peteb

My ACS work fine. However, I think that mine are the Pro 10s. Perhaps you could try the 10s? Another thing is that I usually only wear one plug, in the ear nearest the drum kit. I feel too isolated with both in, like I'm in a different room to the rest of the band / audience...

I used to have one in a jazz bass I owned before! To be honest I found it a bit too much - you have to be very careful with the eq, especially the bass control. I handed it to someone once at a jam session (an excellent pro player) and he wanted a bit more bass so he turned up the bass control on the guitar. He nearly blew the speakers out of the cab...! I prefer the something like the Tri-Logic Bass Preamp like I have in my Xotic jazz, which I find a bit more musical / easier to use. I'm going to keep the MIJ bass passive and just get some hotter pickups. I don't really want to spend too much on it as it is only gonna be my jam session / travel / really rough venues bass...!

Yes, obviously I meant Seymour Duncan Quarterpounders. I know what Bartolinis sound like (I have them in a couple of other basses) but I'm looking for a few alternative choices that may hopefully come up for a bargain on eBay!

I've been using an XJIT4 in Black Cherry as my main gigging bass for the past 4 years or so. Great bass - sounds and plays ace.

I have a Fender MIJ (passive) jazz bass, which plays nicely and looks great but has rather underpowered pickups. I am thinking of having a bit of search on eBay for some secondhand pickups to beef it up a bit. This won’t be a bass that I gig a lot, so I don’t want to spend too much (maybe somewhere between £50 and £100) and I’m in no great rush, so I can wait to see what comes up. For reference, I like the sound of Bartolinis but I’m not too keen on Quarterpounders, nor am I too bothered about an ultra-authentic vintage sound. Does anyone have any suggestions for what I should be looking out for??

Jaco has had an influence on bass players far beyond the fusion genre. Ditto, Jamerson heavily influenced John Paul Jones {amongst many, many others), even though Led Zep were not otherwise particularly influenced by Motown. If you genuinely do want to learn from 'as wide a group of musicians as possible', then you do have to listen to as many great players as possible, even if the music (as opposed to the playing) is not to your taste.

I'm obviously the odd one out here in that I can appreciate and try to learn from great musicians (especially bass players for obvious reasons), even if I don't particularly care for the music. For example, I'm not a big fan of Motown, but I certainty don't dismiss it as worthless and I have specifically listened to a lot of the headlines in those records...

Nothing particularly difficult there and as Blue says, there will be plenty of YouTube clips to help you if you need to learn them ina hurry. Write out lead sheets and you should be fine.

1) maybe, worth a phone call 2) might have been interested but not being told if I can drink or not - doesn't sound very rock n'roll 3) I'm way too old for that, but good luck to them 4) sounds awful and I doubt my singing would be up to it anyway

For most FOH engineers the 'generic bass sound' they will tend to use will be flat with possibley a bump in the upper mids.

Some of them do seem to have a 'one size fits all' approach to any bass player in any band - allows them more time to appease the guitar player and work on the biggest possible bass drum sound known to mankind...!

Which is another reason why many FOH engineers prefer using a DI box...

I've lived in the North for nearly 80% of my time on earth and I'm still a southerner...! Just one of those things...

Last time I was at Jon Shuker's place, he had one on the go (headless, designed to fit into overhead storage) - looked stunning...!

Yes & no! If you can’t play, or if you are in a band who are poor musicians or sound awful then it doesn’t matter what gear you use. If you get to play in a band that sounds great then they will expect you to sound just as good as them. As a rule, good gear will sound better – but diminishing returns sets in at a certain point. If you don’t know how to eq an amp then it doesn’t matter too much what you use. My advice has always been to get the best gear you can reasonably afford, then learn how to use it and not chop and change too often. Good players will always sound better than bad players, but good players with good gear sound better than good players with crap gear! Funnily enough, I have just been talking to my guitar playing mate about this down the pub. He is starting to lose patience with his bass player, who always seems to be chasing a sound in his head and keeps changing his pretty decent gear for stuff that is no better than what he had before. He is talking about getting a rig that just isn’t going to work in 80% of the gigs that they do and will cause problems for the soundman (i.e. my mate). Always better to get gear that works with the way you play and the type of music you do – then stick with it…

The obvious musical one is playing Fat Bottomed Girls on what seems to be the Sheer Heart Attack tour. Most of the factual ones seem covered by that video clip above. I always understood that Freddie was friends with Smile long before he joined, and I had heard that he had even worked with Roger Taylor on his clothes stall in Kensington market before he was ever in the band. Also, I thought that FM re-joining the band, agreeing to do Live Aid and being diagnosed with AIDS in the space of one week was pushing it a bit. This is not to mention tracking down his future partner and introducing him to his parents (whilst coming out in the process) on the way to Wembley Stadium! The story I heard was that Freddie didn’t want to do Live Aid as he wanted a break after being out on tour, but was persuaded by the size of the potential worldwide audience he could reach with one show…

Just been to see it at the cinema. A rather uneven movie, at times completely unconvincing and at other times strangely moving. Lots of liberties with the sequencing of events and songs, which irritated me a bit. I thought that the music bits were pretty good.

This ^

3. Can he afford to stop?

From reading an interview on Luke's website, it seems that Joe didn't look after his voice in his first stint in Toto, which was the reason he was fired. But they stayed friends and he got himself back in shape, leading to him eventually being reinstated in the band.

Unfortunately, it is a big advantage to be able to drive and have a car if you want to gig regularly. I know some people in London manage on the tube and you may find a band who keep gear centrally and have a van at their disposal, but for many gigging bands everyone having a car is a necessity.

If you think that public transport in London is awful, imagine what it's like in most other cities throughout the country. I lived in London for the best part of five years in the 80s - often regret leaving...

I was recently playing a few months of deps for an R&B band while their regular bass player recovered from some medical treatment. As I was playing in a different type of band and using a new rig, I started bringing pretty much every bass that I owned to see how they worked. Of course I asked the rest of the band (well mainly the guitar player and the original bass player, who came to some of the gigs, even though he wasn't well enough to play) what they thought of each bass. They would happily discuss the merits of each bass, but essentially thought that they all sounded great (the guitarist's favourite seemed to whichever bass I had just done the gig with). The truth is that they were happy with any decent bass sound, even though they were quite aware of the differences in each one. Now I have come across one or two band leaders who are hung up upon a particular bass (usually a Precision), but that is pretty rare...

And with good reason… Surely everything in the chain from you striking a note to it reaching the listener’s ears has an effect on the end sound / tone / whatever. This can range from a tiny effect (like what lead you use) to a massive one (roundwound or flatwound strings). The biggest impact on the sound is how you strike the string i.e. your fingers (both left and right hand of course). This is because: a) the inherent tonal quality of your fingers is unique to you and; b) this is the first stage of generating the note and therefore impacts on everything further down the chain. I would have thought that most people, if they really tried, could tell the difference between a Stingray and a Jazz. But if I play a Stingray or a Jazz, it certainly sounds noticeably different, but it still sounds like me playing a Stingray or a Jazz. Similarly, if you were to get up and sit in with my band and play through my gear with the same settings, you won’t sound like me, but like you playing through my rig. I think that the main reason that people can’t seem to be able to tell the difference is that they simply don’t care. A Stingray and a Jazz may well sound a bit different, but the chances are that you will be able to get a tone from either of them that will work with virtually all types of music that use an electric bass guitar. There are hundreds of good bass sounds available (and even more bad ones) and as long as the bass sounds good I don’t think that anyone who isn’t on Basschat, the odd recording producer or an overly fussy band leader really cares. This is very different to an instrument like a guitar, which works in a register that people hear more clearly and really defines the sound of the music the band are playing. Van Halen and SRV each have / had great, iconic rock guitar sounds, but Eddie’s ‘brown’ sound would not have worked on SRV’s albums any more than Stevie’s would have worked on Running With The Devil…!

Not me, but a drummer I used to play with used to get this happening quite regularly