thisnameistaken

I would really like the range of a 5 string bass but I don't like the look and I don't like the feel. I might still get one anyway if I can find one that looks and feels like a 4-string bass. Doubt that's going to happen. Plus I think I would miss having a low B on my double bass if I had one on a bass guitar, so I'd rather not have one at all and not know what I'm missing.

I like the idea of these noiseless jazz pickups but hate pickups with little logos on them. Are these pickups potted? I would want to swap the covers for something plain, can I do that?

[quote name='TPJ' post='1200323' date='Apr 15 2011, 09:47 AM']I've thought about getting a more expensive one but the bass takes some abuse in our gigging environment and I'd rather knock around a £450 bass instead of a £1500 + bass [/quote] I'm in the same boat. Plus I'm clumsy - I don't want to knock chunks out of an expensive bass on every door jamb in my house like I do with my cheap bass... I am still thinking about buying a second bass to set up for slap though, me and the guitarist started jamming some Elvis numbers during a break in rehearsals the other week and they actually sounded pretty good, so we're thinking about busking them.

IMHO if it sounds good now with lousy strings, it is worth putting some time and/or money into. I like the look of it.

Play your own songs, that will teach them. I'd never even heard of this song until just now.

The room at the fenton is pretty small, you could get away with just backline but I've always di'd the bass there. Who told you that?

[quote name='Clarky' post='1194789' date='Apr 10 2011, 05:17 PM']Thanks all for advice. I think I am going to try out some of those foam sound hole plugs and add a mag pickup so I have the choice of piezo, mag or both (since my Coda combo has two channels). Surely that should make things better?!!![/quote] I wonder if it might make sense for you to arrange your own monitoring - have an in-ear for just the bass, so the on-stage volume doesn't matter too much?

[quote name='endorka' post='1194714' date='Apr 10 2011, 04:06 PM']Would it then be correct to say that the downward firing speaker is completely redundant if your double bass is also going through the PA? Jennifer[/quote] Yeah I'd just want some directional monitoring that I could actually *hear*.

[quote name='GarethFlatlands' post='1194541' date='Apr 10 2011, 01:12 PM']The guy nearly fell off his chair when I told him I paid £400 for it. Stu only paid £600 for his '94 Thumb.[/quote] I paid £670 for my '91 Thumb. A couple of years back I watched the same guy I bought it from on eBay replace it with another '91 Thumb that he ended up paying £1050 for. Still worth every penny if you like that sort of thing but it made me appreciate how cheap I got mine. [quote name='warwickhunt' post='1194554' date='Apr 10 2011, 01:23 PM']I find the Streamer Stage I to be a fabulous bass and having owned a pair of SSII (among a multitude of other NT Warwick) I'd still personally take a SSI.[/quote] I also prefer the Stage I. The SSII to me seems a bit over-thought, to the point of becoming a very genericised bass. The SSI has more character.

Our guitarist - who used to play bass in a rockabilly band - swears by squeezing the bass between your knees. Not something I think would work for me but apparently it does help! Can't say I've had any feedback trouble really with my bass, into my regular BG amp using a Bass Max through a Fishman plat pro. I get a lot of volume despite usually being very close to my amp.

FTR I took it to Chapel Allerton Stringed Instruments - Jan is a really nice guy and knows his onions. Lots of locals have recommended him and I can see why.

We played a punk aall-dayer in Leeds yesterday, our set went well, great sound and well received so we enjoyed ourselves, they had some fantastic bands on the bill, some rockabilly, Irish folk, punk, oi, ska, surprising amount of diversity in the line up and some really great live performances. Hope they have us back for the next one.

[quote name='GarethFlatlands' post='1194110' date='Apr 9 2011, 10:25 PM']Our recording engineer today was lusting after my Streamer which was a nice complement considering the strings haven't been changed in at least a year.[/quote] Hehe. The last time I took my Thumb to see a luthier he offered to buy it off me. For £500 more than I paid for it. I turned him down.

I only listened to the intro but your second and third notes in each bar are too early. The rhythm is 'dum - dum, dum', not 'dum, dum, dum -'. How's that for musical notation.

I've always thought it sounded a bit tight and choked, and I thought there was some problems with the fingerboard and the soundpost could do with an adjustment, so I took it to a geezer today expecting to be without it for a week and to get a big bill when it was all fettled. So I was quite chuffed when he spent half an hour moving the bridge, improved the sound about 100x and charged me a tenner! I'd been really struggling with intonation on the E and A in low positions but it was because it was so boomy. Now the tone is really even across the strings, more sustain from the E and A, I can hear the note much clearer, it's a joy to play by comparison. Very chuffed.

I haven't played a bolt-on Thumb but neck dive isn't an issue with my '91 neck-thru model. I agree that the first fret can seem a long way away though. If I had to pound out a riff based around the low F for 5 minutes I would be cursing the ****ing thing when I was done. But then, if all I have to do is burble out tasty bass in a unique and ear-catching voice all night, I would pat my Thumb as I stuck it back in the gig bag at the end of the night and say "Good boy! Good boy!" They are lovely and slightly mental basses, definitely not all things to all men. They are also better suited to fingerstyle playing than slap IMHO. They sound great plucked, really snarly and gnarly and nerdy and generally inappropriate. Love it.

[quote name='BottomEndian' post='1191596' date='Apr 7 2011, 12:11 PM']You could, of course, install all of them on the MBP as a multi-boot system. Then whichever system you choose to boot into, you can revel in the fury and frustration created by its foibles. [/quote] I actually thought about creating an Ubuntu partition on this just to have the opportunity to A/B test it against OSX during a regular work week, but I think I would miss Time Machine too much that thing is a godsend. It would also be an arse to write all the scripts necessary to keep two sets of servers running the same configs, and I am too lazy to bother with it.

When I was still at school I was in a band with a lad whose dad used to be a pretty handy pianist, and he would occasionally feed us his old vinyls (first heard stuff like Graham Central Station from him too) and I think that was the first time I listened to jazz. He had a bunch of stuff I really liked, I remember he was into Cannonball Adderley and Modern Jazz Quartet and generally lots of bop stuff, but I think the first record he had us listen to was a Horace Silver LP and I loved it. Couldn't tell you what it was now though, too many years and too much acid in the interim.

The Thumb is definitely the more idiosyncratic bass of the two, the Streamer the more conservative. It really depends what you want, but I would let your ears lead you. Agree with WH that the Streamer is more comfortable - quality Thumb basses are amazingly heavy for such small-bodied basses, and the short top horn means that fret 1 is an inch or two further off to your left than you will be used to. The Streamer is a better design in both these regards, but personally I like the sound and look of the Thumb much more.

[quote name='BottomEndian' post='1191160' date='Apr 6 2011, 10:16 PM'][size=1]* I used to be quite UNIX-literate, having spent my whole degree battling with CLIs and terrible X-Window systems, trying desperately to get L[sup]A[/sup]T[sub]E[/sub]X to simply compile a single fecking equation. Years of domestic Windows and Mac drudgery have dulled my computer senses to the point that a CLI makes me nervy. *sigh*[/size][/quote] The reason I bought a Mactop was because all my work is on the LAMP platform and I couldn't bear the thought of wasting several weeks auditioning an infinite number of Linux window and file managers that each have something I hate about them (something I seem to have done every couple of years for the last decade). Unfortunately it turns out there are things I hate about both those aspects of the Mac. Ho hum! Well at least I can run Adobe software without having to resort to virtualisation, but then I end up resorting to virtualisation to run IE/Win anyway... On balance I do like having a Unix notebook, it's very handy, I just find some of the GUI to be cumbersome and irritating. Sure this is true of all GUIs if you're fussy, but Apple's USP is their well-considered GUI so it's extra-irritating to find bits of it that don't work very well.