BigRedX

[quote name='PaulGibsonBass' timestamp='1465389699' post='3067753'] It's just a gig with a rowdy (but good natured, non threatening) young crowd eyeball to eyeball with us in a hot, cramped, low ceiling bar! Beer can get spilt, machine heads can get knocked, leads can get stood on and pulled out. No one's going to get hurt, nothing is at risk, I would just rather take a £200 bass into that kind of environment than a £1000 one! It's going to a blast and I can't wait. [/quote] Well then there's no need to worry. I'd be happy to take one of my £5k+ basses to a gig like that.

At the sort of venue where there was a real risk to my musical equipment I would be far more worried about my own personal safety. Instruments can be repaired or replaced, that what you have insurance for - you do have insurance don't you? Human body parts aren't so easy to repair and replace, at least not to the standard where I would be able to carry on doing my job and enjoy playing in a band.

[quote name='Truckstop' timestamp='1465317447' post='3067091'] I think most high-end instruments don't actually get used that much. Never seen anyone down the Frog and Twat with a Ritter or Fodera. [/quote] The cheapest bass I'm currently using to gig with has a new replacement value of just under £3k. The others I use cost considerably more. I'm playing rowdy punk/psychobilly gigs most weekends. At gigs I'm careful with my instruments but not precious about them. As others have said if you really don't look after them then they stop working reliably and that gets in the way of the performance. On the other hand a few knocks and scrapes won't affect them and if they get too battered looking then I can always get them refinished and looking brand new again.

[quote name='JTUK' timestamp='1465322641' post='3067170'] Be gobsmacked then.... the rehearsal needs to produce something otherwise it is pointless. If I want to hang out with mates, I don't need to do this dressed up as a rehearsal. [/quote] JTUK do you even like music?

[quote name='dannelson' timestamp='1465291466' post='3066752'] Just another shout out for OBBM! Have ordered a variety of leads from Dave over the last year, all still going strong. On the subject of planet waves, I've never had one of their cables that didn't break! It's quite pathetic really, this includes their cheap and more expensive options. The only good thing they do are the cable ties! [/quote] IME the screen on most store-bought leads is the minimum that the manufacturer thinks they can get away with. Generally it will be a loosely woven wrap. Unsurprisingly this will be the bit that fails not matter how carefully you coil your leads after use.

[quote name='wateroftyne' timestamp='1465294169' post='3066790'] [url="http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/latestnews/2015/uks-best-part-time-band"]There's a summary at the bottom of this page.[/url] [/quote] I suppose the clause about not having a recording deal or being in negotiations for one would be sticking point for some of the better known bands, but these days I unless the band is selling a significant number of records/CDs/downloads I doubt being signed to a record label would be sufficient to financially support a whole band.

Does anyone still have a link or has saved a copy of the entry terms and conditions for this? If it was mostly that being in a band wasn't your main source of income, given the current state of the music business I think you'll find that a lot of well-known bands might have qualified...

[quote name='owen' timestamp='1465291314' post='3066751'] I used to have a Reverend Brad Houser in bug eye chrome. It has no bearing on this topic but hearing the name Reverend made me remember and it was a cool memory. [/quote] And IMO part of the problem with the lack of popularity of the current bass range is down to how unique and desirable the original Rumblefish basses were.

I used to buy all the components and make up my own leads, because I had my own home studio and required cable runs of very specific lengths and often different connectors wired in very particular ways at each end of the cable. However when I need some more basic jack-to-jack leads for my new bass rig 6 years ago, I ordered them from OBBM. I could have probably made my own for slightly less money, but certainly not once I figured in the cost of my time to do it. All these leads are still functioning as perfectly as the day I received them. They most definitely last longer than any of the shop-bought leads I've owned.

[quote name='Andyjr1515' timestamp='1465228639' post='3066326'] No - much simpler than that. As you can see, I had to infill at the neck to get the neck pickup in the correct place and hide the original rout, but also there were a myriad of drilled holes from the original bridge. The stop-tail routs sorted some of them out but a coordinating piece of walnut to the bridge infill meant I could get rid of the remaining ones Maybe getting on for as easy to build from scratch, but with the horrifying cost of decent wood, it would have added approaching £400 to the cost. Besides - and again you see this more in real life than in the photos - it really does now look like a well cared for [u]original [/u]1970s bass. You would struggle to get that same mojo with all new wood... Good questions, though, BigRedX [/quote] Thanks for that! I'd forgotten about all those existing extra bridge holes. And I didn't realise that decent wood for building musical instruments was so expensive these days. It's a long time since I made my first electric guitar but I don't think the wood I used cost anything like that much.

[quote name='Conan' timestamp='1465223909' post='3066265'] How were the bands selected? How did they bring themselves to the attention of the programme makers? It was clearly filmed in the winter, but I don't recall hearing anything about it at that time... [/quote] IIRC there was a thread on here when the original call for entries came out some time last year. My band had a look at entering this but either we didn't fulfil the criteria or the rights issues regarding the use of the songs was too restrictive for us to consider it, I don't remember which.

IMO the simplest way to future-proof your computer-based recording system, is to buy a cheap computer running the OS of your choice that supports your current audio interface, and reserve it just for doing music on. I bought a second-hand 3Ghz 8-core Mac Pro with 32GB RAM for £300 - I could have got one for less if I'd been able to travel to pick it up in person. It will run any Mac OS from Snow Leopard onwards and therefore will support Logic 8 onwards with the right OS. Has more than enough processing power for what ever you need to do and room for 4 internal SATA drives so you are unlikely to ever run out of room for recording or samples to use with your plug-in instruments. I've made recordings that have been released on CD and got national radio play on machines with considerably lower specifications - you don't need to latest version of anything to make great sounding recordings.

Wow! That's a fantastic looking bass, and a brilliant bit of restoration/construction. A couple of questions: 1. The extra large route and the block of new wood at the bridge was that to give the bridge something a bit more stable to be fitted to rather than the neck laminations? 2. A while there's no denying that it's a brilliant piece of work and great to see a discarded instrument brought to life, I can't quite help but wonder if it would have been cheaper and easier to have started from scratch with some new wood? ;-)

I spent a whole morning at the Sadowsky workshop when it was in Brooklyn trying out their basses and came to the conclusion that they all sounded better with the built-in pre-amp turned off.

A "proper" 8-string! ;-) Does it have a separately adjustable saddle for each string in the pair?

[quote name='wateroftyne' timestamp='1465217280' post='3066169'] That was a great bit of dialogue. Good on them for leaving it in. [/quote] But it was a lazy and inaccurate dig. Most mainstream music has always been mediocre. But that's what helps the truly interesting stuff stand out. Unfortunately IMO none of the bands on this programme really captured the imagination. On the evidence of the snippets of music presented, Bombskare were the most entertaining band by a long long way - although with ska being such uplifting good-time music you have to be pretty crap not to be able to capitalise on this. Then it was just a question of which of the other bands were going to be the least dull in order to get through... Musically it all seemed to be rather predictably worthy and tedious, the sort of things that musicians rather than real audiences find interesting. I would have liked to have seen and heard more from the skiffle band, as they seemed to be a bit less obvious than the bands that did make it through.

[quote name='skidder652003' timestamp='1465120170' post='3065372'] Anyway, my question was how often do you introduce new material into the set, every week? Every month? Do you have a completely new set every year or do you have a few perennial favourites that you can't drop? (For us thats the usual Dad Rock stuff - Hendrix, Zepp, Cream - Yawn...) [/quote] As quickly as we can write then and get them suitably rehearsed to be able to gig. On average we write about 20 songs every year of which half will make it to a gigable state. IMO nothing is sacred. We no longer play any of the songs from our debut EP in the set, although we still practice "StickyPants" for the occasional encore.

There simply isn't such a thing as a future-proof audio interface. The only way to do it would be to stop updating any of your software including the OS.

Finally got around to changing the strings and shimming the neck. First things: the neck on mine is a very tight fit in the pocket and I managed to chip the finish on the treble side whilst removing it. Luckily I found the missing piece of finish and I'll probably be able to glue it back in place once I'm happy with the new neck angle. So far it's looking good. When fitting the LaBella round wound strings I wound more onto the machine head posts to get a better break angle - I found that I needed 8cm on the low E, 10cm on the A, D and G and 6cm on the B and high E to get what I considered a good angle and I might still consider fitting a second string tree for the D and G strings. The new strings have made a massive difference already. Aside from getting a low E string with a decent tension the LaBellas have gone a long way to evening out the tonal differences between the strings. They are also nowhere near as bright sounding as the stock strings which is better if you want to use this instrument as a "normal" bass with an extended note range but not quite so good IMO if you are more interested in Cure/New Order type sounds. However raising the bridge has made the short-comings of the design much more noticeable. Now that it is sitting higher on the pillars the tendency for it the move backwards and forwards is significantly pronounced. A Staytrem bridge with the wider pillars will fix this, but I've also read about people who simply used a metal collars of the correct internal and external dimensions to stop the bridge from moving. Also the pickups need raising (especially the one closest to the bridge) otherwise the instrument sounds really weedy compared with before. AFAICS there isn't as much scope for changing the pickup height as it stands so I might have to look at some longer screws and better springs next time I change the strings. I'm going to leave the strings to settle down and get used to the new tone before I make any more setup adjustments, so I'll report back sometime next week when I've done that. @Musicman20. Right now all I've spent money on is a new set of strings which at some point you'll need to anyway even if the supplied strings were any good. I'm probably going to try some collars around the bridge posts before deciding whether or not to invest in a Staytrem bridge. So if you think you can live with the supplied bridge and don't need to lock down the vibrato then it's definitely good value for money.

I was lucky in that I learnt the hard way, early on, the importance of carrying spares. At one of my very first proper gigs I broke a string during the opening number. I didn't even have a spare string let alone a spare bass. The bassist in the headlining band very kindly let me use his bass to allow my band to do our set. Unfortunately it was a horrible Violin bass copy on a strap so long it hung down my knees and had absolutely zero sustain. The following week I went out and bought myself a cheap back-up bass and a spare set of strings. So nowadays, like a lot of other people here, I'm organised and because I play other instruments I always have a case of spares and tools to cover the majority of non-drum-related problems. I'm happy to break this out when needed because the rest of my band are normally well organised themselves, and so it's only required in dire emergencies. However if I was to find myself in a band with some of the people described here, I'd be tempted to replace the contents of the case with things that would do the job, but not in an easy or comfortable way. For instance the only guitar strings would be a set of extra heavy flat-wound jazz guitar. The jack to jack leads would all be either 4ft or 40ft long etc. Hopefully they would get used once in emergency and then the "musician" in question would sort themselves out so that they didn't need to borrow stuff off me again.

[url=http://www.rogerlinndesign.com/adrenalinn-iii.html]Linn Adrenalinn[/url]?

[quote name='chris_b' timestamp='1464789829' post='3062562'] Why do fans think that a band should be fixed in time and that they all should just stop playing if the band line up changes? [/quote] No, not at all, a new line-up with new material that reflects the current composition of the band is a good thing. I think what both myself and the OP object to is bands that become "Triggers Broom" and continue to just live in a past that few of the current line-up have any real connection to.

[quote name='discreet' timestamp='1464785817' post='3062485'] If it's a famous name that has sold a lot of records over decades then that name has a current value which can be calculated to the decimal point. No-one in their right mind is going to give that up for a moral principle or some half-baked idea of 'respect' for the brand. [/quote] No, not at all. But as an audience we can decide whether or not to go an see a band based on who is still in the line-up. I think you have to take every case on its individual merits, but IMO once the main creative force(s) and focal point(s) of the band (not always the same people) have gone the are unlikely to be worth my time as a live act any more. A case in point is one of my favourite bands - The Pretty Things. The line up has changed massively over the years and the only constant member has been singer and lyricist Phil May. The currently gigging line-up includes original guitarist Dick Taylor and three new members (although one of those has been in the live band for over 20 years now!) and consequently the set draws on the material recorded before 1969 when Taylor left the band. I was lucky enough to be able to have a brief chat with Phil May after one of their 50th Anniversary gigs and asked what the chances were of seeing them play some of their 70s material, to which he replied it would be very unlikely without a line-up containing more of the people who played on those recordings than just him. That IMO is the proper way to do it.

Or have a go at making your own. Then you'll get to see exactly how good value OBBMs are.

If you have week off you'll have plenty of time to get to all the major bass shops in the UK.