peteb

It's partly certain areas and partly the time of the year. No one seems to want to commit to buying advance tickets until they've had the first payday after the Christmas break! We have a couple of gigs on the weekend after next and they have done pretty well for ticket sales. But they are in a different part of the country (Scotland and the North East) and everyone has been paid again now!

Out of those three, definitely the first one - the other two are all the place! I've never heard the Bernie Marsden version before, but that's pretty close to what I've always played whenever I've had to do SG over the years.

We've cancelled a gig tomorrow due to low ticket sales. We played there last year and got a pretty good crowd, but its a difficult time of the year. The guy promoting there wants to try again later in the year, so we will see...

I think that you will need more than just guitar polish to get the cr*p off the body in the first place. There is some product that guitar techs use to clean bodies up. Unfortunately, I can't remember what it is (big help, I know), but it's nothing particularly unusual. Perhaps someone who works on guitars can advise. After that, then just use the standard polishes. EDIT: @tauzero mentioned isopropyl alcohol, which rings a bell. Whatever you use, it needs to be pretty mild.

🙂

I would have thought that these days, £1.5k would be a really good price (especially from a London based shop)! A very nice bass.

I used to have a bright red 4 string bolt-on neck Japanese Burner that I bought back in the early 90s for £520. I ended up selling it for just under a grand about 13 or 14 years ago. It was a great bass - sweet sounding, very light and played really well. Virtually every bassist I knew used to ask if I still had it whenever I bumped into them. It was the bass that I wished I had found several years before, when I switched from Fenders to active basses. I played a lot of gigs with it throughout the 90s, but in those old rock days I used to give my basses a bit of stick onstage and I was always worried that I was going break the damn thing (that headstock angle)! I was constantly re-adjusting the truss rod and in the end I retired it and got a couple of Streamers, which felt much more robust. I finally sold it when I decided I needed a P bass for a blues band. Predictably, I now pretty much exclusively play Fenders and FSOs these days, going full circle back to when I first started gigging!

That's a hell of a track! @dmccombe7, it's on the excellent Itch album - dunno how easy it is to get hold of these days, but well worth getting if you can track it down.

Dave - I'm sure that our tastes won't be too dissimilar, although you may well run to the proggy end of things! As I mentioned before, the ones I would go for are 'Itch' & 'Rocklandwonderland', along with the first album. His last album, 'Ain't Life Amazing' has its moments as well, especially the title track and 'In the Stars Tonight' (which we played at our wedding)!. I'm not keen on his attempts to be be more commercial ('Patio Lanterns'), which doesn't really work for me, but he has done a lot of great stuff - a little more straight-ahead than Max Webster, but still have plenty of quirks and left turns. One of my favourite artists... One of his more strait forward rock tunes, but this always makes me smile when I see it on YouTube

To be a touch pedantic, that would have been Max Webster supporting Rush and it most likely would have been the Hemispheres tour (at least that's the tour I saw)! I loved the Kim Mitchell solo stuff (preferred it to MW myself). He made a few wrong turns, but there are some great albums out there (check out Itch & Rocklandwonderland).

Yep, that's the big difference between a lot of bassists who can play a bit and the real top guys.

RB was tapping comping parts when I saw the Robben Ford & the Blue Line trio about 30 years ago!

I've seen a lot of great bass players play live, and he could well be the best...!

When it comes down to it, it is difficult to convincingly recreate rhythm guitar or keys parts on a bass guitar. Of course there are exceptions - check out the great Roscoe Beck, who started tapping out organ parts on bass when he played an early tour with Robben Ford because they couldn't afford to take a keys player out! On the flip side, I have seen an interview with Philthy Taylor and Fast Eddie where they said that they developed the classic Motorhead sound to compensate for Lemmy playing more like a rhythm guitarist than a traditional bass player (creating a whole new sub-genre in the process)! Also, listen to early DLR era Van Halen, where Michael Anthony will often play busier parts during under the guitar solos.

No, @chris_b is right. I've mainly played in rock bands with just one guitar over the years and you just develop a feel over the years on how to fill things out. First of all you need the right tone and attack, but being in a three piece can give you the opportunity to play a bit busier at times (particularly under solos), to work on your note lengths, you might throw in a few octaves or sometimes you just embrace the spaces in the music (someone mentioned Robin Trower above, which is a pretty good example). However, you are never going sound the same as if you have a rhythm guitar or Hammond or whatever playing, but a three piece can still sound great! I'm playing in a pretty busy Zep tribute these days and I certainly don't use any effects or change my EQ every time there is a guitar solo! You just find a way to make it work.

That's awful mate. Not much you can say, but best wishes to the family.

I agree - it's just a lazy, patronising label to deride perfectly legitimate top quality musicians. It also has a slight whiff of racism about it! Quincy Jones produced polished RnB based pop music with strong jazz, soul, fusion and rock influences, which everyone praises to the skies. Toto produced polished rock based pop music with strong jazz, soul, fusion and RnB influences and all the would be hipsters form a queue to sneer. Quincy even used the same players, not to mention that Steely Dan used guys who played on Aretha Franklin hits (as well as QJ records).

The trouble is that you're completely wrong! As a producer, Beato worked with a number of punk and garage rock bands. His big break was co-writing a number one country hit, which led to him working with several big time country songwriters. One of the things I like about RB is that he has a pretty wide background in lots of musical styles - he might love Steely Dan, but he also sees the value in The Clash. He used to be a lecturer in music, so he does come from an academic background, which is probably what you don't like about him. For me, he seems likable and is very enthusiastic / knowledgeable about lots of different types of music and I generally find his content interesting. Each to his own...

F***, Bruce is starting to look his age! Dunno about calling it a day, but perhaps a younger drummer along with shorter sets and tours might help them to keep going a bit longer. I was never a Maiden fan - I was always more impressed that Nicko had played with Pat Travers in his earlier career. I never met the guy, but I was sat next to him on a train once! Him and Bruce were busy chatting to some girls who were going to a show that night. He seemed a nice enough guy.

A mate (of sorts) of mine is a very good bass player and used to tour with Paul Carrack in the late 90’s among others. He says that he had this discussion with Pino Palladino many years ago. Apparently Pino said to him “Everything you’ll ever need can be found in the playing of Jaco, Jamerson, Aston Barrett and Bernard Edwards and there’s a lifetime’s work there”. That seems fair enough! Having never really studied any of those guys, I would say my top four were: Mars Cowling, John Paul Jones, Alan Spenner and Boz Burrell (you could also add Neil Murray and Andy Fraser). I suppose that kinda shows what my personal tastes were when I started playing.

I would say that a 1x15 would not be enough for a loud hard rock gig. The ideal would be a 4x10 (or even a 6X10), but a good 2x12 would work as well.

Right then, the best would be: Thumpinator – a high pass filter for getting rid of low frequencies that you can’t normally hear. I’ve played a few venues where there is something odd going on with the low frequencies on the bass guitar, so you end up having to take out all the bottom end leaving you with a less than inspiring bass tone. When I’ve played the same places this year, the Thumpinator seems to have sorted that out at a stroke! Caveman preamp pedal – a bit of a luxury and it’s not as if you couldn’t gig without it, but a quality piece of kit that sounds great and gives you more options, both live and recording. Not cheap, but worth it. The worst: MXR octave pedal –I was thinking of getting rid of my existing octave pedal but decided to keep it just in case. Then I saw a MXR going cheap secondhand and now I have two octave pedals that I don’t use. It’s a really good pedal, but I never use it! There’s got to be some other use for it other than playing ‘I’m Gonna Tear Your Playhouse Down’ in soundchecks! NUX C-5rc wireless system – it’s not bad, but I have had a few issues with it and I’m not going to use it at bigger gigs. It will have its uses, such as rehearsals or jams and small gigs where I don’t want to bring my pedalboard that has the Shure GLDX receiver on it. It is what it is – OK but not great. Jury still out: A stripped late 70s P bass – looks cool and sounds great, but it isn’t going to replace my other 70s P bass as my go-to bass of that type. I didn't pay too much money all things considered and I’m still getting to grips with it. Jon Shuker is going to do some work on the frets to get it just right, so it will be a player (as Jon said when he saw it). However, if anything really cool came up that I just had to have, then I suspect that this would be the bass that would have to make way (I could be wrong though, lets see what it is like when I get it properly sorted out)!

Which, as we all know, is of vital importance playing in a U2 tribute act...! 🙂

My 78 is bang on 10lbs, which is OK for me. The 79 I got recently is a little bit lighter, as was the 77 I owned years ago (but a pretty cr*p example of a 70s Fender). The worst, weight wise at least, was a 90s Jazz I owned that was over 12lbs.

Dunno, its like any 70s Fender. I've got a got a couple of P basses from from that period that are great. I've also owned one that was f***in awful. While there is no one who is genuinely famous who is associated with playing an Antigua Fender, Ian from SBL and a couple of other guys who are playing as sidemen for reasonably well known guys who are using them. I'm no expert, so it will be interesting to see if @briansbrew's friend gets what he has been advised they are going for. My only comment is that me and my mates all hated that finish when it came out, but there does seem to be some sort of interest in those basses forty five or so years later!