thisnameistaken

I used to always take two basses because I was really heavy-handed and use to break strings all the time. I was picking so hard I had to rest my thumb on the bridge pickup because any further up the body the strings would just flap all over the place. Unfortunately it gave me more leverage against the bridge saddles and that is where all the strings would break. I use flats now and pick gently over the front pickup or up by the neck, so I don't bother taking a spare bass any more. I haven't broken a string for about ten years, where I used to break them weekly.

[quote name='Roland Rock' post='1173693' date='Mar 23 2011, 07:12 PM']Good to see they're still going - that's where I bought my soul-mate bass ten years ago. Sounds like they're upping the ante on the gear stakes too.[/quote] They moved to new premises a few weeks ago, just a short stroll down the same street but they have about 5x the floor space, it's pretty impressive for an independent guitar shop.

Just FYI, MOR Music on Fossgate just got in a load of Markbass stuff and apparently the full current range of Overwaters, if anyone was looking for somewhere to try them out.

TBH the 'better' ones are often offering numerous tracks at high bitrates that you will probably not even want/need. The other thing you pay for in quality interfaces is good preamps, but it's OK to pay more for quality preamps, it doesn't affect the amount of data you will be streaming over the interface. I never record at over 44.1k 24-bit, and my 4-year-old Core2Duo could easily manage 16 simultaneous tracks of that over firewire 400 to its decidedly average SATA drive. I would imagine a USB interface can hack it for 8 tracks, and frankly I'd be surprised if it couldn't do 16. I packed up my mactop and my M-Audio FW1814 today to go record a trombonist who'd offered to do some tracks on our next EP. His band have done 3 studio albums and he actually said we'd got a warmer more natural sound than he usually gets in the studio, he looked pretty chuffed with it. This was recording at his house with my el-cheapo mobile studio and a bog-standard Rode NT1A, and I am not an especially experienced or talented recordist. Point being: Don't worry so much about gear looking cheap, home recording gear simply is cheap these days and you can get a lot of mileage out of it.

[quote name='skankdelvar' post='1172103' date='Mar 22 2011, 01:54 PM']Decent drummers have always been like gold dust. But finding [i]any[/i] kind of drummer seems to be an uphill slog these days, particularly if you're out in the boonies like me.[/quote] The last band I did went through a ton of drummers. They were easy to find but either not good enough or borderline psychotic. My current band I was lucky because the singer's twin brother is a drummer. Saved us years of fruitless searching. What's frustrating is I know a lot of the lads in bands who are aged 18-24-ish and there are so many really talented drummers at their disposal, I know a couple who've actually switched to vox and guitar because there were so many good drummers! But there's just nobody in their late 20s or early 30s around here. Probably nobody above that age either.

I've barely had time to keep up my DB practice since Xmas and suddenly I've got five gigs on it in a month. :/ Also my rubbish tendonitis wrists are playing up again. Not good timing. Oh well, grin and bear it...

[quote name='fumps' post='1170850' date='Mar 21 2011, 04:32 PM']It's a stereo-type[/quote] So is my delay. [quote name='BottomE' post='1171113' date='Mar 21 2011, 07:08 PM']I think enough of you have mentioned the sub heading being offensive for me to apologise. It was meant in context to guitartists that i have worked with who can't seem to play as fluidly without a ton of effects as they can with - independant of genre. It was an observation not intended to harm or cause offense.[/quote] I knew where you were coming from dude, don't worry it's just the usual suspects* causing trouble. * Yeah **** all of y'all** you got usual-suspected. ** Sorry Nigel! Not you.

[quote name='Ian Savage' post='1170528' date='Mar 21 2011, 12:10 PM']S/PDIF = Sony / Philips Digital Interface, 16 bit digital stereo connection on a standard RCA jack ADAT = Alesis Digital Audio Tape, 8-track recording interface often provided on an optical connection these days (some outboard gear will give you 8 mic inputs to an ADAT optical output, bloody handy - one of the few worthwhile bits of Behringer gear is the AD8000).[/quote] Yeah I used one of those into the optical in on the back of my M-Audio box to record drums, handy bit of kit.

The older models (both the NYC and Russian ones) need a jack, but you can get a jack-to-barrel converter and still use a Boss-style PSU / daisy chain. [url="http://www.effectpowersupplies.com/mini-jack-plug-adaptor-12-p.asp"]http://www.effectpowersupplies.com/mini-ja...daptor-12-p.asp[/url]

[quote name='mrtcat' post='1170458' date='Mar 21 2011, 10:56 AM']I love clean sounds and it suits what i do with the band. I also love toys and have a couple of pedals for playing about (EBS envelope filter is my fav) but I never use it live as it doesnt fit with the band.[/quote] This is important. I can imagine most players in straight-ahead rock / guitar bands won't find a use for effects on bass, apart from maybe a bit of valve grit or whatever. In my band the guitarist sings and he's usually playing a simple reggae or ska chop, we do have a keyboard player but she's often playing trumpet instead, which leaves a lot of room for me. So I often play a lot of notes, or I double up my sound with an octaver or I add a synth on top of my bass (or on top of the octaver!) and whammy that note around, and so on. So while I'm mostly replacing my bass sound with another bass sound, I do often double up and add something else on top instead, just to give a song more hooks and more colour. Another band I did for a while, they were writing songs on a computer and adding live instrumentation later, so it was very rare that the demos they gave us contained anything that sounded like a bass guitar. I remember the first rehearsal I did with them they didn't seem to be digging what I was doing, so I thought it might be a bit of a gamble (you tend to get funny looks using effects on bass with people you don't know) I switched on a few noise pedals through a filter and the singer immediately turned to me and yelled "Play more like that!" So yeah, sometimes it's not appropriate to use effects, and sometimes you won't get the gig if you don't. It just depends what music you're making. So far I haven't tried effects on my double bass but we've been asked to do half a dozen acoustic gigs over the next few months so maybe I will give it a go in rehearsals at least.

Yeah SFX stuff is really good quality and well priced.

[quote name='derrenleepoole' post='1169177' date='Mar 20 2011, 08:45 AM']If you're stuck in position of having one bass but need to get two very distinct uses out of it, your best best is probably a combination of two pickups with a dual preamp. A double bassist I know who plays slap upright has a pickup under the bridge as normal, but also has a piezo pickup under the neck to pickup the slap and click sounds you get from such playing. He then runs both into a preamp and blends the signal accordingly. This would give you great flexibility.[/quote] I think the K&K setup he's got does exactly that. Strings-wise I think silver slaps work well with piezo pups so should be good with your K&K setup and give you a fairly trad sound. For a more modern bright sound one guy I know uses thomastik solo gauge sets but tunes them to regular concert pitch so they're lower tension, he gets a very good sound and it looks pretty easy to play but I've never had a go on his bass when I was sober.

FWIW I use an M-Audio FW1814 which I got on fleabay for about a hundred quid. Most tracks I've done at one time was 10, using an octopre for eight and the two built-in pres for the other two, but it was barely troubling my SATA drive at all on my 4 year old Windoze desktop, I reckon you could easily stream 30+ tracks at 41k onto any half-decent modern drive through either USB or FW.

[quote name='73Jazz' post='1169666' date='Mar 20 2011, 04:35 PM']in my eyes, a compressor ist the most useful effect, which you should start with.[/quote] IMO a compressor isn't an effect unless you crank it to insane-o-squish.

Are there ergonomic benefits to extending the scale length of the bass guitar by a couple of inches? They're already too big for most humans to use comfortably.

It's difficult to say. I would expect both machines to easily manage 8 simultaneous tracks to disk though, so long as you're not recording at a silly bit rate.

[quote name='Grand Wazoo' post='1169582' date='Mar 20 2011, 03:25 PM']In conclusion: to answer your question as to why more companies do not adopt a similar system, the answer is probably because the majority of people are too conservative to explore unchartered territories and that it will take time for the fanned fret system to be adopted by more companies and be more widely accepted. I say, give it another 5 to 10 years and I am sure you'll see more of these appearing on the scene[/quote] They've been around since the '80s at least haven't they? I think the reason there's no demand for them is because nobody's really that bothered about solving such a minor problem, especially not with such a sledgehammer solution.

I have an old version of Reason (can't remember what version it is) that I used to use mostly for demoing new songs, I never really used it for anything serious so I never bothered to upgrade it. I do like it though, I like how quick and easy it is to work with. I haven't used Record but I like the look of it. Again it's something I haven't bothered with because I don't have a pressing enough need to justify the price.

I use effects on about half of our tunes, and I use more pedals than our guitarist does, but I don't think it's becoming standard for bass players to use a lot of effects. Usually I'm the only bass player on any given bill we play on who's using effects. In fact I think we've only played with one other band (Middleman from Leeds) who you could say used a lot of effects on the bass. It's not really about making up for a lack of ability, it's about making the noises you want to make. I'm happy with my dry bass sound but I don't always want to sound like a bass guitar, that's all there is to it really.

[quote name='Tuco' post='1168184' date='Mar 19 2011, 01:11 PM']all this talk of 64 bits!!!! LOL, i must be the ONLY person here running good old 32bit XP SP1 [/quote] Well I have at least updated it to SP3 but I am running 32-bit XP on my desktop. Didn't want Vista, don't want Win7, XP works so why switch to a newer OS with newer problems?

I first started drooling over Thumb basses because I was a Fishbone fan, and eventually I bought one. Norwood definitely influenced me there. That's the only time I've bought a bass because of a bass-playing hero.

Macbook Pros are a good choice of laptop for music just because they have a Firewire port, which are becoming increasingly difficult to find on notebooks. Even the older Macbook Pros will handle tons of VSTs and plugins unless you're doing something insane you shouldn't struggle hardware-wise. I bought a used late 2009 Macbook Pro a couple of weeks ago (2.66Ghz Core 2 Duo, 8Gb RAM) for £900 and I finally got it set up how I wanted it and started doing some serious recording and mixing on it using Pro Tools today. It's apparently just as capable as my Windows desktop Pro Tools setup, I haven't come across any hardware issues at all, it's a good little box. I wouldn't say OS X is a big productivity improvement over Windows (especially not if you were anything of a Windows 'power user' to begin with) but it's not intrusive at least. If you're a Unix nerd it's brilliant especially being able to just pull up a console and BASH the sh*t out of it, but the GUI is still quite immature compared to Windows - it's not as intuitive as the commercials make it out to be and the interface isn't consistent across the whole UI and native applications which can be frustrating. Windows is actually the better OS in this regard although Mac fanboys would never admit it. Still, I think if you want something portable (I did, plus I needed a portable Unix-based computer for professional work) they are a good option. It's true that Windows computers will do it cheaper and I still maintain Windows is the more mature OS despite its problems, but as I said it's difficult to find a Windows notebook with a Firewire port.

No blocks? f***ing needs blocks tbh.

[quote name='Crazykiwi' post='1167718' date='Mar 18 2011, 10:04 PM']The main difference I'd pay for is having wood that has a specific tonal character.[/quote] I suppose it depends on the application. If you're doing something where you're up front a lot and soloing then it's worth having a bass with a recognisable character. I mean I keep my Thumb because I love its sound and it is a very distinguished sound (although IMO it's mostly the electronics and not the insanely dense wood that creates that sound) and I love to play it and I've always wanted one but I don't have a gig for it at the moment so it doesn't get gigged. I think for most people a bass that plays well with a solid core sound that works well in a band mix is enough, and you can get that for under two hundred quid. You just can. There's no argument.