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gafbass02

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Posts posted by gafbass02

    Gig Videos

    in General Discussion

    Posted · Edited by gafbass02

    [quote name='parker_muse' post='848071' date='May 25 2010, 11:40 PM']Are we on about the yank? He's always been tip top with us. No hassle and a nice funny bloke![/quote]


    Yeah, nice guy, and i was very pleased when he commented on how i must care about my tone cause he spotted my QED power cable and monster cabling. But everytime he's been a catalogue of errors, bless 'im. Forgetting to DI the bass again until i was half way through the first song when I realised (not him) and had to go hunting for the lead and plug it in. Then the time he accused my LM2 and traveller 102p of filling the room with bass and crushing his head so he had to take me out the mix (it was on 2, i very much doubt even the markbass has that sort of unmic'd power in a room that size in a 6 piece band!)
    Then there was the realising he'd forgotten to turn the mixer on at all (after waxing lyrical about the great drum sound he'd 'mixed' !!!!!!!!!????) He simply cant hear!!!!

    Then there was pulling the plug on us 15 minutes into our set cause he'd got his times mixed up, didnt even let us say goodbye!

    Plus literally a whole bunch of other stuff!, including several times as an audience member that the whole rig was distorted and sounding very oiver stressed, but hes like 'naw man it sounds great!' in all seriousness i suspect his ears may have gone but he hasnt twigged. I cant recall what it was but the drummer was so angry last time he was about ready to deck him, and it was something else that just defied belief! He also kept telling guitar right to turn up and up and up, before we had to persuade him that it was the wring guitar and we were all deaf, he really wanted the other one. man just soooo many things, these are just the ones off the top of my head lol!

    friendly and pleasent but to give him the benefit of the doubt, possibly not at his best in that venue lol, and i reckon with some serious hearing damage, not helped by mixing from well above the actual rig!!
    :-)

    Gig Videos

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    sweet, here's me with lounge fly in Cheltenham, somewhat before we worked on our sounds a bit, also a tad distorted but hey ho, thats camcorders lol, small bass bridge after the first song but i used the wah so its just quack, quack through the camcorder!
    [url="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJuKZQte2oc&playnext_from=TL&videos=GQqkt1iw2uA"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJuKZQte2oc...eos=GQqkt1iw2uA[/url]

    and here's me 2 years ago at my first gig (and indeed rehearsal!) with the 'wizards of Oz' Ozzy covers band, trying not to look like im not winging it and radinga cheat sheet on the table infront of me!
    [url="http://www.youtube.com/user/wizardsofoz#p/u/5/a4O7K-DaTKk"]http://www.youtube.com/user/wizardsofoz#p/u/5/a4O7K-DaTKk[/url]

    and for giggles an AWFUL photo slide show of my old AOR band doublecross...with some of our AWFUL AoR playing over it....cheeseMUNGOUS mate!!!

    [url="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYtpbgd7tHo&playnext_from=TL&videos=GQqkt1iw2uA"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYtpbgd7tHo...eos=GQqkt1iw2uA[/url]

    ive no idea how to make em lik ethe tellybox and not just a link but of a mod wants to go ahead and fix it i wonr be offended!!! Ive tried loads of times and just cant figure it out! (and yup ive read the sticky!, im just dumb!)

    Ignorance

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    [quote name='dave_bass5' post='847605' date='May 25 2010, 03:44 PM']yeah, i guess i shouldn't have mentioned any particular brand. I dont think i put my point across properly.

    I, personally, find a P or Jazz is a pretty simple bass and i find i mess much less with my EQ and tone knobs during gigs when i use one. Just set and forget (more or less). Plus i would say a lot of sound guys would know how to get a good tone from these basses.
    Then you have the players who have enough electronics on their bass to put the Space Shuttle to shame, 31 band graphics, bi amped rig etc who obviously want their tone to come through out front.
    I guess this could baffle a sound guy as to why you need all that, especially when a lot of the time this tone would be mixed in to the out front mix and buried in low end mud.[/quote]


    Heh heh, just teasing bro, i knew what you meant, i still sometimes miss playing active basses, but i know what yo umean about just set n forget with passives, much easier, less temptation to start fiddling with my knob onstage.

    :)

    Ignorance

    in General Discussion

    Posted · Edited by gafbass02

    [quote name='Starless' post='847450' date='May 25 2010, 01:14 PM']Sound checks? It's a bass, half of any 'nuances' get completely lost anyway (IMHE) - Can I hear it? Can they hear it out there? Good, where's the bar?....[/quote]

    The problem really is that often they really dont have to get lost, i understand completely how most of the minutae many of us fuss over, myself included can get totally lost live, but, as you say, 'can they hear it, well sadly often the answer is no, not really. Especially as our frequency range is one the human ear is not particularly effective at hearing much less in a busy mid heavy (i.e. guitars) mix. Thus we need to either be far louder than most muso's would expect or prefer to even be noticed by Joe public, or have a particularly biting tone to slice through.
    But so often this is all lost and reduced to 'whump whump whump'

    However as we all know, its unlikely to ever change so all we can do is our level best to manage it as best we can, learn the tips n tricks of the trade, and grit our teeth and be thankful for our health when it all goes t*ts up. Or simply be thankful for the fact that we get to do stuff that so many people can only dream of doing. :)

    (oh and ahem, Fender owner here....with a zillion pedals lol!) :rolleyes: .........well until i got my zoom b9.1 anyway!

    Ignorance

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    Ive enjoyed the little mark2 just taking that choice away lol. Does make me think twice before adjusting on the fly tho. Although almost as an accompaniment to the lm2 being fixed post it's also the only amp I've ever just run pretty much flat :)

    Ignorance

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    Trust me, done that, been there, right down to lovely laminated sheets but the bass still (nearly) always falls foul of the same preconceptions/laziness/ignorance/incompetence etc.
    Of course as a soundguy I saw plenty of muppets too!
    Also of course the onus is on us as players to ensure we send a nice tidy signal ideally compressed and noisegated with any fx set up not to spike volumes or with excessive frequency peaks like waaaay too much octaver etc etc and of course to ask the engineer to listen to your amp tone and say could you make it sound as much like that as possible please, core tone shaping is our job. This is something rehearsals are for, to make your tone how you like it that still works in a mix (record rehearsals if poss, and do 'tone regearsals') There's is to convey it as much as possible in the mix in the room. But not to simply just go with the same old and ride roughshod all over yours and the bands preferences for the sake of laziness/ignorance etc etc

    Ignorance

    in General Discussion

    Posted · Edited by gafbass02

    I too have found a massive amount of ignorance often tinged with a sort of patronising amusment towards the bass, noticeable when i try to explain things like how a bass wave behaves, how our ears are 'tuned for mids', how string tensions affects things etc etc.
    (ie NO!! i dont want to tune down to blah blah, i spent hours getting my bass perfect at normal tuning, if i change it, it sounds and feels all wrong!)

    Its like 'look at the cute failed guitarist trying to make his job sound more important' (which is another tag/assumption that gets my goat, I never wanted or tried, or was interested in playing guitar or anything else ive only ever wanted to play bass.)

    I find bass a massively complex instrument with a difficult sound to understand and manipulate, its easy to learn, but hard to play well, and forms the link between rhythm and melody, giving the music its 'heartbeat'.

    How many times must i get a 20 second riff at soundcheck compared the guitarists?,(before its, 'alright mate, OK ..guitars!) I have many different sounds too, many more extreme and potentially more difficult to manage in a mix than 'clean and distortion' that Jonny guitar hero over there has!, (synth, octaver) Why not think to ask Mr sound guy, and no, i dont want to use your £20 behringer DI box, i have a much better one thanks, and while were on it, how about a mic to mix in there too!
    Recently in a studio i got just a nasty dry sound while they spent forever on amp/cab sims for the guitarists....hello!!!!!!!!!!, im here too!!!!!! When we got the result back, sure enough, the same totally unaltered tone, nothing done to spice it up at all.

    This is why when i soundcheck i try to play harmonics, chords, melodic pieces, low notes, flurries, slap, and a nice funky finger line that uses a wide range, hoping the engineer will notice that i tend to play more than just 'dum dum dum', and think, 'oh hang on, this guy can clearly play and does a bit more, Ok, lets make sure its sitting right so we can hear it all', but nope. They give me 20 seconds and set the same woofy settings that they 'always use for bass cause it sounds best innit'

    NO!!!! Im not supposed to be just an inaudible low end mush under the guitars, im an integral part of the shape and form of the song contruction, if I add subtle details its because it improves the music (not just to show off) and as a band we have decided thats what sounds good, so why should you as an engineer who has preconceived notions about how bass in rock bands should sound/be mixed/EQ'd be at liberty to so dramaticlly curtail my additions to our songs?, would the chorus work so well without that high chord being heard?, NO!, we like it!, else i would have left it out! etc etc

    Rant over!!! (and yup ive done my time as a sound engineer too, but i just find on the whole the attitude to bass outdated beyond what it should be, esp when you consider that many of the guys out there werent around in the 'kay bass, 30w amp' days of yore, and even if they were, they still lived through the 80's with all the tech advances in bass and it coming to the fore, as well as the 90's and the likes of Flea et al, so WHY the 1950's/60's attitudes in the year 2010!!!!?!?)

    Ok, rant def over this time!
    :)

    TC Electronics RS210 - Any good?

    in Amps and Cabs

    Posted

    That sounds fekkin lush!!! More so with the F1 IMHO. Also I like the fact that he spent five minutes talking about shifting this and that to emulate the sound of just turning the vpf on the f1 lol.
    God I want one of those cabs now!! (and an active jazz, even though those days are behind me now heh heh!)

    Ordering from Ishibashi

    in General Discussion

    Posted · Edited by gafbass02

    Im a huge MIJ fan, both my main basses are Jap Fenders, a 19902 MIJ '62 and an '07 CIJ '75 ri ive had sooo many basses now and these two are just perfect for me! and the white one, wa sindeed from ishibashi just before the ban!

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