BigRedX

Far better to have an ugly bass than a boring one.

I tried this but I couldn't get on with the sound and feel of the high C string on a 34" scale bass. IMO the same notes played 5 frets up on the G string always sounded better with more body to them. Everything on the high C sounded like bad jazz guitar. I think it's partly a scale-length thing because high C (and high E) on all my Bass VIs sound great, but I do treat them like a guitar rather than a bass and switch to a more "driven" sound when playing those strings.

There are two possible causes here: 1. For the most part the low B in a standard 5-string set is far too low in tension. I wouldn't consider anything less than a 130 for B to complement a 40-100 set and ideally even a bit heavier. You might be able to improve matters by picking a B which is taper-wound at the ball end, but it will depend on other factors on the bass, mostly the break-angle over the saddle. 2. There is more to a 5-string bass than simply taking a 4-string and putting a wider neck on it. To get the best out of a low B the neck needs to be stiffer than normal and the joint between the neck and the body has to rock-solid. IME bolt-on necks only cut it on very expensive instruments, where the fit of the heel in the pocket is perfect. IME cheap 5-string basses simply aren't worth the money. They're not well enough made to get the best out of the low B-string and all they do is put people off 5-string basses.

If this about compression on the bass or compression in general? If you think you don't like compression on the bass either you have the best playing technique in the world or you are doing it wrong. All compression should be doing is changing the difference between the loudest and quietest parts of the signal. If it's doing anything else that's another process and not actual compression. Also there are plenty of things that will add compression to your sound even if you you don't actually have a "compressor" in your signal chain. For a start anything with valves in it will be compressing the signal to some extent - it's part of that "warmth" as will any device producing "overdrive" or "distortion". If you're going through the PA the engineer will probably have added a compressor to your channel, and if not and they are dedicated, they'll be riding the fader which is essentially the same thing (but in most cases not as good). Similarly in the studio. You could automate all the level changes required in your DAW, but a well set up compressor will do the job quicker and more accurately. And don't forget that once the music gets above a certain volume all the audience's ears will be adding their own compression. You can't do anything about that (except play very quietly).

In my record collection all the best bass lines are played on synthesisers.

I used to have a Peterson Strobo Rack and while it looked great in the rack, it never seemed to be any more accurate than the tuner built-in to my Bass Pod. When I upgraded my rig to a Helix I sold the Peterson. I'm currently using the Helix tuner in Strobe mode.

The relevant Allen keys are metric 4.0, 4.5, 5.0 and Imperial 5/32 and 3/16. If you have all of those one of them should fit. If not make sure you at lease have the all the metric ones.

My mum who plays in an oldies ukulele orchestra (and probably does more gigs a year than me) has a pretty good Kala model, but the <£30 ukulele she had before that was perfectly acceptable from a playability PoV. Whatever size you decide to get, make sure you use the same tuning as your students which is most likely gCEA as anything else will be confusing for them. In my limited experience of playing one the trick is to NOT make everything sound like George Formby!

A decent set of metric and imperial Allen keys should cost less than £10. Then you'll never need to ask this question again.

The instrumental parts of side 2 of Rattus Norvegicus could be passed off as unreleased Yes tracks to anyone who wasn't familiar with The Stranglers.

Not aimed at you personally but at the "boutique" pedal market in general. I posted these in another thread: How to make a "boutique" pedal. 1. Find a design from the 60s or 70s and copy it. Make sure that your version uses at least one germanium transistor even if the original pedal didn't have any. 2. Make sure that one of the controls and one socket is in a completely ridiculous place. Say they need to be there in order to improve signal cross-talk from the original design. 3. Give the pedal a name that only a 13 year old boy will find amusing - ideally some kind of knob joke. 4. Give all the controls unintuitive descriptions like "spatter" or "fragrance" and write them on in a barely legible scrawl. Do not put any other markings on the controls, and if you're not using chicken head knobs then have ones without any position markers on them. 5. Pedals with three or fewer controls on them should be in huge chunky metal cases, with the controls positioned at random and in an order not consistent with the signal flow. Pedals with lots of controls should be in a case so tiny that it is virtually impossible to adjust one without inadvertently moving at least one other (also see point 2). 6. Get a five year old to do the graphics. Ideally every pedal should have a different "graphical design" even though the electronics inside are identical. 7. Charge at least £200 for it even though the parts and labour cost to make them is a fraction of that. 8. It should also include one additional control which supposedly allows the pedal to sound both like the original version and any other variations on that design that existed during the production runs. In reality this control either only has one useful position (the others all producing a horrible unmusical racket) or the variations are so subtle that no-one can really hear any difference between them.

I used to have a pair of 1960s Tannoy Golds with 10" dual concentric drivers. They had a nasty upper-mid range hump which over-accentuated our female singer's vocals no matter which settings of the "treble" controls on the back were applied. Also the pair didn't sound quite the same, something that was very obvious when using them as studio monitors and panning a synth sound from left to right. Fine for flattering records made in the 60s and early 70s but not much use for anything else.

Something I'd written myself. The first band I played in were pretty well established by the time I switched from guitar to bass as my main instrument.

The only word of caution I would add is that even electronic drum kits can generate quite a lot of acoustic noise. The mesh heads are quieter than the older "rubber" ones, but the biggest problem will be the kick drum pedal which if she is living anywhere other than on the ground floor will sound like she is constantly stamping on the floor to anyone living below her. I've had to build a floating "podium" to allow our drummer to play electronic drums in my studio without disturbing anyone in the rooms below.

However most of these bands don't have a whole set's worth of hits. At the very best there will be a handful of popular singles, some good album-only songs and still about 25% filler. So why not have some new songs? They can't be any worse than the filler from 30 years ago that they are still playing.

At least the Boss pedals are ergonomically sound and don't look as though they have been designed by a 5-year old from both an aesthetic and practical PoV.

Off the back of DSotM and WYWH I would have thought that Pink Floyd were one of the most influential bands in the world and could have done pretty much what they wanted. After all, wasn't Animals the album that started off life being made entirely out of sampled sounds in the days when doing such a thing would have involved hundreds if not thousands of hours of tape manipulation and editing? Given that the 2 1/2 year gap between DSotM and WYWH didn't do the latter any harm, they could have spent a bit more time on the mixes? Of course it could also be argued that there's nothing like a deadline to focus the mind and the mix. I've certainly been guilty myself of spending too long agonising over recordings simply because I could, and ultimately the additional months spent didn't make a significant improvement. The later mixes were different but not necessarily "better". And finally is there any guarantee that what is being put out now is what the band would have wanted to release back in 1977 (or 1978 if the mixes had taken that long to get right)? After all they've had another 45 years to think about it. I'm not a Pink Floyd fan so I couldn't comment specifically, but IME the versions of albums that I like are the ones that I am most familiar with. Personally I'd rather bands concentrated on writing another album's worth of great new songs than fiddling about with their back catalogue. To me it always seems as though it's an admission of a lack of creativity. (see the other thread on old bands)

So what's wrong with the original version, and why didn't Pink Floyd put it right at the time? I mean it's not as if they were strapped for cash to pay for the studio time.

Watch or some other wearable electronic device? I've been in a band where the guitarist's choice of time-piece was a major source of unwanted noise through the amps. We ended up instigating a "no watches on stage" rule partly due to eliminating potential problems like this and partly because we ultimately thought it looked better.

Every pick sounds different, either due to weight or material. Go to your local musical instrument retailer and buy a load of different ones and see which you like best. Don't forget to also try them in a band setting (if appropriate) because like amp sounds, what works on solo bass can sound completely wrong once there are other instruments in the mix. There was a point where I was enjoying heavy but hard plastic picks which when I was practicing at home made my bass sound great, but in a band where one of the guitarists favoured a clean sounding Strat all that attack disappeared in the mix leaving the bass sounding weedy. These days I'll still try anything that sounds right when recording, but for live use I've settled on Herco Flex 75s which I now buy 100 at a time and never have any problems with the bass sound disappearing in the mix. For me they also have the added advantage of sounding similar to my finger-style playing so I swap between the techniques for reasons of feel rather than those of tone.

In the 90s my band of the time used MIDI controlled backing and multi-effects for guitar and bass. All the effects patch changes were controlled by the backing, so we didn't have pedals cluttering up the stage. It also meant that I could be anywhere on stage and my sounds would change automatically at the correct points in the song.

It's a difficult one. I know I'll be playing in bands until it becomes absolutely physically impossible, so why should I begrudge others the same? As a punter I'm reasonably lucky in that very few of the bands that I liked when I was first getting into music still exist in any gigging form so I'm unlikely to be disappointed, and there are plenty of new young bands coming up playing music I like, that I can go and see. Because of the genre both my current bands move in, I get to see a lot of bands that were reasonably famous back in the 80s and 90s because we are supporting them. Whilst all of them can still cut it from a performance PoV, the depressing thing for me is that most of them are completely happy to trade on songs that are at best 25 years old. I know that on the whole audiences want to hear what they know and like, but there's not even a token song from the "new album" mostly because there is no new album. It's never been easier to record and release music without needing record label backing, so why aren't they doing it? It's as though their creative abilities got switched off sometime in the late 90s. Notable exceptions to the above are Toyah and Mark Burgess.

The other reason why the bass (and drums) are quieter than anything produced since that advent of the 16 track tape recorder, is that they would have been committed to tape early on in the recording process and become further buried in the mix with each bounce required to get The Beatles vision for their songs achieved with only 4 tracks available. Out of interest how are these new mixes being produced? Do they have access to all the unbounced tapes (I believe that bounces were made between recorders onto a new reel of tape rather than onto a spare track and then the bounced tracks over recorded)? I suspect that there will still be a fair amount of instruments that share a single track simply because doing it that way reduces the number of times the tracks need to be bounced.

Generally the mono mixes were the ones that had the time spent on them. Once everyone was happy with these the stereo mix for the whole album would be dashed off in an afternoon.

All of the bands with "no bass guitar" still have plenty of bottom end in their sound. If you didn't know there wasn't a bass player in the line up you'd never know from just listening to the recordings. IMO this makes them all "gimmick" bands. If they didn't make a big deal about not having a particular instrument the average listen would never be aware of the fact, and the "gimmick" is all that makes them interesting. Most have at best a couple of decent songs. In Hurtsfall we try not to make a big deal about not having a guitarist. Obviously I talk about it on here, but that's because on Basschat we discuss the mechanics of making music and it's relevant to the instruments I use. However when talking to music reviewers we play it down, and I doubt that most of the listeners who haven't seen us live are aware of the fact and probably don't even realise that the more recent recordings don't even have a live drummer. Ultimately it doesn't matter how you make your music just that it is entertaining.