tauzero

The face straightener. At least I assume that that's what certain manufacturers use when they produce their price lists. Would fretlessness be counted as an innovation, being as bass guitars stemmed from the notion of emulating the double bass which doesn't have frets? Silly me, I've got one. The Ashbory.

Saturday night's gig was a fun one... It was the third gig since I'd joined the rock/blues covers band, and I invited the other members of the originals band as well. And Mrs Zero had chatted with the former band who had dumped me and invited them down too. So present at the gig were one guitarist and the vocalist from the former band, and one guitarist and the drummer from the originals band (and also the other covers band) and Mrs Zero, who is the other 50% of the acoustic duo I'm in. Just to add to the big cosy famil thing, not only were daughter and son-in-law Sub Zero and Zero Offset present, but also Sub Zero's previous partner and father of her first child. We had been supposed to play downstairs at the pub - the Black Horse rock bar in Birmingham. However, the downstairs PA had blown up so we finished up upstairs, where the bar is yet to be completed but there was a PA. Set went well but there wasn't much audience other than current and former bandmates plus friends and family. Hatchet now buried with the former band, they invited us to support them next Saturday at a party, so we've agreed to that. Plus we can go back to the Black Horse - didn't exactly pay a fortune but it's better than nothing (just). And I think I'll see about getting the other other band in there too.

She might have got a little more interest if she'd mentioned somewhere that it was fretless. Or maybe she'd have got less...

I take a spare to every gig - Hohner Jack 5-string. Being a headless, it's pretty compact (standard guitar case) and I can just prop it up somewhere (doesn't need a stand). It'll also do active/passive in case the battery ever goes flat on it. EDIT: except the ceilidh gigs, I'll have two or three instruments which I use interchangably there anyway so I shouldn't really run out of instruments.

Cheap mixer. Behringer UB802 or Alesis Multimix 6FX.

[quote name='Rich' post='962933' date='Sep 21 2010, 07:54 AM']I didn't stay in that band much longer. Last time I checked, Dance The Night Away was on their repertoire...[/quote] The only way I used to get through that was to either play it quite a lot unlike the original 1-3-5 arpeggio, or go up and down the fretboard as I arpeggioed (E on 5th fret B string, B on 7th fret E string, E on 7th fret A string, B on 9th fret D string, continue up, then reverse). As dave_bass5 says, it is a crowd pleaser, as is Red Red Whine, and until someone can breed a better crowd, some bands will play it.

Hey Joe - Jimi Hendrix You really got me - Kinks Rocky mountain way - Joe Walsh Waterfront - Simple Minds Relax - Frankie goes to Hollywood

[quote name='Happy Jack' post='957692' date='Sep 15 2010, 09:02 PM']Best of all is trying to play fretless bass in a band built around a slide player. You end up using new definitions of "in tune".[/quote] The definition of a minor second is a fretless and a trombone playing in unison.

Antoniotsai 5-string for the blues covers band Peavey 6-string for the rock and pop covers band Warwick Thumb fretless for the ceilidh band (plus Ashbory and NS WAV-4) Mazeti fretless 5-string for the originals band Ashbory or fretless Thumb for ad hoc use at open mic nights

[quote name='BottomEndian' post='958794' date='Sep 16 2010, 08:50 PM']Really? I'd say the opposite is true, compared to (for example) guitarists. We embrace our active circuits, fretlessness and lightweight amp gear.[/quote] A small subset of "we" embrace change. 90% of bassists in local bands for local people play Fenders or Squiers.

Personally, playability trumps tone. If it doesn't sound right, I'll wiggle the knobs until it does. If it doesn't play right, I'll sell it and buy something else. I will not keep a bass which I find inadequate on the playability front (I won't buy it in the first place if I can try it out, but with buying basses over the interweb, that's not always possible).

Truly worst, an abysmal piece of crap - a Rosetti 7, a hollow-body thing with a green sunburst and a plastic scratchplate/pickup. Can't remember what happened to it, but I'd got rid of it before I ventured properly into bass playing. Big disappointment - a Precision fretless, late 70s or early 80s. Body was a big heavy slab of ash that didn't seem to have had much shaping applied, neck wasn't too great (not twisted or anything, just more clunky than the one on the fretted P) - a big disappointment when compared to my tatty old fretted P, and also to the rather nice neck-through fretless, a Frontier, that I pxed for the Fender.

[quote name='BigRedX' post='958026' date='Sep 16 2010, 09:28 AM']As to what they might be, that's the gamble! I'd start by looking for well known bass players who aren't playing Fenders or their clones see what they are playing and go from there.[/quote] Close - I'd say you need to look for well-known bass players who are playing something so crap that no-one else would touch it with a bargepole. Look what it did for the detestable Hofner violin bass.

The Mazeti fretless 5-string is down at the cheap end financially but it's a pretty respectable instrument. There's one on ebay at the moment, in fact.

Anything by UB40. Especially "Red Red Whine". I like playing hammy old (and new) rock songs. Times like these, Sex on Fire, Dakota (not so fond of that, very boring bass line), Sweet Child O'Mine, Wishing Well, All Right Now (not Alright Now, OK?), Sweet Home Alabama, they're all in the set list of at least one of my covers bands, in some cases two. Face it, a covers band needs to play stuff which at least is a bit familiar, otherwise they have the issues of an originals band (ie. no-one knows the stuff) while lacking the satisfaction that writing your own music brings to an originals band.

[quote name='Rayman' post='956050' date='Sep 14 2010, 02:36 PM']That's what I'm missing from my life, just once, a screeming adoring crowd, big stage.....wow, it must be a magic moment.[/quote] Ditto. Plus two or three gigs a year in a medium-sized venue rather than squeezed into the far end of the pub lounge.

[quote name='BottomEndian' post='957266' date='Sep 15 2010, 03:08 PM']Taking the piezo material itself beyond its working limit? Now there's something I hadn't considered. These piezo things are still kind of voodoo to me.[/quote] Or possibly bouncing the string on the bridge saddle, or maybe even the string rattling against the fretboard. EDIT: Just to clarify, by mechanical, I meant anything involved in the physical side of the string's causing the piezo to distort and thus generate the signal, rather than the electrical, which is any distortion caused to the signal by the circuitry that it travels through.

[quote name='urb' post='955341' date='Sep 13 2010, 08:31 PM'][url="http://bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/4988838.stm"]http://bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/4988838.stm[/url] still doesn't come close to this though... maybe Fenders will in another 250 years though [/quote] That Strad is in use, though, and probably has been for 300 years. It gets used in performances so that people with less cloth-like ears than me can appreciate its tone. Unlike the P in the auction, which not only doesn't get played, it would only sound like yet another P if it did. So it's a sparkly bit of wood that only appears to have any sort of value (at least in the seller's eyes) because it's 40 years old.

[quote name='BottomEndian' post='957125' date='Sep 15 2010, 12:53 PM'][url="http://www.bassplayer.com/article/rick-turner-piezo/mar-05/3368"]According to Rick Turner[/url], a piezo pickup can have transients exceeding 12V. Don't know how true that is, but I can certainly push the 9V onboard pre in my Skelf into distortion if I really dig the hell in.[/quote] I had to increase the gain on the preamp of my Ashbory because the output (after going through a Baxandall-type network which IIRC has a gain of 1/3, then through an op-amp gain stage with a gain of between 3 and 4, frequency-dependent) was less than half that of my active basses, and even further down compared to my passive Peavey Grind. You'd need to hook your bass up to a scope to see whether you were actually hitting the limits or if it was mechanical distortion.

[quote name='Happy Jack' post='954337' date='Sep 13 2010, 08:25 AM']A reasonable point, but in fairness at least there is a well-known word in English that is spelled "Squire". I haven't often come across "Shadowsky". [/quote] Well, there's Shadow, and there's Sky... A perfect bass for anyone considering doing a medley of Apache and Toccata.

I remain completely unconvinced about the headroom explanation. The signal coming from a bass is of the order of 100-200mV p-p, which is considerably smaller than the supply voltage. It's like saying that you run less risk of banging your head if you jump up and down in the Vertical Assembly Building than if you jump up and down in St Paul's Cathedral.

[quote name='warwickhunt' post='953262' date='Sep 12 2010, 12:00 AM']As regards the Sado... I'd be inclined to be a tad suspicious of someone that owned a Sadowsky bass and didn't even know how to spell it (especially as has been noted, it is big and bold on the headstock).[/quote] But 95% of [s]Squire[/s]Squier owners don't know how to spell it, despite being writ large upon their headstocks. I don't think it's any worse than that...

[quote name='guybrush threepwood' post='950660' date='Sep 9 2010, 02:31 PM']Ah ok, so do you bypass the preamp in your amp then?[/quote] No, but that is a thought. The fact that the input level is about 15% of line level doesn't matter as there's enough gain on the input side to mean there's an adequate signal passing through the mixer. I send the output to the bass amp at effectively instrument level. While it might be more effective to send the signal to the return side of the effects loop, with the particular band that I'm using multiple basses with, I'm also sending a DI from the amp to the PA and I think that comes before the effects loop , though I may be wrong.

[quote name='guybrush threepwood' post='950630' date='Sep 9 2010, 02:07 PM']Can you get mixers with instrument inputs? I thought the jacks were always line level[/quote] I use a Behringer mixer - the inputs are described as line inputs but the gain available is quite sufficient to bring an instrument-level input up to line level.

Why not just use a small cheap mixer?