octaves and stuff as well. After a lot of tweaking I found the secret was multiple compression stages, but with the most important being on the cleanest tones, set to match the note decay times of the distorted ones so it sounded like 1 complex layered tone rather than 4 separate basses. It took a lot of work to get the natural decay of all 4 tones to fade away at the same time. It was amazing, but the rack was so damn heavy. Never again - unless I can have roadies.

Definitely - pre lockdown I was earning by performing magic and the amount of new effects and props and even cards with different construction is amazing. I once bought a set of tiny weights that would be used for prop building - a set of 10 and there was only 2g difference between the heaviest and lightest and I made up 10 versions of the prop to see which I liked best and what handled and balanced easiest. Then I spent ages changing the placement of the weights in the prop to see if that made a difference I cared about. I must have been out of my mind!

I have the EQ-200 and it's excellent. Having 2 footswitches makes it easy to use for live changes. I got it as an upgrade to an MXR 10 band that I had used for years. It's very quiet in operation and the little screen showing the curve you are using from a memory slot is very handy. It would be nice if it was a bit smaller, but then there would have to be menus or scrolling and things like that.

I find that if there is tab on the page as well I never learn the notation - I suppose I am distracted by the easy option. To the extent that in my official tab books I have put tape over the tab to force me to use the notation only. But sometimes I write the note names, particularly if it is in a key I'm not very familiar with - even just the odd note name here and there to remind me of sharps and flats in the key signature. Like any other language, it needs to become automatic. The best description ever given to me was to compare it to reading English. We start by learning phonetics of smaller bits of a word and then stringing them together. But as we get better at it we don't do that anymore, we recognise longer patterns instead and can read an entire word as 1 pattern of sound. We don't sound out the smaller bits anymore, but we still have that skill for an unfamiliar word. Music is like that. We identify each individual note when we are beginners and the sort of stumble that note into the next one. But eventually we recognise patterns and each bar of music becomes 1 pattern / word in conjunction with the key signature. The real secret is how the practice is done. 5 hours on a weekend is pointless and tiredness / frustration gets in the way. 10 mins per day is only 70 mins per week but will lead to far greater advancement because there is daily reinforcement. One of the best things I ever bought was a bunch of used Double Bass sample sight readings examples / tests for grades 1-5. As they are part of the classical double bass process they are in multiple keys and time signatures, and they are usually only 2 or 3 lines long. https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1860960340/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1 (there's a used one there for 1 pence (+£2.80 postage)! I just started working through them from the easiest ones as slow as I needed. Flipping between them is important as I wanted to make sure I was reading rather than remembering. I didn't write the note names on these as that would defeat the object but I did have the note names on a bit of paper that I could turn over if I was stuck. Some of those types of books come with a CD or a download link to hear them done properly, but there's also smartphone apps that will use the camera and scan it and play it to back. It just needs 10 mins per day of dedicated reading practice and in a year the progress that is made is beyond what anyone hopes for.

No more than 10 mins per day with genuine beginner / Grade 1 stuff You’ll get it.

I agree with all this... but I'd still play them if I was in a covers bands and wanted some Friday / Saturday night gigs. Really I think I have songs I hate, and then songs I hate but would be a useful part of a covers set list if the money is right. I'm just a whore really.

I only bought mine for a laugh really, and I was blown away by it. It does the SVT thing so well. Everybody should have one.

5W. No fan at all. It's the perfect lounge amp, and it's plenty loud enough in the lounge too - in fact stick it into something high end like a Barefaced Super Twin and it is hilariously loud!

All good advice up there ^ I am going to be 'that guy' though - if you are getting lessons, then learn proper notation while you are at it. It's not difficult and it will open up so much other music options for you. You don't need lessons to read tab - that's the point of it. But it doesn't give timing / rhythm information, only the note. I resisted for many years and then got thrown into a big band. No tabs available. Changing keys (one does not retune a bass in that circumstance, and there's no time between songs anyway) and sometimes having to work something out from a written part for a different instrument. It's definitely worth your time.

DLR leaving Van Halen. They got even bigger with Hagar, and we got 2 banging DLR solo albums.

I would give it a try. If it went horribly wrong I would remind myself that the person who asked me was clearly an appalling judge of talent.

If you are already using 2 Two10 cabs and the idea is to just power each with it's own amp you are still using the same amount of cones. Those 2 cabs are capable of mad volume - but you need to feed it with more than a 30W amp. That's the bit to change to something more powerful.

I never boost behind solos, and never turn on a pedal just for that reason either. I either enjoy the space, or I re-write the bass part to make the arrangement work better for when the mix sounds "thin". I do a variety of things but aim to build the bass part as the guitar solo is building. Assuming 4/4 time - roots on 2 beats in the bar, then rising to all 4 beats to add some momentum, then maybe some octaves linking the root and octave with the kick and snare, and then make the part a walking line to get up the neck a bit The order of all that depends on the song and the solo - it could all the other way round if that suits better. But no amount of pedals can fix an arrangement that needs improving.

awful things. Avoid at all costs.

I use the flat EBS ones. They are tiny!

Quick play along with my Lionel I have now changed the pickup, but that’s just a personal taste thing.

I went through a lot of Darkglass stuff too. I've got a VMT and I would like to get an Alpha Omega again but mainly because neither of them are as common as the B3K sound that is now so common it's become passé. I bought an EBS Sheehan Ultimate Drive purely because it is so different to the DG stuff and I've been very surprised at how versatile it is. But I have no doubt I'll still want to try other things.

Depends what room I'm in. Lounge - full rig Office - Helix and Yamaha monitors Bedroom - Roland Bass Cube Garden - iPad with interface and headphones.