mangotango

When trying out a 5-string for the first time, I took a punt on e-bay, on a bass not too far from me - Fernandes Gravity, bit knocked about but played really nicely and sounded good. From that, I learned that 5-string worked for me. When I decided that I wanted an active 5'er, I picked up a Bass Collection to pair with my BC 4-sting, and the Fernandes sat there for a while...until I thought I might like to try fretless, so I had the frets taken out. From that, I learned that I could handle a 5-string fretless. You can see from this that I'd recommend picking up a cheap second-hand but decent 5'er as a test bed for your experimenting. Even if you decide that it's not for you, you can sell on and it wouldn't cost you too much.

I ex-Spector situation like that could arise....

Well, kind of. Rehearsal 10am-1pm, back to the gig by 7pm; set-up and warm-up until 7.30, then soundcheck. 8-9pm, set 1; 9.30-10.30 pm, set 2. It was six songs into the second set that everything went pears. Appreciate the point on stretching during breaks, and I suppose even between tunes on longer gigs - I guess now that I'm getting older (bah!), I need to be a little more aware and take care of myself a bit better.

On Saturday, I played the Xmas gig for the Workshop band in which I play EUB as well as bass guitar. We did 20 tunes, of which I played only 3 on the bass guitar. Had a 3-hour rehearsal in the morning, a few hours break, then back to it, soundcheck by 7.30, 2 x one hour sets with a half-hour break. Part-way into the 6th song of the second set (Poinciana, uptempo a la Shelley Manne, rocking along at around 180, not laid-back like Nat Cole), my right-hand plucking (index) finger totally seized up. With a definite "twinge" right down into the inside of my wrist, it curled up into a hook and wouldn't undo. Worse still, my middle finger didn't feel great either. I finished the tune playing with my last two fingers. Before the next piece, I took hold of those two fingers with my left hand, rubbed them fiercely to give a bit of warmth and pulled gently on them to stretch them out. Next 2 tunes were on bass guitar and by the time I got to the last tune, everything was OK. However, the whole experience was more than a little unnerving! Anyone else had a similar experience and if so, any advice to prevent it recurring? I don't want to do any permanent damage. Appreciate your thoughts. Please note that normally I use a single (index) finger to pluck, though on faster pieces I will alternate between index and middle. Occasionally, for a big fat tone, I will use index and middle together (which is how I finished out the last tune so that the middle gave the index some support), but I have less speed/facility like that.

Jerome Davies. Nice guy, great luthier, really decent bassist. Not even remotely expensive for the quality of his work. DId some fine work on my EUB, but have also seen work that he's done repairing, building, setting up double basses. Well worth seeking out. http://www.realmusicservices.co.uk/jdstrings/index.html

For listening pleasure - either or both of these, spot on Mr. Shaggy. My favourite Xmas tunes that I've played, though are Brooooooooooooooooooooce's version of Santa Claus Is Coming To Town.... and of recent years, this one has rather surprisingly joined it: Surprising because I'm not awfully fond of Louis Armstrong, but it's a good fun to play and swings like a pendulum if you get it right...

I play in a duo with a DB player (when I'm playing guitar, shhhhh!!) and he used to turn up to gigs with his DB in the back of his Ford Ka!! He'd also have a Markbass amp and Berg 1 x 12" in there.....oh, and his wife too, sometimes. I was always surprised that he had room to turn the steering wheel....

Along Came Benny by Dominic Howles. Very fine original mainstream to hard bop material, plus jazz arrangements of a couple of popular music tunes. Oh yeh, and he's my DB teacher.....

DO you mean a DM or a dhP?

I had that at a rehearsal band a little while back - Latin tune with a tumbao bassline. Keyboards got it, drummer didn't. Me caught (both physically and musically) between the two, had to call a halt. Needless to say, neither was happy with the other; and all of a sudden I'm the UN Peacekeeping Force, trying to establish a Buffer Zone in the Rhythm Section...…..

I play unison melody lines with trumpet/keys high up on the G string. On one tune, the intro melody is played on the bass, and so high up on that G string that when buying my new basses, I had to go for instruments with a 2-octave neck. Whilst shopping around, I was in Andertons and ready to pull the trigger on fretted and fretless Sires, when I remembered to try out that melody line....and ran out of neck. Deal breaker right there. And when using the rather lovely Squier Bass VI that I acquired from @Al Krow, there's a bass feature/solo on one tune that will require me to go above the octave on the top E string. Yep, into guitar range. "It's a Far Country - they do things differently there". Fortunately, I speak their language...… BUT since I play in a band with horn players...then there will always be tunes called in Eb, Db, or C that need that low B string rumble. Not all of us go "thump thump thump" in E, playing behind guitarists, y'know.....

I started out as a teenager playing rock music because that was the music to which my mates, with whom I was in a band, listened. Eventually however, I realised how much I enjoyed improvised music and began to listen to Miles Davis and Weather Report. The result was that I ended up in a jazz-rock band before going to University where I was in a punk/reggae band -hey, it was 1977. Post Uni, I was back to playing jazz right up to the point where I stopped playing bass for 35 years or so. Instead I moved over to guitar and played in an original rock/pop band with funk and reggae elements. However, once that broke up, I ended up playing blues/roots music for a decade or so, then drifted into a covers band for a lack of anything else going on. Once I was approaching 50, I decided that it was time to get back to the jazz that I had loved when younger; all of my musical involvement since then has been playing that sort of thing pretty much exclusively. When I came back to bass, it was to play funky jazz, but to get myself back into playing bass and up-to-date with how things had changed since last I was a bass player, I started learning online, specifically SBL Academy videos. As a result, I've learned a whole bunch of techniques from different musical styles - slapped funk, gospel, straight-ahead walking jazz bass, latin…. And I still haven't used the word "eclectic" yet...oh wait, there it is. The more stuff that you play, the better, more informed your playing will be, IMHO. Only two or three styles have never appealed; I don't much like metal of any type, I hate country with an unbridled passion (although that Poco tune "Rose Of Cimarron", posted in an earlier post, was never any hardship to listen to - it's just a good song) and even though I consider myself a jazzbo, I can't bear theBritish version of Dixieland Jazz - especially the bit where the clarinet goes "oooooweebeedeebeedeee" as it always does; or when the drummer gets to a break and everyone shouts "ooyah! ooyah!!" I'm sorry, I've been to New Orleans and heard traditional jazz in its natural environment; and groups of old white English blokes calling themselves "Syd Aspinall's Creole Steppers" or the like...is just bullsh!t, basically.

How do you "accidentally" get a bass? That's not criticism, quite the opposite in fact; it's a serious enquiry so that I can do that myself sometime.....

That looks absolutely wonderful. Not sure why people give the major manufacturers stick for trying something different from their usual lines...unless it's something hideous like a Gibson Corvus or the like. THEN you can beat them with something large and heavy.

Saturday it is, then. See you there, chaps.

Do you know what, I've been suffering from EXACTLY THIS and thought I needed new pillows!! Clearly I need to sort out some exercise and posture improvement - thanks to everyone for your valuable contributions to this thread. It's exactly this sort of thing that makes me so glad I joined this forum.....

Yes. Yes it is. And I cannot tell you how long it took Captain Clumsy here to tee up that shot. Of course, "About 43 years" would be the comedy answer; but in all seriousness, I spent ages trying to get one that would show that young man in the best light possible, just before those Genesis blokes get in the way. I owe him that. And even that screenshot still isn't it, but hey ho, life's too short....as this whole scenario proves.

On which subject... Taking A Little Trip Back With Father Tiresias. Being a serious Genesis fan in my youth (losing interest with the 3-piece pop group version, even though they named an album after me), after having followed this thread, I looked up SH with Nad Whatsit on YouTube, just so I could see what all the fuss was about. Not too much, from what I could see. Anyway, while I was there, I saw various other Genesis items on the YouTube sidebar; one of which was the live version of I Know What I Like from Bingley Hall. Now I actually did go to that show, so I thought that I'd check it out. Thing is, someone I know swore blind that he'd seen me in the film of that gig.......yeh, right. SO I watched it...... ...and there, at 45 seconds, as the crowd rises up when Phil Collins starts to sing, there's a young guy with glasses on who throws up his arms... ....and it's an 18 year-old Mangotango, (with both a hairline and a waistline, unlike now), and all of his life ahead of him....... hadn't seen that before last night and it made me want to weep for no known reason. Not for the Genesis track at all, I can assure you.

Making arrangements to stay with my daughter in Liverpool so that I can drive over to Manchester for this.

If you are willing to look at second-hand kit, you may get more for your money. For little more than the price of a new Stagg, I found an Aria SWB-03. It has both a magnetic pickup and bridge piezos, with separate volume controls for each source....and unlike the Stagg, it has a small semi-acoustic body which gives it a little more warmth and resonance, and also enables audible unamplified practice. As has been said, you need to find the right strings to match your bass; but overall I'm very pleased with my EUB, and several people at the recent Sarf-East Bass Bash also seemed to like it. No, it's not a DB, never will be; but in the mix with an amplified band and using your best DB technique, it more than does the job.

...who has been remarkably quiet since last Sunday's footie results.....

I kind of just have, actually....though for guitar, not bass. Stupid thing is that I have 3 pedals on my proper board for the "guitar solo" moments; one is a clean boost, +20db lift without extra gain; the second is a Fat Shuga pedal, which gives the level boost, a bit of distortion and built-in preset-able reverb, which I use to pick lead lines out of the mix; and the third is a proper full-on distorto lead machine. However...I have 3 other overdrive/distortion/fuzz pedals which were the aftermath of idle experimentation, just sitting there doing nowt. Except that for a recent gig at a small venue, I set up a separate, "simple" spare board to use, rather than my usual "Mission Control" board; and used one of those 3 for soloing...which sounded better than I have in ages, using just that one all night, especially in conjunction with some/a bit/a lot of delay. I had previously tried that pedal on its own and found it wanting because of its apparently thin sound, so it never got as far as a band practice. Chucked in at the deep end at a gig on a whim, it performed like a champion. Weird. Moral of the story; throw nothing away. Fill your house with discarded stuff that might surprise you and actually come in useful one day. Or regret it once it's gone. Wait....that wasn't meant to be the moral at all, was it?

Snarky Puppy, Royal Albert Hall, last night. Amazing gig. Who would envisage a 14-piece band, playing instrumental jazz/funk/world music/whatever, selling out a venue like that? (Of course, landlords will tell you that you'll never draw a crowd with that kind of thing - original music? no singer? - as an excuse for knocking you back for a gig....). Great compositions and ensemble playing, and some fine soloing, the pick of which came from Bob Reynolds on tenor sax and especially crowd favourite Shaun Martin on keyboards, but featured particularly on Moog synth played via a talkbox. A lot of the set was based, obviously, around the most recent album, Immigrance, which they've been touring for over 6 months. Bad Kids At The Back from that album gained the first big reaction of the night. Rightly so, as well - good tune, well played. Nice moment of audience participation too on Xavi, with the 5,000+ audience split into two by Michael League, Snarky bassist and bandleader (and what a fine description that is!! ), to clap a 4-over-3 rhythm, over which the band came in and grooved like monsters. Turns out that they were recording the gig for a live album...which. remarkably, was available as a double CD package a quarter-of-an-hour after the gig finished. Yes, really. I didn't queue for it, having a train to catch to get home; but it will be worth picking that up at some point...and not just because I'm in the crowd noise. Huge shout also for the support act, which was a trio comprising vocalist Lucy Woodward, Snarky percussionist Keita Ogawa on kit drums and the amazing Charlie Hunter on guitar/bass. Hunter's an interesting player - his instrument is a fan-fret 8-string Novax; the bottom 3 are bass strings, the top 5 being guitar strings. And he plays both roles at once, with a technique that's part like Chapman stick-style, part Travis-picking, but with a healthy dose of bluesy funk groove. At one point, on their cover of Terence Trent-Bridge Derby-County's "Wishing Well", he was playing a guitar solo whilst simultaneously holding down a descending bass line. Quite cool. Here's a video clip from a while back, that shows his playing - it's from a TV show hosted by jazz pianist Ramsay Lewis, who has clearly never heard of either Hunter or Nirvana.....

You should check out Landmarq, featuring Basschat's very own @Stingray5…..

The problem is that they're in short supply because you only get two per wolf.... More seriously....I was having real difficulty with the endpin of my EUB wearing through the rubber foot and then the whole thing sliding around all over the place on the tiled floor of the venue where I play with the Saturday Morning workshop band. The solution? Floor Mat from an old Ford Fiesta. Perfect size. End-pin one end of the mat, left foot the other end. Sorted.