BigRedX

Is that a shot of Chernobyl in the background?

I used to own a bass which had provence both as an instrument in itself and from the previous owner (who had it from new). It was a 5-string fretless Overwater Original previously owned by Mickey Féat, a session player who had worked a lot with Mark Knopfler and Dave Gilmour as well as many others. Although there is no documented evidence to be found there is a good chance if he had played fretless bass on a recording between 1984 and the early 2000s it would have been on this instrument, and there are some fairly high-profile albums that he played on during this period. However as interesting as all this was, what was more important to me was the fact that this instrument was apparently the first low B 5-string bass that Overwater ever made, completed sometime in late 1983. While there are older examples of 5-string basses with low B-strings from Carl Thompson and Alembic, This bass and the 1985 fretted version that I also owned are the oldest that I have ever had hands-on experience with. Last time this subject came up I did ask if anyone on Basschat had an older 5-string bass and no-one came forward I also owned this 12-string Hohner electric guitar that may or may not have previously belonged to Captain Sensible: No mention of it's provenance was mentioned when I bought it, but on doing a Google search for more information about the guitar the ONLY other image of a similar instrument was one from when Captain Sensible was selling off some of his unused guitars. All the other Hohner 12-string guitars with the same model number are completely different to this example - having a black Telecaster shaped body and twin humbuckers. EDIT: I wasn't aware of any potential provenance of either instrument before I bought them. I only found out about the Overwater because I was already in touch with Chris May trying to find out how old my other bass was and he told me that it was the first they had made and who it had been made for.

Very much agree with this. If you are going to publicise a means of contact then you should be prepared use that means of contact to communicate with your potential customers, even if it's only an automated OoO reply or something encouraging you to phone instead. I'm self employed and because if I am in a situation where I am only available on my mobile I will not be in a position where I can easily deal with a reply to a customer's query, therefore I not longer give it out. When I first went self employed I publicised every means of contact, but as the business developed I have learned what works best for me and also best for servicing the needs of my customers, and having my mobile number as a means of business contact is not one of those things. If it had turned out that email was unsuitable or inconvenient I would have removed that from my contact details instead.

When I first got interested in music the bassists in all my favourite bands seemed to play Rickenbackers, Gibsons, or something custom probably made by John Birch. If I'd had the money for my dream bass back then it would most likely have been a 4001 shaped instrument with a JB logo on the headstock. I'm sure that some of the bassists in bands I like played Precisions but I just didn't remember them doing so, unlike their more visually interesting competition.

There was a Australian company making guitars with 3-D printed bodies with a similar cut-out style, but I can't find their web page any more. Edit: They are actually in NZ and their website is here

personally I wouldn't bother going custom for something based on a classic "off-the-peg" design like a J-bass. There are already a multitude of manufactures all doing their own take on this instrument, so unless you have very precise and specialised needs, there really ought to be something already available that will be perfect for you. I'd suggest a trip to one of the big mainstream retailers to try every J-type bass in the store, followed by outings to both Bass Direct and The Gallery to do the same. If you really can't find a ready made bass that suits you, then at least you will have a much better idea of what you want from a custom instrument.

Looks like a guitar to me - 6 strings. And also that it might just be a prop rather than a real playable instrument.

I'm sure if I'd started off with a P-bass as my first instrument I'd be used to them. But I didn't. Therefore to me it looks and feels like a step backwards from even the cheapest and least refined basses I've owned in the past.

Until a couple of months ago I could be 99% sure I had never played one. They just never appealed to me. I've owned a bass with a P-bass pick up - a Born To Rock F4B - and a couple with P-J configuration - a Pedulla Buzz and a Hartke XL-4. Having now definitely played one - a MiJ with a maple fretboard, unplugged for a couple of minutes - I can't say I feel I've missed anything. Big clunky body and big clunky neck, no grace or refinement.

IIRC Ibanez made all of the Roland synth guitars and basses, so it's probably unsurprising that they decided to make one with their own logo on as well.

You have to remember that Joe Dart plays in a band whose most interesting album was ten tracks of silence.

I've never really been that impressed by technical prowess on any instrument. For me the most important thing is the music itself. People producing music I like inspire me to carry on creating my own music. People producing music I don't like also inspire me to carry creating my own music in the hope that maybe mine will be popular enough to displace them from public consciousness.

I'll just leave this here:

In the days when I still had a conventional bass rig, when I was playing decent sized stages I could always hear more of me in the foldback than I could from my rig unless I was stood directly in front of it. These days big rigs are nothing more than stage props. My current rig is a Helix Floor and RCF745, and I only take the RCF to small gigs where the quality of the foldback is unknown.

These are the most important ones for me when it come to closing a drum machine as I intend to use it live for one of my bands. I come from an age where pattern memory on drum machines was limited and although many boasted 99 patterns and 99 songs the reality would be that the patterns required for a single song (intro, verse, chorus, middle 8, outro, plus one or two fills for each) would come close to using up all the available memory even if there were only 10-15 patterns actually used. The other one might be the deal-breaker if it's at all fiddly as I need to be able call up the next project/song quickly in a gig situation.

It might only be 6 channels, but it's so cheap that you could buy two, run them in sync and still have paid less than a new Roland TR8S or Akai MPC One. Looking at the specs it says 96 projects with 96 patterns per project. Does that mean 96 songs with 96 patterns available for each song? Can you use the same pattern for different projects? Alternatively can you copy a pattern from one project to another? Are all those patterns and projects stored on-board without having to load from and external source? How easy is it to switch from one project to another?

So where do your song ideas come from? Mine just pop into my head at any time so to all intents and purposes they really do come from the ether! Certainly most times when I actively try and "write a song" nothing very good ever comes of it.

Actually it is my experience that many of the people who claim to like everything only have a quite limited knowledge of music, so while that statement may be true within the confines of the music that they are aware of, as soon as you introduce them to music outside of that, you generally find that their tastes are just as narrow as anyone else's. There is so many different styles of music available to listen to these days that it is truly impossible to like "everything". I confine myself to being open enough to want to listen to anything, but also focused enough not to want to waste my time with what I have already heard and don't like.

IME unless the musicians in question are incredibly technically accomplished and have spent a long time working on their arrangements, you wouldn't want to capture the live sound because generally it's not going to be good enough to withstand repeated listening. And while they are at it would they like to include the less palatable aspects of the typical live performance like inaudible vocals, unwanted feedback and additional compression to mimic how your ears are behaving at gig volumes? I've mostly been in bands that were firstly studio bands and secondly live acts and our problem was the opposite - how to recreate what we had done in the studio at a gig, and tending to fail just as badly doing that as the band that wants to capture the "live vibe" on a recording. I've finally come to accept that the recording and the gig are two different things and although they have large areas of overlap should be approached differently. There's no need to include every aspect of the recorded version in the live one, you can make up for those missing things by being excitingly loud and giving the audience something interesting to watch while you perform. Conversely you need to make the recording aurally "interesting" to compensate for lack of gig-level volume and the fact that here the music has to stand on it's own.

The first question you have to ask yourself is why you want a bass from a particular luthier? IME it should be because they offer something different to what you can get from a mainstream manufacturer whether it be something visual or a combination of design features that are unavailable "of-the-peg". Remember that these days there is such a wide variety of basses available from the various manufacturers that you have to have a particular reason to go for a custom bass in that it can't easily be fulfilled from what is available from the mainstream manufacturers. As I've already said in the previous post intros thread don't get bogged down by thinking that you have to make a decision regarding every single aspect of your instrument. That's what the luthier is there for. If you go them with the look, feel and sound you want, they should be able to put together an instrument to meet these criteria. If they can't you should look elsewhere.

Actually it was the change in arrangement and the juxtaposition of the vocal with a different synth sound that made a previously fine-sounding vocal performance appear to be a little dodgy in places. I've noticed previously that some synth sounds (particularly from digital synths or samples that have been pitch transposed) can contain weird harmonics that have the potential to make the other instruments (and vocals) sound out of tune even if they sound perfectly fine with the non-digital instruments. Several times I've found that a particular musical part only works with a very specific synth sound, and that changing that sound makes the notes being played sound completely wrong. In this case it was far simpler to make tiny tiny changes to the pitches of some of the vocal notes than try and track down the errant harmonic in the synth sound and correct them without changing the feel of the track. IMO the end result is the most important thing not the process used to get there.

Which is why it's important to have a songwriting credit agreement in place fairly early on when starting a new band.

Scale length? If they are short scale they could be Rotosounds.

I think the idea that the song can be defined by the melody line and lyrics stems from the early days of commercial song writing when songs were produced by a composer and separate lyricist and then made available to the public by a publisher through printed sheet music, each party normally taking an equal third of the royalties. Certainly when I joined the PRS in the early 80s new songs were registered with them by submitting a score containing the main musical themes (essentially the melody) and the lyrics. This system also leads to the example where a main musical theme for a song ends up not being composed by the person who is credited as the songwriter. "Every Breathe You Take" is classic example of this. Sting is credited as the songwriter have written both the lyrics and the main vocal melody. Andy Summer's guitar part was just incidental at the time of composition, until some samples that part and since he's not credited as the songwriter, String gets all the royalties fro the sample usage. It's all down to what has been agreed by the band members. At the other end of the scale U2 used to add their manager to all songwriting credits. I've certainly been in bands where the composer for the purposes of the songwriting credits has only been the person who came up with the vocal melody or main instrumental idea and the other members contributions don't count towards the songwriting credits. I've also been in bands where all the band members get an equal credit for all the songs that were written while they were in the band irrespective of how great or small their actual compositional contribution actually was. The reality is that these days that songwriting credits can have little correlation to the actual contributions of the musicians/songwriters involved. Also exactly how much each of the named songwriters actually earns as a proportion the songs is unknown - there no requirement for everyone to have an equal share.

The part in question was a complex harmony vocal with several notes held for a couple of bars. At the time of recording the vocal sounded fine, but during the production process I changed the arrangement of the backing which made in more obvious that a handful of notes were slightly out of tune. I could have got our singer back in to redo the vocal but that would have taken the best part of evening to set up and do the recording, and we might have had to redo more than just the "wrong" notes if we couldn't match the timbre/sound of the new vocals to the original recording. In the end it was about 15 minutes work with Autotune to "fix" the notes I didn't like the tuning of, and then I was able to get on with the final mix. The track in question is actually the one I linked to earlier in this thread regrading the use of "groove quantisation". See if you can spot which notes have been Atotuned.