bassace

I became a teenager in the mid fifties and there was a lot of dross about, it was called dance music. But there were some jewels that stood out. Fats Domino playing My Blue Heaven. That Scotty Moore solo in Elvis’s Blue Suede Shoes. And I was playing Twist and Shout before the Beatles recorded it. But it was mainly jazz back then.

In jazz it probably doesn’t matter quite so much, it’s your ability to play that counts. But there are some very good young bands forming and no way would I get a look in with them. Rightly too.

Sounds Inc were quite busy in those days. They backed Jerry Lee Lewis in Reading in ‘63.

Great stuff, PJ. I’ve been in a few very good bands in my long playing career but the great majority of my gigs have been freelance, arranged on the phone. You will find that you’ll learn quite quickly simply by playing as often as you can. A whole world of music is out there, mostly tunes you’ve never heard of before but which you’ll find surprisingly easy to play. You’ll need to know your ‘navigation’ ie chorus length and structure but this will come. And iReal Pro is your friend because not only will it give you the chords to play over but has a very useful transposing facility. So when someone calls a strange key - singer?- you can find it with a touch of the screen. Good luck, and enjoy!

The man who failed to earth?

In jazz you never play the same note once.

I thought there was plenty of coverage of the Auschwitz anniversary on TV, especially the news channels. It still chills me to realise that the brutality hadn’t started when I was born but was going on during my lifetime. Interestingly - if that’s an appropriate word - it was Belsen I first heard about and Aschwitz quite a while later. We thought they were simply prison camps and then the awful realisation came that they were indeed extermination camps on an industrial scale. Never again!

But Rommel liked jazz. He was always saying ‘Wes Montgomery.’

Nothing about banning banjos.

Lark Ascending. Ralph Vaughn Williams.

That’s just the sort of thing a drummer would say. The cone area is a function of the diameter squared. So, disregarding the common factor of pi, 2x10squared = 200. 1x15squared is 225. Your experience would thus be validated by the maths. Of course, there are other things to consider but this is a valid rough comparison.

Dangerous to generalise, but the smaller drivers tend to be ‘quicker’. Quite useful/essential when you’re trying to move a behemoth like a double bass.

In perusing a topic like this I’m reminded of my own oft repeated aphorism:- ‘Thumb for show, nut for dough’.

It seems that those not in bands spend a lot of time in ‘Off Topic’.

No. Save your money and enjoy your Bryant. BTW, two days ago I agreed that Mrs B could order a new AGA. Same day I noticed an ad for a Bryant soloist and mentioned it to her. Her reply, ‘well, that’s not really expensive, is it?’ I was very tempted to pull the trigger, sort of strike while the iron is hot?

Mine is much admired for it ‘song’. Yours will too. Enjoy!

It’s not how wide the bridge is per se. It depends on the bridge width in relation to the dimensions of the bass. As I said, check whether the foot gets onto the bass bar. You can feel or see the bass bar through the top scroll of the E side f-hole.

Has any work/setup been done on this bass? I have a Soloist and had this problem in its early days. Bryant basses were notorious for having their bridges too narrow and the E foot not standing over the bass bar. You could check this out yourself. If you could find a decent luthier up there a new bridge and soundpost adjustment could work wonders. Laurence Dixon in South London has totally transformed my bass.

I use a 10-3 Array with DB so not the best comparison. But I recently sold a Magellan to a BG player who tried it with the cab and was knocked out by it. And of course I rate the cab very highly. You won’t be disappointed. And Jeff Genzler is very approachable.

Great little amps. I have two, the spare resides under the car’s passenger seat as a backup.But not needed so far.

I remember heaving my DB up here in Oxford. Parking was ok though.

About 13-14 years ago I bought a new Clarus S2 amp And it served me well. But seven years ago I sold it to a fellow bass player and then embarked on a round of Genzler and Tecamp stuff with all sorts of outboards. I also recently tried a brand new Clarus S4 but didn’t like the metallic mid clang from the pickup. But a few weeks ago my friend suffered serious ill health to the extent that he must end his bass playing career and sold the S2 back to me. The two amps differ in that the S2 has only a three way eq in contrast to the S4’s four but the clang isn’t there in the S2 and it’s got a robust and controllable tone without any outboard. It’s got its own inboard HPF. I think that with the other stuff I had been using I was slipping into a mediocre sound without realising it. No more gigs until after Christmas but I’m very much looking forward to gigging my Clarus again. Here is a pic of the amp with the detritus from last nights gig.