MiltyG565

Amazing news! I'm glad you kept your hopes up on this.

I once sold a pedal, met the guy in a lay-by to do the deal, and a few hours later he messaged me to say it wasn't working. It was only £20 and he said he would like his money back and he would throw the pedal in the bin. Absolutely not - If I'm giving the money back, I want my stuff back. I had no idea there was an issue - there wasn't when I was using it. I drove out to his and picked up the pedal and gave him his £20. We talked for a couple of hours about gear and music etc, he was a decent fella. I took the pedal to a local tech and he immediately found that some of the plastic sheath on one of the tiny wires inside had gotten pinched, and the wire was shorting on another component. A bit of electrical tape solved the problem and it was as good as new. I had no issue with the buyers experience, and I had no idea there was an issue with the pedal - stuff like this happens sometimes. A couple of years ago when selling an amp, it blew up as I was demonstrating the amp to the buyer. These things happen sometimes, and, if we're honest, they're much more likely to happen with used gear of unknown provenance. The systems that we operate on as a society are largely built on trust. For the most part, we all engage in these systems in the way they're intended, but there are people who will take advantage. It's never wrong to satisfy yourself that everything is above board, and if you have any doubts whatsoever, it's probably best not to go any further. There is as good as no protection for buyers in second hand markets, and it's your cash at stake. In the OPs case, it sounds like the seller might simply not have been aware of any issues, and I think that's reasonable when talking about an amp, particularly if we're talking about a hobbyist and not a professional musician. The fact that amps are high-powered electrical devices means that somebody isn't likely to take the cover off and go poking around for any reason (and nor should they unless they have all the necessary skills/experience and equipment, and it seems like it wasn't immediately apparent from how the amp sounded that there was an issue as you only knew of this after it was serviced by a technician. Who knows how long the amp was in this state for, and how long the previous owner had it - perhaps he bought it in that condition too, and, none the wiser, didn't see anything wrong with it, just like you didn't. I can completely understand your frustration, and you are quite right in saying that it's important to do all the necessary checks before parting with cash, but unless there's more to the story you haven't told us, I'm not satisfied your characterisation of the seller is completely fair.

Golly, sorry to hear that! It sounds gruesome! It might sound like it's easy for me to say (and that might be because it is), but don't lose faith. The human body and mind is very resilient. Make sure you rest well, eat well, and even get some exercise, as you normally would, and redress the wound as often as the doctors tell you to, along with anything else. It ain't over until the fat lady sings, as they say. As far as playing bass or anything else goes, you're only limited by what you believe you can't do. I had to learn how to walk again after a bout of cancer about 11 years ago, and there have been many times in that 11 years I've told myself I couldn't do things, and I was wrong. I've climbed mountains, walked long distances along coastal paths, sailed more times that I can remember, driven a racing car, and so many other things. Self-limiting beliefs are the thieves of joy and achievement. Where there's a will, there's a way, you just need to have the will. Anyway, that's a bit further down the line now. All the best for your recovery!

Most of the worst offenders are driving used, ex-fleet models because they can't afford new ones 😅 Worse still are the ones driving ones that are 10 or 15 years old. The brand attracts some of the worst people, and I'm sure the salespeople in the dealership probably get on quite well with them, as many car dealers themselves are dead behind the eyes, and solely motivated by commission. Funny thing is, VW and Audi belong to the same parent company, and both dealerships were probably part of the same complex, meaning that your money likely went to the same places it would have done anyway.

Posties are the reason the system works. I was talking to a friend that is an IT consultant in data migration and has spent the last 25 years talking about databases and that kind of boring nonsense. Several projects he has worked on have been to do with addresses. A not insignificant number of addresses in Royal Mail's database are wrong, or simply don't exist on it, and yet people still get their post, because the posties have worked it out.

I have a few things for sale on Discogs at the minute - pretty niche stuff, so they've been sitting a few weeks. Got a nibble yesterday, and somebody apparently purchased one of the records. The order had "ADDRESS VERIFICATION" on it several times, and a minute later I got an email from Discogs saying that the person trying to buy the record has now been banned, and I should ignore the order email. A few minutes later, I got another email from Discogs saying I had sold another record. Given that these have been sitting for a while with no interest, it seemed unusual that I would sell 2 so closely together, and this right after a scammer tried to buy another one, so I held my nerve. I then got an email, supposedly from Discogs, using vague terminology again (dear seller, etc) saying that I needed to verify my account, with a link to a place where I can easily hand over all my information. I sat on it again, and a few minutes later, Discogs emailed me to say that this buyer had also been banned. So that was my little drama yesterday evening.

For the most part, if they unceremoniously left me and my band mates up a creek with little to no good reason, it would be difficult to justify to myself, let alone the rest of the band, a good reason to have them back. However, relationships are complicated and messy, and people can change; how much and in what ways will be dictated by themselves. I suppose what I’m saying is it can be hard to disregard the human element. Typically, most people will put up with somebody that’s not overly impressive for the fact they get along well and they are reliable, over somebody who is breathtaking good but is always late/drunk/cancels last minute/a pain in the arse etc. Remember, all the stories of big-name bands full of arseholes that couldn’t get along and were the most unprofessional people to ever grace earth - they’re the exception, not the rule. Most bands like that never even make it to recording an album, I would reckon.

It's not the wrong lyrics, is it? Edit: shit. Just as well, I always thought the next line was "it's a fruit de mer on a stone cold plate".

You did well, Alanis! Nobody really thought it would be a Danish bloke arguing about the merits of music theory on a pokey little bassists forum in the UK. It's like rai-e-ain on a summer's day!

I really do wonder what you hope to achieve in this discussion. I started this thread merely to say that I respected and admired the deep technical understanding others have of music, and that I someday wished to possess even some of that level of understanding. Your contribution appears to be that it is not necessary because the theory describes the music, not the other way around, ipso facto to use theoretical knowledge to help write a piece of music is putting the cart before the horse and, therefore, wrong, and that it's much better to use intuition when writing music. This is very "what came first, the chicken or the egg" territory. In reality, it doesn't matter. I could spend hours trial and erroring my way to something that sounds good when actually somebody already did the trial and error years ago and somebody is able to explain why the result of that works well, and had I just applied that technical knowledge sooner, I could save my self several hours. That is not cheating, it's not incorrect, and it is not less musical. You may prefer to fumble around with your ears and experience in some false sense of musical purity, that's fine; don't let me spoil your fun, but have the respect to not tell people they are wrong or less musical for applying their theoretical knowledge to a real world situation; that's precisely the point of learning theory.

Unforgivable. As I said before, strings are cheap, so it's worthwhile carrying at least a small variety of them! When it came to bass, we stocked Rotosound, D'Addario, Elixir, and Ernie Ball, with a good "mainstream" selection of each brand, and a couple of something more exotic, like flats/half rounds, steels, NYXL, etc. If a small place can do it, it should be the easiest thing in the world for a chain to do it! My personal preference is D'Addario XL steels, but it's not the job of the shop to dictate to their customers what they should string their instrument with, although I would occasionally have discussions with customers about what they liked in a string and made suggestions based on that.

Do you think if a Sitar player were to write a solo on anything that it would comply with western music theory, or would it, perhaps without the sitar player knowing any music theory at all, comply with traditional Indian music theoretical concepts? Do you think if you played a sitar, would you play something that sounded western, or something that sounded Indian, assuming you have no Indian musical background? As another contributor said, you pick up things like in the English language that we speak, you don’t need to know the theory behind it all to intrinsically pick it up, but we all apply the concepts the same way. That is unconsciously internalising the concepts and redeploying them. The fact that most of us couldn’t explain why the language has these rules doesn’t matter, it does, and we all apply them without realising. And it’s the same with music.

You literally did when you replied to MacDaddy saying he would write a better solo if he didn’t use his knowledge of music theory.

I’m going to suggest that “intuition” is nothing more than unconsciously internalising music theory from decades worth of music consumption, performing, and writing. No doubt what you would intuitively play would be theoretically possible.

Oh cripes, I thought this might happen. Wanting to learn music theory does not negate one’s musicality or expression. I know it isn’t necessary to write great music, I’m not suggesting it’s a precursor to writing or performing well, I’m just saying I would like to understand it. Equally, many great musicians and composers through the years have had at least a firm grasp of music theory and have used this knowledge when writing their music. Whether you enjoy the end product or not is somewhat irrelevant as, again, it’s art. It’s a completely false dichotomy to suggest you either do or don’t need it to write music - nobody is suggesting that’s the case. I do not need to understand how a car works to drive it, but I enjoy learning and understanding it, and this is something I do with my primary interests.