BigRedX

I supposed it depends on what is meant by "learned"? Does it mean the whole song so I could play it as part of a band, or just being able to pick out the main riff? If it's the former it would be "Since You've Been Gone" by Rainbow, which was the first of about 20 songs I learned when I joined a Dad Rock covers band about 10 years ago. Before that I did all my musical learning in the 70s on the guitar rather than the bass, and even then it was little more than being able to strum through the chord progressions in "The Beatles Complete" songbook rather than actually learning the proper guitar parts. Once I'd mastered this I formed a band with some school-mates and we started writing our own songs. By the time I bought a bass guitar (in 1981) this band was already well-established and I just carried on writing bass lines for the songs we were composing, and had no interest in learning how to play songs not written by the band. I learned a few covers in the 80s but that was when I was playing synth... And in the early 2000s I was in a couple of bands that played a mixture of covers and originals, but even then I just wrote my own bass lines rather than learn what was on the recording. To be fair the only things either band kept form the original version were the lyrics and the vocal melody, so even if I had learnt the "proper" bass line it probably wouldn't have worked with what the other instruments were doing. Plus a lot of the time I was only barely aware of the original versions so it was very easy to treat these covers like any other new song idea my band mates had come up with. So if just being able to pick out the main bass riff of a song (but nothing else), it would probably be something like "She's Lost Control" by Joy Division and then it was probably completely by accident, in that I started playing something for a song that we were writing and thought it sounded a bit like another songs so I worked out the rest of the main riff, before discarding it and getting on with writing something of my own instead.

While locking XLRs are fine, I've always found locking jacks to fiddly to unlock. Especially in a hurry.

And just discovered that one of the gigs that had already been moved to next year is moving again. It's a bi-annual event which we were supposed to have been playing this October, but due to the cancellation of April's gig everything had been shunted along so our slot had moved to April 2021. Now it looks as though this year's October date has been postponed and next year's April event is going to be severely reduced. No idea what is going on but we might not be playing until April 2022 now...

Fantastic stuff thanks! My first band (back in the 70s) briefly had a guitarist with a Rapier, 33 I think although I'll need to find the photos to make sure.

Link to the restoration thread please? It sounds interesting.

Our singer has already done one...

The wedding has already been postponed from this year, but I think all the arrangements are still valid for 2021. AFAIK it's not a massively complicated and expensive do. However it will be held in a church. Given that we're a Goth band I would expect half the guests to burst into flames! 😉

Thanks. I have used the Fretless Gus for our cover of "She's In Parties" at a couple of gigs. However it's now been sold to HappyJack.

Just had confirmation that my last remaining gig for this year (another big festival) has been cancelled and moved to a new date next year that our singer can't do because he's getting married.

That's a tricky one. You'd need to devise a method of dropping each block from exactly the same height onto the same surface. I also suspect that the surface they are being dropped onto would have to be chosen so that the act of dropping the wooden blocks onto it doesn't change the surface by damaging it. For me a minimum sample size would be 50. Ideally several hundred.

The Wyn video, as has been said, is a perfect example of the rubbish pseudo-science behind "tone woods" for solid electric instruments. As with all these "experiments" that "prove" the tone wood point, both the methodology and the sample size are scientifically meaningless. The blocks are all different sizes and weights. I could do exactly the same "experiment" and produce completely different results simply by choosing my blocks to give the results I wanted. It needs to be done with multiple examples of each block of wood from each tree species, firstly with them all exactly the same size and then again with them all exactly the same weight. Then there needs to be a good consistency of sound between the blocks of the same species and definite difference between these and all of the blocks of different species. The Michael Tobias example is far more valid. At least he's not blindly (deafly?) choosing his woods on the basis of species alone. It would be interesting to see how the resonance of the body blanks transfers to the tone of the finished bass and if there is any correlation between the "sound" of the blank and the sound of the bass it is made from. It would also be useful for him to make some basses from the blanks that he would normally discard after the tap test and see if they really don't produce a decent sounding bass.

But it is just as likely that: 1. The perception of brightness was purely psychological, brought on by the fact that the bass had new parts on it, after all you weren't able to hear the bass with both necks side by side. 2. Entirely down to the new strings fitted. As I said in a previous post, the brightest sounding of all my basses is the one that has had the strings changed the most recently 3. That the dullness of the previous neck was down to the fact that it was damaged. A new undamaged neck with a rosewood board would have been equally bright and snappy.

How loud is it? Could you do an acoustic gig with it without needing an amp?

Looks like an Eastwood version of an Overwater.

But do they really? There's still no proper scientific testing that shows that even with the wide variation between woods from the same species there is still more consistency of sound within a species than the overall spectrum of sounds from all "tone woods". My position has always been that for solid electric instruments, wood does make a difference, but that it is basically unpredictable and it's contribution to the overall sound of an instrument is fairly low priority.

As before COVI-19 it will depend upon the gig. And looking at videos of the gigs currently going ahead, I don't believe the ambiance would be right for either of my bands to be able to deliver a set worth our's and the audience's time and money.

And here is our 5th thread for this bass...

Even having wood of the same species is fairly meaningless. There are 40+ species of tree that can be called "Ash", and the fabled "swamp ash" isn't even distinct species, but simply refers to "ash" trees that have been grown in swampy conditions. Therefore if you want to make informed choices about wood, not only do you need to know the species, but also the growing conditions, and on top of that: geographical location where the trees come from, age of the trees when cut down, length of time and conditions under which the trees or boards have been in storage for each stage of preparation, and wether or not they have been subjected to any artificial processes in the "seasoning" and probably a whole lot of other factors.

Mass-produce pickups made by machines should be reasonably close to identical, but are still dependant upon the tolerances of components from their suppliers. Is every magnet of exactly the same strength? Is the new batch of wire exactly the same diameter and resistance and does it have the same thickness of insulating coating as the last? And consider that many of those vintage basses would have had pickups that were hand wound and back then no-one would have bothered to check details like the number of turns of wire and the way that those turns were applied (scatter-wound anyone?) let alone the consistency of the magnets and wire used, as long as the items supplied claimed to be the specification ordered.

The brightest sounding of all my basses is the one with the newest strings on it.

The thing is that acoustic and electric instruments are made in completely different ways and the woods are chosen and treated completely differently because of this. On a solid electric instrument, the wood used does make a difference but its one very small part of a wide range of variables, and pretty much insignificant compared with the effect that wood choices have on the sound of an acoustic instrument. And while there are luthiers who claim that the type of wood used is massively important to the sound of a solid instrument there are also those (like Carl Thompson) who say that's impossible to tell what this contribution is going to be until the instrument is finished, so you might as well just pick woods that look good and not worry about their "tone".

It's 4 different basses. Of course each one is going to sound slightly different. Whether it's down to the woods used or any of the other components, the differences in construction - remember that the neck with the maple board is made differently to those with rosewood, and do we know how many pieces of wood are used in each body? - or a combination of everything. However once you drop that bass part into a band mix no-one is going to be able to tell the difference.

How could you tell? Was every other part of all the basses in question absolutely identical? If not how do you know for sure it was the fretboard wood alone that was contributing to difference in sound/tone.

I think it is now the 4th time that's been posted here...

TBH unless you are doing the engineering and mixing, you have no idea which source has been used for the bass guitar. Every time in past 20 years that I've been in the studio to play bass there has always been a mic on one of the speakers in my rig, but there has also been a DI from the head and a direct DI from the bass, so any of those sound sources could have been used on the final mix. And TBH so long as the bass sounds how I imagined it should do in the final mix I'm really not bothered.