Wolverinebass

I don't think that's true. I think most people have a clear idea of what they want to do musically once they've been doing it long enough. Whether that be some covers for cash or the most brutal, tech metal you can imagine. Obviously within that there are ranges of what one will do or even consider. I must admit, if someone used "pacifically" in a sentence that wasn't referring to the largest ocean on earth, I'd be wary too. I think "meat up" is just a step too far down that road really. I get a fair amount of digital auditions on Bandmix. Some are interesting, most aren't what I'd want to do, so I politely decline. Sometimes it's actually a message from a person that isn't bulk mail in that way. There's no sense in making oneself unhappy about something that should be fun. From personal experience, @NancyJohnson is a really good bass player and songwriter. Why would he want to work with people whose material he doesn't like? I wouldn't either just as I'm sure you wouldn't. Whatever bar we set for others to cross is arbitrary and of course unfair and possibly unrealistic in terms of some people's talents (or lack of them thereof), but I would say that in the last 10 years I've not compromised on mine and I've been much happier for it.

Ironically, when I spoke to Ian Klos on the phone he asked me about headstock shape. He was determined to not have the 4 in a line Fender as he wanted a better balance. I suggested 2+2 with more like an Ibanez or Status (obviously without stealing them I hasten to add). I've actually never had a bass that was 3+1. It's curious actually. Alien almost.

That 3 mile drive is killer in the current economic situation.

Well, a while back (2 years ago in fact), Klos started offering replacement necks. I had the idea of "wouldn't it be cool to have a Wal with a graphite neck?" So, I ordered one. There were massive delays as they were tooling from scratch. No big deal, I'm a patient man. I ordered a G4 body from Warmoth as well as some Herrick multicoil pickups and a Lusithand NFP Special preamp. Along the way, aside from the wait, other things raised their heads. Herrick pickups were too deep to fit in a standard MM hole. Fine, get the route deepened. What I didn't know was the pickups were actually too big anyway as for some reason, the holes where the screws go to fix them to the body. So, I had to have the cases files down. Funnily, Martin said he was aware of this issue and yet they didn't put it on the product page. Hopefully, they'll have sorted that issue now as he makes really good gear. As the neck holes had to be drilled I wasn't doing that. So, I got it back last week and here we go. So, does it sound as I thought? Yes. It's not quite Wal sounding as the Lusithand filters go to about 4kHz rather than the Wal's which only go to about 2.8kHz. So there's more top end if you want it. Kind of like in the realm of Modulus sounding top end. The preamp and pickups are insanely loud. I had to wind down the preamp gain about 50% to get an equivalent sound as with my Wal, with no clipping. I did ask Ian Klos for some other things as well. He's a really nice guy and I spoke to him on the phone for about an hour one day. So, I had the nut width made wider to accommodate my playing style. I also had the radius altered, string spacing changed and a hipshot for good measure. The body is a Warmoth G4. Walnut body with a Black Korina top. Bridge is a Babicz with Harley Benton knobs. This is the 3rd thing I've bought from Nuno at Lusithand and he really knows his stuff as well as being incredibly helpful too. Herrick pickups are great and the peeps at Klos make great gear too if you like graphite. I can honestly say it's one of the most comfortable necks I've ever played. With the demise of Status going wood only, if you want a replacement graphite neck, you could do a lot worse than order one of these. When I get a moment, I'll upload a video of me noodling around.

Yeah, and they can do one for that price too. I posted on Tech 21's Faceook page and asked how many they would sell if the price in the US was the same as here which was at the time $712. They replied with a care emoji. Really?!! Really?!!!! It costs more than an HX Stomp which guess what, you can do everything this does and a whole lot more, plus it has presets and midi control as well as 2 inputs so you can run a bass in stereo which is in stereo like an Alembic. Unlike this which is just parallel from a mono signal. Their stance is totally wrong to me. Summarised, it's "but it's not us! We have no control of the price gouging idiots at Rocky Road!" Now, either they really have no control and Rocky Road is price gouging us, or they're doing what Ernie Ball did which is keep the US price artificially low by deliberately making everywhere else more expensive by charging the importer full US list price. I think it comes over that they don't care about you at all if you're outside continental US. Which makes it doubly ironic they replied with a care emoji to me.

In case anyone is interested. The OP text was Richard Osman. I can't remember if it was an interview or just on a show, but I've definitely seen it.

It's probably best we don't know.

I met him in Glasgow in 98 or 99. I don't know if they still do it, but Stiff Little Fingers used to play the Barrowlands in Glasgow every St. Patrick's day without fail. He was just walking through Queen Street station and obviously, one had to have a quick chat. He was a really nice guy.

Ultimately, nobody cares about what a particular bass player uses unless you're a fan. Dingwall and Darkglass have built empires off Nolly Getgood's back. Mark King probably put Rob Green's unborn great grandkids though university the amount of signature stuff he did with them. It was something that I found frustrating as for every new tour/anniversary/album a new Kingbass would appear. How amazing. What innovation. Oh, so aside from the paramatrix circuit, nothing was really new and just options you could choose. Maybe do a new model? Maybe replace the buzzard with something similar? No. Endless variants of the same. Ashdown have now went after anybody it appears. Does anyone really think a standard RM800 with "Rex" on it will sell well? Or the standard ABM with some bad graffiti front panel with "Shavo" on it? Good luck with that. That's before you get to the signature pedals which are mostly truly terrible.

What kind of bass cab can be endorsed by Eddie Hall then? Is that the holy grail? Or would they have to be endorsed by Tom Stoltman currently World's Strongest Man for them to be adequately trusted?

I don't know about that. I thought your TE 1200 was brilliant actually.

Let's not confuse "endorsee" or "endorsed by" with signature model. I would say the hands down winner is Mark King. Nine different models of Status Kingbass. NINE. All of them are just options of each other. That's impressive. Not just for Rob Green who milked the "I must play Mr. Pink by Level 42 with the exact same gear as Mark was using on tour!" crowd for everything they've got. Rex is catching up though. Obviously the new Pantera tour wasn't such a money spinner after all.

That's probably because they are. It's why the nut width on the medium price market is almost universally 40mm. Fancy a Cort bass? Buy anything under 800 quid that doesn't have Fender on it and that's what you're probably getting anyway. I would imagine people would be going for an Ibanez before these.

10 weeks actually. End of the financial year. Great. Spend more on an amp with someone's name on it and slightly different knobs. Neither of them will be any different from standard models I bet.

No, it belonged to Jesus of Nazareth as he could only afford it with help from his father. Yes, that's in jest as I own 2 Alembics which are fabulously amazing instruments. Admittedly, I couldn't afford a new one now and unlike Jesus, don't have nepotism to fall back on.

Alembic have been without a UK distributor for almost 20 years. The last one was The American Guitar Centre down in Ashford Kent and they hadn't done anything for years before they ceased trading. However, this may be a good thing, if of course Bass Direct can ever get the peeps at Alembic to answer the phone or email. Whilst I got the issue I had sorted out, trying to get hold of them (I appreciate the time difference before anyone says) was really frustrating. It all got sorted out really quickly when I did and they are lovely people who honestly couldn't do enough for me. Just they don't seem to reply to emails or answer the phone very much at all. Which reminds me, I have had something I've been putting off sorting with my Stanley Clarke for more than a year because of fear of this happening again. But, we can see how that pans out.

That is perfectly true to a degree of course. In my world (recording studios), there has been a joke that we can't be replaced as that would require the clients to actually know what they want in the first place. However, what I see probably happening is AI being used by streaming companies to skew the amount artists get by flooding and pushing the system with AI created music. At that point, not only am I obsolete in terms of my job, but so are the artists. Who has the money then? Oh, it's been sucked upwards. As with all things, it's what you use it for that determines what your viewpoint is. In my view, this stuff is being pushed in a direction so that staff can be cut and the bottom line for shareholders/companies can be increased, no matter the human cost involved. Like that healthcare CEO who got shot a few weeks back. His company were using defective AI to assess people's claims (read as deny 90% of them out of hand) which they knew about, but didn't do anything because they were making so much money from telling people to "f-off and die." That's the world we live in and frankly, I think it sucks.

It's because the people/corporations who are developing AI in all likelihood don't give a toss about improving people's lives. What they want is to suck up the cash from creative fields so they don't have to pay for photographers, music (in any way), copywriters. The rest of us will be doing a lot more than the laundry forever as to improve people's lives and reduce all the menial crap we all have to do is not what this is being developed for. That sort of idea would require a fundamental reset of society and that's not happening ever as billionaires and massive corporations aren't going to give up a penny for normal people. Ever. I look upon AI as just another tool whose fundamental aim is to suck money upwards to the top. Sure, it'll have it's uses for us near the bottom, but to me, that's the ultimate aim.

True, he's not solely responsible and yes, things were inevitable in that way post Napster. I was merely illustrating that the guy doesn't value music and never has. I don't know what you think is "negotiable" when the guy is actively trying to pay us less by any means possible whilst he's making hundreds of millions of pounds a month. The royalty rates will never go up. Ever. Spotify have cornered the whole market and as such won't play ball. The whole "made up artist" thing to me reeks of fraud, but because it hasn't been legislated, he's going to get away with it. As for the snowballing thing. Considering the cost of touring, that's a very different question which again, doesn't have an optimistic answer sadly for most smaller artists. Anyway, as I say, streaming is great for discovering new things. A bit less so for actually being paid for your work.

Maybe you should realise one of the people responsible for enabling quite a lot of that piracy is Daniel Ek who was the CEO of uTorrent. Nowadays he's being both the arsonist and firefighter by running Spotify. A legalised form of theft if you will.

I think it's important to separate your opinion on Spotify and steaming in general from Ek as a person. Streaming is useful for finding things and testing the water. It's unfair in how much musicians are paid, but that won't change anytime soon if ever. Now, let's get on to Ek. He's a tech bro who though Spotify makes more money in a quarter than Paul McCartney has in his whole life being the most successful songwriter in history. In 2013, Q magazine did an article on Spotify and although they couldn't work out if it made a profit from the actual music, they did work out that they were making $73 million a month from the adverts. Okay, fair enough. Ek has come out with ludicrously tone deaf comments about how if musicians want paid more they should release more music. This is whilst he's lobbying governments to lower the royalty rate musicians get. Now, for the really insidious part. Have a read of this. https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-ugly-truth-about-spotify-is-finally?utm_source=multiple-personal-recommendations-email&utm_medium=email&triedRedirect=true Basically, Spotify are paying artists flat fees to write songs then putting them out under multiple artist and song names to skew the amount they have to pay everyone else. In other words, just wait until AI becomes more of a thing. They'll become more aggressive with playlists, yet actively feed this stuff to the top to avoid paying anyone anything. In Wall Street 2 Shia LeBouf asks Josh Brolin how much it would take for him to retire, saying that most people have a very specific figure in their head for how much it would be. Brolin smiles and just says "More." That is what you're going to get with Ek. Nothing is going to be enough. The minimum stream number will only continue to rise. 1000 isn't much. How would you feel when it reaches 20,000 per song to get anything at all? How are you going to feel when he undoubtedly wins in his quest to bring the royalty rates down? Or as he quietly pushes AI or in effect "muzak" to pay musicians even less by reducing their percentage of the daily streams, by increasing the stuff he controls? Look, I'm an originals musician. I appreciate that the technology is out there and the genie can't be put back in the bottle to pre 1998, nor do I deny the usefulness of streaming as a whole. All that being said, I think Ek is a criminal who is making obscene amounts of money from ripping us all off. He has used the weakness of the record companies in the wake of Napster to build a vast fortune. It is however, being done by stooping our backs and systematically crushing us. The fact that people in reasonable arena level touring bands have to do multiple projects/businesses/teaching and whatever else just to live is wrong to me. I won't get to that level, but I object to a jumped up little tosser like Ek ripping us off, then trying to take away the merest crumbs from the table that he gives us, whilst telling us to "work harder" as he trys to reduce our amount of crumbs to atoms.

It makes it easier due to ergonomics. How your arm sits basically. Whixh is also why one likes it. It makes you feel more connected to what youre playing due to using the same position.

I have always regarded Glyn Johns as a tosser for that. Those songs could easily have taken a more overdriven sound. Can anyone really pick out what Entwistle is doing on Bargain? No, because all the treble has been cut off. What about WGFA? The bass is so low in the mix it's criminal. This approach reached it's absolute nadir on Who By Numbers where the bass not only has no treble, but no sustain either. You can't even hear the bass in huge parts of that album. The drums sound terrible too. It's a terrible mix, mainly because he's turned the guitars and vocals up way too much. Who Are You has better drum sounds, but that's because Jon Astley recorded them.

The irony of that clip is that Pete Townshend saying Entwistle was one of the first people to move away from "duummm, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum dum" type playing. Then ironically that's exactly what Entwistle does albeit in a slightly altered way. The tone in itself isn't actually that difficult to achieve as long as you can do parallel processing like on an HX Stomp. Whether or not you like the 1999 bassy/distorted/chorus tone he had is another question entirely.

Live at Leeds by The Who. Arguably one of the greatest live albums ever recorded. With a precision. Which cuts through. Weird that. I've got a 2017 classic 50's precision. No doubt with crap wood and pickups. Strange that I've never had a problem cutting through. Could it be through a knowledge of eq, effects, overdrive and where the rest of the band sits in the overall frequency spectrum might have something to do with it? Not all basses are good for all things, true and I choose basses for different projects based on how they should work sonically, but the assertion that passive fenders don't cut through isn't true at all.