peteb

You might not care, but if someone turned up to the jam night I used to do had a bit of a decent CV, then we wanted to play with them. Quite often (especially the jams at the blues festivals), pretty much everybody on the stage had done more than I had, which was great because I got the opportunity to play with some excellent players that I otherwise wouldn't have done. My point was that if someone like @chris_b had turned up to one of those jams, we would have asked him to get up rather than him having to ask us and we would have been happy for him to use my bass. All I expect is the same respect that I would show to you, semi-professional courtesy if you will. I would always take a decent enough bass to these sessions and always let other people use it (assuming that they seemed OK) and never had the slightest issue with them treating it with respect. As far as expensive basses go, the first of these jam sessions that I went to (which was kinda like an informal audition for the BL's own blues band), I was called up as soon as I walked in (I was onstage before I had chance to pay for my drinks at the bar) and handed a Fodera that was being used as a house bass for the night! It didn't even belong to the guy playing in the house band, a friend of the BL had just got it and asked the other guy if he wanted to try it out. It's a guitar, not a woman! The other guy who used to do it when I wasn't around used to bring a Mexican Jazz bass rather than his American P bass, which was perfectly fine. I generally used to bring an American Jazz bass or, sometimes a Stingray - no harm at all ever came to any bass that I let others play.

Fair enough, but completely different to any event that I've done. If you were to turn up at the jam nights that I used to do a few years ago and we knew about you, the BL would be making a point of asking you to get up. If I had said 'he's not using my bass', then I wouldn't have been asked back as part of the house band!

So, here's a scenario. I'm visiting someone in your town and they get me to come to your jam night. They come and say to you, we've got someone new in the audience tonight who's happy to get up and who's played loads of festivals, played with people who you may have heard of and been on a couple of albums. Are you going to say we're not going to invite him up because he doesn't carry a bass when he travels? I've done loads of these events, some (especially the ones at festivals) where there are some pretty decent players getting up. I would never take a £5k bass to a jam night, I generally just used to take out a bog standard four string Fender Jazz. We never used to allow drunks or idiots to get up (you can always tell) and even if they weren't the greatest players, we never had any issues. Some of the jam nights were great, but the regular ones used to run out of steam after a bit because you just get the same guys coming week after week. Insisting that you only play with guys who bring their own bass is only going to make that worse. It seems a bit pointless to me.

My view has always been that if you are not prepared to let someone else play your bass, then you shouldn't take a gig as the bass player in the house band at a jam session.

I'm always a little bit surprised about this. A ew years ago, I used to be the bass player for a few jam nights, either at a pub in the next town or a couple of blues festivals that a guy I played for was involved in. A few people would bring their own instrument, but the expectation was that you would provide a house bass that most people who got up would use. I generally would bring something decent, but usually not my main gigging bass (for the pub jams at least). To be fair, I would feel a bit stupid dragging a bass to a jam night where I didn't know any of the guys and might not get called up. I suppose, different jams have different ways of doing things.

Mark Bass gear just works! I've gigged a couple of their combos (102 & 103) and still have a LM3 head. Not necessarily the most impressive amps I've ever owned, but they never let me down and always worked well in a mix. If for some reason, I was forced to use MB for the rest of my gigging career, I wouldn't complain!

I know a few guys who have bought a cheaper guitar / bass just for fly gigs, as they can't face the thought of trusting their beloved (and expensive) guitars to the tender embraces of airport baggage handlers!

In my experience, most musicians at that level don't (unless they are being paid to promote them). There are exceptions and I have seen guys occasionally turn up with a decent Squier (the great Jack Pearson's main guitar is a Squier strat), but those are few and far between.

But I'm not in the market as I've got a few basses of a similar quality, all of which I paid about £1.5k more or less (actually £900 to £1.7k, but thereabouts)! The OP is looking for something similar for that budget, and as you say, a Japanese Sadowsky at £1.3k could be the last bass he ever has to buy. I've been gigging for many (40+) years and have been lucky enough to play with quite a few guys who make their living from playing music (or used to), some of whom have been in famous bands, or played with people who have been in very famous bands. One thing they have in common is that none of them play entry level instruments as their main gigging guitar / keyboard / whatever. I don't know any bass player at that level who plays a headless Hofner or whatever. But what do I know...

All really good choices. If I was in the market for a 4 string jazz, I would definitely buy @jay-syncro's Sadowsky!

Basses on which I would normally install a Badass Any non-recent Fender I think that they do give you a bit more sustain and I prefer the sound and feel of them, although others might prefer a BBOT. But let's face it, it's all very marginal and it makes very little difference in a mix. However, both of my 70s P basses have a badass on them, while my more recent Fender Jazz basses (both American Standards) do not!

That's a great example - relatively easy to play, but all open strings. No chance of playing it properly in any other way!

Really? To be frank, that must have sounded bloody awful! The crowd might have enjoyed it, but they will notice the difference the next time they hear a band play it properly! If you're going to be a musician, you have to be careful about trying to get away with the bare minimum a crowd will accept. That's a sure way of never getting beyond the lowest pub gigs. To be fair, you can go too far the other way and get OCD about doing everything note perfect. But it's still better to be able to play things right than trying to get away with doing it wrong.

I would suggest that the OP insists the band makes its mind up and commits to one tuning or the other, with presumably Down 1 (i.e. in Eb) being the way to go. I play in different bands that play in different tunings, so I have some basses set up in Concert (using 50 - 105 gauge strings) and others down 1 (55 - 110 strings). I do have a P bass with a slightly higher action in Concert than my other basses, so I have the option of tuning it down for certain (mainly blues) gigs.

But as you will know, playing it an octave higher doesn't sound right. A mate of mine put a Hipshot Xtender on the E string of a 5 string bass, for playing this song and stuff like Soundgarden (where loads of songs are in Drop D).

The example I was going to use was Slither, which would be near impossible to play authentically on a bass in standard tuning or a 5 string! A lot of riffs utilise open strings, especially on guitar, but also on bass.

I kinda agree with you. There are many great bass sounds and in the right context, even a 'bad' tone can work. However, some people just sound f***in awful without doing anything about it. Of course, we just dismiss them as being cr*p without saying anything and thus they never reach their full potential (even in something as trivial as sounding good while playing an electric bass). The OP asked should they buy a new bass for £1.5k or a number of cheaper instruments. My advice (and yours) was to buy the best secondhand instrument for that budget, for which they can get something really good. I speak with a fair amount of experience, but it's up to them if they listen to me or not. I think the point you're getting at is why aim for mediocrity? To be good at anything, you have to commit to it. That means putting in the hours learning to play, doing loads of gigs with lots of different bands and getting decent quality gear. There's nothing wrong with having fun playing a budget bass in your bedroom and hanging out in bass forums. But if you want to take it further then you have to have a bit more commitment, and that includes buying better quality gear to enable you to get the gigs you need (that's the easy part).

I bought a secondhand Fender Precision, about a year or so old, from a shop for £200 in December 1979 when I was 18 years old. I'm still gigging that same bass today!

But surely EVH playing the Telecaster is the same as Lewis Hamilton driving the Mondeo? But the guy playing on the Grammy winning album won't have been playing a £200 Squier Affinity, nor is it particularly likely that he would have used a £35k Fodera. However, he might well have been playing a Fender / Stingray / Lakland (or whatever) that he picked up second hand for about £1,500. Which is the point of the thread / @chris_b and my original arguments, i.e. at the £1.5k budget the OP mentioned, you can start to get a bass that is really good and of noticeably better quality of a decent cheaper bass!

C'mon, good players will always sound better than mediocre players, regardless of what bass they are playing! But they will sound even better on a decent quality bass... You could put me in a Ferrari and Lewis Hamilton in a Mondeo and he will easily beat me around a racetrack. But he would lose heavily to any other F1 driver driving the Ferrari...!

There are both! Of course, you can get something playable and sounds OK these days for less. However, my point is that as @chris_b says, for £1.5k or thereabouts you start getting into a different league of basses and you can get something really good that you could gig forever. If you can't afford that, then there are perfectly reasonable cheaper options. However, £1.5k can get you a top quality secondhand bass!

I reckon that £1,500 is about the sweet spot for getting a really good secondhand bass! For that money, you are getting something that would cost around £2.5k new, which is pretty much the threshold of getting a really well made bass. If you have that much money to spend then why would you want three mediocre instruments rather than one top quality bass? You can only play one at a time, if you have one great bass and an OK spare then you're pretty much covered.

- Some do, but they are only impressed if you play something that they recognise from being used by the bass player of their favourite band - many are impressed if they see a Fender logo, but it doesn't go much beyond that - No, they don't, but... they will notice if your band doesn't sound as good as the last gig they went (of course, the bass sound is only a small part of that) - Oh yes they do, very much so - if you sound great and / or play a 'cool' bass, other musos will notice and you are a bit more likely to get called for more gigs (assuming that you can actually play) - Not to your average punter, but most musos will notice the difference and will actually care

Cheers Pete Always good to see you still playing out. Puts me in mind of Pinetop Perkins, the great American blues pianist, who died suddenly at age 99 of a heart attack, with a diary full of gigs booked for the coming year...!

I've been using a Shure GLXD for years now and it is by far the best wireless system that I have come across (and I've had loads over the years, going back to the first Nady systems i the 80s that used to pick up taxi companies in the middle of a gig)! My GLXD is one of the older ones that you can't plug a lead into, so I have a separate tuner on my board as well.