uk_lefty

If you go onto the webpage for Positive Grid and download some better amps hopefully it improves your experience. I had the Spark full size version and thought it was tinny and disappointing but different presets sound so much better. Hopefully it's the same on the Go! Good luck.

Joel, I'm not taking anything away from your post, you know your stuff and I'm not going to dispute it. It's just this line. This line made me think of this: https://youtu.be/BHkhIjG0DKc

That seems more of an Eastwood type thing?

If you had to play a U2 song that's one way of dealing with it I guess.

I am guilty of this too!!! Moreso in my old band. I've grown up a bit since, though. In my current band a lot of the songs don't have scope to overfill but my approach is now 'less is more'. But to avoid any muddiness my basic rules are not to play fills under vocals or during a chorus. Under solos it's fine to an extent but not so much you're taking over the solo itself.

If I remember right... Years ago when I first started reading bass forums over dial up internet I used to read the bassist section of Harmony Central. The Peavey T40 was a bit of a joke amongst people there, giving each other a friendly ribbing about playing one and it being a crappy bass but there were some who were loving them and collecting them. I think at the time they were going for peanuts on eBay over here. Now they're over a grand.

That neck!!! Lovely.

I would learn to play right handed to have that bass. Absolute perfection.

I've got a gig in Amsterdam in a few weeks and my pedalboard is impractical to take with me, so I bought a small Harley Benton board and put this "essentials" board together. The good: small, light, fits enough pedals on to keep things interesting. The bad: I bought a Boss daisy-chain to power them all but some of these pedals have their power inputs on the side, which is annoying. I will have to power it with a Caline power supply... And it doesn't fit under the board... Going to have to find a way of extending the front feet but keeping it all stable. What's on the board? Boss wireless, HB tuner/ mute, Behringer Limiter/Enhancer which may get sacrificed, Darkglass Duality Fuzz, TC Corona Chorus and a Marshall Guvnor overdrive. What got left behind? Boss OC-2 which doesn't get enough use sadly and isn't an integral sound in the set at the moment, AMT Bass Wah which gets occasional use but not enough to justify a spot on this board, TC HOF reverb which is always on for fretless and gets use in the middle 8 of one song only on fretted bass, MXR M80 preamp and distortion which I'm kinda thinking I should keep but just can't quite bring myself to yet...

If it works, it works!!! For an outdoor gig on a dodgy May afternoon I found that a medium sized North Face rain jacket fits an Ashdown Rootmaster head and cabs perfectly to protect from the rain!

Well, if the Wal is off to the skip I suppose I could, reluctantly, take it off your hands... 😜

So far so great with this bass. I've used it in two band rehearsals and a gig. The highs are really clear and present, the bass is nice and deep and defined... It doesn't have the brittleness of tone that some maple boarded basses can have IMO. The stock strings need to go, I can't wait to get some new ones on, but even with slightly dead strings this bass really really sings. The feel of the neck is fantastic, the weight and balance just right. The tuners are really stable including the E which needs to come down to D occasionally. I'm super impressed. It's a much more refined instrument than my Stingray so it complements it fantastically. I thought I might regret the cost but I have to say I have no regrets at all. Even the case is incredibly well put together!

Thanks everyone for the contributions.... I had TI's before on my Precision and really didn't like them, likewise Chrome's aren't my bag either. I'm going to give either HB or Fenders a go to see how the bass takes to flats and then possibly upgrade after that experiment.

I don't usually like the look of fan fret basses... Until now! Looks amazing.

I feel for you but it sounds like there's three big reasons why walking away wouldn't be a bad thing: the band thinks they can just turn up and gig and everything will be ok; you're the only one who sees the value in rehearsal and is trying to actually organise stuff with no decent response from the majority; they or a character in the band sees bassists as unimportant. All sounds pretty crappy to me and better off walking away if I've read it right. I walked out of a band after five and a half years for similar reasons. We had become good friends with a few points of disagreement that we always managed to work through. What did it for me was that through COVID nobody could be bothered refreshing the set, rehearsing at home, trying to do just anything to keep it going, except me. Then the drummer organises a gig on a date he knows I can't do and with no rehearsal time after months and months of no rehearsals. This was on top of criticism for having a personal life that interfered with his crackpot ideas of staging a gig at just a few days notice. Also, the way four of us found out about the gig was a Facebook message sent by the drummer, he hadn't even cleared it with the singer who owned the pub where he announced the gig was to happen! They got a dep in who was better prepared than the actual band, the gig was a disaster and I walked shortly after by text message. Five and a half years just packed in, I couldn't continue with the stress of being ordered around by someone who turns up twenty mins late for rehearsal, spends twenty mins moaning about the drum kit, then goes for a smoke.

Possibly a case of jazz musicians having more grip on reality than all the usual JMB rock-god-in-waiting types?

Yep!

Just out of shot to the side of the bass rig is a 15" 500w sub my drummer bought. He plays an electric kit so we had kick drum, toms and bass guitar all coming through the sub. The difference in sound overall for the band was phenomenal, we didn't have a bad sound before but this just helped really fill things out! Played a very large converted barn last night, at the bar, some distance away in a straight line from the stage area, you could feel the bass.

Absolutely love an old Peavey. My first gigging amp was a Peavey acquired from the outgoing bassist. It had weirdly named controls on it like "pyramid". Since then I've used a Peavey TKO 150watt combo that was putting out far more ooomph than the 300watt Ashdown Toneman I had at the time. I was looking for a backup head a while ago and the Peavey's were bargains!

I really really want a left handed fretless Stingray so if you come across one...!

Who uses flats on a jazz and why? What would you recommend? Years ago I put flats on an MIM Jazz for a while and really liked it but took them off to have light stainless steel rounds instead for slapping and bending the strings. I've just acquired an American jazz with a maple board and I'm considering flats on it to get a different sound, more like the Joe Dart Dean Town tone (yes it's all in the fingers, amp, preamp, compressor, humidity, moon cycle....)

My Kramer has rosewood and that has the least "mwaaaah", you have to really work to get it. I now have a Harley Benton with a laurel board and that has an ok amount of "mwaaaah". I've had an ebony boarded Warwick and that was "mwaaaah"-tastic. If the edges of the fingerboard (it can't be a fretboard on a fretless, surely?) weren't razor sharp I may have kept it on because it just had that 80s fretless tone in spades.

The Desert Penguins presents... The best music of the 00's decade! Support act before, DJ after. The Corn Exchange in Hertford. Hope to see you there!

Wow. Bargain

Likewise the lefties get a rosewood board on the dark night colour but righties get a maple... No idea why. There are some great colours in this range, I really like the P bass in the glittery pale green too. My wife stopped in her tracks asking how much it cost to comment on the colour!