peteb

Oh, the bass player in Govt Mule, Carmine Rojas (ex Joe Bonamassa, Bowie, John Waite, etc) and a load of Nashville session guys. I was thinking once of buying an Alembic (about 25 years ago). I went down to the old Bass Centre in Wapping to try one and as soon as I picked it up, I knew straight away that it wasn't for me. Incredibly well made bass and I'm sure that it would have sounded great, but the neck just wasn't for me! I bought a Warwick Streamer LX (that I still have) instead.

Are you telling me that your Squire CV Jazz is objectively a better bass than my Xotic Jazz? Seriously, I very much doubt it! That’s not to say that your Squire is a bad bass, far from it. Diminishing returns start to kick in here and I’m guessing that I probably paid twice as much as you, but that’s not to say that the Xotic is twice the bass that your Squire is. Equally, I can’t see that a £6k Sadowsky (as good as I’m sure that it is) is noticeably better than my £2.5k (new, not what I paid for it) Xotic. If you found a Ken Smith that was difficult to play, then someone has made a complete mess of setting it up!

Money doesn’t necessarily equal quality and sometimes you are just paying for a name. I have played and owned some great Fenders and some bloody awful ones. Every American Lakland that I have ever played has been superb, but I’ve never played a Skyline that has been above mediocre.

It's just a brand name. If it was the grammar or punctuation that you were getting wrong, then he might have a point 🙂 edited (ironically) for grammar!

Who cares? Never owned one, probably never will...!

Exactly, that's the point. You get the bass that you can find / afford and you take it out whenever you gig (alright, you might use different basses for different gigs). There's a reason why I wouldn't get a YOB Fender or a Fodera (probably the best bass I have ever played), even though I could afford it if I really wanted one. If you have to worry about leaving it in a corner of a pub, or the loss of value every time it gets a ding, then why get it in the first place. But I will quite happily take a £2k bass to a gig.

I am sure that you can put together a parts bass that will be very decent and perfectly gigable, but will it be as good as a Sadowsky, Lakland, or in my case, an Xotic??

Have you really found many cheapo Yamahas or Squiers that were that good? I know that some early Squiers or Tokai basses were reckoned to be better than some of the new Fenders at the time (which in the 80s wasn’t saying much), but I’ve yet to find any that were anything special – gigable, maybe if you swapped out the pickups, but not great by any means. My go-to bass is the one I paid the most money for, which was why I paid so much for it (secondhand of course). It’s got plenty of dings now, but who gives a f**k. It plays / sounds great and the reason that I bought it was to do gigs, not sit in the corner of a room…

The new and the old Markbass stuff are very much different beasts. I've got the LM3 and had a couple of great MB combos (103 & 102) - all Italian produced, non Class D. You run your mpulse pretty much the same as I do mine, but I'm using a 4 ohm cab (maybe the master on my amp creeps up to 1 o'clock at most places). I also use the semi-para EQ all the time.

It's not the weight of the amp, so much as how the power section works and how it reacts every time you play a note. The old Markbass amps didn’t use a Class D power module and work well in a mix (keys and everything). I’ve got an old Italian LM3 and it is certainly the loudest amp that I own (far louder that the old D800). I prefer the sound of the Mesa & the Handbox, but the MB is great at what it does and just works. I’m sure that the TT800 will sound just as good as the mpulse on its own in a small room, but will it punch through a mix and fill out the sound as well?? I don’t see how it is any different in that respect to my old D800, which sounded great on its own. If you do decide to go down that route and move the mpulse on, then give me a shout. I have often wished that I had the extra headroom of the 600w mpulse, compared to the 360w version that I’ve got.

I dunno, it’s all part of the experience, paying dues and all that. It’s just that none of us are getting any younger. At least these days, we’re generally not trying to sneak extra band members past the desk to save on hotel rooms!

I've got two rigs; a 'big' rig (that isn't that big these days) and a more compact one, along with another spare amp. I do different types of gigs, often with very different bands, sometimes on bigger stages and sometimes in the corner of a tiny pub. Sometimes you might struggle to fit the bigger cab onstage and sometimes you don't want to be lugging a rack cased amp to the far corridors of a Travelodge in a strange city at 2 o'clock in the morning. At least, not at my age...! I also have a third rig; an old Hartke amp and a cheapish 810 cab. it lives permanently in a mate's rehearsal studio (I've only used it once in the past ten years).

Personally, I would be very wary of selling the mpulse to get the TT800. I had a Subway for a while and it was a great sounding amp, but I still got rid of it after a while. It was great when playing deps for a R&B band, but when I got it on a bigger stage with a heavier band and loads of keyboards - it just got lost and couldn't keep up. Last time I was down at Bass Direct, I told Mark how much I had liked the Subway, but still sold it on. He said "It's not just the sound of the amp, but the way it delivers it", which I think is very true. I replaced the Subway with a Handbox hybrid amp, which once you get used to the EQ section, is superb. I'm another one who's main rig is a Mesa amp (mpulse) and Berg cab (HS410), which is as good as anything that I have ever heard.

The short answer is scale and costs. The UK is a medium size market, worth selling to but not big enough to sustain a large scale manufacturing business. The fact that we have now put up barriers to our biggest export market doesn’t help, but of course at least there are no tariffs in place. The bigger issue (arguably) is costs. There is no way that the UK can compete with China and the far-east in larger scale production, even taking tariffs and shipping into account. To do so, it would have to massively reduce its costs, and seeing as the major element of that is labour, then that would mean paying significantly lower wages as well as reducing other associated costs (pension / NI contributions, etc). As you say, the UK is good at small scale, high-end production (note that the same is also true for other northern european countries), but there is a reason why its manufacturing base has declined. I could answer in a lot more detail, but that leads to a risk of derailing the thread and of opening up a debate that the mods won’t like.

No, not at all. I've had a few cheaper basses over the years (usually as a spare), but I always moved them on for something better after a few months. Like Chris, I bought my first Fender Precision as soon as I got my first job (working backstage at a theatre as an 18 year old). It was a really nice mocha brown P bass with a maple neck. This travelled up and down the country with me for 6 or 7 years (acquiring a pretty crappy 77 Precision as a spare along the way), before I sold it when I first discovered the joys of active basses back in the mid 80s. Bizarrely, my old brown P bass came up for sale a few months ago and I ended up buying it back for five times what I sold it for 24 years ago! It has seen a bit of life since we have been apart, belonging to a couple of session musicians, doing loads of soul gigs, living in a recording studio and apparently even being used to settle a drug debt several years ago! But now it's back with me, been cleaned up and wearing an old badass bridge that I've had in my spares box for years as wellas a bart pickup and still sounding as great as ever. Sounds and feels like a proper Fender (to me at least). So my oldest bass is one I bought a couple of months ago, which was the first really good bass that I owned...!

If Chris is involved I'm sure that it will be kosher! I bought a couple of tickets last night.

That is arguably true, but I used to deal with those actually in government. They never used to be this amateurish (e.g. not reading a very important report related to their portfolio because they were organising a nativity play! That is inexcusable and would never have happened 20 years ago). I am not talking about whether you liked the politicians or agreed with their policies, but how they implemented them.

Not at all, I used to have to deal with politicians and can tell you that there has been a very definite decline.

To be fair, that isn't the reason. There were always career politicians, but the ones in power were more capable and got to where they were because they good rather than their connections or views on a single issue. I know a lot of people are very reluctant to accept this, but there are still plenty of capable politicians on both sides of the house, but unfortunately they are not in the cabinet now.

If she had bothered to read it she would have found that they had capitulated on fishing, even after all of the fuss that they made about it! The level of incompetence of government in this country over the past decade has been staggering. It never used to be like that (both parties were pretty capable at governing the country, whether you liked them or not).

Other tributes online from Mike Portnoy, Carmine Appice, etc. Apparently he died of cancer.

His Wikipedia page has said that he has died, but no there is mention of cause of death or whatever.

Just seen that @Crawford13 has started a similar thread - mods, please can you lock this thread or merge with the existing one

Just seen on Facebook that Chris from Alpher Instruments is offering a chance to win an Alpher Mini Mako 30 inch scale bass for just £10 and help musicians struggling as a result of the pandemic. This raffle is available worldwide with shipping included. It costs £10 per ticket, with all proceeds going to helpmusicians.org.uk Here’s the link to the tickets: https://alphershop.com/.../products/raffle-ticket-mini-mako Nice one Chris - a great gesture...

British bands definitely have an allure for European audiences as many of the world's biggest bands came from these islands (from the Beatles to Black Sabbath to the Clash). However, support for live music is stronger in most European countries than in England these days (maybe not so much in Scotland & Ireland) and there are plenty of good bands over on the mainland. UK bands not getting gigs in the EU may well mean more gigs for them. I don't think that the EU wants to exclude British acts, hence the offer in the first place, but it will have to be reciprocal. I wish that UK Govt cared as much...!