BigRedX

Which kind of re-inforces the point that Fender should stick to what they are best at. Or at least do a lot more R&D before unleashing another bass that isn't a P or J on the public.

But is it actually better than your own basses? Personally I'd be worried about catching something off that - the areas around the bridge and pickups look especially minging, not to mentioned that massive fag burn on the headstock. You are probably absorbing tar and nicotine every time you touch the neck. 😉

Very much this.

Maybe if you were in Abbey Road, but I was thinking more along the lines of Sun or Chess, which were set up in a space the owners of the record companies had available. Also there wasn't really anything "premium" about the microphones used back then. They were just what was available at the time. It's only desire to carry on copying what has gone before that has made these devices anything special.

But in those cases the composer and the musicians involved when the pieces in question were written are now all dead. Certainly when I have been to see any modern classical pieces, there has either been some performance input from the composer as one of the musicians or as the conductor, or the piece has been performed by the ensemble that it specifically written for.

Question for covers bands - does your audience come specifically to see your band or do you play to whatever audience is already at the pub? My experience both as a musician and as an audience member is that the vast majority of the audience come with the venue rather than the band, and unless the live entertainment is particularly dire they will be there regardless of who is playing.

But remember that a lot of what are now considered classic recordings were done with minimal equipment - a space big enough to fit the musicians, a handful of microphones a plate reverb and some compression and that was it. IME a good mix engineer is worth far more than a bucket load of plug ins.

Publicising events too early can work against you too. My sister was excited to find that one of her favourite comedians was playing a venue close to her in a few months time and that there were still tickets available. However only when she turned up on the night and couldn't get did she discover that she was a year early for the gig!

Is it? Even he decided it needed changing in 1957. And again in 1976, and again in 1979...

The most important thing is that there is an engineer who is sympathetic to the genre of music and can understand what you are trying to achieve. As long as you are able to transfer the audio files you have created onto their system the equipment will be irrelevant.

It takes certain amount of skill to make a traditional and generally accepted design more ugly and think you've done something good.

Sorry, as the instruments are essentially Fender copies with a funny shaped headstock the reasons behind the construction are far more important. And I think it is important that manufacturers and luthiers explain the thinking behind the features on their instruments, and why they have stuck to traditional designs or why they have changed them. After all anyone with the appropriate tools can easily make a P or J copy. Their very essence is to be able to be made with simple machinery and relatively unskilled labour.

I much prefer the fretless playing on the second album which isn't by Pino (it certainly wasn't him when I saw them live).

TBH he's on the one track I don't like very much, and IMO doesn't add anything to it.

Personally I don't think there's anything wrong with the gear. Remember that even the most simple of modern recording set ups is technically vastly superior to the equipment that most classic recordings were made on - especially if you are not relying on an acoustic space to make your recording in. IMO there are two things at work here. 1. We all tend to be super-critical of recordings we have made ourselves, even when ultimately there's nothing really wrong with them. Also it's very difficult to judge a dance track at home when it needs to be played on a club system along side similar tracks that you think sound good. 2. It may be that like me you are simply not as good an engineer as you would like to be. It took me 20 years and several tens of thousands of pounds spent on equipment to realise that I was never going to be able to make recordings that sounded as good as the ones by my favourite artists. Are there any studios specialising in house music in your area? I'd take a couple of tracks to a commercial studio with a sympathetic engineer and do your mixes there and see if that makes any difference to the sound of your recordings.

Interesting, and thank you for taking the time to come a explain your thinking behind the construction of your basses. However, it is my understanding was that the Fender method of non-angled headstock construction was done simply because it allowed them to use smaller pieces of wood for the neck blanks as well as reducing the amount of skilled craftsmanship required, and Fender were all about keeping the production costs down. Any additional benefits appear to have been "invented" later. Personally in 45 years of playing guitars and basses with angled headstocks I have never come across any problems either with weakness at the head/neck transition or deficiencies in tone; although that is far harder to quantify as tone is entirely subjective and I've never payed two instruments that were sufficiently identical in all other ways for me to be able to say categorically that the headstock angle is what is causing the difference in sound (and no-one else has either). Also IME non-angled headstocks come with their own sets of problems - variable break angles of the strings over the nut leading to a mismatch in the compliance of the strings and tuning issues caused by string trees/retainers. And what is so bad about a glued scarf joint? Modern machining and gluing techniques will guarantee that the join is at worst as strong as the surrounding wood and if done properly will be stronger. And why is a joint at this point on the guitar or bass less good than the one between the neck and the body? Or the joint between the fingerboard and the neck? Or even the multiple joints that are made between the various pieces that go to make up the body itself?

The Sweet. Although it was Get It On by T.Rex that introduced to the world of music, The Sweet with their catchy hits and interesting B-sides who transitioned me from Pop to Rock. The Pretty Things. A band who continually re-invented themselves whist staying interesting. Freur/Underworld/Underworld. Another band who re-invented themselves and continue to do so even today. For me Doot-Doot is the sound of the 80s.

I've played in originals bands most of my life - I took up playing guitar/bass/synthesisers because I wanted to write songs and being able to play some instruments seemed to be good way to achieve that. However I have also played in two covers bands and that's enough to know that it's not for me. Yes, a large proportion of "originals" bands aren't particularly original, but as an audience member at a gig, I don't necessarily want original, but what I do want is to be entertained, and TBH there's a lot more to entertaining an audience than playing some songs they might enjoy. If that's your USP as a covers band the venues you play at would be better served by a DJ or a well selected playlist. There's nothing big or clever about being a musician per se. Like it or not it's all the other things that you do whilst playing the songs to your audience that will make your band entertaining or not, and for the most part the covers bands I've seen have not really been very entertaining to watch. That makes it difficult for me as an audience member because I rarely go and see covers bands unless one of the musicians is a friend of mine, and so any feedback has to be "diplomatic". I've grown up with the idea that "rock" music should be mostly played by the people that wrote it. One of the bands that I really liked when I was discovering music was The Sweet who came in for a lot of stick because most of their hits were written by Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman whilst their contemporaries - Slade, T.Rex, Bowie - were writing their own material. Those attitudes meant than when I formed my first band in the mid-70s there was never any possibility that we were going to play covers, although our unconventional instrumentation and almost complete isolation from any local music scene meant that we were never aware that most bands started off by playing other people's music and if we had been we wouldn't have been able to play any in a recognisable form. In fact I'd been playing in bands for almost 10 years before I did my first cover song, and even then it was one picked deliberately to be a complete contrast to the type of material that the bands was writing at the time. So it's probably no surprise that of the two covers bands I've played in the one that was most enjoyable was one that would probably be despised by most musicians on here in that all we kept of the original would be the lyrics and vocal melody. Occasionally we would include one of the other major musical themes, but only if we thought the song absolutely required it. Because I only had at best a passing knowledge of most of the songs we covered, I treated each one as if the singer had written it themselves and created a baseline that I thought worked with what they were singing. By contrast the conventional cover band I was in was a much less enjoyable experience. It probably ruined the listening experience of a lot of songs that I learned, and I mostly felt that their audience would have been better served by a good DJ with an appropriate selection of records. I suppose it didn't help that the originals band band I was playing in at the same time, was doing more gigs, getting a better audience reaction and actually making more money once expenses had been taken into account, and overall a lot more fun.

Unless they are by the team that did the Superfly amp in which case the design will be poorly implemented, the build quality questionable and the customer support non-existent.

This.

Surely it’s the photograph that is iconic? the rest of the album cover is ripped off an Elvis one as has been pointed out, and IIRC the bass was being smashed up because it was a bit of a dog. Was it even used on the recording of the album?

3rds on the guitar always sound iffy to me and a lot of the time I’ll either leave the out or replace them with a 9th or a suspended 4th which sounds more interesting and in tune.

It might be worth checking the neck joint. One trick is to slacken off the strings and then release the neck bolts by half a turn each so there is just the slightest amount of play in the joint. Then tighten the strings back up to pitch. Once you have done that retighten the neck bolts. This procedure uses the tension in the strings to pull the neck is tightly as it will go into the pocket. If this doesn’t work then try adding more mass at the headstock or bridge.

Is this for “decoration” or to actually be used? If you are going to used should it not be position in the place that is most comfortable for your particular playing style?

Hellraiser by The Sweet - first single I bought. Seven Seas Of Rye by Queen Cherry Bomb by The Runaways