BigRedX

A well-contracted neck and neck joint is far more important than the scale length on a 5-string bass unless you are looking at 36" scale or longer basses. The next most important thing is to find the right strings for your 5-string bass. What works well on one bass doesn't necessarily work as well on another, plus IMO the low-B strings in most sets are too light and low in tension compared with the other strings. For example, in a standard 40-100 set the low B should be at least 128 if not 130. As others have said go and play as many 5-strings as you can and see what suits you. Also your money will go a lot further if you buy second hand, and you'll loose less should you decide that 5-strings really isn't for you and you end up selling it on. IME most people trying 5-strings for the first time make the mistake of buying something cheap that isn't sufficiently well enough made to do the low B string justice. After all there is much more to making a decent 5-string bass than taking a standard 4-string design and putting a wider neck on it. Finally, again as others have said, once you get your 5-string put your 4-string bass(es) away and don't get them out again until you are either ready to sell them or you find you really can't get on with your 5-string.

Most bassists who claim not to need compression probably have something in their signal chain that is actually doing the job of a compressor. Where it is valves in the amp or something in the sound coming out of the PA. The only way you guarantee not to have any compression in your bass sound is if you: 1. Don't go through the PA 2. Use a transistor amp (not class D) with the input gain well below the level at which the clip light comes on and still plenty of clean extra volume available on the master volume control. 3. Don't have any overdrive/distortion/fuzz effects. 4. Don't use any digital effects. 5. Don't use a wireless system.

For someone like me who is mildly dyslexic, breaking posts up into digestible chunks by automatically adding space after a return makes it easier to read. If I can read what other members have written without having to work too hard to understand their massive blocks of streams of consciousness posts I'm more likely to take the time to offer an answer or advice.

I doubt it. I have shimmed the neck on my Squier Bass VI. Pretty much everyone does, as it's the only way to get the break angles over the bridge right. I put a cut-down business card in the back quarter of the neck pocket. Uncompressed this is about 0.5mm thick. Once all the neck screws have been tightened up it will less. Looking at the pocket from the side there is just enough room to slide in a piece of 80 gsm paper (roughly 0.01mm thick) 25mm wide into the gap. The same piece of paper folded in half to make it 0.02mm thick won't fit in the gap. The rest of the joint is a completely snug and gapless fit. So from what I can see the is a hairline gap of less than 0.02mm in the middle third of the neck pocket . Either end where the neck is attached to the body by the screws it is a completely snug fit. In fact I would venture that since the card is likely to compress more than the wood of the body or the neck, there will be fuller contact between the two surfaces at the point where I have added the shim that there was before. Most of the contact anyway will be from the end of the neck against the end of the pocket cause by the pull on the strings. In fact one of the tricks to get the best possible neck joint on a bolt-on neck is to slacken off the screws very slightly before re-stringing and then re-tighten them once the instrument has been strung and tuned to the correct pitch. This allows the tension in the strings to pull the neck as tightly as possible into the pocket.

Should we even have a radiused fingerboard on a bass? On a bowed instrument you need the radius to allow each string to be individually accessible to the bow, and on the electric guitar the slight radius is supposed to make playing chords easier and more comfortable. However on the electric bass we don't really play full chords like a guitar, and if you think about it the fretted stringed instrument the bass has the most in common with as regards playing style is the "classical" guitar which nearly always has a flat fingerboard.

If you listen to any national radio broadcast (as opposed to internet) radio for any length of time it is still very obviously playlisted, so someone somewhere is still having a big say in what you get to hear. The big difference now is that for anyone with a real interest in finding different types of music radio and printed media no longer have a monopoly on popular taste.

Unless you are an originals band intent on global mega-stardom it probably doesn't really matter. However in the interests of practicality you should pick one that: 1. Isn't being used by a currently active band (or at least not one in the same country as you). 2. Will allow your band to be easily found on social media and other internet searches.

For a company that is supposed to be a serious luthier suppliers Stewmac sometimes write some real nonsense! Then again if they can sell someone an £8 (plus shipping etc from the US) part that whose function can be suitably duplicated with a a piece of card that can be obtained for free, then good luck to them. The values of the shims them sell: 0.25°, 0.5° and 1° may not sound a lot but a standard business card thickness filling half the neck pocket is usually more than enough to solve most neck angle problems, and is roughly the equivalent of the 0.25° shim. The argument for not leaving any bare wood "exposed" within the neck pocket makes little sense when one of the solutions they sell will still leave some wood exposed because 1) it is unlikely to be a completely snug fit in the pocket and 2) the holes for the screws are oversized. If you are really concerned about leaving bare wood open to the air within the pocket then seal any un-laquered surfaces on the pocket and neck heel before reassembling the neck joint.

When "Boy" was released what U2 were doing was fairly radical compared with other "new wave" pop bands. Good tunes coupled with an inventive guitarist. It hasn't always been "stadium rock" either. I saw them in 1980 along with about 50 other people at The Boat Club here in Nottingham on their first proper headlining tour.

Only one other band was able to make it work. Plus having re-read it recently I'd say most of the advice in it is so out of date that it's been reduced to a quaint historical document rather than anything actually useful.

It's the Fender Custom Shop John 5 Signature Tele. And thanks!

Technically using the vocal stem and adding your own instruments makes it a remix rather than a cover.

Try changing the delay from 1/16th notes to 3/16 notes.

And finally we have the video for the B-side completed and up on YouTube:

Good advice for any gig. Unless your error brings the whole song crashing to a premature end mid-line, no-one in the audience will even notice.

Yes it has. It's in a list of features that hopefully be re-instated at some point in the near future. In the mean time you can achieve the same result by clicking on the "bullet" icon next to the topic title rather than the title itself when you want to read a topic. You can also find new posts in a topic by scrolling down until you see an orange line in-between posts. This line divides the posts you have already read from the new ones.

What's wrong with the bass sound in the context of your band mix?

I can't say I was a Numan fan back in 1979 as I thought he was completely ripping off my favourite bands of the time - The Human League, Vice-Versa and of course Ultravox, but I've mellowed since then and one to see him on this recent tour where the music was fantastic and didn't rely too much on the old hits.

Are there really no low-profile alternatives to the Fender-style 5-way switch? Personally I'd have asked about the feasibility of replacing it with a rotary switch. Not only lower profile but you could have added some extra switching alternatives.

In the 90s I was what superficially looked like a conventional rig, but closer inspection revealed that there were only 3 easily adjustable controls - the input gain on the Peavey bassfex at the start of the signal chain and the two output volumes on the power amp that fed the top and bottom of a bi-amped system. Many of the patches I used didn't make any sound at all on their own because they included MIDI-controlled gates and filters that only opened when the sequencer part for the correct song was run. I had a default patch that essentially connected the input to the output via the crossover that I made available to anyone who needed to use my bass rig at a gig. Needless to say few other bassists did.

Both the bands I am currently playing with were well-established when I joined so at the moment I don't really bring anything other someone to play bass. However in bands in the past I have been the main composer of the music, provider of the majority of the equipment, provider of the rehearsal room and place for other band members to store their equipment, owner of the equipment and location for the band to make their recordings, producer of all the printed and later on-line promotional material, organiser of pretty much everything to do with the band - rehearsals, gigs, recordings, photo-shoots and band image. In other words everything except sing and write the lyrics.

Like any good music nerd I have plenty of lists, including an all-time top-5 albums one, but only 3 of those albums have absolutely no duff tracks on them and they are: (in chronological order) 1. "Parachute" by The Pretty Things 2. "Doot-Doot" by Freur 3. "Fakevox" by Plus-Tech Squeezebox

I've managed to break every single string including low B at one point or another. Admittedly the low B was on a set that was several years old and back in the 90s when getting decent 36" scale B strings that were any good was a lot harder than it is nowadays. I always take a spare bass (and spare strings) when I'm gigging. I've not broken many strings actually at a gig (IIRC 3 in almost 40 years) but ever since I broke a string at one of my very first gigs on bass and didn't have either a spare bass or a replacement string, I've been prepared.

Thanks! As soon as I have the time I'll go and check both out. Having it look like a traditional bass amp is of little importance to me - after all I'm the bassist whose main bass is a Gus G3, The wedge profile should take up less room on shared gear stages and the weird setup will discourage more conventional bassists from wanting to borrow my rig at these gigs.

Having played one of these as well as several EB3s, I can categorically state that the Warwick has pretty much nothing in common with the Gibson models except that it may superficially look the same to someone who doesn't know much about bass guitars.