tedmanzie

i found this snippet: “The neck on the P bass is a ’63 and the body had a fretless neck on it when I bought it in 1970. The Meters didn’t like the fretless concept, and I was ordered to get rid of it or ‘they would break it,’ in the words of Art Neville. Basically, I really liked the tone of that particular bass and the CBS pickups more than I liked the sound of the original P basses. The CBS basses seemed to have a lot more punch to them. So instead of looking for another bass, I went looking for a neck to put on that bass.” but i think the first meters was late 60s so presumably he had others first.

neil bought my filter twin. great deal, speedy and great comms. cheers

[quote name='51m0n' timestamp='1351850386' post='1856093'] Love The Meters. Its not as dry a recording as you might think. Yes the instruments sound quite dry (bit of room on the drums, could well be a kit recorded with as little as two mics, more likely just four I think), but there is a fair amount of room on the vocals, probably either a plate or a real reverb chamber . Drum sound is typical 70's funk, super damped skins (get your drummer to put his wallet on the snare to get that close to this), and a totally unhyped kick drum (you would never get away with that plop kick sound in a contemporary band, but its just exactly right for this). Tiny bit of a spring reverb (might be a plate) on the guitar and thats it I reckon, its there but its just so small, bit more when the guitar is taking a bit of a break though. The sense of dryness is more the lack of instrumentation, and the space given to everything. Its far cleverer than just nopt using any reverb or delay ambience. There is not a hint of the need to hype the top end, all the normal culprits fo rthis obsession (guitar, vocal, cymbals) are really kept under control, which just makes everything sound far easier to listen to. They are so unafraid to keep the mojo in the mid range and not try and get into a war for presence in the mix. Masses of saturation though, lots of hard driven tape and mic-pres to get that sound. Yes you can do it to digital today for sure, but you have to aim for it from the get go and not get distracted with the far wider available frequency response availalble on digital than on cheaply pressed 45's in the 70's. Its fair to say that this stuff almost entirely mixed itself on the way to the tape, i doubt they did much but bring up the faders and ride them a bit for the mix. A little very gentle eq-ing and that plate/chamber verb on the vocals and its time to party.... Just a tonne of mojo going on in there though! [/quote] i agree with all this, and yes you're right it's not totally fx free - quite a long decay on the guitar reverb actually. very deep bass though for a recording from this era (i'm listening to look-ka py py). i've got an repress, don't know if that's helping. such a nice round bass sound! i agree the cymbals are better like this. also the [b]kick[/b]. modern stuff, and almost ALL larger than pub gigs i've been to seem to think that kick drums should sound like a [i]depth charge[/i] going off. i can't stand that enormous booming kick sound! booooom. personally i'm not a fan of old school 'stereo' panning and when i listen at my studio i often kick it into mono. i would be totally happy with just one big speaker to be honest! one speaker is more like a huge being 'talking' to you... this is another thread...

by the way, these albums have made me want a P-Bass.

yeah the up front unreverbed sound was what i mean't by dry, but i agree it also applies to the no frills playing style. totally agree about mr m[color=#282828][font=helvetica, arial, sans-serif]odeliste (!!!) and n[/font][/color]ocentelli too! in fact i got into the meters in that order - drums, then guitar, and more recently bass. makes you wonder if modern recordings just capture too much, or the the engineers are trying to make everything too spangly. modern recordings can be pretty fashionably 'dry' but they don't sound like this.

I've had "The Meters" and "Struttin" for ages on vinyl, but for some reason just picked up "Look-Ka Py Py" this week. [b]wow[/b] i had forgotten how unbelievably brilliant this band was. so sparse and funky, and an amazingly dry sound. anyone here a fan of George Porter, Jr?

Are these still for sale? I've been trying cashews for a while but I can't used to the size. What's the radius of these?

Just demo'd and bought a Fender Jazz at Dave's house. Great chap, good deal, lovely bass, thanks again