Adrenochrome

Most basses can work for most styles of metal. If you're going to be playing fast riffs in lower registers I'd recommend a bass with a fairly defined (not muddy) sound and pickups that don't "*choke" when you're playing fast. * - I don't know what the technical phrase is... anyone know a better way to decribe what I mean?

Someone asked if I'd play bass in their new band if they lent me a bass. So first time I picked up a bass was at my first band practice, sink or swim! (I already knew my music theory and had played a bit of guitar, also self-taught, before that)

My eldest son is nearly 5 and he's had a 1/2 size classical guitar for over a year. He's easily big and strong enough to play it but he wants instant results and so he gives up after about 2 minutes so he hasn't really got to grips with it yet. He is however doing a play based scheme after school once a week called 'rhythm time' which is going very well. Maybe like me he won't respond well to be pushed into something too structured at a young age? I didn't pick up a bass until I was 25.

[quote name='tonybassplayer' post='180380' date='Apr 19 2008, 11:16 AM']The "Worlds End" is a lovely pub in a beautiful location and I must try to get us a gig there. Glad to hear you had a good night. Tony[/quote] We played last year and our agreed fee was 'quite small'. We absolutely packed the place out as I got many colleagues from work to go and my wife got all the parents she knows from my sons' nursey and school to go. Serious money was put over the bar and I was a little disappointed that we weren't given a small bonus and the promised re-bookings at the Worlds' End and Blues Bar (which we also packed out) haven't materialised...

I don't think there's anything wrong with that bass for a beginner. It might even stop you doing what I did, ie moving from 1 crappy bass to another frequently. You might want to try using the bass without any bass/treble bass or cut, and get used to developing tonal variations using your hands, pick, whatever rather than the electronics.

Hello! Whereabouts are you from? Yes, it's a nice looking bass.

[quote name='Wooks' post='178176' date='Apr 16 2008, 06:47 PM']I found out about the preamp problem by finding out that Peavey were selling gear on their fleabay site, and subsequently my cirrus developed the problem! I spoke to Peavey and they said it would cost £105 to have them do the repair or I think £60 if they sent you the bits and you do it for yourself. Might be worth giving them a call.[/quote] Thanks for the update. The bass was only 195 new, and it probably isn't worth the cost considering the bass is my main gigging bass and has a fair bit of wear on it. I'm making do with rechargeable batteries at the moment. This was my first active bass so it took me a while to realise it wasn't just normal (regular gigging) use causing the batteries to drain so fast.

My Millenium AC bxp has the same pups and pre-amp AFAIK, and suffers from exactly the same problem. No, I foolishly didn't register the bass and I've had it for 18 months. I love the bass apart from this problem. Does anyone know if there is an easy fix that a guitar tech or someone who knows their wiring/pups could do?

"Back of the net!"

More than likely - most discussion forums and things like MySpace are automatically blocked so I do quite well to get access to basschat at all.

I was at work, so all I could see in your previous post was a blank square with a red cross in - didn't know if it was a piccie or a film clip or what. My band are supposed to be playing the same venue in the future when they've sorted noise level issues out so I'll be interested to see how the gig goes.

...go on, what's the little red cross supposed to be?

I'm not gigging on Saturday so you can borrow my Ashdown MAG 300 if it's any good to you? It's in a rack and there's a power lead and 1xjack and 1xspeakon output leads that all live in there as well. No need to leave anything in it's place. Jon

Depends on how much volume/speaker area you really need when gigging, and how much you can fit in whatever transport you get to gigs. I've got the 210T cab and it doesn't sound any more trebley than my Peavey 1x15, so it won't necessarily add much more definition to your onstage sound. An extra 2x10 would do you for most gigging situations as you should have PA support for bigger venues. Of course you might just like the bigger stack of having a 4x10 as well as your combo, up to you really.

Funny reading about recent social club gigs! Unusually for us our last 2 gigs have been social clubs. On Saturday we played Equalized Club in Stapleford, Nottingham. It was a right laugh, and despite there being bingo in the break, and some of the audience being elderly, we got on just fine. The oldsters were up dancing from the 1st set onwards; we even had couples up dancing for Nothing Else Matters fairly early on. If you're being paid reasonable money for these club gigs you've just got to be professional and put on the best show you can regardless.

If your basic bass playing skills are all there, then you may find it all comes together when you play in a group. There are a few songs we do that have a certain groove such that when I'm playing a note at the same time as the drummer's kick drum, the sound and [i]feel[/i] is much greater than the sum of the parts - and it's wonderful. Likewise if you're playing in unison with the guitar and the combined sound is so powerful its untrue. And I'm talking about fairly basic songs here, maybe Led Zep or UFO for the groove and maybe the run-down at the end of Sweet Child O Mine for the unison bit. It's moments like those that point out to me why I'm playing bass.

...just in case anyone is interested: Peavey Millenium AC bxp in purple/black - sounds great but battereies don't last very long. fretless Aria Pro2 Magna in black with maple board - easy to play, stays in tune, sounds okay. Rose-Morris EB0 from the early 70s - thumpy. lightweight but pup is microphonic Stagg bc-rich clone that I've modded a bit (BA2 bridge, graphite nut + strap-button positions so far) Hohner Jazz bass (black, maple board) - sounds/looks great but frets are badly worn so relegated to rehearsal room Tanglewood Rebel 5 in purple - for when I needed a 5-string, currently living in the attic (LaBella tapered B-string works well) Aria acoustic in red burst - cheap and cheerful mainly for home practice Ashdown MAG 300r head - very reliable, lived in it's rack since day 1. Ashdown MAG 210T deep cab - cheap, reliable. Peavey black-widow 1x15 cab - absolutely ace, I've had this for donkeys' years. + Samson wireless bug thingy, Zoom FX unit that I mainly use for muting and tuning between songs.

I used to do this one, I think I used to play the fill: D E D B E, the E after the D is hammered-on pretty quickly and pulled-off quickly to the D; or maybe it was a couple of frets down, it was not long after the single was out. . . I could be wrong, this is from memory!

I'm loving my 1x15 and 2x10 set-up. I only use both cabs when I know it's a medium to large venue with no PA support. We played a medium-sized club last week and our soundman cried off so we only had our back-up PA and I'd only brought my 1x15 and couldn't go through our small PA. I was still audible at the back of the room although it was pretty muddy apparently. And my rig is fairly cheap, all Ashdown MAG and Peavey gear.

I don't [i]entirely[/i] agree but they have generally played it too safe for me and apart from 1 or 2 songs they have been uninspiring (and I was quite a big fan in the 80s-91ish) and dull without actually being rubbish.

I don't generally do it but the last time I had to I played the intro & main riff to Schism by Tool - not because it's flash but because I wanted to show that the D & G strings on my bass were used occasionally. Ended up with a young Tool fan screaming for us to play a Tool song for the rest of the night. I've also played the outro to Jeremy for similar reasons, and I usually want to take a bit of a breather and I don't do the poppity-poppity thing.

Yes, the DI from your amp will probably be okay. All the recordings I've done were from the DI on my amp. I'm not one of those people that get giddy about the effect their cabinet has on their sound so others may disagree with this. I'd suggest recording a few practices (preferably with a multi-track recorder) and really listening to each individual part and checking that all the parts really DO sound as good as you thought they did (you often can't tell while playing them live). When we did a 'proper' studio recording of an EP we recorded the whole band first take but with the full intention of doing the vocals, guitar and bass (if needed) after and using the original guitar and vox as guides. Luckily I didn't need to re-do any of my bass so we spent the best part of 2 days layering the guitars and vocals. Our guitarist ended up using his 3rd choice guitar as it was the only 1 that had good enough intonation up the neck - we'd never noticed before! He also had to simplify one of his riffs as the quirky timing that sounded great live just didn't sound good at the desk.

Yes it's possible. It's quite a good setlist for a covers band and my band do quite a few of those. Stick all the tracks on an MP3 player and have that playing every waking minute that you can. On songs like Love Walked In the fills and passing notes are not very prominent so you can simplify the bass part a lot without losing the sound of the song. On Basket Case the fills are more prominent so you'd probably want to play most/all of them. Use whatever charts/music/shorthand you need to help you along. Go for it!

Make the guitarist do it properly. The walking bass line goes down to an open E anyway so shifting it down to D isn't gonna help that much unless you got a 5-string or lower tuning on a 4-string.

I use 40-100 or 45-105 for rock music, 50/50 pick and fingerstyle. For more even tension my preference would be 40-105 but generally I buy what I can afford . My fretless has 40-60-80-110 flats which are from 2 different packs of strings and I never change those.