thisnameistaken

[quote name='liamcapleton' post='897743' date='Jul 18 2010, 02:00 AM']I kind of disagree. If you are happy with music as a hobby then I would agree with that last sentiment, but if you want to make money playing music then eventually you'll find yourself in a position where you have to do something you don't enjoy. That's when you find out who's a good player and who's a bad one... the bad player will be the one with the sorry expression on his face not getting involved like they should and the good one will apply their skills in the best way possible and get stuck in, even if they don't like it. It doesn't mean they're soulless musicians. Every job in life, even the ones you enjoy, requires a degree of sacrifice, nothing is as cut and dry as it seems.[/quote] Yeah, that's exactly what I'm talking about. The "stylistic" guys Doddy is talking about (what he means is they're famous for one thing because they did that first or outstandingly well, and they're consequently considered way better at that thing than any of the "versatile" people he's talking about) ended up where they are because they were doing something they were 100% passionate about and the industry took notice and said "Hey, we think lots of other people would like to hear what you're doing, here's some money", etc. Whereas the people you and Doddy are talking about ("my favourite session musicians") are more like "Hey dude this is successful MOR Artist 'X' from the previous decade or newly label-created R&B singer 'Y''s famous "producer" - we'd like you to come to our slick studio in LA and make our slick pop records sound slick please, so that people who listen to a lot of Top 40 radio but otherwise don't give a sh*t about music really will buy our new record". I would 100% love to be in the former position, where the music I'm making because that's what I love suddenly becomes a desirable sound and everybody's throwing money at me for it. But I would be bored to tears if instead I had people calling saying "Hey I heard you can play your instrument well in various styles, and I need various styles recorded adequately, can you come down..." - I would be crying into my ovaltine every night. Honestly when I read your post where it said "I always wanted to model myself on my favourite session players" it made me wonder why you started to play bass in the first place. For me it was a happy accident, but within a short while I'd latched on to players like Norwood Fisher, and people from my past like Bruce Foxton or Bedders or Bruce Thomas. I can't imagine ever thinking "I wish I was more like a characterless session musician". Might sound harsh but really that's how I feel. I just find it weird that anyone ever felt driven to take up a musical instrument because they heard an unnamed contributor to an artist's record do his thing quietly in the background. Didn't you have a f***ing rock star to look up to?

I've tried to make this happen in the past by speaking to pedal builders individually, and failed. I need a utility pedal making up to replace my Boss LS-2 and I would like to hear from anyone who thinks they can do it. I need: A 2-channel mixer with send/returns like the Boss LS-2, but with more independent footswitching than the LS-2 offers: Input from instrument to 2 loop sends. 2 loop returns with an active volume control on each with 6db-ish boost available. Mono output. Each loop can be enabled/disabled. If both loops are disabled the input is buffered straight to the output. Three stomp switches: [list] [*]Two for enable/bypass the two loops. [*]Third footswitch reverses the state of the other two, so if loop #1 is in and loop #2 is out, stomping switch #3 brings loop #2 in and loop #1 out. [*]Similarly if both loops are active, stomp #3 would bypass both, and vice versa. [/list] Switching must be noiseless, like the Boss LS-2. No loud pops. Output is always buffered even when both loops are bypassed - this pedal will always be in my signal chain so I would like a quality buffer in there to keep my signal in good shape. NOT true-bypass. Ideally I'd like this pedal in a Sansamp-sized enclosure, laid out like this: -[]-[]=[]-[]- |x p -- p x|= |1 ------- 2| |___3___|= Where: [] is a loop send/return jack = is IN or OUT jack, or PWR for LEDs p is a volume knob 1/2/3 is a footswitch x is an LED showing the state of each loop (different colours please!) - is just to stop the forum collapsing whitespace! I don't really want to see any of our resident builders battle it out in here price-wise so anybody who is confident of achieving this please PM me with a price if you're up for it. I either want a pedal that does what I need or an understanding of why it's too expensive to be practical, either resolution will be satisfactory! - Kev

Actually when I was... 23 I think, I sold all my gear and packed it in after a band ended where I'd been gigging 5 nights a week and touring most of the time. It hadn't been a bad experience but my situation changed, I had to move quite a long way and I ended up in a place where I didn't know any musicians, starting from scratch again. After seeing the local music scene I decided not to bother. But I picked it up again a few years later. I don't think the break did me any harm. But to be honest I probably wouldn't have sold my last bass (it was a Warwick Corvette Proline 6-string, white maple body, bart soapbars, serial #000014) if I hadn't had to sell it to appease the tax man. I think it went for £300 to Len at Superbuy in Wakefield. Good times...

Was that the only UK date?

[quote name='TheButler' post='896958' date='Jul 16 2010, 11:00 PM']It took me ages to get a Mesa 400+ ... I'm only 20[/quote] You have no concept of "ages"! Wish I was either 20 or had a Mesa 400+...

[quote name='bubinga5' post='896950' date='Jul 16 2010, 10:40 PM']Bro is this a live thing..i mean can you tell by there body language?[/quote] No that's not really what I meant (although it's a good point and probably true). I mean when you hear someone put in a stand-out bass take, you can hear that they are enjoying it, you can hear that they're familiar with that style of music and they've created an authentic sound but at the same time their own take on it - not just stringing together a bunch of cliche licks and coming up with some JobFinder / Casio auto-rhythm version of the beat or whatever. I also think it's pretty disrespectful to the great artists of any given genre to suggest that you can do what they do and also what everybody else does in all other genres, and be authentic at all of it, without caring about it or listening to it in any detail. It's nonsense really.

I think you can usually tell when a musician doesn't really like the music they're playing. If you're playing music that you wouldn't actually listen to in your own time, it's obvious. Over the years I have played in bands that span many different genres but in each case it's been music that I like a lot. I couldn't do a Top 40 band or a country band or a rock band because my heart wouldn't be in it. So for me it's not a case of "stylistic or versatile", it's more a case of soul or no soul.

[quote name='ThomBassmonkey' post='896531' date='Jul 16 2010, 01:57 PM']Don't like the tone personally, it doesn't sound punchy enough or fat enough for slap, the sound's far too dry imo. If you like that kinda thing, then fine, but it's a bit like trying to play the blues with an Ibanez guitar through a Mesa amp IMO, just doesn't suit.[/quote] I much prefer that chunky, gutsy sound to the pingy, nasal modern slap sound everybody uses.

[quote name='wateroftyne' post='896462' date='Jul 16 2010, 12:34 PM']Not a slap fan at all, but MarloweDK is an astonishing player.[/quote] He's not really playing "slap" there though it's more a pick style sound. I like it.

I think £400 for the Fender, £200 for the Hohner, are the prices where you might get people biting. Maybe a bit lower if the right people don't see them.

I would put the overdrive before the wah (filtered overdrive is a nice effect, overdriven filtered bass just sounds like overdriven bass), limiter before the overdrive, chorus would be at the end. So sort-of the reverse of what everybody else is suggesting, then. Best advice: Try a few combinations and use your ears to decide which works for you.

[quote name='Major-Minor' post='795194' date='Apr 3 2010, 06:44 PM']I've just found out that one of my basses may be a James William BRIGGS of Wakefield.[/quote] Are you trying to say that something good once came out of Wakefield? You should call the Wakefield Express, this will be front page news! [quote name='douglas81' post='795331' date='Apr 3 2010, 09:45 PM']Well, if it is a Briggs, you could be holding tens of thousands of pounds worth of bass in your hands! Give Tony Houska a bell at the Contrabass Shoppe[/quote] ... and he'll try to sell it for double.

[quote name='Rich' post='893992' date='Jul 13 2010, 05:59 PM']Brilliant. Many years ago, a mate and I managed to succeessfully get the same sod-off-and-leave-us-alone result by telling two annoying women that we were plumbers working on nuclear submarines, and proceeding to explain to them in great detail how toilets work underwater.[/quote] Oh that one sounds fun! Another time me and a friend from Belfast told two girls that we were the Finnish mens tennis doubles team. I don't think either of us even knew the rules of tennis at the time or what Finnish people sounded like. Fortunately neither did they.

[quote name='Zach' post='894395' date='Jul 14 2010, 08:35 AM']I have no idea what album you're all talking about. Can someone put up a link so I'm less clueless please.[/quote] I've never heard of it either.

[quote name='Al Heeley' post='893244' date='Jul 12 2010, 10:24 PM']Thanks for the link sir, will check out. EHX mention about feeding a compressor into it, but then you're going to drastically reduce the attack dynamincs for the filter operation?[/quote] Actually the filter's not envelope-controlled. It is triggered by the level of your input signal at note attack, but the sweep is controlled by the start, stop and rate sliders and not your amplitude envelope. No matter how hard you pick, the filter sweep (assume it triggers at all) will always be exactly the sweep you've got set up with those sliders. It's one of the reasons I really like the BMS, the filter is pretty unique and very good at aping a synth.

[quote name='OldGit' post='893258' date='Jul 12 2010, 10:40 PM']One of the glossy womens magazines had a cover headline this month "who are the good ones in bed? Hint: the nerds are" or something like that.. Maybe that's where I'm going wrong [/quote] I should add my other two abiding memories of Lambert: The summer he spent working in an amusement park as the voice of an animatronic redneck pig who told corny jokes and sang country songs. And the time he did a sh*t so long he decided to take a photo of it so he could show it to everybody. This was before the age of digital photography - he had to get it developed! Ah I really miss him.

[quote name='Russ' post='891721' date='Jul 11 2010, 01:37 AM']Was he in last night's episode of The IT Crowd? [/quote] Haha, I saw that. No he wasn't quite that nerdy although he did have glasses. He ended up marrying a rather foxy fitness instructor, I mean I really liked the guy and he was a top musician too but how he bagged her I'll never know.

Yes the newer model is true bypass, it's the older one that has a horrifically awful always-on buffer in it.

Gorgeous. What's that thing stuck in the F-hole? I've seen them before but never knew what they were, is it something repair-related? Also what's that pickup? Ta!

If you're going to use the suboctave slider (standard-quality tracking analogue octaver) then you'll want it early enough in your chain for the tracking to work well. If you're not bothered about using that slider then it doesn't really matter where you put it. If it's the older model then yes you'll find in bypass mode it destroys your sound, but if yours has a 3PDT footswitch (I think most do, mine both did) you can [url="http://www.talkbass.com/forum/showthread.php?t=315187"]mod it to true bypass very easily[/url].

[quote name='Mr. Foxen' post='892328' date='Jul 11 2010, 10:06 PM']Machine screws did make a jazz copy sound like a piano though.[/quote] Exactly how much salt should we take this with? I would like to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're joking but there's a lot of bullshit talked about tone in this forum.

I don't use a compressor live, I haven't used one since the mid '90s. When recording, I'll generally leave it to whoever's supposed to be creatively in charge of the session (unless it's me of course!) to decide whether they want to compress my tracks. I usually prefer the sound of the bass without it and I usually play evenly enough not to really need it, but some people like the sound and if they want to use it I'm not going to complain.

There are other options (the Hexe pedal as already mentioned looks good), also there's a schematic for the Bugcrusher which someone posted on TB, it doesn't look very complicated for someone who knows a bit about building circuits.