BigRedX

Unfortunately for scientific methodology "as identical as possible" is not close enough. It has to be EXACTLY the same otherwise you can't rule out construction as the reason for the difference is sound. And even having the same musician playing the instruments isn't good enough. I'm a very average player, but I know that I unconsciously adjust my playing technique to match the sound of the instrument I am playing. Plus a sample of one of each three different bodies is statistically meaningless. The whole point of the "tone wood myth" for solid instruments is that tonal qualities can absolutely be attributed to a single type of wood used in the construction of an instrument. As we can see and hear it is very easy to make instruments that sound different, what we need to be able to do is make instruments made from the same woods sound consistently the same (while sounding obviously different from otherwise identical instruments made from different wood) over hundreds of examples.

IIRC Ten Years After were Mansfield-based? Jake Bug has pretty much fallen off the radar after his one moderately successful album. Sleaford Mods seem to be doing better, but I just can't shake the image I have of them from their very early days when they supported the band I was in and were astoundingly underwhelming. Bands form Nottingham who have done well after leaving the city - Stereo MCs, posh boys from Ruddington (I was at school with them), and Tindersticks who started of life in Nottingham in the 80s as various far more musically interesting bands before deciding to move to London and become Nick Cave Lite.

Yes I did. AFAIK the Marleaux version of the Pagelli Bass was a different instrument to the Diva, hence my comment.

Then they should buy a different bass. Surely the whole point of having lots of different designs is that somewhere there will be the right bass for everyone. Otherwise we should all play Fender Precissions and be done with it.

IIRC there were some Pagelli badged basses built by Marleaux. Certainly when I asked Pagelli about getting a "Golden Bass" made he pointed me in the direction of Marleaux who then ignored all my emails.

Never happens for me. I really don't care about the individual musicians. It's the songs and the overall arrangements that are important. Good bands are always greater than the sum of their parts anyway.

Nottingham is ace (at least compared to Mansfield it is). 😉 However considering it's size and the fact that it has a vibrant local music scene, it doesn't seem to be able to produce the number of nationally well-known artists that other similar cities seen to do. And some of the best known "Nottingham" bands have had to move away from the city and ignore the fact that they came from there in order to get any real success.

Do they? But there are over 40 different species of tree that are included in the "Ash" family. As far as the timber merchant is concerned they are all ash. But they are all biologically different so it follows that the timber they produce must have slightly different qualities. If the wood used on a solid electric instrument is important to its sound then manufacturers should be telling us exactly which species of Ash is being used. And where it comes from, because "ash" grows in a wide variety of climatic conditions all of which will have an impact on the way the layers of grain that go to make up the trunk of the tree and produced and in turn the timber that comes from it as a result.

No of course it hasn't. You'd need to do it with hundreds of instruments, and you still wouldn't have a definitive answer because every piece of wood is different, so there is no way of telling if it was actually the body wood that was making a difference and not some other variance in the construction. Even if you did tests where you just swapped the body and kept everything else exactly the same, first you'd need to eliminate the possibility that simply disassembling and reassembling the instrument didn't result in changes in the sound. If you could get to the point where it was possible to consistently rebuild the instrument without changing the sound you would then need a scientifically valid number of bodies - say 25-50 of each type of wood. All the bodies would need to be exactly the same size and shape, and each made of a single piece of wood to eliminate any effect joining two pieces of wood together might have. Until someone can go to this trouble and expense all you can say is that every instrument will sound slightly different to the others, and it is impossible to pin-point exactly which factors are causing those difference.

Depends on the bass. IME there is no one brand/type gauge of string that suits every bass. In the past I have spent between £10 and £60 for a set depending on what worked best for each particular bass. At the moment for the four basses I use regularly I have four different sets of strings costing between £20 and £35

And Carl Thompson, another highly skilled and renowned luthier, has said that there is no way of telling what an electric bass will sound like until it has been finished.

Both of those changes would have made a difference to the sound of the bass. However, it would have been slight and until they were made there was no way of knowing if they would be an improvement (which in itself is completely subjective). We also don't know what other tweaks to the setup of the bass were made at the same time, or if simply the act of dismantling and re-assembling what is essentially a very ordinary factory-made instrument would have been responsible for most of the "improvements" in sound. There of course is the placebo effect, and the fact that no-one will want to admit that complicated and expensive modifications to their instrument will have resulted in it sounding worse. As with all these anecdotes there is no scientific method and the data itself is completely subjective.

For one band where a play a more "traditional" bass guitarist's role I have a pair of 34" scale 5-string basses. For the other where I play both "bass" and "melody" parts (alternating with the synth player) I use a 30" scale Bass VI. Whilst I could play a lot of the first band's bass lines on the Bass VI, it wouldn't be a particularly pleasant experience. Most the things I play on the Bass VI are impossible to play on a conventional 4 or 5 string bass.

I play in two very different bands and therefore need two very different basses.

Well it's certainly not Nottingham.

If you can't gig why not work on recording and songwriting?

For me time spent learning a song I'll never otherwise play is time taken away from writing new songs that I probably will play.

IMO it's a big enough category for it to be a top level forum within "Gear" and not a sub-forum and certainly not a sub forum of "Other Instruments".

One of my bands supported Toyah just before COVID and from the songs I recognised, the live arrangements were quite a bit different from the versions I knew from the records.

I've owned a lot of very expensive audio interfaces over the past 25 years, but these days for bass and guitar I use the USB output of my Line6 Helix. This lets me record the bass with and without the effects applied simultaneously, so if I not 100% sure about the sounds I want to use I can then run the direct recorded sound through the Helix Native plugin and tweak the parameters whilst listening to the playback. When I'm happy I can then download the edited patch back into the Helix to use when I play the song live.

I briefly experimented with using my Linn Adrenalinn in one of the effects loops of the Helix which would give me the sorts of synth sounds I wanted but still with the flexibility of signal chain positioning that the Helix allows. In the end I decided that it was too much faff, and if I couldn't get the sounds I wanted out of the Helix on its own, I'd stick a "keyboard" synth sound that I wanted on the backing, and blend it with a suitable bass or guitar like sound from my playing through the Helix. That has worked perfectly well for me.

I'm a very average bass player who doesn't drive or own a car (I have passed my test and have a clean driving licence, but I'm a crap driver and IMO a menace to other road users so I don't drive), and very occasionally because I'm self employed work has to take preference over music. However I'd like to think that as a band member, I'm enthusiastic and have plenty of experience of gigging and recording, a decent composer and arranger, a good graphic designer with plenty of contacts for getting things printed cheaply/for free, and have my own good quality recording setup and rehearsal space (for bands without acoustic drums), means that for the last 45+ years of playing in bands years my short-comings have been more than out-weighed by the positives.

Until the cookies and tracking policy is more transparent and all cookies over than ones essential for the login functions of Basschat to work can be easily to rejected without having the deselect each one separately, Basschat has been relegated to its own browser where all cookies and other browsing history are automatically flushed on quit. No links in posts will be followed and no other sites will be visited from this browser rendering all the tracking data useless.

I think what they mean is that it is based on all those horrible telecaster-shaped basses produced in the far east in the 60s and 70s that were often shorter than 30" scale length. The actual Fender Telecaster Bass doesn't have the same body shape as the Telecaster Guitar.

That's one of the great things about the Helix. Not only can every preset have a different selection of effects in a completely different order, but using the set lists I can keep all the different requirements completely separate. So I have one set list for each band I play in plus one for when I'm playing/recording guitar at home. One each set list I have one or two default presets that have all the effects I would normally use with that band in the order that I would normally want them, so creating a new preset for a song has been made much easier.