BigRedX

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

But would he want to? Musically they are on different planets.

Exactly. Surely the whole point of the Thunderbird is that it's not a Fender?

More importantly can we turn the graphics off an use old-school text emojis without having them automatically converted? It used to be an option in previous versions of the forum software.

Age only matters if you (and the others in your band) let it matter. Having similar musical influences and ambitions (however big or small) are far more important. In The Terrortones I was by far the oldest member of the band (in my 50s) and by contrast one of our many drummers was only 17 when he joined the band, but we all wanted to play the same kind of music and be out there every weekend gigging so the difference in ages didn't matter. Same with my two current bands, although we are mostly much closer in ages we share a love of the same kind of music and want to be creative and gig.

Entirely depends on how the rest of the band play it and how closely their instrumentation and arrangement match the original.

I wasn't gigging but simply playing music for my own amusement, I'd probably sell all my basses and just keep a guitar and a synth.

I would hope so. The synth band I was a member of in 1984 had an original TR808, in the days when it was a pricy bit of kit, but the decent alternatives were even more expensive. We would struggle to get more than one song's worth of patterns in it and chaining them together to form a song involved actually running the song in real time and switching patterns manually in the correct place for the device to remember the order. If you made a mistake it was simpler to stop and try again then go back and edit it.

And value is relative. If my expensive gear gets stolen or damaged I can easily replace now it with something cheap that will do the job. If I'd had my first bass stolen or damaged back in the early 80s that would have been it. Despite the fact that it only cost £60, I would have taken me another 3 to 4 months of being careful with my food spending to afford a replacement, by which time the band would either have folded or replaced me.

I was thinking more of the potential for serious physical violence against myself or my fellow band members. I've played some "dubious" places in front of "scary" looking audiences, but because it's been originals and the people are there primarily to see the bands and listen to the music, rather than us being a distraction after the football, or a soundtrack to drunken posturing, there has never been any real problems. However I've been to see friends play in covers bands and the amount of violent knobheads that seem to use the presence of alcohol and loud live music as an excuse to kick off is staggering, even in pubs that don't normally have a dodgy reputation. Makes me glad I'm not involved in the covers scene.

As I have said many times before in threads like this, I have no idea why you would be worried about taking expensive equipment to a "dodgy" pub, but not worried about your person? If my equipment gets damaged or stolen it is replaceable. If my body got damaged it might well be game over for my playing yet no one seems to consider this.

No guilt whatsoever. Most because when I first started gigging in the early 80s I was mostly playing synthesisers, and at the time the entry level for a basic mono-synth was £200, for a poly-synth was £1000 and anything with user programmable memories on it was £3000 upwards. By comparison even the most expensive bass guitar is in real terms relatively cheap.

I don't either a Rob Allen MB2 or a Shuker Artist, but I have tried both, and I would go for the Rob Allen every time. Shuker make some very nice looking basses, but I have yet to play one (and I've played a fair few) that I even remotely liked the feel of. It could be just me because everyone else seems to think they are great, but as someone who has tried them and cannot got on with them at all, I ought to point out that they are not for everyone, and you should most definitely try before you buy.

Please let us know if you get a reply...

While Entwistle could most definitely play I think he got away with standing still because visually there were plenty of other things happening in the band.