musophilr

I'm a guitarist who can find his way around a bass. It annoys me when people claim that a bass is a guitar with thicker (and usually fewer) strings. It's function within a band is different, and the techniques required to operate it are different. The visual similarity to the electric guitar is just that and no more. The instrument is a bass, it isn't a guitar (regardless of what Leo might have originally called it). /rant

Audition Thursday. I can play all the stuff I've been told to prepare, and have learnt it except the song I got out of a book. Still can't play it without the dots in front of me. AARRGGHHHH! Once upon a time with a different band they criticised me for taking sheet music on stage. I said "I can play it right with the dots or get it wrong without them, which would you prefer?" Eventually they sacked me, allegedly for different reasons but my sheet music must have had something to do with it. Don't want the same to happen again. Why is some music so hard to memorise?

[quote name='flyfisher' timestamp='1329775661' post='1547286'] More to the point, does your audience look at your band and think "you pathetic bunch of sad losers pretending to be rock stars but the only gigs you can get are sh*tty ones like this etc, etc. Just sayin' [/quote] Quite! Camel are one of my favourite bands. It isn't just low-grade gig audiences I despise for not liking Camel it's nearly everyone who doesn't like Camel, but most of the time I manage not to let it show.

IMO the best results with Gibbo-type controls are had when you dial in the soloing sound you want with the front (neck) pickup on full bore (nice fat sound), then you roll off the back (bridge) pickup for a non-muddy-still-cutting-through rhythm sound. You might find that because the front pickup is often quite dark, your back pickup might require a little tone rolloff as well to avoid it slicing like a cut-throat razor. Then there's the mix of the two: blend the back pickup (with the tone rolled right off) with the front pickup (with the tone all the way up), use a fair bit of overdrive. You get that sustained flute-y Andrew Latimer Camel-y sound that's smooth but it's still got some treble in it. I find Gibbo type controls on a guitar are so useful (and so much second nature to use) that I find operating things like Strats is just, well, inconvenient.

Good thread. FWIW I'm being auditioned (again) for a bass gig this week and they gave me a list of songs to learn. Some of them I can play note for note (assuming I've heard the original correctly), in a few places I've thought of elaborations I could use if they were considered to be enhancements, and the odd one or two basslines are "intelligent guesswork" which seems to fit when I play with the original. There's a Shadows number for which I can read the bass part out of the book, but that's not helping me to learn it! I guess I'm starting with the original each time with the willingness to nobble it later if I have to.

Nobody likes to hear this kind of stuff going down, and you have my sympathy as I too have invested bits of myself in projects that either fell apart or were prevented from reaching potential. The upside is being a bass player you can choose your gig

Guitarists either use the "It's my sound, maan" excuse for being too loud, or they blame the drummer. (I know, I am one!) Having said that, IMO you need to be able to play at reduced volume 'cos they might ask you to do that at a gig where they're paying you good money and you have to do what they're paying you to do. Therefore you should not only practice playing the dots, you should practice playing them at various volume levels. And you have to accept that in some cases you might have to compromise on tone quality if you've been relying on a cranked amplifier. It IS possible for a drummer to get a powerful rock sound without bashing seven bells of hell out of the skins, I know a chap who can do that. But just as a guitarist might have to accept a compromise on tone quality, so should other band members. BTW try nobbling the vocal EQ as follows: (1) take out the bass. The female voice produces almost no sound in that frequency band anyway so you're losing nothing by doing so other than the opportunity for bass frequencies to start feeding back. (2) Hike the 3kHz mid-range by 3dB, it will make the vocals stick out a bit more I don't like the yellow spongy earplugs, they cut treble and some midrange and let in all the bass, so you get a highly bass-biased version of the sound. The ~£180 personally moulded jobs are very good.

[IMG]http://i1202.photobucket.com/albums/bb376/musophilr/TheWorkplace.jpg[/IMG]

There was one referenced from the Music Radar forum some time ago. Might take a while to find it. Edit: Eureka. [url="http://www.guitarstorage.com/studio-guitar-case-racks/"]http://www.guitarstorage.com/studio-guitar-case-racks/[/url] [url="http://www.totally-free-woodworking-plans.com/guitar-rack-plans.html"]http://www.totally-free-woodworking-plans.com/guitar-rack-plans.html[/url] Does this help?

Chords which change under a constant melody note. The first time I became aware of it was in Mary Hopkin's eurovision song [i]Knock Knock Who's there[/i], in the chorus "the door is always open [u]wide[/u]" (the underlined word). I wasn't quite a teenager then. Later on, I discovered other instances of chords which change under a constant melody note on Focus and Camel albums.

[quote name='BigRedX' timestamp='1329235730' post='1539308'] For me Punk was about not accepting (the) status quo. That just because rock music has been created in a particular way in the past doesn't mean that you should continue to create it that was in the future. And it needed to be horribly destructive to make a sufficiently big enough impact against the rather pedestrian music that prevailed at the time. [/quote] I don't recall Les Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, Yes, Camel, Focus et al making "pedestrian" music, although there was a fair bit of it in the pop charts. Rock'n'Roll started growing up in the mid-late 1960s - by the mid 70s it reached a height of maturity which punk then managed to destroy and has not been regained since, except in niche markets such as jazz/rock fusion and some of the seriously technical metal.

[quote name='Low End Bee' timestamp='1329235256' post='1539291'] I think you're reading too much into punk. I would say it's goals were to eradicate ELP and wear straight trousers. [/quote] If you say so, but to me the whole thing seemed horribly destructive. I quite understand a backlash against pap like "How deep is your love" but IMO it really did throw the baby out with the bathwater.

[quote name='thepurpleblob' timestamp='1329224778' post='1539029'] I'm not surprised that these kids don't know Paul McCartney. What ired me more was the "I live in the now" attitude shown a number of times. As if "modern" music just appeared out of nowhere. From nothing. With no history. Arses [/quote] That's the legacy of punk for you. Punk demanded you ignored everything that was ever understood to be commonly accepted wisdom about music - including the idea that to make music you should know something about it.

Sound (or sounds - versatility), playability, design/build quality - reliability. Colour would be a consideration if there were a choice between two otherwise equal instruments, or if it was so hideous as to be puke-worthy. But I bought my silver RBX375 without even noticing the colour, the instrument satisfied me in every other respect.

Scissor Sisters - I don't feel like dancing Journey - Open Arms .. for audition next week

[quote name='discreet' timestamp='1329143762' post='1537701'] The drummer always turns up, which is great - but he's [i]always[/i] late. In my view he should arrive [i]before[/i] everyone else, as he has to spend thirty minutes setting up his kit, thus wasting the time of those who were punctual! What [i]is[/i] the matter with these people? [/quote] A drummer I knew would leave it until the time the gig/rehearsal was about to start, before saying "I guess we'd better load the wagon. let's have one more spliff first". This was tolerated as he was a most excellent drummer, but we got around it by telling him the start time was 90 min or 2 hours before. So if we wanted to start at 2030 we'd tell him 1830 ...

What skankdelvar said plus when the guitarist can get away from the minor pentatonic rooted on the root of the I chord (often other soloists do but the guitarists don't). I'm quite happy for bass players to arpeggiate the chords though - sometimes (as a contrast to a chorus full of roots).

I've still got it. tbh it's probably not worth much more than the gig bag I keep it in, but you can make me an offer ...

People who are irrelevant showing their ignorance ...

[url="http://www.DasBarockOrchester.co.uk"]www.DasBarockOrchester.co.uk[/url] [url="http://www.musica-electrica.co.uk"]www.musica-electrica.co.uk[/url]

The reason most of us can pick up a newspaper and read it even though we've never seen that text before is because we've been reading our language since early school age. We'd be just as good at music if we read music each day year in year out.

I once failed to get to a band practice (as guitarist) because the bike I'd been riding home from the day job spat me off on a bend. Result was right shoulder dislocated (pushed in by about 3") with the ball joint cracked in two. Was a long time before I could get my arm over anything fatter than an SG.

[quote name='JTUK' timestamp='1328883232' post='1534313'] I would not like to take your own monitors as the P.A co can get a bit liberal with what they put through them if they can't provide to a decent spec, I don't know why you would use them as a company, personally [/quote] Ah, what I meant was the band controls its own foldback from its half of the splitter outputs and the FoH bloke can do what he likes with his half!

If you regularly play where there's a house PA with not enough foldback sends, is it worth taking your own monitoring system with enough splitters to feed your monitoring system and the house PA ? Has anyone tried using a Jamhub with IEM onstage?

[quote name='solo4652' timestamp='1328873342' post='1534020'] The porn studio next door has complained about the noise [/quote] Why weren't you recording the soundtracks for them ? (A band I was in did a sleazy version of [i]Feelin' Alright[/i] which had me using wah on the guitar and some said it sounded like a porn soundtrack )